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Also this issue: Let's Waltz Again Hair Apparent Workingman's Dead |
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April 18-24, 2002
movie shorts
Amélie
Imagine a movie that hooks itself directly into your brain’s pleasure centers, triggering grin after joyous grin, and you’ll have some idea what it’s like to watch Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. Audrey Tautou, an actress of silent-film beauty plays the titular gamine, a pure-hearted waif who successfully provides for everyone’s happiness but her own. --S.A.
(Ritz at the Bourse)
A BEAUTIFUL MIND
The kind of movie that makes you wish they’d just do away with the Oscars altogether, A Beautiful Mind is as tasteful as a dentist’s office, and about as exciting. Playing John Forbes Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician who struggled with mental illness for most of his life, Russell Crowe is cocky but socially awkward, above the world but not as far as he’d like. It’s an unsentimental performance, but director Ron Howard turns reserve into stasis. --S.A.
(Ritz 16; UA Riverview)
ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS
Friday meets Miami Vice, with a few detours. Ice Cube is a bounty hunter named Bucum Jackson, who’s hot on the trail of small time bail-jumper Mike Epps, when they inadvertently run into a bizarre and bloody diamond heist. They partner up in search of the loot, encountering multiple double crosses. The film manages an erratic class critique, though its actual line-up of events doesn’t make much sense. --C.F.
(UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview; 69th St.)
BIG TROUBLE
With the exception of the used-up Tim Allen and the mostly-annoying blowhards Johnny Knoxville and Tom Sizemore, everyone in this Big ensemble comedy is welcome: Jason Lee, Janeane Garofalo, Rene Russo, Dennis Farina, Stanley Tucci, Omar Epps, Andy Richter. Unfortunately, the delightfully assembled talent can’t prevent Big Trouble’s title being partially self-descriptive. Based on the novel by Dave Barry, the script is chock full of safe, punchy bits. But this is fundamentally a noisy, complicated farce, and what trouble there is derives directly from its strict adherence to the centuries-old genre. Cupidity, stupidity, misunderstanding and massively parallel coincidences abound, all paced like a chihuahua’s heart attack. Even though the plot points are “now items” like bombs and airplanes and national security, it’s hard not to think that Tartuffe is just off stage left, waiting for his entrance, sniggering. -- R.G.
(UA Grant; UA Riverview)
BLADE II
With a lot of money and not much imagination, Blade II does nothing to rework its genre except amp up the pace and throw in a couple of video-game effects. Wesley Snipes reprises his utterly flavorless performance as the half-human/half-vamp vampire hunter, Blade, who joins forces with bloodsuckers to take on an even more dangerous foe: the mutated Reapers who feast on vamp and human alike. Director Guillermo Del Toro (The Devil¹s Backbone), who handled genre material with aplomb in the kicky Mimic, falls into line with slam-bang tactics. Blade II feels more like a Mad Lib than a movie. --S.A.
(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
CHANGING LANES
Partly written by Michael Tolkin (The Rapture), from a story by newbie Chap Taylor, Roger Michell’s tale of morality and masculinity is occasionally strangely absorbing, despite distracting narrative conveniences and bizarre character flips. Ben Affleck smashes into Samuel L. Jackson on the FDR, as both are on their way to important court dates in the city. Affleck is an ambitious lawyer hoping to seal a slimy deal; Jackson is a recovering alcoholic insurance salesman trying to convince his ex not to move to Portland with their two sons by buying a house for them. Affleck leaves the accident scene (and Jackson, in the driving rain). He also leaves behind a crucial file, which Jackson picks up. The rest of the film tracks them through the day, in their own crises and in various emotional and other collisions as each tries to get over and get even.--Cindy Fuchs
(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA Sameric; UA 69th St.)
CLOCKSTOPPERS
French Stewart -- in the employ of an evil defense contractor -- has developed a watch that can drastically speed up time for the wearer, causing everything else to appear to have stopped. The watch still has a few bugs to be worked out, though, so Stewart sends a prototype to his old mentor Professor Gibbs for advice, and darned if Dr. Gibbs doesn’t have a nosy, fun-loving teenage son who finds the watch and uses it to do fun things like rake his girlfriend’s lawn, help his rhythmless buddy win a DJ competition, and put a peeing dog in a meter maid’s car. This is the best you can do with such a marvelous invention, Einstein and I are wondering? --R.G.
(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Grant; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
E.T.: THE EXTRA- TERRESTRIAL
It’s only fitting that the most famous messiah-figure of pop cinema (sorry, Obi-wan!) gets a second coming on the big screen. E.T. turns 20 this year, and its return to theaters is as welcome as home after a long journey, and as paradoxically unfamiliar. Much has been made of the edits and digital makeover that the always-tinkering director Steven Spielberg has given his most paradigmatically Spielbergian film. What worked then still works, and how. Drew Barrymore gets the best lines and she nails all of them; Henry Thomas’ Elliot captures well the bittersweet travails of childhood friendship, love and loss, and E.T. is utterly believable as a living, breathing character. “This is reality,” Elliot says, and the awestruck child in you will likely agree. --R.G.
(UA Grant; UA Riverview)
FRAILTY
A single father (Bill Paxton, who also directed) conscripts his two young sons (Matthew O’Leary and Jeremy Sumpter) into a life of religion-fueled serial killing. Dad believes he and the kids have been called by god to “destroy demons,” and spends some years, beginning in 1979, doing just that -- demons who happen to be disguised as humans whose names show up on a list dad receives via his visions. One of the sons grows up to be Matthew McConaughey, who recalls his unfortunate childhood for a Dallas-based FBI agent (Powers Boothe, who only has to show up to significantly up the creepy ante of any movie). The movie plays with perspective, such that your narrator describes scenes he couldn’t have known, and so the big pay-off surprises come at the expense of some narrative logic. But if you go with the creepy flow, you can achieve a decent sense of horror and dread, if that’s what you’re looking for. Besides, Paxton says that Fred Durst “told me his audiences would love it.” That must count for something. --C.F.
(Bryn Mawr; UA Riverview; UA Sameric; UA 69th St.)
HIGH CRIMES
When it comes to movie husbands, Ashley Judd can’t catch a break. In Carl Franklin’s movie, she’s a brilliant San Francisco lawyer who outsmarts prosecutors, drives an expensive SUV and is trying to get pregnant with dreamy hubby Jim Caviezel. Big surprise, catastrophe strikes: Husband is arrested by the Marines for slaughtering nine El Salvadoran civilians 15 years ago. Throughout the film, grainy flashback “footage” shows several versions of the crime, so you’re supposed to be unsure who’s lying -- Caviezel or his superiors, whom he claims are framing him. Judd defends him at the court martial, with the help of recovering alcoholic, ex-marine, once-super-lawyer Morgan Freeman, and assigned marine lawyer Adam Scott. And oh yes, her kooky sister (the poorly served Amanda Peet) comes along to provide comedy and a girlfriend for Scott. The case takes preposterous turns, Judd finds herself in various dire situations (home invasion, car wreck, circling-camera revelation scene, etc.), Caviezel cries, and Freeman maintains his dignity, despite the obligatory booze-temptation business. Franklin really needs to find a script he can run with. --C.F.
(AMC Andorra; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA Sameric; UA 69th St.)
HUMAN NATURE
Given that it’s written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), you’d expect odd things from Human Nature, and, hey presto!, you’d be right. Patricia Arquette stars as a woman whose body is covered with hair, Tim Robbins as an uptight (and minimally endowed) behavioral scientist who’s devoted himself to “teaching table manners to mice,” and Rhys Ifans as a man raised by an ape, or rather, “a man who thought himself an ape, which amounts to the same thing.” You can figure the rest out from there, can’t you? An electrolysized Arquette shacks up with the repressive Robbins, but when Ifans is discovered living naked in the wild and taken in as a research subject, Arquette finds herself wondering why she’s repressed her animal side. Human Nature is a less ironic creature than Malkovich; the tone never quite gels, and the film’s obvious desire to have Something to Say prevents you from just enjoying it as a lark. --S.A.
(Ritz at the Bourse)
ICE AGE
Unfortunately, that squirrel from the trailer is not one of Ice Age’s protagonists. That distinction belongs to a trio of misfits: a mopey, solitary mammoth named Manfred (Ray Romano), an abandoned sloth named Sid (John Leguizamo) and Diego (Denis Leary), a voracious sabertooth tiger who just might turn out to have a heart of gold. Ice Age is sappy, to be sure, and more than a hair too self-conscious -- its characters are knowing and hip in that millennial way -- but its deft comedy is still heaps of fun -- and, of course, there’s that darn squirrel, who keeps turning up and giving the picture a lift just when he’s most needed. What a relief they didn’t become extinct. --S.A.
(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans;Baederwood; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
JOHN Q
John Q (Denzel Washington) takes over a Chicago hospital with a gun he’s somehow got past security, bonds with some of the other ER patients feeling oppressed, and eventually offers to give up his own heart for his dying boy. --C.F.
(UA Riverview)
KISSING JESSICA STEIN
Jennifer Westfeldt is an editor/journalist at an NYC magazine; Heather Juergensen runs a downtown art gallery. Simultaneously fed up with the lame hetero dating scene, they meet through a personals ad, and do their best to make a lesbian relationship work, contending with kibitzers and naysayers. Adapted from an off-off-Broadway play, Lipschtick, the film derives its comic sensibility and rhythms from Woody Allen, but, happily, it actually likes its women characters. Even more daringly, it suggests that love and sexual attraction are not functions of gender or even a fixed self-identification, per se; indeed, its lack of investment in traditional identity politics is more innovative and refreshing than its familiar comedic inclinations. --C.F.
(Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
LAST ORDERS
Three old friends gather at a pub in South London to pay homage to one of their own, recently deceased and set on the bar -- in an urn. They toast; they laugh; they remember good times. And then they drive off to fulfill Jack’s “last orders,” that his ashes be scattered at Margate Pier. As they recall how they came to know Jack (played in flashbacks by Michael Caine and, in his earlier years, by JJ Feild), you come to understand the shifting, fraught friendships between Vic (Tom Courtenay), Lenny (David Hemmings), and Ray (Bob Hoskins), as well as Jack’s son, Vince (Ray Winstone). Carrying on, in Last Orders, is different for all concerned; it remains, in all cases, an experience dense with costs as well as rewards. --C.F.
(Ritz Five)
MONSOON WEDDING
Monsoon Wedding tries to borrow visual energy from the so-called “Bollywood” spectacles of Indian cinema, but all Nair and cinematographer Declan Quinn manage to evoke is hubbub. Aditi (Vasundhara Das) is struggling both with her arranged marriage to Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas), and her on-again offagain affair with a married man. But even when political concerns regarding India are raised, it’s only as background noise to the question of which boy ends up with which girl. It’s a lively film, but it’s so eager to please that it avoids all but the most clear-cut moral stances: There’s no indication at any point that any of the characters’ problems extend beyond the domestic realm, or at least can’t be solved within it.--S.A.
(Bala; Ritz Five)
MONSTER’S BALL
Haunted by the memory of her death-row convict husband, Leticia Musgrove (Halle Berry) is unable to move on, not least because she sees in her son Tyrell a lack of control that reminds her of him. Working as a waitress in rural Georgia, she’s surrounded daily by poverty, racism and meanness. Looking for her own escape, she drinks and, eventually, falls into an unlikely relationship with Hank (Billy Bob Thornton) -- a member of the corrections team that has seen to her husband’s execution, only one of many contrivances in Monster’s Ball. Lucky for Hank and Leticia, all these other characters are set up to service their trajectory toward one another. But Leticia’s story, in the end, is more compelling than those of the film’s many bad men, redeemed or not.--C.F.
(Ritz Five)
NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VAN WILDER
Mugging ceaselessly at the camera as if eyebrows were going out of style, Ryan Reynolds, as seventh-year senior Van Wilder, shows such a gap between actual and imagined charisma that you almost want to like the guy. This is a movie which thinks it’s still a novel joke to come up with funny three-letter combinations for fictional frat houses (in this case, DIK). Can there be anything else to say? --S.A.
(UA Riverview)
PANIC ROOM
Movies that begin with someone moving into a new house always end badly. Panic Room starts with Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) looking at a cavernous, multi-floored house on New York’s Upper West Side. Its most ominous aspect is its “panic room,” with a thick steel door that slams shut with an alarming thwack and a bank of surveillance monitors. The film efficiently jumps to their first night in the house, complete with thunder and lightning and, oh yes, a trio of home invaders. They want millions of dollars hidden in the titular room but Meg and Sarah are soon locked inside. While it surely raises significant questions about the relations between security and money, it never pushes hard at the assumption of privilege that grounds these relations. --C.F.
(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; Ritz 16; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA Sameric; UA 69th St.)
PORN STAR: THE LEGEND OF RON JEREMY
The thing about Ron Jeremy, he just wants to direct. Okay, not really. But the 49-year-old star of over 1500 adult films, nicknamed “The Hedgehog” for his copious body hair and stocky stature, does want to be a “serious actor,” as this easygoing documentary makes abundantly clear. Without criticizing the porn industry, the film makes it clear that no one, not even Jeremy -- certainly the most famous male porn actor of all time -- is particularly satisfied with their lot. --S.A.
(Roxy)
RESIDENT EVIL
Based on a video game, it would appear that Resident Evil doesn’t have much going for it. On the plus side, it features a short-skirted Milla Jovovich carrying a large gun, and is co-written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (Event Horizon), whose dark predilections for constructing Terrible Places and fragmenting the heck out of narratives (Alice in Wonderland-style) serves him exceedingly well here. --C.F.
(UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
THE ROOKIE
Former big league pitching prospect Jim Morris (Dennis Quaid) finds himself 15 years removed from his best chance at the majors, married with three kids, teaching high school science and coaching baseball in Nowheresville, Texas. The thing is, Jim starts throwing again and finds out his surgically repaired and rested arm is much better than it was when he was in his supposed prime -- yes, dangerously close to Rookie of the Year territory, but at least this is based on a true story. There’s not much suspense when the movie’s title tells you exactly what’s going to happen; it’s a bit like Citizen Kane being named It¹s A Wonderful Sled. --R.G.
(Baederwood; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS
Wes Anderson's follow-up to Rushmore is a stylish but moribund exercise that chokes on the tongue lodged in its cheek. The story of a family of child prodigies -- playwright Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), financial whiz Chas (Ben Stiller) and tennis ace Richie (Luke Wilson), this film is founded on the same precepts as its successful predator, but is much less involving. --S.A.
(Roxy)
SHOWTIME
This oh-so-clever riff on buddy/cop/reality series by director Tom Dey (Shanghai Noon) makes the most of the opportunity, for about four minutes: William Shatner is expert-advising for the titular show, explaining patiently to the two -- grumpy LAPD veteran Robert De Niro and showboat Eddie Murphy -- how to slide off a car hood. To complete the cop show parody, the cops also have a “real” case while shooting the series. The plot is what it is, namely, a parody of a completely easy target. --C.F.
(AMC Orleans)
THE SWEETEST THING
Cameron Diaz is Christina, a San Francisco clubhopper and heartbreaker, who just may be tiring of the revolving-door approach to male companionship. This doesn’t keep her or her sassy friends (Christina Applegate and Selma Blair) out of the scene, though, and one fateful night Christina trades barbs and beers with Peter (Thomas Jane). Even though the duo has all the chemistry of organic shampoo, their three-minute dance floor flirtation is the impetus for all the ostensibly transgressive romantic wackiness that follows. Screenwriter Nancy Pimental (formerly a South Park writer) throws raunch around like table salt.--R.G.
(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; Ritz 16; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIéN
Shortly after high schoolers Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) say goodbye to their girlfriends for the summer, they meet beautiful, Spanish-born Luisa (Maribel Verdú), married to Tenoch’s pretentious novelist cousin, Jano, and they invite her to drive to the beach. Though Luisa’s aware of the limits of her adventure, there’s more at stake for her than immediate gratification. The film too, is full of narrative layers and visual nuances; the journey is punctuated by images of what goes on in Mexico: police checks, poverty-stricken neighborhoods and community activities. Its interest in the vagaries and shifting colors of truth make Y Tu Mamá También an unusual film: Though the boys inevitably learn that pursuing your immediate desires can lead to unexpected consequences, they, and you, may appreciate and savor what remains unknown.--C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
