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Code 46
* * *

"Code 46", the latest film from the insanely prolific British director Michael Winterbottom, comes billed as a science-fiction film but anyone hoping for an elaborate special-effects orgy is liable to be sorely disappointed with what he has come up with. Like such seminal works as Godard’s "Alphaville", and some of David Cronenberg’s early movies, this is a film where ideas about technology are of more importance than the technology itself and where a future world is created not through an army of technicians but through looking at existing locations in a new and unique fashion. Set in the not-too-distant future, where disease is so prevalent that travel is highly restricted and where cloning is so widespread that reproduction is severely limited so as to prevent genetic relations from unknowingly having children, Tim Robbins stars as a oddball investigator with highly developed empathic skills who is sent off to a factory in Shanghai to discover who is stealing valuable passports to sell on the black market. His prime suspect is worker Samantha Morton but he finds himself strangely drawn to her-a situation that inevitably leads to numerous complications for the both of them.

It is hard to accurately describe "Code 46"-with its long, lyrical scenes of Robbins and Morton slowly growing closer in a strange Asian land despite the impossibility of their relationship, the closest comparison that I can think of is to imagine what "Gattaca" might have been like if it had been directed by Sofia Coppola. It is utterly bewildering-while there are a series of opening title cards that attempt to explain the rules of this new world, they don’t really help matters much and, in fact, all they do is telegraph the one element in the film that should remain a surprise-and paced so slowly that I suspect that most viewers will have given up long before the ending. That said, I must admit that while I didn’t really care about the story or the characters, I did find myself caught up in the film both because of the sheer oddity of what Winterbottom has done and because Robbins and Morton have a nice, unforced chemistry that always shines through even as the rest of the film gets murkier and murkier.

R

Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce. Directed by Michael Winterbottom. Starring Tim Robbins, Samantha Morton and Jeanne Balibar.

Festival Express
* * *

Upon discovering that the new music documentary "Festival Express" features performances from such seminal acts as the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and the Flying Burrito Brothers, some unreconstructed hippies might be tempted to break out an old tab of LSD before attending in order to enhance the mood. I cannot warn against that strongly enough because what the ads don’t tell you is that the film, a chronicle of a post-Woodstock concert tour of Canada where a group of musical acts where hired as sort of a traveling music festival that would go from province to province by train, also features a performance by none other than Sha Na Na. Watching those dopes with a clear head is challenging enough-doing it with a brain full of acid could lead to unimaginable psychic damage.

That trauma aside, "Festival Express" is a pretty entertaining documentary that will prove to be a valuable artifact to fans of the music of that era. The performances (which also include tunes from The Band, Buddy Guy, Ian and Sylvia and others) may not be beautiful from a cinematic point-of-view (most of the footage is rough and grainy) but they do have a lot of energy and excitement to them. Additionally, the contemporary interviews with the survivors reveal many interesting stories, the most intriguing being the running story of being dogged at every stop by kids branding the $10 ticket price as a rip-off and demanding that the concerts be turned into free shows. (As one of the promoters later put it, "I gave the public too much and they didn’t deserve it.") The strangest, most moving sequence is one that captures an impromptu jam session between Jerry Garcia , Janis Joplin, The Band’s Rick Danko, and Bob Weir working their way through "Ain’t No More Cane". The music, rough at first, grows as the group gets into it and you can actually feel the pleasure they convey as they sit and sing and play simply for the sheer love of it-that pleasure, sadly, is tempered when you realize that all but Weir are now dead.

UNRATED

Directed by Bob Smeaton. Starring The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, Buddy Guy and the Flying Burrito Brothers

The Hunting of the President
*

One thing that has been overlooked in the debate over such left-leaning documentaries as "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "The Corporation" is the question of how they work purely on cinematic terms. Personally, I think the reason that both films are so effective is that they are told in a clean, entertaining style that manages to convey an enormous amount of information without ever getting bogged down-deep down, I suspect that even those bitterly opposed to everything said in those films would have to admit that they are never boring to watch. To fully appreciate the skill that went into making those films work as cinema, I recommend watching "The Hunting of the President", a new documentary that takes similar subject matter, namely the extended campaign to discredit and bring down the Bill Clinton presidency, and delves into it in such a condescending and ham-fisted manner that people of all political persuasions will be insulted and bored by it. Formless and graceless, the compendium of interviews (the key get being Susan McDougal, the Clinton business partner who went to jail rather than offer false testimony in exchange for a reduced sentence-a person who might be a fascinating subject for a decent documentary someday), news clips and inappropriately jokey stock footage goes on forever without ever getting to much of a point beyond the notion that Bill Clinton was a god among men (with the exception of that Monica Lewinsky nonsense) and that his troubles were caused entirely by those who were jealous that they weren’t as cool or popular as him-a political version of "Mean Girls". A mess from beginning to end, this is little more than a glossier version of the muckraking tapes occasionally put together by fringe groups and is a shallow depiction of what should have been a fascinating subject.

UNRATED

Written and directed by Harry Thomason and Nickolas Perry. Narrated by Morgan Freeman

There is a fascinating movie at the heart of "Touch of Pink", a gay-themed riff on "Play It Again, Sam", but the problem with the film is that writer-director Ian Iqbal Rashid shunts it off to the sidelines. The film stars Jimi Mistry as Alim, a London-based South Asian Canadian (for no other apparent reason than to indulge in a couple of Canada jokes) who is so obsessed with the notions of romance in old Hollywood movies that he is convinced that the spirit of Cary Grant (portrayed in an odd, if not entirely uninteresting, manner by Kyle MacLachlan) is always by his side ready to dole out life lessons. Having not yet admitted his homosexuality to his mother Nuru (Suleka Mathew), Alim goes to enormous lengths to hide his true relationship with "roommate" Giles (Kristen Holden-Ried) when Mom visits to convince him to come home for a wedding.

This particular plot is not especially interesting-the comic complications are hardly fresh, the lapses into melodrama are jarring and the film never quite gets a handle on the fact that the main character is in the throes of some kind of psychosis. Instead, I found myself far more interested in the character of the mother; instead of becoming just another one-dimensional caricature, Mathew invests her with a lot of personality and she comes off as funny, compelling and, I’ll say it, sexy enough to warrant a film of her own. There is a scene in which she and (unknown to her) the son’s boyfriend bond one day while shopping and drinking and the two of them strike so many sparks that you wonder why Rashid didn’t just abandon all the Cary Grant stuff and just follow them around.

RATED R

Written and directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid. Starring Jimi Mistry, Kyle MacLachlan, Kristen Holden-Ried and Suleka Mathew.

-- Capsule Reviews by Peter Sobczynski

Copyright © 2004 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
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While the views expressed by Peter Sobczynski do not necessarily reflect the views of Criticdoctor.com, the Critic Doctor will occasionally examine Mr. Sobczynski's film reviews to bring forth an honest examination of those views expressed.