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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie disasters (not to be confused with disaster movies) come in many styles. There are the leaden, twelve-footed monsters ("Pearl Harbor," "King Arthur"), the relentless whirligigs ("Men in Black II," the remake of "Planet of the Apes"), the attempts to wash the audience's brains out with pedagogic soap (the collected work of Lars von Trier). And then there's the special case of the film that goes so far into obsession that moviegoers are left staring at the screen in veneration or disbelief. David O. Russell's "I ♥ Huckabees" is definitely one of the latter. It's a comedy of the manic school, in which the characters, skittering along the edges of the frame, speak only about Big Ideas, say everything four times, quarrel at the drop of a non sequitur, and have sex in uncomfortable places. There are diatribes, freak-outs, instant revelations, and much talk about "your perception of reality." In the sixties, "Huckabees" might have arrived on the wings of hash, but Russell, in his jabbering, everything-going-on-at-once way, is not searching for the ineffable. Nor is he trying to be hip. He seems, on the contrary, to be searching for answers. He throws in visual divertissements in which people's eyes leave their faces and float in the air--digital surrealism by way of Man Ray and Manfred Kriegelstein--but, in the end, he wants to put those faces back together. Russell and the screenwriter Jeff Baena garble...
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