MOVIES

Coco Chanel

Shirley MacLaine plays the legendary French fashion designer at the age of 71, when the House of Chanel was trying to make a comeback after a decade of gradually increasing irrelevance. The movie opens with her disastrous 1954 show, and MacLaine is very entertaining as a cantankerous old chain-smoking snob.

However, the bulk of this made-for-cable-TV film is told in flashback and is about Gabrielle Chanel's youth.

It's a weepy rags-to-riches story that is better served by Anne Fontaine's French-language movie "Coco Avant Chanel," which covers most of the same time period and opens in Japan next month. (Yet another Chanel biopic is scheduled for release after New Year's.)

Whereas Fontaine and her star, Audrey Tautou, concentrate on the dynamic between the social milieu of pre-World War I France and Chanel's iconoclastic personality, "Coco Chanel" settles on trite romantic melodrama centered around her love affair with Boy Capel (Olivier Sitruk), most of it in dubbed English. It seems a waste of MacLaine's talents and star power not to have constructed the whole movie around her.

Directed by Christian Duguay, starring Shirley MacLaine and Barbora Bobulova

Now showing at theaters nationwide

Patti Smith: Dream of Life

Filmed over a 10-year period by Steven Sebring, this impressionistic portrait of rocker-poet Patti Smith was made with the subject's full cooperation. In fact, Smith herself supervised the production, calling up Sebring whenever she felt like talking or inviting him to accompany her on tour and on visits to places like her childhood home in New Jersey, where her mother makes her macaroni and cheese.

Like Smith's poetry, the film is an elegy to sensation and the truth of the moment. Candor is Patti Smith's default mode, and while her adherence to values associated with the 1960s is often overstated, her rapport with people, whether they be former lover Sam Shepard, her son Jackson (who grows into an adult before our eyes), or the mother of REM's Michael Stipe, is immediate and touching.

Fans of her records should be aware that there isn't much in the way of musical performance. The movie is less about Smith the professional than about Smith the private philosopher and raconteur, and it helps that she enjoys being the center of attention.

Directed by Steven Sebring

Starting Saturday at theaters in Tokyo, to be followed by theaters nationwide

Transporter 3

In this third movie about the adventures of Frank Martin (Jason Statham), the super-chauffeur and his trusty Audi A8 are forced into transporting the kidnapped daughter (Natalya Rudakova) of the Ukrainian Environmental Minister (Jeroen Krabbe) by a freelance terrorist (Robert Knepper) who has been hired by a nefarious multinational corporation.

If "3" is actually better than the first two hyper-violent "Transporters," it's because Martin gets to use his brains as much as his impressive brawn. He has to, since he's got a device strapped to his wrist that will explode if he strays more than 25 meters from his car, and Martin's quick-witted resourcefulness is put to the ultimate test when the Audi plunges into a river.

Statham's own resourcefulness as an action star who doesn't take himself at all seriously saves his character from abject ridiculousness. He's a likable stud and makes for a bitterly funny hero.

Directed by Olivier Megaton, starring Jason Statham, Robert Knepper and Natalya Rudakova

Now showing at theaters nationwide(IHT/Asahi: August 28,2009)