Following program already in progress.
But the science and the apostles and the fallen angels.
Oh, this movie did not put down dogma. This movie celebrates dogma.
This movie says, here's a situation where these angels have found a dogmatic loophole
that's going to cause a lot of trouble and we have to save the universe.
And I think that's the point of the satire, which is that if you can have a religion that says,
uh-oh, God made a mistake and here's a loophole.
You can't. You can't, though. You can't have that religion.
Turns out it's not a loophole.
Well, it's about a plenary indulgence and we could probably spend three hours discussing it.
Which is the fascinating thing about the movie.
I mean, last week we reviewed a movie called The Bachelor, which was about zilch.
This movie, we could talk about you and I for three or four hours about the ideas in this movie.
I'm suggesting that there would be a more entertaining way to do that without numbing everybody out
with all of this exasperating, exhaustive dialogue about things.
I went through 12 years of Catholic schools and I was hanging on for dear life.
And it was boring in a way. It was as dull.
I went through Catholic school too. We used to talk about this stuff all the time.
We were always trying to figure out, would this be a mortal sin? Would this be a venial sin?
These characters, and Kevin Smith is a Catholic, says he goes to church every Sunday.
You know what? If you aren't Catholic, you'd be completely lost.
Well, maybe so.
But even if you are, it would be completely exhausting and was.
And what about Salma Hayek as a muse turned stripper fighting an excrement covered demon?
Well, I mean, strippers and muses.
Is that funny? When you're six, it's funny.
Strippers and muses kind of have the same function at times.
Coming up next, the new film from the director of the fifth element, The Messenger, the story of Joan of Arc.
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You're not that far.
That's Mila Jovovich as the maid of Orleans, passing her first test
by identifying who is and who is not the future king of France.
The film is called The Messenger, the story of Joan of Arc,
and it practically leaps off the screen.
Acclaimed French director Luc Besson has rendered a vibrant, realistic,
and complex movie about the teenage girl from a small village
who led the French to victory over the English in 1429.
In this scene, Joan tells the real dauphin of her divine mission
and inspiration. He's played by John Malkovich.
I was going to mass like I do every day on the same strange wind.
Besson's ability to evoke altered states of consciousness
and yet ground a scene in reality are completely in evidence here.
His lens takes us right into battle behind mesmerizing Jovovich
as her inflamed warrior rallies the troops.
The film renders a very humanly plausible Joan who grows more complex
as she struggles with her own demons in prison.
Dustin Hoffman plays her conscience.
Who are you to even think you can know the difference between good and evil?
Are you God?
I'm just the messenger.
The camera takes us right into the most visceral battle scenes
as well as the turmoil of her troubled psyche.
Jovovich is wholly believable in this part which requires her to be both human
and superhuman. I was nevertheless completely engrossed for all
two and a half hours of The Messenger.
Oh my God. You fell for this?
I thought this really worked.
I thought this movie was shallow, dumb, boring, endless.
It wanted to be brave heart and it failed.
I've seen two great movies about Joan of Arc by Dreier and by Bresson
which are about her spiritual crisis.
Here is a movie that's basically about a teenage girl who looks like a model
and leads all these people into battle.
It's a modern take on a classic story.
I don't want to be modern. It's updated.
No, it's not updated. It's cheapened.
It's turned into some kind of a battlefield picture with lots of swords and horses.
What's cheap about it? They deal with Joan in a complete way.
Because they're more interested in the action than they are in the spiritual crisis.
Oh, I completely disagree. I mean, I think that it's very clear that she's engaged
in some kind of inner struggle and he evokes that at the end of the film
and actually all the way through when she's talking, when she's having those
emotional moments with her character, the conscience.
But if you want to see that inner struggle, go see The Passion of Joan of Arc by Dreier.
It's a different vision for different times.
And I think this works. I think audiences will connect with this picture.
I think good movies are good movies whether they're new or old
and bad ones are bad even if they're new.
I think this will hold up.
Okay, our next movie is Felicia's Journey.
And this is the Canadian director Adam Magoyan's first film
since the powerful The Suite Hereafter.
This one is also about a lost girl and a predatory male like Suite Hereafter was
the story of a man named Hilditch, played by Bob Hoskins, who is a chef in a factory.
He spends his nights alone in a big old house preparing complicated recipes
by following videotapes of an old TV show.
That's Arseny Kandzian, Magoyan's wife, as the cooking instructor,
and the little boy, of course, goes out to be Mr. Hilditch,
who befriends a desperate Irish girl named Felicia
who has come to England looking for her boyfriend.
Drink some of that tea while it's warm.
The goodness is in the warmth, they say.
That is Elaine Cassidy as the young girl who is in grave danger
from this odd and seemingly innocuous little man.
Things happen.
Things take a turn.
Felicia's Journey is based on a novel by William Trevor,
one of the greatest of living writers, and like most of his stories,
it doesn't have villains so much as victims.
The movie contains the elements of a thriller,
but it doesn't let us off the hook that easily.
When he gets to the end of the story, Magoyan would rather use irony than action,
and the result is a film that lingers and grows in your memories
until you finally appreciate that it's not just about a girl in danger
from a twisted man, but about misery leaping from one life to another.
And Magoyan is so good at doing this because he is able,
the way he did in The Suite Hereafter, to take the surface of things
and have a very controlled, tranquil surface,
but underneath are the most demoralizing and horrifying emotional sentiments
and really horrifying circumstances sometimes.
And he lets that camera pan over the details of this man's life
to show what they reveal and what they hide about him.
Absolutely. You know, lesser filmmakers would have taken this novel by Trevor
and turned it into some kind of a demented thriller
with Mr. Hilditch as kind of the Norman Bates character.
Exactly.
And this movie has sympathy and pity for him as well as for her.
It does.
These are two people who both suffer.
It's not so simple. It's not so simple.
You can't say because his mother was this way, he is this way.
It could have gone a lot of different ways. It's very penetrating.
Absolutely.
When we come back, our video pick, and this is a video pick that you can see free right now at home.
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Okay, time for the video pick.
And I first caught this film at the Sundance Film Festival last January
where it was one of the best documentaries about a brilliant and goofy kid named Justin Hall
whose home page made him one of the earliest stars of the first days of the World Wide Web.
Hall posted a daily diary in which he wrote down everything in his life,
sometimes in very indiscreet detail.
I'm not sure I can speak to that exact term boyfriend.
With Justin, things are really fluid all the time.
But in terms of being intimate with Justin, I mean, it is a problem
because anybody can read about it on the page and if he uses your name, then it's obvious.
The film, called Home Page, follows him around the country as he meets other pioneers of the emerging web,
including Howard Reingold who, like a lot of people, has a love-hate relationship with Justin.
I wrote a really long, intense, personal rant about how I thought you were trying to parent me yesterday.
Well, great. Put it on your website.
I didn't put it on my website. I exercised restraint, Howard.
Home Page is an unusually inventive documentary and it is being released in an unusually inventive way.
It opens next Friday in New York, theatrically, but its director, Doug Block, is premiering it free, full-length, uncut, on the web.
So starting this weekend, you can see it at www.ifilm.net.
One philosophy prof here, I went up to him to ask him to support my major or support my class,
support some of my efforts here institutionally, you know, that I was having a problem
because I couldn't pick a department in the school, you know.
I'm just doing all these things that are all from these, it's a combination of art and writing and religion and this and that.
Home Page is a groundbreaking film all the way around.
It was shot entirely on handheld digital cameras and now it's being given away online as a promotional device.
Home Page is at www.ifilm.net and in more ways than one.
It's my video pick of the week.
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Now let's take another look at the movies we reviewed on this week's show.
Two thumbs up on Anywhere but Here with strong performances by Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman.
We split on Pokemon, the first movie.
Joyce thinks this animated feature is fine for its target audience.
I think kids deserve better.
We split again on Dogma.
I admired the spirit behind Kevin Smith's satiric comedy.
Joyce thought it was exhausting and not funny.
We split again Big Time on The Messenger.
And finally two big thumbs up for Felicia's Journey.
So some big disagreements this week.
Yeah, pretty exciting and I want to leave you with two words about Dogma.
Bow wow.
And now you have to go make a good confession.
Thanks a lot, Joyce. It's been a fun, inspiring review.
Two weeks in a row.
Remember you can hear our reviews, Joyce's and mine, on the web at ebert-movies.com, part of the Go Network.
And my print reviews are at suntimes.com.
Next week some big new holiday movies including 007's latest adventure, The World Is Not Enough, with Pierce Brosnan back as James Bond.
And Tim Burton's ghostly thriller, Sleepy Hollow.
We'll see you next week and until then, the balcony is closed.