Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:41:55 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Nathan Lee :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Nathan+Lee istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/fifty-years-later-we-cant-help-but-stare/38563/ Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST The girl in "The Girl Can't Help It" is Jayne Mansfield, and the thing she can't help — or rather the biggest of the many things she can't help — is the spectacular effect of her monumental bosom. Sheathed in Technicolor sequins, they propel her forward like a pair of megaton rockets in perpetual detonation. Blocks of ice melt in their wake, eyeglasses shatter, and bottles of milk erupt in the clutch of flabbergasted gentlemen, their white-hot geysers an outrageous innuendo. The dynamism of... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/easy-rider-hits-a-rough-patch-of-road/38165/ Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST Plenty of films are touched with madness: "Vertigo," "Showgirls," anything by Werner Herzog. Some are totally bonkers: "Pink Flamingos," "Lady in the Water," anything by Vincent Gallo. Then there's the elite pantheon of the brilliantly deranged, the truly inspired crazies: "Mr. Arkadin," perhaps, and "Pootie Tang." And beyond them all, in a category all its own, stoned into oblivion and howling at the moon, there is the bad vibe apocalypse of Dennis Hopper's "The Last Movie." Rarely screened... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/five-years-and-still-growing/31436/ Mon, 24 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST Do we really need "United 93?" The question is on a lot of people's minds as the fifth Tribeca Film Festival opens tomorrow night with Paul Greengrass's harrowing speculation about what transpired aboard the hijacked airplane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. The festival is to be commended, even marveled at, for such opening night audacity. It's about to kick off the festivities by traumatizing several hundred people with a blast of unbearable, nerve-shattering verite. Savvy... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/existential-drama-of-posing/30657/ Mon, 10 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST Never ask if Andy Warhol was prophetic or symptomatic, analytic or intuitive, critic or celebrant. His every (in)action served to blur such distinctions, dissolve the categories, totalize the ambivalence that went hand in hand with late-20th century relativism. We live in his dream, which is to say his nightmare. He watches us from the Factory in the sky, filming us as we sleep. The results are broadcast every night and called reality television. Warhol is the quintessential American artist if... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/hormone-potter/23212/ Thu, 17 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST A dark and powerful force has crept into the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Its looming presence has been hinted at before, but now it is here, an implacable fact of life. Strange and beguiling metamorphoses are in store for boy wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), his loyal comrade Ron (Rupert Grint), and their plucky pal Hermione (Emma Watson). This subtle demon has a name, terrible to pronounce. Beware ... Puberty! The fire, in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," is in... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/lazy-gangsters-guide-to-fame-and-fortune/22765/ Wed, 9 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST For 10 bucks plus change, you can now spend two hours in the company of 50 Cent, ne Curtis Jackson, the latest hip-hop MC to put down the mike and step in front of the camera. Alternately, you might spend that money on (used) copies of his hit albums, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'"and "The Massacre," and spend an afternoon nodding your head to his lazy, seductive flow. I recommend the latter; if not exactly worthless, Mr. Cent's big-screen debut keeps the lazy but fails to seduce. "Get Rich or Die... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/bloody-bore/22221/ Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST "Saw," if you recall, was the story of a nut job named Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) who devised absurdly complex death traps for his victims. His twisted ambition, borrowed from "Se7en," was to impart moral lessons with extreme force and facile irony. His true raison d'etre, however, was to give two young Australian cineastes a pretext for splattering the images and ideas of every horror movie they'd ever seen - all of them, from the look of it - up on the screen. The movie was stupid, disgusting... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/return-trip/22227/ Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST Slowly, slowly, "The Passenger" (1975) drives Jack Nicholson all over the map with a trunk full of ambiguity in tow. He plays Locke, a journalist gathering documentary footage in deepest post-colonial Africa. When his hotel mate, a mysterious British businessman, drops dead from a heart attack, Locke assumes his identity and embarks on the road to nowhere, pausing en route for a sequence of inscrutably metaphoric engagements with Euro-formalist tableaux. "I prefer men to landscapes," says the... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/high-60s-groove/22062/ Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST In 1968, filmmaker William Greaves assembled a small crew in Central Park for an experiment in freewheeling deconstruction - or, as one participant called it, a "feature length we-don'tknow." The working title was "Over the Cliff" - the cliff, in this case, being every normal procedure of moviemaking. What ultimately came together in the editing room is known as "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 1," a minor avant-garde classic opening today at the IFC Center in a new 35mm print. The rehearsing of a... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/lump-of-muscle/21859/ Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST "Doom" opens with the standard sci-fi mumbo jumbo: It's 2026, a mysterious portal to Mars has been discovered, there's trouble at the research facility on the other side, and so on. Within five seconds we're racing through under-lit hallways as panicked scientists flee an intergalactic terror. Cue orchestral menace and the Universal logo bathed in Martian murder red. Doom! (But for whom?) Next we meet a lump of muscle named Sarge (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) in the middle of debriefing. Cut to a... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/supreme-cinematic-poet-of-isolation/21566/ Mon, 17 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST A small number of filmmakers achieve such singularity of style, theme, or personality that they establish their own category. We speak of the Bressonian, Hitchcockian, Altmanesque. No time soon will the name Robert Beavers enter common currency in this manner, but if any living filmmaker has offered a superior definition of moving image clarity and precision, I've never see it. Sample the complete retrospective of his work currently in progress at the Whitney Museum and you'll find yourself... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/pseudo-art-house-flop/21547/ Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST Where the truth lies is, apparently, somewhere in the vicinity of Kevin Bacon's rear end. Thereabouts you'll discover the secret to Atom Egoyan's silly new sex thriller, a feckless retread of "Mulholland Drive" that devolves into the trashiest gay panic extravaganza this side of "Basic Instinct." Would that Paul Verhoeven had juiced up this art-house raspberry: Never mind the truth, where's the sense of humor? Alison Lohman stars, most dimly, as Karen O'Connor, a bubblegum journalist trying to... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/looking-forward-back/21222/ Mon, 10 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST "Bless this institution" said one of the many disembodied voices to be heard in Views From the Avant-Garde. Now in its ninth year, the New York Film Festival's annual sidebar of experimental film has indeed become an institution, at least among the coterie who crowd the marathon screenings. Curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith, "Views," as everyone calls it, is one of the pre-eminent showcases in the world for such work, and reliably contains some of the best and worst efforts of the... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/re-examining-bressons-carpentry/21157/ Fri, 7 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST Robert Bresson's "Pickpocket" opens today at Film Forum in a new 35mm print, presenting anew the problem of what remains to be said about this singular French filmmaker, considered by many one of the great artists of the 20th century - and by others a dour, overrated mannerist. I'm not interested in defending Bresson against the charges of the latter camp. I suppose there's still a crowd who thinks of Braque as a second-rate Cubist who devolved into the maker of ugly bird pictures, but they're... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-monster/20803/ Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST There was no movie in the New York Film Festival I wanted to see less than "Capote," a re-creation of the years when Truman Capote was embroiled in the making of his most famous book, "In Cold Blood." Word on the street was that director Bennett Miller had made a handsome, tasteful picture, and that Philip Seymour Hoffman was splendid, magnificent, amazing, etc., in the title role. But when movie people started predicting - even demanding - recognition at Oscar time, all I could think about was... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/southern-exposure-2005-09-30/20806/ Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST The big story out of Sundance this year was the flourishing of a new breed of Southern cinema. These were "films about the South by Southerners," as festival bigwig Geoff Gilmore put it, and four of them - an unprecedented number - vied for prizes and distribution deals in the prestigious Dramatic Competition section. Buzzing the loudest was "Hustle and Flow," the dubious saga of a Memphis pimp trying to break into hip-hop. Playing to better notices, if much less hype, was Jim Morrison's... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/simply-smashing/20427/ Fri, 23 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST David Cronenberg has designed a nifty prismatic shell for his new movie, "A History of Violence." Considered from one angle, it looks like an exercise in the style of ironic neo-noir practiced by the Coen Brothers; all lean, steely craftsmanship booby-trapped with sly jokes and crazy blasts of violence. From another angle, it scans like a neo-Western that's been tricked up in the manner of "Far From Heaven," with John Ford providing the template rather than Douglas Sirk. Turn it over again, so... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/parlor-of-myths/20449/ Fri, 23 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST "The truth about a film festival," critic Manny Farber once wrote, "is that it is a parlor of myths, a dilemma bound to overrun a place that is supposed to be exhibiting only the best blue-chip films." He was talking about the sixth annual New York Film Festival, that juicy slab of late-1960s cinephilia, and four decades later it's bracing to watch his scalpel intellect cut through the fat, poke at the bones, then move in to slice off the leanest, healthiest cuts. With characteristic... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/romance-in-purgatory/20089/ Fri, 16 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST Generically, "Just Like Heaven" is a romantic comedy - and an awfully generic one at that. Neither as stupid as it could have been nor smart as it ought to have been, this chick flick deluxe is remarkable for two reasons. First is its postcard-preposterous view of San Francisco as an upscale wonderland of fogless rolling hills, ubiquitous bay views, enormous Victorian apartments, and total heterosexual supremacy. Second is its other deeply conservative aspect: a strikingly pronounced pro-life... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/what-to-see-this-week-2005-09-16/20102/ Fri, 16 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST Vertigo (Museum of the Moving Image) Alfred Hitchcock's brooding masterpiece is as good a candidate as any for the movie, the one that contains and explains all others. Audiences tend to get so flustered by James Stewart's melodramatic agony they laugh it off as camp, but don't let that keep you from the big screen plunge. Everything at Anthology Film Archives A slew of repertory rarities is set to unspool this weekend at the cornerstone of adventurous New York cinephilia. Jean-Luc Godard's... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/lofty-rhetoric-empty-poetry/19972/ Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST Theo Angelopoulos has announced that his new film is the first part of a trilogy that will attempt a "poetic summing up of the century that just ended." Those are some mighty big words, and he's backed them up with a mighty big movie. Just shy of three hours long, "The Weeping Meadow" is an epic meditation on Greek history from 1919-49 that follows the fates of a young couple (Alexandra Aidini and Nikos Poursanidis) from childhood exile through, well, everything: romance, parenthood, the... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/exorcising-more-than-demons/19794/ Fri, 9 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST I love it when movies write their own reviews. Take, for example, the following courtroom scene from "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," where Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) defends Father Richard Moore (Tom Wilkinson) against charges that he killed young Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter) by refusing her medical treatment. Arguing that Emily was, in fact, possessed by demons, and quite beyond any medical care, she calls to the stand an Ivy League expert in demonic possession (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Wise Dr... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/as-provocative-as-a-kenneth-cole-ad/19388/ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Summer ends with a wince courtesy of "The Constant Gardener," a pretentious epic to kick-start the season of overrated Oscar-bait. Based on a globe-trotting political thriller by John le Carre and directed by Fernando Meirelles ("City of God"), it has all the ingredients of a prestige picture deluxe: movie stars, exotic locations, pseudo-sophistication, political naivete, and a massive marketing campaign. Ralph Fiennes stars as Justin Quayle, a diplomat in the British High Commission assigned... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/not-so-happily-ever-after/19204/ Fri, 26 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Once upon a time, a visionary filmmaker embarked on a grand new project. It would be an imaginative account of the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose famous collection of German folklore gave us the stories of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood, among countless others. In this telling, a freewheeling mix of fact and fancy, the Brothers Grimm travel the countryside coming to the "rescue" of villagers under attack by supernatural forces. In reality, the... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/wes-cravens-fearful-flying/18870/ Fri, 19 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST If you want to see dumb people doing dumb stuff, go for a walk: That's life. If you want to see them while air-conditioned, go to a movie: That's entertainment! Stupid folk, intentional or otherwise, are as much a part of cinema as cinematography. You could trace one line of movie moron from vaudeville to silent comedy through slapstick, screwball, and farce all the way up to Will Ferrell. Another might consider the damsel in distress from the Griffith to the slasher flick. As for the... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/love-among-the-grizzlies/18477/ Fri, 12 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Timothy Treadwell spent 13 years of his strange, solitary life living with the wild grizzly bears of Alaska. An amateur naturalist and fully certified eccentric, he was possessed by delirious aggrandizement, imagining himself the sole defender of the great predators, a "kind warrior" in the battle for their survival. From the evidence of "Grizzly Man," he seems to have accomplished very little in concrete terms. But, then, the evidence in this case is of a most unusual kind. During the last... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/bleeding-men-the-women-who-love-them/18116/ Fri, 5 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Jorge Luis Borges, in his pseudoscience classic "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," describes a Chinese encyclopedia that organized the entire animal kingdom into 14 categories, including "belonging to the emperor," "embalmed," "sucking pigs," and - my personal favorite - "having just broken the water pitcher." "The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe," Borges wryly concludes, "cannot stop us from planning human patterns." Numbers impose logical patterns on... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/how-a-fish-is-choking-tanzania-to-death/18144/ Fri, 5 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Forty years ago, the Nile perch was introduced to Lake Victoria, the vast freshwater lake that unites the borders of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. There, in a region some believe the birthplace of mankind, the implacable predator thrived like a cancer, gobbling up the native species. Biodiversity was gradually extinguished; oxygen levels plummeted; the lake's ecosystem began to collapse. Lake Victoria is now in the death throes of an environmental endgame: With the food supply all but vanished... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/navigating-the-great-american-divide/18008/ Wed, 3 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST "Junebug" is the story of a blue-state woman meeting her red-state in-laws - and the purple bruises that result. Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) is the quintessential cosmopolitan. Born in Japan, raised in South Africa, she runs a gallery in Chicago specializing in outsider art. One day at an auction, her eyes lock on George (Alessandro Nivola), a young stud from North Carolina. Quicker than you can say "southern fried chicken," they're making out to the clipped rhythms of a Godardian credit... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/sadness-at-a-slow-burn/17765/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST Is Issey Ogata the greatest actor in Japan? It's entirely possible, but as he mostly works on the stage, we'd have to go there to find out. Unlike his potential rivals on the big screen (Takeshi Kitano and Yakusho Koji are the only names that immediately come to mind), he has appeared in few movies, and fewer still that have made it to America. Most will remember him, if at all, from his minor but crucial supporting role as a soulful Japanese businessman in "Yi Yi." That was world-class... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/bad-is-good/17399/ Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST All film critics have their blind spots, soft spots, pet genres, favorite filmmakers, (in)defensible loves and hates. The present critic, for instance, is generally averse to romantic comedies, kid flicks, anything with Vince Vaughn, and movies about sports - unless kung fu can be considered a sport. So there's easily a half-dozen reasons why "Bad News Bears" ought to strike out in my book. First, it's a movie about baseball. Whatever. Call me when Godard has something to say about our national... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/it-was-hard-to-find-oh-well-whatever-nevermind/17423/ Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST On April 8, 1994, the body of Kurt Cobain was discovered at his home on the shore of Lake Washington, his bloodstream full of heroin. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the official cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Cobain's death was tragic, distressing - but not much of a surprise. His fame was predicated on a poetry of failure. "I feel stupid and contagious," ran the chorus of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the anti-anthem that made him an icon. "I Hate Myself and... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/biting-off-more-than-he-can-chew/17073/ Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST "Everything in this room is edible!" giggles Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) from the chocolate heart of his enchanted candy factory. Five children, his guests, drool at the luscious landscape spread out before them: peppermint mushrooms, licorice lawns, sugar-wafer blossoms, milk chocolate rivers. "Even I am edible!" chirps the Wonkster with a wave of his purple rubber glove, "but that's called cannibalism, and it's frowned upon in most societies." And this is what you call a Tim Burton movie... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/to-live-sigh-in-la/17075/ Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST The camera races after Mamie (Lisa Kudrow), who runs, hysterical, through a rough patch of woods, her image jagged by the handheld cinematography. She reaches a clearing, rushes into the street, and is violently slammed by an oncoming car. It's a nasty shock; the audience gasps. Then a title card slips in from the right, splitting the image into two panels. "She's not dead," it reads. Another: "No one dies in this movie. At least onscreen. It's a comedy." After twisting through a great deal of... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/terrors-of-roosevelt-island/16719/ Fri, 8 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST Leaky architecture is the villain in "Dark Water," but the thing that really freaked me out was a little monster named Cecilia (Ariel Gade). Barely old enough to read New York magazine, she's already a full-fledged Manhattan real-estate snob. Are the parents to blame? After all, mom (Jennifer Connelly as Dahlia) is a pill-popping depressive, dad (Dougray Scott as Kyle) is a bitter jerk, and both are baring fangs in an acrimonious divorce. All of which is enough to give a girl an attitude, but... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/world-is-not-enough/16420/ Fri, 1 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST Jia Zhangke films locally but thinks globally. In "Xio Wu," "Platform," and "Unknown Pleasures" - each shot in the Shanxi province of China, each suppressed by the country's authorities - he analyzed the lives of young people who feel dwarfed by the past, unmoored from the present, and anxious about the future. Baffled by the national narrative and pressed by forces they barely understand, his disaffected provincials turn inward and go blank, even as they externalize their aspirations through... Nathan Lee. http://www.nysun.com/arts/what-to-see-this-week-2005-07-01/16424/ Fri, 1 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST Edvard Munch (Cinema Village) Dense, witty, and splendidly confrontational, Peter Watkins's 1976 masterpiece is a biopic like no other. Over the course of three ceaselessly gripping hours, the life and times of the tortured Norwegian artist are rendered through a dazzlingly complex montage that combines recreation, faux-documentary, criticism, and original scholarship. Held over for just a few more days, this rereleased rarity, one of the most lucid films ever made about an artist, is screening... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/two-masters-unleashed/16271/ Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST "War of the Worlds" is approximately two hours long. Not one second is less than masterly, and a good many are literally stunning. When the aliens rise to destroy mankind, they do so armed with laser beams, spotlights, strobe bulbs, multicolored flares, massive bolts of lightning - a blazing arsenal to overwhelm the sun. Secured in their gigantic insectoid robots, they also come with boom, thunder, and an unnerving ambient drone, their every attack preceded by a pulverizing blast of their... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/jungle-bliss/16178/ Tue, 28 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST What's in a name? Like all things, it depends on where you're coming from. For the average moviegoer, if the name is a mouthful like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and it comes attached to a maker of unusual experimental movies, it can only sound like one thing: difficulty. Fortunately, the Thai filmmaker to whom it belongs is not only a supremely rewarding artist, but a singularly humble one as well. While studying film at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. Weerasethakul (as Thai nomenclature and... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/devil-within/15997/ Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST Here it comes: rough, raw, furious, hilarious, disgusting, disgusted, dripping bloody guts - a great American movie. "George A. Romero's Land of the Dead" does more than resurrect corpses; it revivifies the moribund practice of smart, subversive, sensationally entertaining pop cinema. Mr. Romero's triumphant return to the genre he immortalized is tougher than "Batman Begins," slyer than "Bewitched," shrewder than "Crash," and more inclusive than "Me and You and Everyone We Know." It... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/iamb-not-what-i-seem/16020/ Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST By design and by failure of design, "Yes" dares you to say no. Written and directed by the eccentric British filmmaker Sally Potter ("Orlando," "The Tango Lesson"), the movie is pretentious, didactic, reductive, schematic, and occasionally very silly. Yet it can also be beautiful, clever, compelling, and moving. There are formal delights and structural bungles; superb acting and simple-minded speechifying; disarming sincerity and grating naivete. It is, in short, a mixed-up movie about our... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/what-to-see-this-week-2005-06-24/16023/ Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST Land of the Dead (general release) George A. Romero returns to the genre he immortalized with this masterly zombie action flick, a work of incontestably great popular (and populist!) art. Is it too early to declare it the American film of the year? Spirited Away (MoMA) / Howl's Moving Castle (general release) Great kid's stuff, "Howl's Moving Castle" - and also one of the most radical dream narratives this side of "Mulholland Drive." The latest from legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki doesn't... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/irritatingly-winning-tour-de-force/15611/ Fri, 17 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST In January, "Me and You and Everyone We Know" won a Special Jury Prize for "Originality of Vision" at Sundance. In May, it garnered the prestigious Camera d'Or (first film) award at Cannes. Come December, expect a fresh batch of hosannas from the various film-critic groups. But for now it's June, the debut film by Miranda July is opening in theaters, and, if you'll permit me, I'd like to present "Me and You and Everyone We Know" with an award for Most Overrated Film of the Season. The... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/air-is-tonic/15474/ Wed, 15 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST "Wheel of Time," the second of three documentaries by Werner Herzog to open this summer, is a becalmed interlude. Its predecessor, "The White Diamond," was a vertiginous essay on flight, folly, and the burden of dreams. The upcoming "Grizzly Man" remembers a New Age preservationist who was devoured by a bear. The subject this time is monumentally tranquil: Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage and ritual. This being a Herzog picture, however, spectacle is everywhere. Buddha was enlightened in Bodh Gaya... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/from-a-humble-chinese-prison-camp-to-king-of/15393/ Tue, 14 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST Poor Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale). First, he fell down a well and was traumatized by bats. Then his philanthropic parents, exiting an opera, were murdered by a lowlife. Years later, when the case went to court, the perpetrator got off, thanks to Dr. Jonathan Crane (Gillian Murphy), a nefarious head-shrinker in league with Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson), a powerful mafioso. But just as Bruce prepared to exact his revenge, someone shot his bete noir dead. Drat. What's a disillusioned aristocrat... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/add-suspense-remove-irony/15256/ Fri, 10 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST French director Alexandre Aja isn't a complete sellout. For the American release of his horror film, "High Tension," he's figured out a "hybrid solution" to the "problem" of how to "best present the film in English to an American audience." The problem being that lazy American teenagers don't want to read subtitles, though they do want to see deranged hillbillies fellate themselves with the decapitated heads of foxy French chicks. No doubt nudged by an American distributor with high hopes for... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/best-coffee-in-tokyo/15259/ Fri, 10 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST If "High Tension" more or less lives up to its title, "Cafe Lumiere" goes all the way. Here is a movie for anyone who has ever stopped to watch sunlight dance on a leaf; swung by the Met to soak up Vermeer; or wept for the lucidity of an Ozu film. We can talk mise-en-scene till we're blue in the face, but there's really nothing to it but this: pure, enveloping, restorative light. The director, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, is famous for his peerlessly beautiful cinema - and infamous for the complexity of... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/z-boys-their-stuntmen/14844/ Fri, 3 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST Venice Beach, pre-gentrification: The sun is setting on the golden age of surfing, and the generation of young Americans born in the 1960s rides its final waves as they break against a crumbling pier. On land, these young punks in tube socks cruise the grimy asphalt on wooden boards rigged with hard, plastic wheels, thrilling to their own kinesis and bad attitude. Multiethnic and working class, utterly apolitical and totally disaffected, they are the spiritual predecessors of the hip-hop... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/arts/not-your-average-british-eccentric/14698/ Wed, 1 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST "The White Diamond" begins like a normal documentary. Over a montage of black-and-white archival footage, a wry voiceover ruminates on man's desire for flight. The tone is ironic, apocalyptic; the sequence terminates in a close-up of the Hindenberg aflame. We are then led through the workshop of Graham Dorrington, designer of flying machines. Among other things, the title of the film refers to his latest prototype, a small, highly mobile, pear-shaped blimp. Not your average British eccentric... NATHAN LEE http://www.nysun.com/summer-guide/popcorn-flicks-art-house-feasts/14425/ Wed, 25 May 2005 00:00:00 EST Judging from the menu, the popcorn flicks are an unusually gourmet bunch this summer. As always, there's sure to be a lot of junk food out there ("The Fantastic Four," July 8), and some truly revolting confections ("Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo") but several of the most talented commercial filmmakers are serving up their latest gazillion-dollar eye candy for global consumption. Stephen Spielberg gets back to what he does best with "War of the Worlds"(June 29), a science-fiction spectacular...