Tell No One

An opening scene at a family reunion establishes several faces and relations; only you’ll need to see this movie twice in order to make the irregular puzzle pieces fit. Tell No One comes from France but is based on a novel by American writer Harlan Coben. Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne) will no doubt be remade as an American film, because it does unfold like a thriller should with multiple plot twists, so it behooves you to see this faithful version before it becomes merely something to compare something else to.
Frankly Tell No One unwinds so smoothly it’s hard to recommend anything else currently playing that employs such a fine tuned sense of suspense. After the beginning reunion sequence we focus on the lead couple, François Cluzet (Dr. Beck) and Marina Hands (Anne Beck) only to see their idyllic lakeside getaway interrupted by violence. The next thing we know it’s eight years later and Anne is dead and the police are re-opening the case with Dr. Beck as their main suspect. Before long all the people we briefly met earlier come into play as either suspects or allies, or maybe both.
Director Guillaume Canet also plays a supporting role but one that goes against his usual leading man good looks acting roles. He paces the story with just the right amount of information, so we’re always learning things at the same time as Dr. Beck. The introduction of important supporting characters at important intervals such as an inspector heading up the case or Beck’s lawyer, brings a familiar face forth (at least for French cinema fans) when you least expect it.
Canet even makes a dog an important character in a way that brings humor and emotional release as the plot starts to thicken. Beck runs his dog in a set-up that’s lifted from a Leos Carux film. We see him in a long tracking shot running along the street (with the dog) while we hear U2’s “With or Without You.” (In the Carux film he uses Bowie’s “Modern Love.”) This then figures into the story when U2 is used as a user name for an important email. It’s also the only real appearance of pop music in the film, another point that makes its use interesting. Right after that we see the dog get taken down by tranquilizer guns when the police bust into Beck’s apartment with a search warrant. As our new protag the dog drifts into unconsciousness all of a sudden the film is all about him.
But Canet shifts gears after catching us off guard with a moment of canine tenderness and proceeds to the freeway foot chase scene to end all chase scenes. There may be a bit of Marathon Man in this sequence but even as a multi-car pile up allows Beck to escape anew he’s given a deus ex machina when some homies show up out of nowhere to help him because they heard about the chase on the news.
There’s a subplot about this smaller gang of three thugs who work for someone (we don’t know yet) who are totally badass. The chick in the group tortures their victims by using the strength of her grip to put the kibosh on your stomach. When this nada gang engages the police, who at this point have just rescued Beck because they now believe he’s innocent, the shoot-out positively makes you glad you’re watching. Another scene involves Kristen Scott-Thomas (English Patient) giving her ward the Mammy Yoakum evil eye after the bitch slaps her. This scene freaked me out in a good way.
When we move into the final act there’s at least two zinger twists that are more inconceivable than unbelievable, and yet they move like clockwork. We’re talking a Waterbury clock before it was a Timex clock.
Tell No One is playing exclusively at the downtown Angelika.

Dulce and Dead Milkmen

Every now and then we pull a classic interview from the files: This week an interview conducted with The Dead Milkmen from the early '90s. Note the part about Dulce, New Mexico, then an unheard of border town, but now part of the general UFO conspiracy iconography.

Rodney Anonymous a.k.a. H.P. Hovercraft, the nameless leader of the Philadelphia outfit know as The Dead Milkmen, was in rare form last week. Speaking by phone from his home he seemed to be priming comedy material as much as pushing his band on their Soul Rotation tour.
"I want to bring back progressive rock," H.P. said. "I want my rock stars to have Cambridge educations and wear silly gold outfits. I want to replace the members of Nirvana with members of Rush. And therefore have the song 'Smells Like Teen Spirit of the Radio.'"
The Milkmen's itinerary was to have taken them through the South before heading towards Texas but fate dictated that those gigs be rescheduled. Their drummer, Dean Clean, hurt himself at a gig in Hoboken.
"There was a wet floor and his feet went out, he went down, The next day we're supposed to play Asbury Park, which our roadie Matt hates anyway."
For a group that has foisted such titles on the alternative music scene as "If You Love Somebody, Set Them On Fire" and the tongue-in-cheek "Punk Rock Girl" the true nature of the deceased lactose ones comes out in the anarchic manner of their song writing. The individual members have home studios. Rehearsals are "a democracy [where] everybody puts in stuff." But the main ingredient to that process comes from Rodney's own favorite guilty pleasure: Constantly reading alternative newsletters.
"One said Jimmy Carter was our first android President." And space invaders should be aware because the Dairy Dudes are onto them. "Dulce [New Mexico] that's where the government has their genetics lab, so that the aliens would come and set up experiments. It explains the missing cattle," Rodney informs me adding "but according to them it also explains the children on the back of milk cartons.
"The point is I never dismiss anything somebody tells me, no matter how wild. In any descent conspiracy there's going to be a bunch of red herrings," he noted more seriously.
"The guy who took all those pictures [in Gulf Breeze] of the UFOs: The guy who bought his house found these UFO models in the attic.
The big one that I'm into is Area 51. And Dulce, New Mexico."
The Dead Milkmen have an instrumental, not recorded yet, called "Dulce". One of Rodney's sources for strange news, the magazine Far Out "had the guy from Megadeath talking about Dulce." Rodney, who spends a lot of time in library reference sections reading books like Weird America, found that the town of Dulce kept popping up. One reference book he was looking through had the page about Dulce cut out "I was like 'Ahh, Ahh.' I slammed the book and ran from the library."
The obvious alias Rodney uses, H.P. Hoovercraft, also has him busy on this particular day:
Penning a letter to a society that has found a mummy that was half-human, half-crocodile, he writes concerning a possible lead. "There's a Lovecraft story about this whole process of mummification. He ghost wrote it for Harry Houdini." In the story Houdini travels in Egypt and ventures out at night only to find intrigue in the desert night. From a secret ceremony on top of a pyramid "they threw him into the Temple of the Great Pyramid."
The Dead Milkmen will roll into Houston this Thursday, if their van hasn't been abducted, to play at the Vatican.
Rodney breaks away to make another call, this one to a reporter in Mobile, Alabama. The Dead Milkmen are booked there on the 21st at a club called Vincent Van Go Go's. "Hmm," muses H.P. "Sounds like the kind of place where I can disappear."

Encounters at the End of the World

McMurdo Station, the Antarctic community that's home to the National Science Foundation forms the basis of this Werner Herzog documentary. A community of over 1000 they might as well live on the moon for all the isolation that surrounds them. As always, Herzog's droll yet existential delivery in voice-over narration adds its own mystical element to a film ripe with transcendent images.
"I haven't come here to make a film about penguins," remarks Herzog at least twice in the first ten minutes. And yet at about the halfway point the camera comes to rest on a group of the tuxedo clad webbed birds. It seems the penguins either go one way, to the feeding ground near a shoreline, or the other way to their habitat. One lone penguin skates to the ice of a different drum and waddles towards an mountainous shelf 70 kilometers away. It's a suicide mission of animal intent, no creature could survive. "Why?," Herzog emphatically asks. A scientist suggests that even if they retrieve the little guy, as soon as they return him to his lair he'll immediately turn around and march anew.
Other fantastical sights include various scientists explaining their research missions; the vocalizations of undersea creatures that literally sound like a combination of that song "Frankenstein" by the Edgar Winter Group and the more experimental phase of Pink Floyd, no kidding; and a training session for emergency situations in whiteout conditions where a group of people put buckets over their head and tether off and then try to find their way around camp. The underwater photographer will amaze you even more as we view creatures lost to time like weird starfish that look similar to monsters from an '80s John Carpenter movie. Not only are the divers well trained, each venture has its own built-in danger factor in lieu of the fact the scuba divers are constantly under thick ice.
All of the goings on are shadowed by shades of the naturally bizarre and polished by Herzog's unique perspective. Just as he did in Grizzly Man and other docus, Herzog tries to find the meaning in a life extraordinaire.

Savage Grace & Brideshead Revisited

There is the misapprehension that serious films of quality are only released in the fall and that the summer is for tentpole bonanzas. The truth is out there if you care to look. Two films in release are as serious, tony, and adult skewering as you are going to see now or at the end of the year. Savage Grace is currently unspooling exclusively at the River Oaks and Brideshead Revisited opens tomorrow at the River Oaks and Market Street 5 in Woodland Hills. I don't even know where the latter theater is but I'm sure it's within a $15 gas radius of Free Press Houston World Headquarters. Perhaps another misapprehension would be that art films only play in central Houston.
Savage Grace places the aud in the middle of an incestuous relationship that ends in murder. The story is true although there is some speculation as to how and if heiress to the Bakelite fortune Barbara Daly Baekeland had sex with her son. As depicted in Savage Grace with an unblinking eye and without trying to personify their actions as bad or evil Mom seduces her son in an effort to cure him of being gay. He subsequently comes, then stabs Mom, calls the police and promptly orders Chinese food to go. If you could even find a Bakelite bracelet from the 1930s and give that as a present to a femme it would be far more cool and rewarding than, say, hopping down to the Galleria to buy said femme a Prada sweater.
Brideshead Revisited whittles the novel into a digestible feature length film. Fans of Evelyn Waugh or the 11-part miniseries from the early 80s will appreciate the eloquent treatment of serious themes offered here. Obviously this film centers on specific relations and jettisons parts of the book. But because it finds the spine of an almost spiritual kinship between middle-class lad Charles Ryder and his trysts with the upper crust Flyte children it works. Charles forms platonic and romantic liaisons that often intertwine and expose to his own doubts about religion and social standing. By exposing the decay of aristocracy in the early 20th century in a subtextual manner within a romance the film outshines the similar Atonement.

Kevin Costner on Swing Vote

There’s a blunt edge to its political humor that’s tempered with a young girl single Dad dynamic so common in Disney films that permeates Swing Vote. In a storyline out of a Capra film, right down to the sacks of mail in the finale, one person holds the destiny to an upcoming Presidential election because of their uncounted election stub.
In fact the movie could be more about a single parent raising a precocious child than the current political fracas. “And Bull Durham wasn’t about baseball and Tin Cup wasn’t about golf,” Kevin Costner tells Free Press Houston during a round table interview. Costner and Madeline Carroll, who play Bud and Molly Johnson in Swing Vote, swung through town last month to stump for the film.
In a slightly outlandish turn of events Bud has gotten laid off work by what he calls “insourcing,” Mexican immigrants brought in replace him at the egg factory. It didn’t help when security cameras caught Bud sneaking a beer behind a huge stack of egg crates and then knocking them all over. Bud also plays in a Willie Nelson tribute band called Half Nelson, only a couple of members are still incarcerated. Bud cusses a lot. “Bud’s not a PTA Dad, he’s not a soccer Dad,” Costner intones.
“I’m glad they gave it a PG-13 because I wasn’t going to cut one goddam out of it,” Costner continued. You can get a lot of goddams and quite a few scatological euphemisms into a PG-13 flick, but you usually only get one or two F-bombs. “I wasn’t going to cut ‘Fuck, thank you Jesus.’ There’s a saving grace about Bud, that’s the strength of the movie,” Costner declares.
In an effort to court Bud’s one and deciding vote the Republican incumbent President Boone (Kelsey Grammer) and his wry advisor (Stanley Tucci) determine that Bud, an everyman if there ever was one, leans to the left. The Republicans adopt a friendly gay marriage stance with Boone’s next campaign spot. Meanwhile the Democratic challenger Donald Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper, Costner’s nemesis in Waterworld) takes an anti-abortion position and decries an unguarded border situation because his manager (Nathan Lane) thinks Bud fields to the right.
One spoof commercial has Hopper walking in a schoolyard of children who subsequently each disappear in a puff of smoke: “Join me and the Democrats as we preserve all life, thus fulfilling God’s intelligent design,” Greenleaf states.
Asked whether anyone on the production saw parallels with the current Obama/McCain race Costner reminded the film was shot a year ago. “Nobody was calculating in the first place. If this movie could only work in election year then it’d be a failure. It has to work five years from now. For me it had the kind of emotional bottom I like.”
The third installment in the Mummy franchise, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, opens against Swing Vote. Costner doesn’t play the game of guessing opening weekend grosses. “I’d like to kick Mummy’s ass but we don’t stand a chance,” he laughs. “That doesn’t mean we’re a bad movie.”
Costner allows that after his next film, a horror movie involving Indian mounds, and that also pairs him with a young daughter, in this case Ivana Baquero of Pan's Labyrinth, he wants to direct again. A Western that observes the end of the era. For instance a scene that captures the first time an airplane flies over a farm, or the first time a car drives into town. "That probably frightens all the horses." About Open Range Costner recalled the dynamics in the characters played by Annette Bening and Robert Duvall. "I'm going to get you to the gunfight, but first we're going to see how these people live."

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

The formula for The Mummy doesn't really change film to film. You start with a crazy vehicle chase, you introduce fantastical beings like the Scorpion King or abominable snowmen, heretofore called yetis, and get that looney guy to fly you in and out of danger. The third installment of the Mummy franchise left me dull. This is truly Mama Mia for 13-year old boys, in other words it's a shitty movie that lots of people are going to see. If they tell you they had a good time, that's because they're 13 and don't know any better.
Maybe the best thing was replacing Rachel Weisz with Maria Bello without any eyebrows being raised. That's only because Bello creates a beguiling foil to Brendan Fraser and dyed her hair brunette (or wore a wig, in any case the hair looks better than the yetis) and speaks with a crusty English accent. I swear I was racking my brain trying to think of what English actress it was on the screen until the final credit roll.
Fraser and company travel to China in the hopes of putting some excitement in their now dull lives. John Hanna, their third wheel in previous films, runs an Egyptian themed bar called Imhoteps in Shanghai. Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li figure in the plot too. The story involves a mad Chinese ruler who was turned into a terra cotta statue over two-thousand years ago, only to be re-animated. Fraser's sure the statue is a mummy, which kind of seems strange since I always thought mummies were, well, mummified at death
The CGI is better than Mummy 2 but there are still some kinks in the technology of computer rendering of yetis and terra cotta warriors. There's lots of gunplay, plenty of one-liners that aren't funny and the general feeling of a 110-minute commercial for NBC/Universal's (parent company GE) broadcast of the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

Local filmmakers at RICE Media Center

SWAMP presents local filmmakers in a program of short films at Rice University, Tuesday night starting at 6:30 pm. Light snacks and drinks will be provided. Donations for food and beverages are appreciated. Following is the list of films being screened. The theater is located at University Blvd at Stockton, or Rice entrance #8. There's usually free parking behind the Capos station across the street from the Rice Media Center

"The Artist"
by Taylor Risien
"Disastroworld"
by David Purdie
"Mitosis #2"
by I-Aoi
"Nature's Path"
by David Courtney
"Sisters"
by Bob Works
"The Old Mill"
by OTE Films
"Orange, Not Apple Green"
by IMM
"The Ballad of Frank Gilroy"
by Tim Eggert
"Mourning Sunrise"
by Michael Kahlil Taylor
"Time Travel"
by Leisure Learning Documentary Class
(instructor, Doug Kilgore)
"Historic Houston"
by Rice University School of Continuing Studies
Documentary Class (instructor, Doug Kilgore)