Short Takes

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY For cruel cosmic jokes, it’s hard to top debilitating a sensualist with a stroke that leaves his mouth and body immobile but his mind free to bang helplessly against the sides of his skull. And yet one remarkable thing about the movie version of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir—famously dictated by the stricken author using only blinks of his left eyelid—is its visual lightness, as unbound in its own way as Bauby’s free-floating consciousness. The long opening scene is first-person cinema at its most harrowing, as French Elle editor Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) slowly awakens to his “locked-in” state: as shot from his restricted point of view, the shimmers and severe angles of Janusz Kaminski’s inventive cinematography capture his dawning horror so vividly our own eyes feel the strain. But Bauby’s captivating inner monologue (as adapted by Ronald Harwood) shoves aside self-pity to revel in a trove of tactile memories, rendered by painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel with goatish gusto—the wind whipping a lover’s hair, a babe-studded blur of a fashion shoot. (Juliette Helfling’s quick, associative editing creates a new-century model of psychic torment: the soul as a disembodied DVD commentary track, with the memory a multi-disc changer stuck on shuffle.) It’s only when visualizing Bauby’s flights of fancy that Schnabel’s direction crashes to earth: These fantasies demand the eruption of a defiantly unbridled imagination, not shampoo-commercial period costumes and prancing danceurs. But Amalric, gnarled and motionless for much of the movie, hints at the leaping mind inside, and the catwalk parade of stunning actresses cast opposite him—from Emmanuelle Seigner as his estranged wife to Marie-Jozée Croze as a patient saint of a therapist—suggests that despite his imprisonment in a casing of meat, the author never lost his delight in beauty, nor escaped the ache it must have caused. In French with English subtitles. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at the Belcourt)

CASSANDRA’S DREAM This sun-drenched British noir is the most fatalistic of Woody Allen’s genre pieces: the title says the worst is going to happen, and his script is the escalator that unhurriedly delivers two brothers to their foretold hell. Ewan McGregor (the natty class-climbing one) and Colin Farrell (the good-hearted foolhardy one) play the (more theoretical than believable) siblings whose shifting luck leads them to consider a murder-for-hire scheme. Once the seed is planted, Allen charts their downward moral slide from initial disgust to shivery contemplation to “Where do we do it?” Allen’s script has the bare bones of a classic study in doom, and sadly, that’s exactly what he’s filmed: the dialogue has the expository clunk of a radio play, and the plot’s well-worn gears creak and crank where they should glide. The effect is of watching someone erect a big, sturdy scaffold without constructing the actual building. At the same time, Philip Glass’ insistent score supplies something like momentum, and Vilmos Zsigmond’s camerawork gives the movie a crisp, almost vulgar photorealism that’s unusual for Allen’s recent work, especially outdoors and at sea (!). As, what, the millionth self-absorbed actress character in the Allen filmography, the heretofore little-known Hayley Atwell makes a scorching femme fatale; whenever she’s on screen, she seems capable of razing this house of cards with just the breeze from a batted eyelash. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at Green Hills)

IN THE NAME OF THE KING: A DUNGEON SIEGE TALE “Wisdom is our hammer…prudence will be our nail,” intones a wise old medieval king as only Burt Reynolds could play him. So take the hammer of wisdom and pound the nail of prudence through your forehead before paying to see this dogpile of tax-shelter sword-and-sorcery, which pits Jason Statham as a brawny farmer (cleverly named “Farmer”) against wicked sorcerer Ray Liotta (not a misprint), sniveling duke Matthew Lillard and their lumpily latexed, digitally Xeroxed hordes. “You want to accelerate things?” poor Liotta bellows, perhaps off-screen to his agent before the check bounces. “Fine! We will accelerate!” Alas, the instruction didn’t reach director Uwe Boll, Germany’s master of creatively financed videogame cinema, who slogs this interminable saga out to more than two hours of muddy battle sequences, smudgy effects work and just-shoot-me performances. This being ein film von Boll, it sounds hilarious in description—c’mon, a royal court presided over by Stroker Ace and Shaggy!—but it’s as numbing and depressing to watch as two suits hammering out a film-packaging deal one venal clause at a time. If not for yeoman panther-puss Ron Perlman, ass-kicking tree sprite Kristanna Loken, and the helium-headed insanity of Reynolds’ endless deathbed scene—which involves, honest to God, a discussion of the agricultural merits of seaweed—this would give the unfortunate viewer no quarter. Or, as Lillard puts it, “no quarters.” —Jim Ridley (Now playing)