Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Interview
Directed by Steve Buscemi
C
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., Aug. 3

Boozy, battle-scarred former war correspondent Pierre Peters (Steve Buscemi) is disgusted with his latest assignment. Big-time indictments are coming down in D.C., and yet here he is, stuck in SoHo, pounding out a puff piece about a tabloid starlet named Katya, famous not for her undistinguished acting career, but rather for the men she's slept with. In a rather cheeky casting gambit, Katya is played by Sienna Miller, a tabloid starlet famous not for her undistinguished acting career, but for the men she's slept with.

Turns out Miller isn't such a bad actress after all--something I never would've guessed after suffering through Factory Girl--and her Katya is a bundle of coked-up nerves, raging diva entitlement and complete indifference to the world around her. Pierre doesn't even bother hiding his contempt, tossing back bourbons while passive-aggressively mocking her every vapid answer. You'd think the interview would be over once he calls her "Cuntya," but their night has only just begun.

Stretching the bounds of credibility, there's a fender bender, a mild concussion, and suddenly Pierre's hanging out in Katya's SoHo loft, where the booze, drugs and confessions all start pouring out in one of those stagy two-character showdowns that tend to feel more like acting school exercises than an actual movie.

Interview is Buscemi's remake of a 2003 film by the murdered Dutch director Theo van Gogh. The great-great-nephew of the celebrated painter was gunned down in 2004 by a Muslim extremist, apparently as a response to his TV movie Submission: Part I. Buscemi touchingly intends the film as tribute to a fallen comrade, and in addition to adapting the screenplay himself, he's also directed Interview using van Gogh's preferred method of running three simultaneous cameras. Such a well-intentioned project--too bad it's not very good.

For starters, Buscemi is woefully miscast. An enormous amount of the interplay between Pierre and Katya depends on sexual tension. She's one of the most beautiful women in the world, but he brings out her daddy issues. There's a masculine brutishness to his dialogue, and Pierre is constantly pushing closer and invading Katya's physical space. And yet--don't get me wrong, he's one of the best actors around--he's still Steve Buscemi. It's a role Harvey Keitel or Nick Nolte might've knocked out of the park. The movie needed Anthony Quinn, not Peter Lorre.

Finally the artifice of the enterprise becomes too much to bear. We wander far off course into murder confessions and cancer revelations, and the movie tritely settles for blackmail plots, ditching Interview's infinitely more interesting initial premise of watching two people from different worlds actually sit down and talk to one another.

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Arctic Tale
Directed by Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson
B+
Reviewed by Brook Midgley
Opens Fri., Aug. 3

The global warming cause has propagandists Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson on its side. And that's good, because the directors do a damn good job of documenting the slushy mess we've made of that cold crystal circle in the North.

Under the National Geographic umbrella, the husband-and-wife team spent more than a decade following wildlife in the Arctic. From their research they created the fable of polar cub Nanu and walrus pup Seela, following them from their births to the births of their own babies. Queen Latifah narrates the kid-friendly tale, and her first line is demonstrably prophetic: "They're children of the Arctic, their lives cradled by the ice around them." And that's just the problem--the cradle is melting.

It's one thing to hear global warming is killing walruses and polar bears. It's another to meet Seela and Nanu, and then watch them and their parents abandon the ancient rituals they've relied on for years in order to survive.

No longer can polar bears count on sufficient ice cover to provide shelter nooks for their food source, baby seals. And watching the polar bears' bewilderment as they fall through the ice will more than make you want to buy a hybrid and sign up for wind energy. These warmer conditions have also melted the sizable ice islands walruses use as refuge. Sadly, there's more than one scene where too many walruses climb onto a too-small island, only to capsize it and chuck everyone into the water. Eventually both the polar bears and walruses resort to swimming 200 miles to Rock Island, a rare feat that may now become routine.

Arctic Tale is painful to watch at times, but Latifah's narration sets a tone that doesn't leave you feeling completely suicidal. Just when you think the Arctic world is on its last legs, Ravetch and Robertson introduce walruses' communal flatulence, a perky little fox faithfully shadowing Nanu or Nanu's successful ploy for food when faced with a male challenger.

The film closes with the birth of Nanu and Seela's children. Ben Harper's "Happily Ever After in Your Eyes" plays as we see the clumsy first movements of the polar bear cubs and walrus pup. It's perhaps too pleasant a closing given the challenges those babies will have to overcome to survive.

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Gypsy Caravan
Directed by Jasmine Dellal
B
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Aug. 3

Last year Borat made a mockery of anti-Gypsy sentiment. ("Gypsy, who is this woman you have shrunk?") Now comes director Jasmine Dellal to finish the job. Setting out to dismantle one of the more enduring cultural stereotypes--that of gypsies as a nomadic race who'll steal your belongings the moment you blink--Dellal's film attacks by way of example, tagging along with the titular concert tour, which shlepped across the country back in 2001.