"The 3 Rooms of Melancholia": Insert cliché about children and war here -- then abandon
Pirjo Honkasalo's devastating war documentary "The 3 Rooms of Melancholia" is one of those films you have to allow yourself to surrender to, bit by bit, without worrying too much where it's taking you or why. Most of what goes under the name of documentary film these days, as I constantly complain, is just second-rate TV journalism. Finnish filmmaker Honkasalo is an entirely different animal, an artist with a piercing eye, tremendous patience and a rigorous formal technique.

This isn't what you'd call an undemanding film (check out that title!), and I don't think I absorbed it all in one viewing by any means. But "The 3 Rooms of Melancholia" is a prodigious, almost spiritual experience, a luminous, challenging art movie out of the Tarkovsky school that happens to be about a real war and its effects on real children. It was also a daring cinematic enterprise; while the Western media had trouble getting any independent footage from Chechnya, this Finnish art-film director took a film crew there and captured the breathtaking devastation. The audience for this kind of thing is necessarily pretty small, but if anything I've just said sounds intriguing, put this on your must-see list.

Honkasalo, who's best known for the feature "Fire-Eater" and the documentaries making up her "Trilogy of the Sacred and Satanic," is a festival fave who has never made the least impression on the marketplace. But at some future date when historians look back at the grim (and poorly understood) story of the Chechen rebellion and/or civil war, they'll find two telling works of art. One is Andrei Konchalovsky's ignored masterpiece "House of Fools," and this is the other.

Honkasalo starts a long way from Chechnya, on the fortress island of Kronstadt outside St. Petersburg. Site of an important anti-Bolshevik uprising in 1921, Kronstadt now hosts an elite military academy founded by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The boys here are mostly orphans or kids from profoundly damaged families, and as we absorb the details of their routinized lives, Honkasalo silently enforces the point that the long tentacles of the terrible Chechen conflict have touched almost every one of them. There's almost no narration and less judgment; as cheerless as it is, Kronstadt is better than the streets for most of these boys. What lies ahead for them, as Russia's officer corps of the future, is a troublesome question.

The remaining two "rooms" of the film take us to Grozny, the all but flattened capital of Chechnya, and then to nearby Ingushetia, where many Chechen refugees live. Honkasalo follows a Chechen woman named Hadizhat as she tries to rescue abandoned, abused and starving children in Grozny -- some don't even know where they came from, or who and where their parents are -- and takes them across the border to an unofficial Islamic orphanage.

Watching a group of three kids age 5 and under say goodbye, probably forever, to their desperately ill mother in a bombed-out building might not be your idea of a good time at the movies. In fact, it might be the most painful scene I've ever seen in a film. But Honkasalo isn't twisting our heartstrings to no purpose; she's challenging us to confront such an awful moment and face its consequences, and also to ask why it had to happen and whether -- whoever and wherever we are in the world -- we might have done anything to stop it. The answers to such questions are never comfortable, but the profundity and humanity of "3 Rooms of Melancholia" provide their own kind of hope.

"The 3 Rooms of Melancholia" opens July 27 at Film Forum in New York. Other engagements, and a DVD release, may follow.

Fast forward: What unites David Brower and Rob Zombie? Um, well -- a passion for rebellion, man!
I'll leave you with two films that have nothing in common except that you should see them if you're exactly the right kind of person. You'll know, I promise. I liked them both, pretty much. But then, the legendary environmentalist David Brower and the lunatic death-metal artiste Rob Zombie are two guys I'm willing to cut tremendous slack. I wonder if they ever met each other? I wonder if they'd have liked to hang out and dish on our corrupt politicians? I wonder -- OK, I'll shut up.

Brower, the longtime head of the Sierra Club and later the founder of both Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute, might have been the most important environmental activist of the 20th century. Although he learned to work the political system and forged alliances, for example, with Lyndon Johnson's administration, he was also the first major radical environmentalist who believed we had a duty to restrain development and save the wilderness, not for some instrumental or economic reason but purely for its own sake.

Kelly Duane's film "Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America," digs up a lot of intriguing newsreel footage, as well as Brower's Sierra Club home movies from the 1930s onward. Interviewing many of the principals in Brower's big battles, it tells the story of how this onetime rock climber became the activist who saved the Grand Canyon from being dammed; created Redwood National Park, North Cascades National Park and Point Reyes National Seashore; and generally led the environmental movement to its biggest victories. It's a thrilling tale, all but unimaginable in today's political landscape.

Duane's battle to make Brower relevant to a more youthful audience is a noble one, but I'm not sure adding music by Yo La Tengo, Fruit Bats, the American Analog Set and other indie-hipster bands will do much to accomplish that goal. Still, this is an engaging, well-made docu that admirably captures the singular importance of its subject. Unfortunately, Brower died in 2000, before production began, so his voice is heard only on file footage and in excerpts from the Sierra Club's audio history. ("Monumental" opens July 22 at the Quad Cinema in New York and Sept. 9 at the Music Hall in Los Angeles. Other engagements should follow.)

How do I love Rob Zombie's would-be horror classic "The Devil's Rejects"? Let me count the ways. Well, actually, I don't know that I love it at all. I love the idea of it, I guess -- but I'm not sure I ever want to see it again. Zombie refuses to call this a sequel to his deranged semi-underground hit "House of 1000 Corpses," even though it, well, totally is.

The sadistic and murderous Firefly clan of that film, led by evil clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) and his siblings Otis (Bill Moseley) and Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie, Rob's wife), having survived the onslaught of one laconic sheriff, now face his laconic-sheriff brother, played with terrific aplomb by William Forsythe. But now the cheerleader-slaughtering Fireflys are the heroes! Zombie doesn't just want this to be a tribute to "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "Last House on the Left" but an inflated Peckinpah-esque epic about a lovable band of nonconformists who just happen to be inbred homicidal maniacs.

Much of "Devil's Rejects" is absolutely hilarious, especially the brief appearance by a Gene Shalit-like film critic who explicates all the Groucho Marx references. Zombie's eye for the faux-'70s detail is perfect, as is his use of such "stars" as Mary Woronov, P.J. Soles and Diamond Dallas Page. But that scene in the hotel room, with the woman and the guy's peeled-off face? Trust me, you don't want me to explain it. Possibly the worst thing in any horror movie ever. Of course you're going to see this if you're a fan, and of course, like me, you'll admire Zombie for going all the way to nutso operatic bloodletting with this one. But maybe also a little voice inside will be asking you (and him): Dude, what's the point? ("The Devil's Rejects" opens July 22 nationwide.)

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