Beyond the Multiplex

Fast forward: "Memento" plus the first scene of "Reservoir Dogs" equals an "Unknown" quotient; back to the land with "Commune"
I have a soft spot for Simon Brand's formulaic, claustrophobic and intermittently effective thriller "Unknown," I guess because it reminds me of the kind of movie my high-school friends would have seen on Saturday night in the long-gone downtown grindhouses of Oakland, Calif. It's a heist film and a puzzle film. It deliberately and obviously rips off "Memento" and "Reservoir Dogs." I've heard this kind of thing called a "bowling-league" movie, as in, you could start a bowling league of lowlifes with all these disreputable characters.

A bunch of guys wake up on the floor of a filthy warehouse, somewhere in the Arizona desert. They don't remember how they got there, or even who they are. See, they were all fighting and a canister of some kind of gas broke open -- you know, the kind that leads to unconsciousness and short-term memory loss but few other obvious effects -- and here they are. Even in the movie's credits, they're all identified by attributes rather than names: Jean Jacket (Jim Caviezel), Broken Nose (Greg Kinnear), Bound Man (Joe Pantoliano), Rancher Shirt (Barry Pepper).

Caviezel's character is the first one to wake up and provide us with some really bad tough-dude method acting, but the others soon follow. There are angry confrontations, fights, bouts of vomiting, but they still don't remember who the hell they are. There are clues: a phone call, a newspaper article. It seems like some of them are kidnappers and some of them are the victims, and the whole thing went south somehow, even before the mysterious gas and the shooting that left Handcuffed Man (Jeremy Sisto) hanging from a railing and bleeding out from a bullet wound.

Their memories come back in incoherent flashed-back bits and pieces, of course, and we begin to see how the kidnapping has unfolded in the outside world, where a ransom is being paid and the cops are on the trail. But once the paranoid surrealism of the opening scenes begins to fade, so does the film's inherent interest level. The plot twists and secrets that arrive late are pretty cheap, but effective enough. Jean Jacket actually gets all these deadbeats to work together for a cause and whistle the theme of Beethoven's "To Joy" (I kid you not), but is he really an upstanding guy or a complete sleazeball? Will he ever know for sure? Do we care? This is being jointly released by the Weinstein Co. and IFC, but neither of them bothers to list "Unknown" on its Web site. Don't you feel sorry for it? (Opens Nov. 3 at the IFC Center in New York. Other cities may follow. Also available pay-per-view on some cable TV systems.)

You may well decide that the back-to-the-land hippies who founded the Black Bear Ranch in the late '60s, deep in the remote forests of Siskiyou County, Calif., were nuts. But, at least in Jonathan Berman's film "Commune," there's no disputing their courage. Furthermore, in documenting how three generations have been raised about as far off the grid of mainstream society as you can get without disappearing, Berman captures a way of life that has been curiously influential -- has been imitated, ripped off, ridiculed and demonized -- ever since.

As actor Peter Coyote, an occasional visitor and short-time resident, observes, Black Bear was the last of a series of communal living experiments that stretched from San Francisco northward, almost to the Oregon border. It may also have been the most intense. At the end of a nine-mile dirt road, difficult to traverse in summer and impossible in winter, Black Bear attracted the most dedicated and ideological communalists, and sometimes the weirdest ones.

Berman has assembled an extraordinary collage of Black Bear home movies and personal testimony to document the commune's highs and lows. It's not an idealized portrait; many survivors look back on Black Bear's ethic of near-totalitarian togetherness with regret. (At least for a while, residents couldn't sleep with the same person more than two nights running. Otherwise, they might become a couple, which was of course a bad thing.) During the darkest years, Black Bear was invaded by a cultlike child-rearing cluster called Shiva Lila, who separated children from their parents and took them to the Philippines and India, where some died of diphtheria.

By the same token, the people who survived Black Bear and came back to society seem no better or worse than the rest of us, and the sheer hardships of the place meant that many of them learned practical skills -- cooking, cabinetmaking, herbal medicine -- that have turned into useful and lucrative careers. Most former residents view each other with tremendous (and sometimes guarded) affection, and continue to look back on Black Bear as a life-defining experience. Amid the dozens of documentaries made about various aspects of '60s society and culture, "Commune" stands out for its ambiguity, honesty and sheer human clarity. (Opens Nov. 3 at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities to follow.)

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