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Indie Flix
By STEVE PERSALL
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 12, 2001
Movies in limited release:
'Real' characters, real boredom
SERIES 7 (Not rated, probably R) (85 min.) -- Daniel Minahan's satire on reality TV focuses on a show called The Contenders, in which ordinary people stalk and kill each other for prizes. The reigning champion (Brooke Smith) is eight months pregnant, and her opponents range from an emergency room nurse to a cranky senior citizen.
Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote: "Series 7's premise of reducing those kinds of shows to absurdity -- not that great a distance, it turns out -- is a promising one, but sounds better than it actually plays. Intriguing for the first reel, the concept gets tedious surprisingly fast and, even at a short 85 minutes, isn't really suited to feature length.
"One of the problems with Series 7 is these 'real' people don't feel especially real or particularly interesting. There's not a trace of nuance in the pedestrian dialogue, and the film's forays into dark humor aren't noticeably funny. Getting progressively less involving as it goes along, the strongest feeling Series 7 creates is the passionate desire to change the channel and move on."
Opens Friday at Channelside Cinemas in Tampa.
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Sexual tension among the samurai
TABOO (Not rated, probably R) (101 min.) -- Japanese director Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses) spins a provocative tale of gay samurai in the 19th century and about an androgynous teenage recruit (Ryuhei Matsuda) whose affairs disrupt the warriors' severe training.
Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Wilmington wrote: "A poetic movie about machismo, romance and death, Taboo is one of the strangest of all samurai films and one of the most memorable. . . . Taboo is both austere and violent, filled with the slash and clang of swords . . . and it's gorgeous, with costumes by Emi Wada (Ran) and stunning, nerve-jangling electronic music by Ryuchi Sakamoto.
"Throughout, the story remains ambivalent. The beauty is disturbing, the sexuality leads to death, and eventually we begin to see the samurai code as secretly embracing both. Taboo's last image . . . is poetic and savage, an explosion of emotions held too long in check."
Japanese with English subtitles. Opens Friday at Channelside Cinemas.
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