The Golden Age
of Comic Books began back in the '30s and ended with the adoption of the Comics
Code in 1954, but a comics renaissance is taking place right now. Spider-Man is the fifth-highest-grossing
movie of all-time, and The Hulkís trailer
is leaving fans salivating for its release next summer, along with Daredevil and a slew of others. Last
year, a novel about comic books (The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) won the Pulitzer, and a film
based on a very thin graphic novel (Ghost
World) was Oscar-nominated for its screenplay adaptation. Not to mention
critically acclaimed blockbusters with protagonists who want to become
comic-book artists: Freddy Got Fingered,
Tomcats,Monkeybone. Okay, maybe I went too far with that one.

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
(opening Friday, June 28, at the Little) isn't based on a comic book, but they
do factor heavily into its script. Altar
Boys is based on the popular novel by Chris Fuhrman, who died before his
book was published, adapted here by Jeff Stockwell and The Queen of the Damned's Michael Petroni.

Altar
Boys is a lot like The Virgin
Suicides, only with 20 minutes of superhero animation thrown into the
dreamlike mix. Like that film, Boys
is set in the mid '70s, and is about Catholic-school students in that dorky
period between childhood and adulthood. It's told in similar fashion, as well
--- like adults struggling to piece together the hazy details of what they did
just before high school set in.

These eighth-graders aren't much
different from the kids in Suicides,
either. The ringleader and brains of the outfit is Tim Sullivan (Kieran
Culkin); the heart, and our protagonist, is Francis Doyle (Emile Hirsch, who
could easily pass for a younger version of Road
Rules' Theo). In addition to smoking, drinking, and messing around, the
four friends create their own comic book --- to pass the time, but also to
release some of the aggression they feel toward their evil, moped-riding,
one-legged teacher, Sister Assumpta (Jodie Foster, whose now-defunct Egg
Pictures produced the film).

Each of the boys has his own
uniquely named and gifted character in the book (called ìThe Atomic Trinity,î
even though there are four of them), which pits their altar-egos against the
cartoon version of Sister Assumpta (or Nunzilla) and her fictional biker
henchpeople. These animated segments, which fit surprisingly well into the
film, were created by Thomas Fleming and Todd McFarlane; the latter cut his
teeth as an artist for The Amazing
Spider-Man in the late '80s, and later directed Spawn.

There's more here than just comics.
Francis has a crush on his formerly suicidal, potentially crazy classmate
Margie Flynn (Jena Malone, who played the young Jodie Foster in Contact), and he wins her affections
with the Cyrano-style help of both Tim and the poet William Blake (far more
helpful than Robert Blake). Their relationship, which is incorporated into the
nun-killing fantasy, is awkward and surreal; though it's sweet, it comes across
just as un-sugar-coated as the rest of the film. We also witness the slow
unraveling of Tim whose innocent pranks evolve into something scary and
dangerous. (Picture the wide-eyed innocence of Tobey Maguire fused with the
rebelliousness of Jackie Earle Haley.)

In addition to the wonderful
performances by the kids, the real star here is director Peter Care, who until
now was best known for making music videos with R.E.M. and Depeche Mode. Boys is a thoughtful, deliberately paced
film from a music-video director you might assume would glitz things up with
visual bells and whistles (as in, say, Behind
Enemy Lines).

Altar
Boys is finally being released after a couple of well-publicized film
festival flaps. Jodie Foster pulled it out of Sundance '01 because the
animation wasn't ready, then the film was bitch-slapped out of last yearís
Cannes Festival; Foster reneged on accepting the juryís presidency when she
jumped at the chance to replace the injured Nicole Kidman in Panic Room. But as it happens, the
movieís post-Spider-Man timing really
couldn't be better.

Only two films carry the distinction of winning
three awards at the Cannes Film Festival. The first was the Coen brothers' Barton Fink, and the second, Michael
Haneke's The Piano Teacher (also opening June 28 at the Little), should
vex just as many people as Fink did
11 years ago. Cannes juries tend to choose films that are dark and disturbing
(which might explain why the lighthearted AmÈlie
wasn't even accepted to last year's event), and The Piano Teacher is probably the darkest, most disturbing yet.
Itís probably the all-time worst First Date Film, but it is a thrilling tale of
repression and self-destruction.

Isabelle Huppert plays Erika Kohut,
a Schubert-loving professor of piano at a Vienna conservatory for gifted
teenage musicians. Erika is in her late 30s, and still lives with her
domineering mother (Annie Girardot), who presumably rides her daughter because
she never lived up to the musical promise she exhibited as a youngster. The
film opens with Erika being hollered at because she came home from work three
hours late and had the audacity to spend her own money on some new clothes.

Erika's messed-up maternal
relationship translates into bad news for her students, who receive the brunt
of their teacher's misguided rage. She's extremely tough on them, often
labeling them as pathetic and suggesting they'll be lucky to find careers
tickling the ivories at a strip club. We begin to see a slightly different side
of Erika when the cocksure Walter Klemmer (BenoÓt Magimel) clumsily tries to
seduce her. He's a brash young engineering student who isn't at all serious
about the piano, which irks Erika and sends her spiraling into a cycle of
reckless behavior that includes self-mutilation, public urination, and
recklessly endangering the career of her most promising student, as well as
something involving the used wads of tissue found on the floor of a private
booth in an adult bookstore. And that's all before she finally succumbs to
Walter, providing cinema's creepiest sex scene since Dennis Hopper rode
Isabella Rossellini into nitrous-fueled oblivion in Blue Velvet.

The
Piano Teacherís leads won Best Actor and Actress Awards at Cannes. Magimel
does a decent job as Walter, but Huppert, whose perpetual scowl is perfect for Erika's
oddly unemotional role, brings the movie to life. The character is incredibly
prim and proper, wrapped so tightly that no emotion would ever think of trying
to escape...until she begins to unravel and reveal her true colors. Huppert
conveys this flawlessly, and if Piano
Teacher werenít a controversial foreign film released early in the year,
she'd be a shoo-in for next year's Oscar race.

If Teacher were an American film, the audience would also be
railroaded into feeling sympathy for Erika --- and if Ron Howard had made it,
people would think it was the greatest film since Patch Adams. Haneke doesn't pull any punches, however, and as a
result, earned his second straight Cannes Jury Prize (after the spectacularly
unseen Code Unknown, with Juliette Binoche).

Speaking of controversy, Teacher garnered just as much as the
sex-crazed dramas Baise-moi, Intimacy, and Romance, but it managed to do so almost without nudity (save what
you see on the monitor in the private booth scene). You have to salute writer-director
Haneke, who adapted Elfriede Jelinek's novel, for making a film that isn't
particularly graphic, but is powerful, brutally shocking, and difficult to
watch. I felt like taking a shower after Baise-moi,
but The Piano Teacher made me want to
scrub down with a stiff wire brush and an industrial-strength
detergent.

For
more of Jonís movie ramblings, visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy
(www.sick-boy.com), or listen to him on WBERís Friday Morning Show.