Go Fish Pictures
A sex android in Ghost in the Shell 2 goes on a philosophical bender.
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Bang Rajan
Opens Fri., Sept. 17, at Varsity
Several bravura fight sequences, captured thrillingly by cinematographer Vichien Ruangvichayakul, are reason enough to see Thai director Thanit Jitnukul's stirring account of Siamese villagers fighting their Burmese oppressors in the 18th century. What begins as a straightforward history lesson—how the Kingdom of Siam became modern-day Thailand—quickly evolves into a vibrant, often visceral story of love during wartime and perseverance in the face of mind-blowing brutality. Like a Shakespearean tragedy, Rajan assembles a sizable cast, then leaves no man (or woman) standing; the emotional focus is on conflicted warrior Nai In (Winai Kraibutr) and his pregnant wife, E Sa (Bongkod Kongmalai), but roughly a dozen secondary characters, including an aging military leader and an ageless monk, emerge with crystal clarity.
It's easy to see why Oliver Stone lent his name to the American distribution of Rajan: Like Platoon, it takes a raw, unflinching view of combat, employing a low-traveling camera for a literally down-to-earth perspective on each skirmish. And though the film incorporates considerable gore (decapitations, lost limbs, and worse), the violence is artfully rendered and never gratuitous, and there's no smug moral awaiting viewers at the end. Rajan simply expresses with unusual power the adage that war makes beasts of men, and no one truly emerges the victor. (NR) NEAL SCHINDLER
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Opens Fri., Sept. 17, at Neptune and others
Eight years ago, Mamoru Oshii's animated film Ghost in the Shell opened in the United States and was widely acclaimed as the finest anime ever made for adults. Fans have been waiting impatiently ever since for Oshii to return to the animation table. Except for the real fans, the hard-core fans, who knew that Oshii's film was only a cinematic riff on themes and characters originally created by Masamune Shirow (not his real name), already one of the kings of Japanese comic art when he came up with Ghost in magazine form back in 1991, and who continued to draw more episodes into the late '90s, while Kenji Kamiyama (animator of the noir thriller Jin-Roh) has busied himself with two seasons' worth of half-hour television films based on the same material.
Oshii's sequel ignores all this activity and returns to plot elements already present in the earliest installments. The story centers on sex androids which have begun to turn on their human users, with gruesome results. Batou, the quartz-eyed cyborg from Dr. Aramaki's Security Section 9, is assigned to discover why—and to do it without the energetic and remarkably decorative assistance of his ex-commander, Major Kusinagi, who disappeared into the information net at the end of the first film, having fused with another cyber-entity known as the Puppetmaster. . . .
Now that all the amateurs have left the room, I have two points to make of particular interest to the true believers among us. First, Major Kusinagi barely figures in Ghost 2, and she is bitterly missed; her interactions with Batou in the earlier film gave a welcome touch of humanity to the endless philosophical dialogues about what really constitutes life, as opposed to artificial intelligence, etc., etc., etc. The dialogues continue in Ghost 2, and get even denser, and Batou's new semihuman sidekick, Togusa, just isn't a pretty enough interlocutor to make up for the disappearance of the Major.
Second point: By the end of Ghost 2, you will almost not mind the Major's absence, because Oshii and his visual collaborators have come up with such a rapturously gorgeous environment for the story that when the recycled Kierkegaard gets too thick, you can just let your ears go to sleep while your eyes trip out. CGI has never looked so good. (PG-13) Roger Downey
Silver City
Opens Fri., Sept. 17, at Meridian and Metro
If John Sayles had remade The Manchurian Candidate instead of Jonathan Demme, he'd have had the integrity to make the U.S. government turn out to be Al Qaeda's ally, as the Bush regime effectively is in real life. Though it's far lighter in tone—half comedy, half noir—Silver City presents a more forthright allegory about Bush's America, in which the orgy of corruption reaches throughout society, from Halliburton-esque puppeteers to corporate-whore candidates to a supine mainstream press. Who can stop the bad guys? A tiny, hardy band of rebels descended from the Secaucus Seven.
Sayles hired Chris Cooper as the Bush doppelgänger, wittily named Dickie Pilager, because he'd heard Cooper did a wicked Bush impression, and his Shrubbish verbal pratfall comedy unquestionably outdoes Will Ferrell's and Dana Carvey's. In the opening shots, dim Dickie is filming a campaign spot, fly-fishing on a lovely Colorado lake his bosses plan to poison with industrial waste once he's elected. He reels in a corpse, so his Karl Rove–like minder, Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), hires a private detective to find out who might be competing with the Pilagers in the dirty-tricks department.
Leftist Dreyfuss has as much fun as Cooper does being vile and rightist. Nobody could get more mileage out of hissing, "No handouts for homos!" Danny Huston has less brio as Danny O'Brien, the disgraced ex–crusading journalist on their trail. He's pretty much there to lead us through the serpentine conspiracy plot and introduce us to way the hell too many characters. We meet Danny's old boss (Tim Roth) and lost love (Mario Bello), who's sold out to a daily paper, and her slimy tobacco-lobbyist fiancé (ever-typecast baddie Billy Zane); Dickie's monster senator father (Michael Murphy) and pothead sexpot sister (Daryl Hannah); a hydrophobic talk-radio star (Miguel Ferrer); a Pilager-funding media magnate (Kris Kristofferson); plus about two dozen more characters.
