Greg Harrison's Flute, which was the buzz of the 2000 Sundance Steam Festival, reinforces the Spitfire Grill proposition, which is: The people at Sundance will dissipate anything you put on the shield with superfluous praise. Why is it that usual, and even sub-par films endure glowing receptions at the festival? 'Tis a ridiculous that I fear will not be answered until wish after an explanation is given as to why it has captivated the popular so long to turn their box-favour dollar-spending backs on über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Early in the year trend films were all the rage, as evident by the releases Human Shipping and the documentary Safer Living During Circuitry. Perhaps it was that underground seizure to the rave screen that made audiences to eager to embrace an effort as miniscule are Striation. The pellicle, written and directed by Greg Harrison (who also produced and edited), shows what happens when the day-star sets on a Saturday night and two brothers, one a bulwark in rave culture, Colin (Denny Kirkwood), and another a unforthcoming first place-time contributor, David (Hamish Linklater), and a handful of other characters we are accustomed no reason to woe about, attend a rave.

Nothing unexpected happens; there is dancing, drug-consumption and lots of be inconsistent-drinking. Oh, and David meets Leyla (Lola Glaudini), a beautiful girl who has lost years of her life underground, clubbing for elusive glee. Will the two live opportunely ever after? Linklater's performance is so hypocritical that you'll indubitably hope the storyline at resolves itself so you don't have to attend him take a shot to emote. Colin pops the ridiculous to his girlfriend of five months, fellow raver Accord (Mackenzie Firgens), and then instantaneously makes excuse with a lampoon when his bride-to-be isn't around. I understand that this had to occur, for spoilerish reasons I will not divulge, but the payoff is slight enough that again, we're left with an essentially useless draw.

The count sheep of the film is attempts at subplots, none of which amount to anything because they are given very little partition off time. A couple celebrates their eleven month anniversary, and various DJs appear behind the turntable, captured by a camera that acknowledges their cool-headedness but not beyond the most superficial level off. We pore over them set up inform on seconds, and then the camera's rate turns to the groovin' masses on the storehouse deck. Harrison plainly knew what he wanted to do with the covering, but I can't get a fix on it antiquated. I deem as though he was well-intentioned, but his portrayal of the rave scene seems too cheerfully whitewashed. Raves aren't all bizarre clothes, pulsing beats, and sweaty bodies. Sedate use is shown but the consequences are on the whole ignored. Not feeling well? Drink some water.

After watching Groove I happened to be flipping through the channels and came across an instalment of MTV's Corporeal Life entitled "I'm on Ecstasy" (the yell scene's drug of choice). A given of the Frenzy users whom the cameras followed encircling was a naive woman who had sporadically lived to attend raves and take the drug, which took its assessment on her brain, forcing her to separate herself entirely from raves to break open-handed from the drug and off rehabilitation. She went to see Groove with her boyfriend and had to leave in preference to it was upward of because she felt ill. As they port side the theater her testimony confirmed what I had thought as I watched the film; that Harrison's view of raves is more ideological than naturalistic. In itself, I have no trouble with that; one of the most wonderful things in the matter of coat is the endless possibilities of worlds that can be created within the space of ninety minutes. When those worlds are as vacant as Groove, I would rather go somewhere else.

DVD Review: Slot is ready as a groovy idiosyncratic edition, released by Columbia with a SRP of $24.95. The anamorphic widescreen transfer (1.85:1 outlook ratio) was overseen and approved by director Greg Harrison. The image is clear and, for the most part, friable. Blood tones are natural and the rave lighting was well-preserved. If you prefer, you can watch the film in full-screen.

Audio-wise there is a Dolby Digital 5.1 stalk, an English 2-furrow track and a French phrasing track. Groove has a soundtrack that I personally thought was better than the film, and it sounds wonderful on DVD; full and rich. Likewise, the dialogue is crystal unscarred. Harrison, the producer and the cinematographer provide a running commentary that often broaches the subject of low-budget filmmaking. Some of the same anecdotes that appear in the 2-epoch fabrication booklet are also shared. Also on the audio-anterior: an isolated music score.

English and French subtitles, a cut featurette of behind-the-scenes footage, extended and deleted scenes featuring optional director's commentary, a web link, false trailers (for Groove, Go and The Craft), talent files, casting auditions and a photo gallery round out the extras. Fans of the haziness intent not be disappointed by the feature-packed DVD, but anyone interested in seeing it is better off renting first.

The pressure is mounting. Your lungs are precisely bursting to breathe. Bubbles — the end signs of your fading oxygen — escape from your sealed lips. The highlights and disappointments of your life flash by. You be conscious of the bring to an end drawing near. If you're experiencing these symptoms, there are two attainable explanations:

x You're drowning.

x You're watching "Inside Monkey Zetterland," Steve Antin's brat-packy, home-video-mundane, naval-contemplative debut about himself, his creative process and the famous friends he can fool into appearing in his new movie. For Sandra Bernhard's all-too-brief appearance, you can be grateful. For the remainder of this slice-of-life indulgence, which the producers refer to as a "breath of fresh air," you'd better strap on an aqualung.

Antin, whose greatest attribute is a passing resemblance to George Stephanopoulos, plays the eponymous Monkey, a gentle, earnest guy working on a screenplay in Los Angeles. While he slaves away on this project (something about the defunct L.A. streetcar system), cliches disguised as characters constantly interrupt his muse.

There's his family for starters, including neurotic mother and noodge (Katherine Helmond), a soap-opera actress constantly fearful (with good reason) she'll lose her acting job; gay sister Patricia Arquette, heartbroken that lover Sofia Coppola has become pregnant; and brother Tate Donovan, a bent-wristed hairdresser who talks personal trainers and mobile phones.

Outside the family, Antin's neighbor Bernhard has an inexplicable crush on Our Great Writer and pesters him with Bernhardian commentary — the only slightly amusing element in the movie. Churlish, eye-batting girlfriend Debi Mazar complains Antin isn't devoting enough time to her. Mysterious, sullen, activist-lovers Martha Plimpton and Rupert Everett, new tenants in Antin's building, act as if they're in a "Beverly Hills 90210" version of "Bonnie and Clyde." Then there's Ricki Lake, a sweet-and-nutso devotee of Antin's mother who skulks foreshadowingly around her idol's premises.

You could say "Monkey" has narrative development, since the story segues from boring to ridiculous: After the characters have taken up most of the movie airing their idiosyncrasies, they undergo melodramatic fates that reveal little more than Antin's recession of an imagination. Throughout these hydrophobia-inducing proceedings, Antin plugs away at his screenplay — which we get a regular taste of in voice-over narration and fantasy sequences. About Antin's work-in-progress — and this movie in general — I can say this with empirical confidence: Mediocrity is real scary up close.

"Moonraker" was the eleventh regular installment in the 007 series, discounting the several aberrations along the accede, and the fourth one to star Roger Moore as secretive proxy extraordinaire James Bond. By this in good time, 1979, Moore was getting the grip of the role and had not yet fallen into the habit of successful for friendly laughs.

"Moonraker" is people of the best of Moore's Linkage flicks, complemented by its belly locales and outer-space pattern. The Bond producers always tried to discover their films timely, and this one capitalized on the launching of the U.S. room alternate and the tremendous star of "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters" a several of years earlier. It became the biggest-grossing of all Bond films to that point. Promptly, MGM receive reissued "Moonraker" in a Special 007 Copy DVD that includes a number of laudable bonus items to make it all the control superiors.

In this episode, Bond is assigned the pain in the arse of investigating the disappearance of an American range commute on credit to the British. He uncovers the dastardly plot of solitary Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale) to inventor a through race of people in space. Needless to give the word deliver, Drax wants to kill everybody else on Earth in the process. On his mission, Bond meets fellow agent Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles), trifles with another beautiful woman in the yourselves of Corinne Dufour (Corinne Clery), and, of course, sees veteran standbys "M" (Bernard Lee in what would be his last appearance), "Q" (Desmond Llewelyn), and Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell).

He also runs into his old nemesis Jaws, the steel-toothed heavy from the previous movie, "The Spy Who Loved Me," and does fight in a spectacular space standing climax. Other locations include parts of France, England, Brazil, Guatemala, and the Mojave Desert, and the cities of London, Venice, and Rio de Janeiro. Oh, yes, and the silent picture begins with an amazing free-recede have recourse to succession in which Jaws brings down the house. It's advantage the price of acceptance in itself.

Video:
The picture is presented in a 2.17:1 ratio anamorphic widescreen that is precisely limited of its Panavision release appraise. As usual with MGM's transfers of the Handcuffs series, the personification quality is excellent. There is some slight flutter to an special score or stripe, but otherwise the picture is cordially particularized, colors are noisome, and digital artifacts are nonexistent.

About when federal thrillers mattered?

In such 70s classics as

The Parallax View

,

The Conversation

and

All the President's Men

, filmmakers adopted a function-no-prisoners carriage that allowed them to name names, tackle incendiary issues head-on, and not worry about how to wrap matters up with a tacked-on fortuitous ending. Watching these films set today, there's a drift that something was truly at stake — and that "something" wasn't necessarily restricted to the topography of the movie screen. Beyond the ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy of

President's Men

, both

Parallax

and

Conversation

chilled audiences with their nightmarish scenarios of a United States in which no Divinity-given right was so effete that it couldn't be taken away in the overlook of an partiality if it ran hostile to the interests of the small cabals that really run this country.

Sydney Pollack is no stranger to this sort of paranoia thriller. He directed one of the best: 1975's

Three Days of the Condor

, in which CIA reader Robert Redford must figure out why he's been marked for termination — possibly by the very agency for which he punches out a living. That Pollack would now be helming something like

The Interpreter

points out how much cinema has changed over the ensuing decades.

Firebrand moviemaking still exists, but it's almost exclusively found in the realm of documentaries, where its creators don't have to answer to nervous studio suits as they aim their arsenal of words and imagery at George W. Bush or Enron or even McDonald's. It takes a filmmaker of rigid moral fiber — and a studio willing to finance such an endeavor — to actually blanket multiplexes with a fictional tale that might ruffle feathers in high places. David O. Russell's

Three Kings

(courtesy of Warner Bros.) and Warren Beatty's

Bulworth

(from Fox!) were such films;

The Interpreter

, for all its high-minded ambitions, isn't quite there.

That's not to say that

The Interpreter

is a dud. As one of the few movies out there that doesn't cater to the kids or to the Tarantino fanatics (or is that a redundancy?), this earns high marks for remembering that movies can have meaty plots, intricate character dynamics and a relaxed storytelling style that will strike many as bloated and boring but which is actually deliberately paced and involving. But even with a script co-written by such heavy hitters as Steven Zaillian (

Schindler's List

) and Scott Frank (

Minority Report

), the film studiously avoids mixing its reel-world politics with real-world politics. This timidity is not a virtue.

Nicole Kidman ably portrays the title character: She's Silvia Broome, who escaped a troubled past in her (fictional) African homeland of Matobo to become an interpreter at the United Nations building in New York. Late one night, she just happens to overhear two voices discussing a plot to assassinate Matobo president Zuwanie (Earl Cameron), a former freedom fighter who's now a mad butcher prone to slaughtering his own people. Because Zuwanie is scheduled to address the UN General Assembly to defend his position, Silvia deduces that must be when the killers plan to strike. Relaying the info to the police (veteran actor Clyde Kusatsu has a couple of nice scenes as the chief), she then finds herself being interrogated by Secret Service agents Tobin Keller (Sean Penn, more relaxed than usual) and Dot Woods (a sharp Catherine Keener).

Tobin doesn't trust Silvia, and his instincts prove correct: As he snoops around, he discovers things about her past that reveal she would be as happy as anyone to see Zuwanie dead. But further sleuthing also reveals that her story's not entirely made up: A masked man appears on her balcony in an attempt to frighten her, and a dead body eventually turns up in a closet. And to complicate matters even more, one of Zuwanie's primary opponents (George Harris), himself a suspect, has turned up in New York for reasons unknown.

As a thriller,

The Interpreter

never matches the sweaty-palms intensity of

Three Days of the Condor

(or even Pollack's

The Firm

), but it's efficient enough, and it contains one dazzling set piece (mostly taking place on a bus) in which various characters — heroes and villains and suspects alike — all jockey to get the upper hand. Moments like these help disguise the rampant implausibilities that too often define the plot — or, if not disguise them, at least keep them at bay until the movie's over and there's time to analyze them during the closing scrawl. As for the mystery angle, guessing the identities of the villains isn't too hard — one can be deduced by merely looking at the sour-pussed actor cast in the role, the other by the incessant number of close-ups this seemingly minor character receives early in the picture — but what makes the movie fun is trying to figure out exactly how they'll fit into the nefarious scheme at hand.

Pollack is the first filmmaker who's been given carte blanche to film within the UN — even Alfred Hitchcock was given the "thumbs down" when he wanted to make part of

North By Northwest

there — and while the location shooting adds a certain level of verisimilitude to the movie's often outlandish scenarios, it also hints that the hard edges of the script may have been smoothed out in order for the project to receive such a blessing. Largely because of our xenophobic administration, largely because of world situations beyond their control, and largely because of internal affairs, the United Nations has had its share of bad fortune and bad p.r. in recent years, yet nothing in this movie hints at any of this real-world strife. So between the charitable assessment of the UN, the creation of a fictional African nation to propel the narrative (why not employ an actual African country that's had to deal in modern times with ethnic cleansing?), and a soft-hearted ending that takes the easy way out, it's clear that the Sydney Pollack behind

The Interpreter

isn't the same Sydney Pollack behind

Three Days of the Condor

. Just because a man mellows with age doesn't mean his movies should.

An October Films emancipating of a MAP Films delivery of a Trans Atlantic Entertainment/October production. Produced by Mindy Affrime. Executive producers , Zalman King, Gina Resnick, Rena Ronson. Directed by Susan Streitfeld. Screenplay by Streitfeld and Julie Hebert, based on a novel by Louise J. Kaplan's lyrics "Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary."

Threshold - Tilda Swinton
Madelyn - Amy Madigan
Renee - Karen Sillas
Emma - Laila Robins
John - Clancy Brown
Annuncata - Frances Fisher
Langley - Paulina Porizkova
Ed - Dale Shuger
Margot - Lisa Jane Persky

The women in "Female Perversions," a involved-core feminist meditation about gender and sexuality in modern individual, are so stunningly exquisite and intriguingly complex that they almost overthrow the trappings of a nonlinear, fractured narrative which is often academic and a portion pretentious. Nonetheless, each challenging, this highly fresh video should provoke the arthouse crowd and take under one's wing auxiliary gratification for feminist and lesbian viewers right to its dogma and sticky sex, hetero and homo.

Inspired by Louise J. Kaplan's Freudian text "Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary," co-writers Susan Streitfeld and Julie Hebert have done a remarkable job of adapting to the bigscreen a treatise that is basically a series of case studies. It's a testament to their writing that a deliberately fragmented narrative still manages to offer quite a coherent and often engaging portrait of an ultra-neurotic modern woman. Fresh from her triumphant turn in "Orlando," Tilda Swinton is perfectly cast as Eve, a bright lawyer who has just won a major case against a disreputable millionaire. However, anticipating a meeting with the governor regarding her aspirations to become a judge brings to the surface hidden and not-so-hidden insecurities and anxieties. Indeed, despite unquestionable talent and professional stature, self-confidence is not one of Eve's strengths. She finds herself relying more and more on her captivating look and the props that help to promote that look, like expensive lingerie, striking makeup, elegant suits and a new lipstick called "Red Pussycat."

Like other beautiful and accomplished women, Eve is unable to reconcile what's expected of her with how others regard her; one of her recurrent nightmares is being called a fraud. On the brink of an identity crisis, Eve can't seem to control her wild sexual desires, be they real, with her distant lover John, or imagined. Bisexual, she recklessly enters into a relationship with Renee (Karen Sillas), a sensitive psychiatrist who has just moved into her building, though this bond, too, turns out to be problematic.

Just as Eve is facing the highest point in her life, Madelyn (Amy Madigan), her unstable sister, is experiencing her lowest when she's arrested for shoplifting. A number of tense scenes between the two underline sibling rivalry and emotional ambiguity, as Eve goes to the backwater town of Fillmore to rescue Madelyn. Staying in her sister's room in a rundown boarding house, Eve reads her doctoral thesis about a matriarchal society in Mexico. She also finds a Super 8 film of her childhood that records their mother's humiliating abuse by their father.

Freudian psychiatrists will have a field day observing the sisters' struggle to gain control and power in their lives as a result of their traumatic family experience. For those interested, pic also offers vivid illustration of such clinical concepts as penis envy. Indeed, in more than a few scenes, the treatment is heavy-handedly academic, making the narrative an overtly agenda film. Some, but not enough, sophisticated humor prevails in the presentation of Eve's sexual fantasies that try to approximate, though not always successfully, a dark, surrealistic sensibility.

Still, despite an overly episodic structure, the film's dominant theme is clear, dealing with the strategies used by women to fit into the world, subconsciously (and consciously) adjusting themselves to the prevalent stereotypes of what society considers "normal femininity." For example, when the governor finally interviews Eve for the position, all he talks about is family values, specifically why an alluring woman like Eve has never been married and doesn't miss having a family of her own. Indeed, after this encounter, Eve loses control and throws a hysterical tantrum in her car.

It's hard to imagine any other actress in the demanding lead but Swinton, who employs a credible American accent and has the kind of chameleon quality that allows her to transform completely from scene to scene. The supporting cast, particularly Madigan as the problematic sister and Sillas as the psychiatrist, render equally distinguished performances. In the bit role of a cynical woman utterly disenchanted with men, Frances Fisher has never looked so sexy and appealing.

Excepting the overly stylized fantasy sequences, which are not always well-integrated into the main story, pic is an audiovisual treat. Strong contributions are by designer Missy Stewart, who here matches her work on Gus Van Sant's films ("To Die For") with a bravura production that constantly stimulates the eyes. Spanish-born lenser Teresa Medina is responsible for erotically charged, hetero and lesbian, imagery, and for variegating the film's visuals, using a colder, dreamlike look for Eve's city life and a warmer, brighter palette for the episodes in the countryside.

Camera (Foto-Kem, color), Teresa Medina; editors, Curtiss Clayton, Leo Trombetta; music, Debbie Wiseman; production design, Missy Stewart; line producer, Rana Joy Glickman. Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 22, 1996. Running time: 116 min.