Director : Gary Oldman
With : Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke

“Nil By Mouth” is one of the most emotionally brutal movies I have seen in many years. In fact, not since the bleak Scottish film “Breaking the Waves” and the gripping New Zealand film “Once Were Warriors” has anyone had the courage to make a film quite so devastating. Gary Oldman’s directorial debut spares no truth from the telling. Not unlike the gritty lower/middle class English films by Ken Loach (Riff Raff, Raining Stones) and Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets & Lies), Oldman’s England is a landscape that is literally and figuratively hard to understand. The language is intensely thick and hard to decipher, but meets perfectly the often violent and angry working class English-ness of the film. There is a roughness to both the cinematography, a slightly choppy and in-your-face British “Mean Streets” Scorsese style, and the language that neatly compliments the gruff personalities on the screen.

“Nil By Mouth” is a roughly autobiographical piece (dedicated to director Gary Oldman’s father- but more like “Mommy Dearest” than some sappy made for TV movie) that explores the abusive dynamics of a family walking on shards of love. The film focuses on a hapless woman named Valerie and her extremely dysfunctional family, which includes her husband, the abusive, alcoholic and drug using Raymond, her junkie brother Billy, and her mother Laila. Oldman spares nothing is his portrayal of the bitter realities of life on London’s social and economic fringe. In one scene, Laila takes her son Billy, who is going through severe heroin withdrawal, to buy a fix. She is forced to watch as her son shoots up in the back of her car, trying to force herself to swallow her tears.

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1997 Pen/Faulkner Prize Recipient

The characters in most of the novels I read focus on real people living in our own real world doing mostly real things. Occasionally a writer is able to come up with that rarely truly unique addition to the world in which we live. Tolkien had Hobbits, Katherine Dunn had the freaks in “Geek Love,” C.S. Lewis had the characters from Narnia, and now Rafi Zabor brings us a talking bear who plays alto sax almost as well as his idols Sonny Rollins, Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

“The Bear Comes Home” is a first novel by a journalist and part time jazz drummer. With all the enthusiasm and urgency that make most first novels an author’s best, Zabor has succeeded in creating a truly epic tale. Not only does he confidently navigate the bear through the emotionally turbulent struggle to fit in as a talking bear in a human’s world, he also manages to so accurately describe the pain associated with being an artist. The bear’s struggle becomes the metaphorical voyage of a person’s race to discover what it’s going to take to make life worth living.

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Director : Scott Rubin
With : Vince Vaughn, Joaquin Phoenix, Anne Heche

Three new friends spend the summer bopping around Malaysia meeting exotic women, living on the beach in primitive huts and smoking hash. The dream trip. At the end of the summer two of the friends return to the New York, Sheriff (Vince Vaughn) to ultimately drive a limo and Tony (David Conrad) to put his Harvard architecture degree to use, while the third- Lewis (Joaquin Phoenix) stays to help free orangutans. After the trip the three fall immediately out of touch until two years later when an attractive lawyer (Anne Heche) shows up to give Tony and Sheriff an offer that’s difficult to refuse.

It turns out that the day the three had split Lewis had been thrown in prison for possession of the large quantity of hash (a trafficking quantity) that the three had purchased for no other reason than because you couldn’t even buy a smaller quantity. Now Lewis is set to hang for the crime in 8 days unless his cohorts return to Penang to share the guilt.

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