DVD REVIEWS OF NEW RELEASES.

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

Futuristic '2046' too stylish to spring to life

There is something fitting about Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai's ``2046'' being set in 1966, some five years after director Alain Resnais' ``formally inventive'' ``Last Year at Marienbad.''

``Marienbad'' was from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose novels were known for recurring images, random events and shifting periods of time.

Wong's ``2046'' - a film among the top titles of many critics' lists - is about a scribbler named Chow played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai. A party boy/womanizer with slick-backed hair and a thin mustache, Chow barely interrupts his good times to pen a few news items and sci-fi stories to make a living.

Women drop in and out of his life. Early in the film, Chow runs into a former lover, Lulu (Carina Lau), who is now calling herself Mimi. She lives at a nearby hotel in Room 2046, but when Chow returns to see her, she's gone. Some aching curiosity prompts him to move into the room across the way - 2047.

Chow soon encounters the hotel owner's oldest daughter, Jing (Faye Wong), whose love for a Japanese man (Takuya Kimura) has angered her father. Then a new neighbor moves into 2046, a call girl named Bai Ling (Ziyi Zhang). Both women will play roles in his life. He has an affair with Bai, and later a flirtation with Jing.

He first glimpses Bai through the slits of a grille. (Jalousie - the French word for jealousy - refers to louvered blinds, presumably because jealous lovers would try to spy through the slits. It is, as it happens, also the name of a Robbe-Grillet novel.) Chow himself is often ``spying'' - or is it merely journalistic curiosity? - peeking out his door to see who Bai might be bringing back, or listening in on arguments between Jing and her father.

Wong (``In the Mood for Love'') is a dizzying stylist, who, like Resnais and Robbe-Grillet, breaks from conventional storytelling. Time and space aren't fixed - and neither are desire and love. The sensuous curve of a woman's body, a long black glove, the geometrics of a claustrophobic room and lavish color all have power of their own in ``2046.''

The number in the title also refers to the year in which one of Chow's futuristic stories is set. In the tale, which becomes part of the film's narrative, people zip around on bullet-style trains staffed by sexy robotic attendants, heading for a place to recapture their memories. The androids themselves have their own delayed emotional reactions - a tear shows up on the face of the exotic female 'bot long after her impulse to cry. The image is arresting - a clever conceit - but a bit too precious.

As dazzling as ``2046'' is, its formal construction saps some of the life out of it. The film is also very male-centric. The women function more as aspects of Chow's slippery attitudes about love, and so in some ways it never feels complete.

Love in ``2046'' is connected to memories, some of which are returned to over and over - like those train riders - even in the heat of passion. But for all its cinematic virtues, the film needed - as in all passionate relationships - a little messiness to really make it come to life.

``2046'' ($29.95; Sony)

'Grizzly Man,' 'The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill'

There is something romantic about madmen, and German director Werner Herzog has fallen more than once - with characters like the mad 16th-century explorer in ``Aguirre, the Wrath of God,'' and the loony entrepreneur ``Fitzcarraldo,'' who attempted to haul a steamboat up a mountain to bring opera singer Caruso to the Peruvian jungle.

Timothy Treadwell, the subject of the documentary ``Grizzly Man,'' was a self-styled environmentalist who convinced himself he was protecting the giant beasts in the wild of Alaska. To do this, Treadwell lived among them for some 13 years, filming thousands of hours of himself interacting with the grizzlies. Eventually, though, the then-46-year-old onetime aspiring actor and his girlfriend met horrifying deaths in an encounter with a hungry grizzly. The only reason that Treadwell had not been killed and eaten earlier, conjectured one observer in the film, may have been because the bears thought something was wrong with him.

``I will die for these animals'' was the mantra repeated ad nauseam by Treadwell, who at times acted like he was Mr. Rogers and the bears harmless kiddies. But in the next breath, he'll let you know of his bravery, telling you if he shows fear, ``They will decapitate me, they will chop me into bits and pieces.''

What's obvious is that Treadwell never learned much about the animals he was supposedly protecting - preferring, it seemed, to mainly rely on his untrained observances, as if a little real knowledge would get in the way of him becoming one with the bears, which seemed to be his ultimate ambition.

To be fair, Herzog, who narrates the documentary, doesn't fall head over heels for Treadwell's reinvention from his directionless life to grizzly man. (Treadwell's father says his son was very hurt when he came in second to Woody Harrelson for a role on ``Cheers,'' and Treadwell himself says he had a near-fatal drug overdose - though no one seems to know if it was a fact - before finding his true calling of protecting the bears.)

Herzog interviews a number of people who weigh in on Treadwell's naivete. Among them was an Aleut spokesman who noted that the grizzlies and Aleutian Indians had co-inhabited the same area for centuries because they respected each other's territory, and felt that Treadwell was causing harm by giving the bears the sense that all humans were friendly. Another, a bear ecologist, contends that poaching wasn't a problem in the area that Treadwell was ``protecting,'' which was already federally protected land. He admits that hunting is allowed to cull the population, but Treadwell in his filmed tirades builds the threat up to massive proportions.

Treadwell supporters who testify to his sincerity are also interviewed, but they are all caught up in his romantic image rather than having a sense of what he was accomplishing in the wilderness.

It is the graphically vivid description of Treadwell's and his girlfriend's deaths by the coroner, Dr. Fallico, that is most arresting. Even Fallico's overly dramatic presentation, which might have been laughingly hammy in other circumstances, doesn't detract from the gruesomeness of the event, the sound of which was captured by a video camera.

``Don't you do that,'' Treadwell would say, shaking a finger at a bear weighing more than 1,000 pounds and looming over him. Pretending to be Dr. Doolittle was not merely an act of naivete but an egoistic death wish. While Herzog shows us the line Treadwell crossed between passion and madness, he also cuts Treadwell some slack, defending him - ``as a filmmaker'' - for some interesting shots of the bears he took, and casting him at times as a man fleeing civilization to seek spiritual harmony with nature.

The dour Herzog, though, is mostly ambivalent about his exuberant subject, but has produced a fascinating documentary. But ``Grizzy Man,'' which is appearing on many critics' top-10 lists, can also seem like a bad joke. In Treadwell you see the madness of someone dying to be recognized as someone special.

Mark Bittner, who's at the center of Judy Irving's documentary ``The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,'' stands in sharp contrast to Treadwell. Though the 40ish-50ish Bittner had arrived in San Francisco with the ambition of making it as a musician, when we're introduced to him, he - by his own admission - has not paid rent in 25 years. Articulate and sensitive, the ponytailed man worked on and off through the years but, for the most part, lives by the kindness of friends. Somewhere along the way, he became the unofficial guardian of a flock of wild parrots, which he observes and feeds daily.

How these parrots came to be wild and flock in San Francisco is a matter of amusing conjecture in the movie, but unlike with Treadwell, the birds came to Bittner. And unlike Treadwell, he didn't tend to anthropomorphize the birds, although he gave them names like Mingus, Picasso, Sophie, Pushkin and Tupelo. His favorite was Connor, an independent blue-headed conure who lived among the mostly cherry-headed flock.

While this may seem an idyllic picture - one that Irving's camera captures gorgeously - Bittner has learned enough to understand that his birds live in nature and are subject to the dangers of the wild, including predatory hawks. When forced to separate from them, he makes a plea before a San Francisco committee to leave the parrots alone - that they are wild and doing nothing is the best thing for them.

And although saddened by the separation, Bittner reflects upon a Zen parable about how when a river spills from the top of a waterfall, the water disperses into individual drops and then becomes the river again at the bottom. It's a wonderful moment.

Bittner saw himself as part of a larger picture; Treadwell was always in the foreground.

``Grizzly Man'' ($27.98; Lionsgate)

``The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill'' ($26.95; New Video)

'Dark Water,' 'Into the Blue,' 'American Pie Presents: Band Camp'

After his account of Che Guevara's early life in ``The Motorcycle Diaries,'' director Walter Salles turned his attention to a remake of a Japanese horror film. After the success of ``The Ring,'' the studios jumped on board, hoping to duplicate its B.O., but returns - and chills - have been diminishing.

``Dark Water'' - about a separated mother, Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly), and her daughter, who move into a New York City apartment with a leaky ceiling and ghostly happenings - is an odd duck. Salles may have ambitions of turning this into something more than a silly remake - Polanski's ``Rosemary's Baby,'' anyone? - but while the current Japanese horror films have a certain creep factor, they mostly rely on flimsy premises that don't translate well.

The result is that ``Dark Water'' is all soggy atmosphere with little grounding. Even the presence of Connelly or Tim Roth as her lawyer has trouble keeping your attention. ``Dark Water'' may have worked at half its length as an hourlong cable show; instead, in pour portentous flashbacks and dreams until you mentally duck out of the rain long before the film is over.

As long as we're on the subject of being all wet, there's ``Into the Blue,'' an action picture that basically exists to put Jessica Alba and Paul Walker in as little clothing as is PG-13 possible. Its director, John Stockwell, seems well aware of that, considering how much time he spent photographing their bodies - especially Alba's. Sunken treasure, a downed plane filled with drugs and skimpy outfits masquerade for a plot.

The straight-to-video ``American Pie Presents: Band Camp'' should have been called ``American Pie: The Next Generation.'' Tad Hilgenbrink plays Matt Stifler, the younger brother of Steve Stifler (played with great flair by Seann William Scott in the first three films). Hilgenbrink tries to copy the smirk, but doesn't have the mischievous glint in his eye that made Scott fun to watch. And this ``Pie,'' even bringing Eugene Levy from the originals, lacks the cleverness of the movies. Yes, there's funny dumb (the Farrelly movies, for example), and there is just plain dumb, like ``Band Camp,'' which contains a ``Girls Gone Wild''-type subplot and nudity.

``Dark Water'' ($29.99 for rated and unrated; Touchstone)

``Into the Blue'' ($28.95; Columbia)

``American Pie Presents: Band Camp'' ($26.98 for rated and unrated; Universal)

'The Crusades: Crescent & The Cross,' 'The Shield'

One thing you can count on is that people have long memories - at least when it comes to their turf. Just witness the long conflicts that have blighted Ireland, the Balkans and, of course, the Middle East.

Earlier this year, the History Channel presented a very entertaining and informative documentary called ``The Crusades: Crescent & The Cross.'' While the three-hour show did not try to make any analogies to what is going on in the Middle East today, as they say, those who don't know history are doomed to ....

But even if you dispute the relevance of what took place over a 200-year period beginning in 1099, ``The Crusades'' - covering the three campaigns - uses re-enactments, maps and scholars to help shed light on the era and sort out some misperceptions.

The addition of Glenn Close to ``The Shield'' has helped keep the show from losing its way. Close plays the tough-minded new precinct captain, Monica Rawling, who oversees Michael Chiklis' shady cop Vic Mackey, who finds himself trying to keep from going under.

Other TV-related DVD titles listed below.

``The Crusades: Crescent & The Cross'' ($29.95; A&E)

``The Shield - The Complete Fourth Season'' ($59.98; Fox)

``Seaquest DSV: Season One'' ($59.98; Universal)

``Twilight Zone: Season 5 - The Definitive Edition'' ($99.99; Image)

``Criss Angel: Mindfreak - The Complete Season One'' (A&E; $24.95)

``Nowhere Man: The Complete Series'' ($49.99; Image)

Rob Lowman, [phone]

robert.lowman(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1) TONY LEUNG CHUI-WAI ``2046''

(2) JENNIFER CONNELLY in ``Dark Water''

(3) TIMOTHY TREADWELL in ``Grizzly Man''