Any sequel could not hope to capture the originality of the first film, and any attempt to re-create the sweetness of that film would quickly turn to bile. So George Miller has moved his creation from a timeless past to a contemporary present, from an idealized countryside to a fantastic city, from the day to the night, and from the lessons of how to create order (in herding sheep) to those of how to cope with the chaos of modern, urban life.

That's not to say that the first BABE was as sweet and sunny as some choose to remember it. It had very dark, violent moments of its own (as so much truly *good* "children's" fare has--a lesson that Disney took to heart long, long ago). That may be why Farmer Hogett himself is quickly put out of the way with a lesson in the Power of Gravity that was written for the Coyote by Chuck Jones.  Due to misunderstandings at an airport, Babe and Mrs. Hoggett find themselves stranded in an Everycity that combines elements of all. The Eiffel Tower lurks to one side, Lady Liberty holds her torch up in the harbor, and the skyline is dominated by skyscrapers from all over--including Phillip Johnson's landmark IDS Building (usually found in Minneapolis). In a section of town laced with Venetian canals and a weird jumble of architectural styles, they find refuge in a surreptitious hideout for animals, dominated by a band of apes, led by a felonious monk named Thelonius, all working for a creepy clown played by Mickey Rooney (whose part was, thankfully, cut considerably).

But even though it proves to more difficult than he (or we) could imagine, Babe's own innate goodness triumphs again at the end. So does the film.

That is just the start. Things do get even weirder.

In time, Cusak discovers a small door at the back of his office. Going through it, Alice-like, he finds himself for 15 minutes inside John Malkovich and is then spewed out in a weedy field by the New Jersey Turnpike. Naturally, his thoughts to turn ways that he can make a buck off his discovery and complications ensue.

Boy, do they ensue!

In what is surprisingly turning into a pretty innovative year in American film, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH redefines what "innovation" means.

The professor, a Miltonist of some note, was reading his own work in a faculty poetry reading.

"I can come to no conclusions."

The refrain came again, inconclusively:

"I can come to no conclusions."

The poem was inspired, the professor told us, by having recently seen Antonioni's RED DESERT.

"I can come to no conclusions."

I had seen the film too, and the professor's refrain struck home. RED DESERT, a visual poem about surfaces and colors, about industrial and emotional waste lands, had left me feeling drained, adrift, removed from things around me. The professor had caught the mood.

In Antonioni's latest (and possibly last) film, BEYOND THE CLOUDS, John Malkovitch plays a movie director, a surrogate for the old man himself. "I've always wanted to know what lies behind the surfaces of things," says Malkovitch in voiceover, taking a line from the director's memoirs, THAT BOWLING ALLEY ON THE TIBER. Walking and riding through and between four cities in Italy and France, Malkovitch gazes at arcades and beaches, doors and streets, plazas and shop windows, connecting four stories about connection and disconnection, about conclusions and inconclusiveness.

In fog-bound Ferrara, a young man and woman meet and almost, but never quite, have a love affair. In picturesque Portofino, out of season and half-deserted, the director himself is suddenly taken with--and takes--a young shopgirl with a past secret that belies her looks. In rainy Paris, a man is torn between his lover and his wife, who finally leaves him only to meet another man in the same condition. And finally, in Aix-en-Provence, a young man without any religion but the pleasure of the present is taken with a young woman whose religious sense admits no pleasure and no present.

There could be much to mock here. Antonioni has always been on the verge of pretentiousness (and more than often over, according to his harshest critics). There are scenes that seem like parodies of visual tropes from ther films: deserted streets, sterile modern architecture, women framed by the columns they lean against. Malkovitch's verbal musings read better than they sound, and the whole thing has a stitched-together quality, as if it strained for a unity among these tales that is not quite there. (The Malkovitch sequences were actually directed by Wim Wenders, called in to finish up because the demands on his Italian mentor, weakened by a stroke a few years ago.) And, typical of Antonioni, it is a very limited world in which these characters move--the working class and non-intellectuals serve mostly as props in these tales of bourgeois dissociation. Even though each character seems to be from some other place than where the action occurs, there is little hint of cultural mixing, we see only a child or two and no old people aside from Marecello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau (in much-too-brief scenes). And there has to be some disappointment when it seems that what lies beneath the surface of things is what goes on behind closed doors.

Even so, it's a film that leaves much to think about and much to admire. A love scene where the characters never touch is like a dance of flesh in which the warmth can almost be felt. The cheap but messy vitality of a mistress's apartment stands in contrast to the cold stark modernism of a married couple's apartment. The beauty of a cathedral choir offers sanctuary from the moisture and texture of a cobbled street. A deserted apartment becomes a semi-comic scene in what seems to be a round of eternal returns. And suddenly, we are aware that we are not watching a director moving between places and imagining a set of stories but moving through the actual landscape of his own interior world.

Even at this stage of his life, Antonioni comes to no conclusions but suggests that the same stories will continue behind those silences, those surfaces.

Billy is a boy who seems doomed to growing up without hope in a coal town in northern England. His mother dead, his father and brother embittered by a never-ending strike against Mrs. Thatcher, Billy doesn't even have the hope of physical bravado to carry him along in the community. When he takes boxing lessons at a local gym, he's hopeless until he sees and is intrigued by the dance class taking place in the same building. Soon he is sneaking off to dance practice, pretending that his 50 pence are still going for boxing. Eventually, though, his family has to find out and he has come against their prejudices.

Much of this story can be, and is, the stuff of light comedy: a boy's coming of age and very slow sexual awakening; the awkward teenaged arms and legs; the suspense of keeping secrets. But, even more than THE FULL MONTY, the emotions cut deep. The motherless family's pain is palpable, the secret of one of Billy's friends is a dangerous one, the sense of hopelessness can almost be smelt. And the emotional rescue, trite as it sounds, is through dance--the set piece of the film is no classical tour de force but a drama of feeling acted out with a body moving in space.

A great deal of the credit for this film goes to Jamie Bell, who is on-point perfect in his gradual growth as a dancer and whose face is a fascinating mixture of childishness and maturity, of ecstasy and pending bitterness. His teacher, Julie Walters, herself matured from the young scholar of EDUCATING RITA, also shines as a woman who knows talent and why it should be nurtured when it is found. And Stephen Daldry, with able help from cinematographer Brian Tufano and editor John Wilson, creates jetees of time and space, touching down so lightly that you hardly notice the changes.

There are some parts that don't work as well. It's never quite clear if the dotty old grandmother is supposed to be more an object of comedy or sympathy. Nonetheless, BILLY ELLIOT ought to be an object lesson to every filmmaker who hopes to glam things up with big-name stars. 

What we get in BRINGING OUT THE DEAD is another of Scorsese's (and Schrader's) inquiries into the nature of salvation--the need for it, the possibility of it, the mechanism for it. Nicholas Cage is Frank Pierce, ambulance driver for Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy (or Perpetual Misery, as he calls it) Hospital. He and his partners prowl the Manhattan streets, waiting for a call or seeing what they can find--and there is plenty to find: maiming, killing, drugs, prostitution, and misery of every order.

None of this is very new, certainly not in Scorsese-land and especially not after we are treated to such sights each week in ER, NYPD BLUES, and all the other (to their credit, good) dissections of urban life that TV feeds us each week. It would have been easy enough to play off those now-familiar themes: the bureaucracy of "health" care, the long disease that is modern urban life. And it would have been easy enough for Scorsese and Schrader to return to the hypermetabolic violence that has marked their earlier collaborations and individual films. But BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, as thematically consistent with their other works as it is, is closer to--of all things--THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and KUNDUN than anything else.

Cage's Frank is a haunted man--literally. He has had trouble sleeping for weeks, troubled by waking visions of a young woman whose life he failed to save. Now, he's lost his touch and he keeps waiting for the one call that will again allow him to bring the dead back to life and not just to a stretcher in a morgue. The opportunity seems to come when he and his partner (John Goodman, in this case) are called to treat a heart attack patient who had locked himself in a bathroom, seemingly wanting to die. But Frank finds the thinnest thread of pulse and brings the man back, technically at least, to life after the doctors had already pronounced him dead. Is this salvation, though--to be hooked to tubes and wires, pounded again and again with electric shocks to return to the cycle of misery and suffering that is life? 

That call gives Frank no rest yet, but it does give him a chance to meet the man's daughter, Mary (Patricia Arquette). A daughter who discovers her love and need for a dying father after she had only wished that he would die, she alternates in mood and dress between urban Gothic and midwest cheerleader. Her life is not in danger yet, but she too needs saving. But will Frank find the time? He still can't sleep. His boss won't fire him. His partners are all wackos. And so many others need attention, from Noel (Marc Anthony), the street hustler in dreadlocks who only wants water to drink, to Cy (Cliff Curtis), the compassionate drug dealer who tries (he says) to create an oasis of peace and rest.

Theme and plot aside, Scorsese also seems to work deliberately against expectations. This Cage is not the off-the-wall man on the brink we've seen from COTTON CLUB to SNAKE EYES, but the yearning seeker of LEAVING LAS VEGAS and CITY OF ANGELS. So too Scorsese (with his right-arm editor Thelma Schoonmaker) gives us an Emergency Room service that is the Anti-ER. Frank's movements and actions are no less vital than those on TV, but instead of the TV show's delight in crash, clash and confusion as lives are being saved, we see Frank moving at a deliberate and thoughtful pace as lives are being lost. Robert Richardson's cinematography, along with the original music by Elmer Bernstein (when pop music is not sending evocative cues), seem reminiscent of Errol Morris's films (and no surprise, in part: Richardson worked for Morris on FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL).

The film might have been even better if Schrader had trusted Scorsese's eye and if Scorsese had been willing to cut back Schrader's script. We have too much voiceover dialogue telling us what Frank has done and what he thinks instead of showing us what he did and how he thinks.  But that weakness is still not as strong as some would seem to believe.  Frank would seem to want to be Avalokiteshvara--the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion (reincarnated each generation, Tibetans believe, as the Dalai Lama). But the last image in the film is that most familiar image in Scorsese's iconography, the Pieta. Scorsese and Schrader, like Frank, may never find the peace they seek, but BRINGING OUT THE DEAD does try to show that peace indeed is somewhere to be found.