The Wall Street Journal-20080201-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Review - Film- -Caramel- Finds Some Sweetness In a Battered City- Tale of Beirut-s Women Is a Charming Surprise- A Deadly -Dead Body-

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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Review / Film: 'Caramel' Finds Some Sweetness In a Battered City; Tale of Beirut's Women Is a Charming Surprise; A Deadly 'Dead Body'

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All but one of the actresses in "Caramel" are nonprofessionals -- not unprofessional, just untrained in the craft -- and they are, to a woman, enchanting. So is this Lebanese comedy of sisterhood, a small- scale debut feature, in Arabic and French, directed by Nadine Labaki from a script she wrote with Jihad Hojeily and Rodney Al Haddad. A skillful actress as well as an experienced director of commercials and music videos, Ms. Labaki plays Layale, the beautiful owner of a Beirut beauty salon called Si Belle. The broken-down sign over the door has almost lost its capital "B," just as the battered Lebanese capital has lost its former elegance. And "Caramel" -- the title refers to the sticky mixture used as a depilatory in the Middle East -- was made with limited resources; don't expect an elegant, fully realized production. Do expect, though, to be touched and surprised by a string of intimate, urgent vignettes about five women who meet at Si Belle or work there.

Layale, a Christian, lives at home with her parents and spends a good part of her life waiting for the car horn that announces the arrival of her lover. (More often than not, text messages announce that he can't get away from his wife.) Layale's employee and friend, Nisrine, is Muslim; she agonizes over the fact that her fiance doesn't know she's no longer a virgin. Much of the tension in "Caramel" turns on the problematic status of women in Lebanese society, where liberation is barely skin deep. It's more a symptom of that status than a sign of negligence that Layale refuses to wear a seat belt when she's driving her car. "It suffocates me," she tells a handsome motorcycle cop.

Yet Ms. Labaki's film is anything but a feminist manifesto. One of its characters, Jamale, a middle-aged woman with illusions of becoming an actress, is anguished at finding herself no longer young. An octogenarian named Lili is, not to put too fine a point on it, crazy as a loon. Her younger sister Rose, a self-effacing seamstress in her 60s, knows she's getting old, but longs for an elderly client who, not to put too low a cuff on it, wears his trousers weirdly short. Rima, a young shampoo girl rather than the bird girl of "Green Mansions," longs in her turn for a radiantly beautiful woman customer who arrives at Si Belle cloaked in mystery. And "Caramel" bears no animus toward men, except for the selfish lout that Layale has chosen for a lover. Even the handsome cop turns out to be a good guy. There's no law in his book against tenderness.

'Over Her Dead Body'

'Over Her Dead Body" is an out-of-brain experience. The plot involves a ghost named Kate, played by Eva Longoria Parker, who tries to keep her former fiance from falling in love with a psychic named Ashley (Lake Bell). This can be interpreted either as a battle between the living and the dead, or as a contest over who has the brightest lip gloss. At one point Kate lashes out at Ashley, calling her all- too-vital rival a "lying, cheating hussy," except that she pronounces it "hoossey." That may be understandable in a ghost -- she's losing her connections with life as we live it. But the movie has lost its connections to entertainment as professionals perform it. With one exception, this misbegotten chick flick plays like a big-budget high school production -- "The Sixth Sense" reduced to nonsense, "Topper" bottomed, "Blithe Spirit" become clamorous blather.

The exception is the reliably likable Paul Rudd. He plays Henry, an almost-bridegroom by virtue of Kate, his almost-bride, having been crushed to death by a falling ice angel just before their wedding ceremony. (I'm not telling you anything you won't find in the trailer, or in an online clip that runs three minutes and feels like a taste of eternity.) Mr. Rudd keeps himself at a safe remove from the frantic proceedings through a combination of light irony and careful self- containment. The two women fighting for Henry's body, if not his immortal soul, are uncontained and uncontainable, a tedious ghost versus a strident spirit medium. The kindest context in which to put "Over Her Dead Body," which was written and directed by Jeff Lowell, is that of a training film, a public display of people trying to master their craft. The best way to see it is not at all.

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Morgenstern's DVD Tip

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)

DVDs mean never having to say you missed a movie forever. I missed "The King of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters" when it had a brief run last year in a handful of theaters, but now Seth Gordon's feature-length documentary has come out on shiny digital disks, and it's a sensationally smart and joyous film.

Much of the action conforms to the classic structure of mano a mano combat between two formidable adversaries, a top dog and an underdog. The big difference, which gets smaller as the movie grows in intensity, is that the manos in question manipulate little joysticks, the fields of battle are video screens and the combatants are two of the greatest arcade-game players the world has ever seen. The gaming world, that is, a subculture of mostly male obsessive-compulsives who believe that what makes us human is hand-eye coordination -- or, more grandly, mind-body coordination -- combined with what one tournament organizer in the movie calls "deep, comprehensive intelligence."

I'd say that deep, comprehensive intelligence is what distinguishes Mr. Gordon's approach to this film. He sees the craziness of it all -- the beeps and boops emanating from the big boxes that house such retro games from the 1980s as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, the pervasiveness of a sort of pinnacle-and-fame disease that prompts outwardly sane people to seek after the electronic nirvana of a perfect score and subsequent enshrinement in the Guinness Book of Records. Yet he also understands the roiling passions that underlie the virtuosity, and he's got a great eye for spotting real-life heroes -- or anti-heroes, as the case may be.

"The King Of Kong" is blessed with one of each. Filling the latter category is Billy Mitchell -- prosperous, movie-star handsome and movie-star vain; his preening for the camera reminded me of Robbie Robertson's insufferability in "The Last Waltz." Contending against him for the world's highest Donkey Kong score is Steve Wiebe, an earnest, almost painfully virtuous high school science teacher and family man whose working life has not been a bed of roses. (Never has a family man in distress had a more supportive wife.) Virtue may be its own reward, but does it also bring Steve the success he so richly deserves? To find out, feed this DVD to your player and press Play.