Thursday, July 24, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Hakuna masnoozer

Nowhere in Africa

Guaranteed to make kids fidget and seniors marvel at its old-fashioned storytelling, Nowhere in Africa is a long, carefully told piece of ordinariness--a "quality" picture that is neither delightful nor dreadful, compelling nor confounding. It is, to paraphrase Mark Twain, a good nap wasted.

Armed with this year's Oscar for best foreign language film, but anchored by its timid artistry, enamored with Africa and its benevolent natives but repulsed by Germany and its rampant anti-Semitism, Caroline Link's film of Stefanie Zweig's novel will convince gullible audiences they are watching a masterpiece, though it delivers nothing masterful. In this revved-up age of fractured narratives and barely intelligible screenplays, Nowhere offers the quaint pleasure of a familiar story told at a leisurely pace.

Set in Kenya from 1938 to 1946, the film follows the travails of the exiled Redlich family as they struggle with impoverishment, imprisonment and separation. As the film opens, Walter Redlich (Merab Ninidze) arranges for his wife, Jettel (Juliane Kšhler), and daughter Regina (Karoline Eckertz as a child; Lea Kurka as a teenager) to emigrate from Breslau to Nairobi just before Kristallnacht.

There, Jettel bristles at their squalid living conditions on a cattle ranch, but Regina bonds with the family cook, Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), and Walter insists that his wife accept a life of sacrifice over the certain death of the Holocaust.

Had the Redlichs' story been told only in their confined quarters, it might have developed some emotional resonance. But dwarfed by the grandeur of the breathtaking African landscape, their petty bickering seems trivial. Removed from the apocalyptic savagery of World War II, they are like a churlish Adam and Eve--a lucky couple arguing over the ingredients of an apple pie while overlooking the fact that their original sin has been forgiven.

Nowhere pretends to ponder the swamps of race and sexual politics, but only focuses on the spiritual awakening of a privileged white woman. Treating Kenyans like adorable intruders in their own land, this German movie preaches tolerance, but it easily could be mistaken for a vintage Afrikaner commercial trumpeting the virtues of apartheid.--Robert Chancey

From DIY to digital

Robert Rodriguez is most renowned for his $7,000 1992 film El Mariachi, considered the cheapest flick ever put out by a major studio. A decade later, the Mexican-American auteur is on his third--and supposedly final--installment of Spy Kids, a franchise launched in 2001 to spoof the tired world of cinematic espionage for younger watchers.

Clearly, Rodriguez has done an about-face with guerrilla filmmaking. Spy Kids 3-D is about as high-tech as it gets, taking on the appearance of a colorful video game throughout this mercifully short film. Furthermore, it employs the same 3-D technology as James Cameron's Titanic documentary, Ghosts of the Abyss, released this year on IMAX (though Spy Kids' cardboard-framed glasses hearken back to the '50s).

So there's a lot to look at. This is a godsend because there's little worth hearing. The plot--the younger of the Cortez siblings, Juni (Daryl Sabara), must save his sister, Carmen (Alexa Vega), from a virtual reality game controlled by the powerful Toymaker (Sylvester Stallone)--doesn't have any of the daftness of the original, nor the narrative depth to keep adults interested. Furthermore, some of the adults (Stallone and Rodriguez casting-fave Selma Hayek) overact to the point of nausea.

The film does boast an interesting, satirical approach to the conventions of video games and virtual reality, as well as offering a lesson in honesty that doesn't moralize heavily. And credit Rodriguez for using mostly Mexican-American actors, staying loyal to his roots even when his movies don't.--Mike Prevatt