Parable, on the other hand, is defiant in defending her beliefs and her romance.
Listen to this, a little later she goes,
Shall I abide in this dull world which in thy absence is no better than a stye?
When Paray tries to end their relationship,
Parable stalks into the school library and makes a dramatic demonstration of her love.
I will make me a willow cabin at your gate and call upon my soul within the house.
I will write loyal cantons of condemned love and sing them loud even in the dead of night.
I love grand gestures like that.
Lost and Delirious is about the same kind of mad passion the girls are reading about in their Shakespeare class,
Anthony and Cleopatra.
Parable's character argues that true romance must not be afraid to say its name,
but the Paray character is afraid,
and her rejection pushes the other girl to greater and more daring demonstrations of her love.
This is a lovely movie to look at with lovable and powerful performances,
including one by Jackie Burroughs as a headmistress who has known some passion in her life, too.
I love uncompromisingly romantic movies that make grand and glorious gestures,
and Lost and Delirious is the perfect title for this one.
You're so right about the actions of the character that Piper Parable plays,
becoming a mirror of what they're learning about in school.
Of course it sounds great on the page and it reads well,
but when someone actually acts that way it can be frightening.
Piper Parable, it's been well documented on this show that I'm completely smitten by her,
but she's really good in this role,
and it's the kind of role that if somebody else does it and they overplay it,
you could go, oh, God, enough is enough, but she's really solid in this.
She is totally sincere,
and she has scenes in this movie that would be very silly if they were not sincere,
and you can see that she's going over the top and knows she's going over the top
because she's filled with all these adolescent notions where she even denies she's a lesbian.
I'm not a lesbian. My love transcends all categories
and stands by itself on the mountaintop of human existence.
And we would be remiss if we didn't mention that this is just a very erotic film.
I mean, that room where those three girls are staying,
it's what every teenage boy likes to think a room like that would be.
Okay, when we come back,
The Crimson River is a thriller that's being compared to the silence of the land.
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How Martian Zigbee Dorlew eats a Reese's.
There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's.
Is it a serial killer?
It's teasing us.
Jean Reno is Pierre Nieman, a legendary police captain
investigating a string of gruesomely creative murders near an idyllic but mysterious college campus
in the Crimson Rivers, which plays like the Silence of the Lambs in the French Alps.
Now, Crimson isn't in the same league as Silence.
For one thing, Pierre doesn't have a Hannibal Lecter-like foil,
but it is a wild, ambitious, and often spectacularly entertaining thriller.
Nadia Ferres is Fanny, a local who discovered the first body while mountain climbing.
Do they export the girls now?
In some cases, yes.
It's a shame that the police are so good.
They're making a military mistake.
Me too.
Pierre and Lise Fanny's help in investigating the murder site,
and it's not as if they can take a cab to get there.
Vincent Cassel is Max, the young cop
working a vandalism case who stumbles directly into Pierre's path.
There were times when the plot of the Crimson Rivers left me snow blind.
Corpses are piling up, yet Pierre seems to be falling for Fanny,
and in the meantime, Max is getting into a wild, video game-style bra with skinheads,
and then he's visiting a blind nun who believes her daughter was murdered by demons.
Now, if all of these elements had been tied up neatly and without gimmicks in the final scene,
I would have stood on my seat and applauded,
but the ending is actually sillier and more contrived than the last five minutes
of a mediocre, straight-to-cable mystery.
Nevertheless, I am recommending the Crimson Rivers for its mad opera style
and for the great John Reno.
You know, I was let down by the ending, too, and frequently in thrillers,
I don't even want to know what the ending is,
because I like the setup so much better than the solution.
But Matthew Kasowitz, who directed this movie,
is a young French director who has made previously three movies set
in the urban grittiness of Paris and suburbs about young kids,
and suddenly here he turns out to be a wonderful visual stylist
who makes a movie that is just fascinating to look at.
This movie, like Silence of the Lambs,
carries you along on these characters and these locations
and these strange sights and sounds almost all the way to the end,
and I recommend it, too.
Yeah, and he knows it's reminiscent of Silence of the Lambs.
There's a scene where the corpse is strung up,
very reminiscent of a scene from that,
and he's very aware of having fun with this.
That scene, I mentioned the video game style.
You even hear, like, the game saying,
game over when the fight is done.
I mean, it's some wild stuff.
He's filled with lots of exuberance and invention.
Okay, our next movie, named Himalaya,
was one of last year's Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Film.
It tells the story of a dangerous trek through the mountains of Nepal,
an ancient tradition that is both practical and spiritual.
As the film opens,
the young village chief has been killed in an accident,
and now there's a struggle between his best friend
and the dead man's father to lead the caravan.
The older man, named Tinle, was formerly the chief,
and it says he's still equal to the goal.
The younger man is named Karma.
There's a bitter rivalry as Tinle and Karma lead herds of yaks
and disagree about the route, the weather, and everything else.
There's a hint of American Westerns in Himalaya,
and in the showdown between the generations,
I think we're maybe supposed to be reminded
of John Wayne and Montgomery Cliff in Red River.
The film has been directed by Eric Valley,
and the cinemascope photography is breathtaking
in the way it captures the lonely mountain vistas.
Valley is a National Geographic photographer.
Some of the sequences look as if they were as dangerous to photograph
as they play out in the movie.
The story is simple and yet thrilling and effective
in the way it uses mostly local people to play themselves.
I've never, ever seen anything quite like Himalaya before.
I would agree with that, yet I'm still going to give it a reluctant thumbs down,
because I think that cinemascope approach
and the National Geographic background
make this very curiously uninvolving for me.
I mean, it looks beautiful, and I kept thinking,
my God, they must have gone through so much to make this story,
but the story itself just plays out,
and you know exactly what's going to happen.
There are no surprises, and as I said,
because you're so far away from everything,
I didn't get involved with it.
There's some enormous suspense in the scene
where they're trying to get over that part of the pass
where it looks like the bricks are falling away
and the bridge is going to let go.
It's kind of like Wages of Fear or Sorcerer in that scene,
and it can really work.
I know what you mean when you say that the look of the film
is better than the drama,
but I'm thinking I've never seen this before,
and I'm grateful to be able to see it
and to see it while it's still there to be photographed.
That is almost enough to have me recommending this.
All right, we'll be back next with my parting shot.
MUSIC
One, two, one, two, three, four
Give me a break, give me a break
Break me up, he's back, kick that bar
Give me a break, give me a break
Break me up, he's back, kick that bar
LAUGHTER
MUSIC
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The movie is over.
The credits start to roll.
You're scrambling for the exits
and that's when the stars reappear like party guests
who forgot their car keys.
Those outtakes are cookies
and many of them are starting to get on my nerves.
When Poodie Tang ended,
I sprang out of my seat as if I'd been Goose,
but then I had to endure a full-length music video
and a bunch of lame bloopers.
That's the general rule.
We now join the following program already in progress.
If the movie is clever,
think Ferris Bueller's Day Off
or there's something about Mary,
the epilogue will also be entertaining.
But I've yet to see a lousy film redeemed by a cookie,
so the next time you're walking out after a bad movie,
don't look back.
And that's my parting shot.
Okay, recapping this week's movies,
two thumbs up for Crazy Beautiful,
a split decision for Baby Boy,
two big thumbs down for Poodie Tang,
two thumbs up for Lost in Delirious.
It opens next week in Selected Cities
and two more thumbs up for Crimson Rivers,
but finally a split decision on Himalaya.
Remember, you can hear our reviews at
ebert-roper-movies.com
and read us in print at suntimes.com.
Next week, we'll be back with the science fiction epic
Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within,
and until then, the balcony is closed.
I think you're really wrong about Baby Boy,
the best movie on the show.
I mean, when you talk about their choices of men,
haven't you heard about man sharing
and the man shortage in the black community?
I've heard about that, and I thought for a while
there was going to be a relentless look at that,
but it pulled back in a compromise for a happy ending.
I don't think so. I don't think so.
I think it's about these people,
and it really deals with them.
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