Egoyan, Atom

Where the Truth Lies (Unrated Theatrical Edition)

A female journalist tries to uncover the truth behind the breakup years earlier of a celebrated comedy team after the duo found a girl dead in their hotel room. Though both had airtight alibis and neither was accused the incident put an end to their act.System Requirements:Running Time: 108 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/THRILLERS Rating: NR UPC: 043396138988 Manufacturer No: 13898

Director Atom Egoyan's 2005 film Where the Truth Lies is laden with nudity, sex, violence, lies, blackmail, betrayal… and really, what more could you want? Other than some genuine tension, a more compelling story, and better acting, that is. In adapting Rupert Holmes' novel, the Cairo-born Egoyan (Ararat, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) has taken on a murder mystery with film noir elements that will leave many viewers wondering exactly "whodunit" until the final few scenes; and while that's surely a good thing, the ride itself simply isn't all that scintillating. Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth star as a (Dean) Martin & (Jerry) Lewis-style team whose principal talents seem to consist mainly of pill-popping, soulless sex with a stream of nubile young women, and hosting an annual polio telethon. Fifteen years after their '50s heyday, journalist Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman), who appeared on the telethon as a child, seeks out the pair to determine why they split up and, not coincidentally, what really happened to the dead girl with whom they had dallied the night before. Bacon is reasonably unctuous as the leering Lanny Morris; but Firth is uninspired as the more elusive Vince Collins, and although Lohman is game, she sometimes seems out of her depth in a role that calls for her to both seduce and be seduced, to manipulate and be manipulated. Egoyan, who also wrote the screenplay, has an eye for odd little details (much is made of Pan Am's first class dinner service, for instance) and an ear for great music (the soundtrack includes tunes by Charles Mingus, Louis Prima, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Funkadelic) and good dialogue ("Having to be a nice guy is the toughest job in the world when you're not"). But the film is curiously tepid; the sex is unconvincing, the mystery lacks a sense of danger, and the resolution is hardly shocking. One wishes that, having dipped into this genre, Egoyan had gone all out and made a film as delightfully sleazy as, say, Basic Instinct. --Sam Graham

The Sweet Hereafter (New Line Platinum Series)

In synopsis The Sweet Hereafter may sound like a devastatingly unpleasant downer, but don't be discouraged. The real subjects of this luminous picture (adapted by director Atom Egoyan from Russell Banks's novel) are hope and renewal--avoiding the cheap emotions suggested by those clichéd terms. Like other Egoyan films (Exotica, for one), it's an intriguing sort of mystery, a puzzle in which the big picture is not revealed until the very last piece is in place. A metropolitan attorney (Ian Holm) travels to a small British Columbian town where 14 children have been killed in a school bus accident to prepare a class-action suit. With sensitivity and empathy, he approaches relatives with promises that the suit will give focus and closure to their grief. And as he investigates the circumstances of the accident, he not only uncovers a few local secrets, but dredges up some painful pieces of his own past. Slowly, deeper mysteries are revealed--eternal mysteries at the very heart of human nature: Who is to blame for a tragedy like this? And why do people feel such a need to assign blame? Is that how they give meaning to otherwise inconceivable events? How does one reassemble a shattered life? The Sweet Hereafter is too honest to offer bromides, but it shows how a few people struggle, as best they can, to answer these questions for themselves. DVD extras include audio commentary by Egoyan and Banks, a Charlie Rose interview with Egoyan, and a panel discussion with the filmmakers. --Jim Emerson

Ararat

After coming home from Turkey, a young man recounts to a customs official, how his life changed during the making of a film about the Armenian genocide.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 3-MAY-2005
Media Type: DVD

This remarkable, intricate movie from Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) centers around the making of a film about the genocide of Armenians in Turkey in 1915--but this is not a dry, didactic historical re-enactment. Ararat unspools multiple storylines around Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), an art historian hired as a consultant on the film; her son Raffi (David Alpay); his stepsister, with whom Raffi is in love even though she believes that his mother is responsible for her father's suicide; an actor (Elias Koteas) hired to play the Turkish officer who organized the genocide; and a customs officer (Christopher Plummer), who holds Raffi for questioning under suspicion of smuggling heroin. All these characters, combined with the movie within the movie, intertwine in a complex yet powerfully emotional examination of memory (both cultural and personal), loyalty (to one's family, to one's heritage), creativity, and the subjectivity of truth. --Bret Fetzer

Exotica

In spite of its atrociously misleading packaging, Exotica is a beguiling mystery by enigmatic Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, in which people and their relationships are not what they seem. What at first appear to be disparate stories of a tormented tax auditor, a lonely pet-shop owner, and a sensitive stripper and her coworkers gradually merge to reveal a larger, interconnected portrait. The sequences involving Mia Kirshner's schoolgirl stripper are particularly engrossing because of her character's intelligence and the scenes' deeper subtext. Indeed, Exotica is less about stripping than about fragile human relationships, and it is not until the truly revelatory final scene that we are able to fully absorb the film's deeper meaning. --Bryan Reesman

Forbidden desires and dangerous intrigue generate sizzling heat in this erotic thriller! At a sexy strip club called Exotica, three strangers -- an obsessive man, an erotic table dancer, and the club's mysterious D.J. -- share much more than is apparent at first glance! As their secret passions grow, they become more deeply entangled in an inescapable web of jealousy, deceit, and revenge! The powerfully seductive hit EXOTICA is gripping entertainment -- you won't be able to take your eyes off it!

Felicia's Journey

Like Hitchcock, Atom Egoyan envisions family life as a potential hotbed of literal or figurative violence and incest. In Felicia's Journey, Egoyan's adaptation of William Trevor's shattering novel, one dreads to imagine what TV-cook mom (Arsinée Khanjian) did to so damage her pudgy son that grown- up Hilditch (Bob Hoskins) still prepares meals in perfect unison with faded videotapes of her show--and, as we eventually discover, often takes more sinister trips down Memory Lane. Distant kin to Psycho's Tony Perkins, Hoskins's troll is so obsessive, so traumatized, his every short-armed, fat-handed gesture and sing-song utterance is precisely calculated to keep reality safely buried.

Egoyan's movies often seem located underwater, in some surreal dreamscape where one's breath is perpetually suspended while a slow horror seeps ever deeper under the skin. Helpless, transfixed, one watches as his characters drive inexorably toward mined intersections where lives and souls may be lost or redeemed. When Hilditch's path crosses, diverges from, and finally coincides with that of young, pregnant Felicia (Elaine Cassidy)--an Irish innocent searching for her errant boyfriend--it leads to terrible epiphany for these fellow travelers. Trouble is, creepy Hilditch and too-naive Felicia come up a bit short in the psychological complexity department, so by film's end, revelatory payoffs are mostly penny ante. Felica's Journey tours familiar Egoyan territory--an industrialized wasteland full of hungry hearts--but this latest fairy tale (think perverse variations on Hansel and Gretel) isn't in the same league with such "family values" masterpieces as Exotica or The Sweet Hereafter. --Kathleen Murphy

Where the Truth Lies (Rated Edition)

A female journalist tries to uncover the truth behind the breakup years earlier of a celebrated comedy team after the duo found a girl dead in their hotel room. Though both had airtight alibis and neither was accused the incident put an end to their act.System Requirements:Running Time: 108 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/THRILLERS Rating: R UPC: 043396131194 Manufacturer No: 13119

Director Atom Egoyan's 2005 film Where the Truth Lies is laden with nudity, sex, violence, lies, blackmail, betrayal… and really, what more could you want? Other than some genuine tension, a more compelling story, and better acting, that is. In adapting Rupert Holmes' novel, the Cairo-born Egoyan (Ararat, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) has taken on a murder mystery with film noir elements that will leave many viewers wondering exactly "whodunit" until the final few scenes; and while that's surely a good thing, the ride itself simply isn't all that scintillating. Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth star as a (Dean) Martin & (Jerry) Lewis-style team whose principal talents seem to consist mainly of pill-popping, soulless sex with a stream of nubile young women, and hosting an annual polio telethon. Fifteen years after their '50s heyday, journalist Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman), who appeared on the telethon as a child, seeks out the pair to determine why they split up and, not coincidentally, what really happened to the dead girl with whom they had dallied the night before. Bacon is reasonably unctuous as the leering Lanny Morris; but Firth is uninspired as the more elusive Vince Collins, and although Lohman is game, she sometimes seems out of her depth in a role that calls for her to both seduce and be seduced, to manipulate and be manipulated. Egoyan, who also wrote the screenplay, has an eye for odd little details (much is made of Pan Am's first class dinner service, for instance) and an ear for great music (the soundtrack includes tunes by Charles Mingus, Louis Prima, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Funkadelic) and good dialogue ("Having to be a nice guy is the toughest job in the world when you're not"). But the film is curiously tepid; the sex is unconvincing, the mystery lacks a sense of danger, and the resolution is hardly shocking. One wishes that, having dipped into this genre, Egoyan had gone all out and made a film as delightfully sleazy as, say, Basic Instinct. --Sam Graham

Essential Atom Egoyan Box Set

A four-disc box set with four feature films—SPEAKING PARTS, CALENDAR, NEXT OF KIN and FAMILY VIEWING— from Atom Egoyan, the four-time Cannes Film Festival winner and Oscar-nominated writer and director of THE SWEET HEREAFTER, EXOTICA & WHERE THE TRUTH LIES. The box also includes three rare shorts, feature audio commentaries, deleted scenes, photo essays, video interviews, behind-the-scenes material and a documentary.

Family Viewing/Next of Kin

In NEXT OF KIN (1984), a young man is having problems with his family. Catatonically unhappy, he undergoes video-therapy with his domineering parents. At the clinic, he comes across the videotapes of a troubled Armenian family, who twenty years earlier gave up their infant son to a foster home. This sly comedy explores the unexpected outcome of Peter presenting himself as this family's long lost son. FAMILY VIEWING (1987) won numerous awards at major film festivals and established Egoyan as one of the most striking new directors of our time. In this black comedy a young man discovers that his childhood home videos have been erased to make room for his father's homemade sex tapes. These two features are enhanced by Egoyan's commentaries, as well as his first short films. For aspiring filmmakers as well as cinephiles, this collection of early work is a great introduction to this acclaimed writer and director.

Speaking Parts

The complex plot of Speaking Parts captures the twisty psychology of its yearning characters. Lance (Michael McManus), an actor who has only had nonspeaking roles in movies, sees his chance when a movie team uses the hotel where he works as a production office. Lance seduces Clara (Gabrielle Rose), the screenwriter, who gets Lance cast in the central role of her deceased brother, who died giving a lung to her. Meanwhile, a maid (Arsinee Khanjian) in the hotel rents the movies Lance has acted in so she can watch his fleeting appearances, and Clara goes to a mausoleum where she watches a video of her brother. As in many of Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan's movies, the characters use technology to channel emotions they can't express directly. Speaking Parts is seductive and hypnotic, full of images both eerie and sad. --Bret Fetzer

Haunting images and obsessive sexuality merge in the film which confirmed Atom Egoyan's status as one of the most talented directors of his generation. This disquieting and enthralling postmodern thriller entwines its characters in a dangerous web of psycho-sexual desire. Lance is a movie extra looking for his first speaking film role, and when the alluring Clara, an idealistic television writer, checks into the hotel where Lance works, he seduces her into casting him in the film she is working on. Meanwhile, Lisa prowls video stores, only interested in viewing and reviewing the movies in which Lance appears as an extra. Both the look and impact of video on our lives vibrate in this richly photographed film, so penetrating and original that it begs to be watched again and again.

The Adjuster

Insurance adjuster Noah (Elias Koteas) works with people who have suffered the loss of their homes and other disasters. He gets a little too involved with his clients, taking advantage of their vulnerability to control their lives--while only having the most glancing interactions with his own wife, Hera (Arsinee Khanjian), who secretly videotapes the porn films she watches for a government censor board. When another couple (Maury Chaykin and Gabrielle Rose) poses as part of a film crew who want to use Noah and Hera's house, Noah moves his family into the motel where he houses his displaced clients, bringing his separate worlds too close together. Though initially mysterious and distanced, The Adjuster builds carefully to a striking sense of loss and sorrow. As in his earlier films, Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan explores how people evade and contain the traumas in their lives. --Bret Fetzer