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Also this issue: The Empire Strikes Back Another Fine Meth What Goes Around |
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May 16-22, 2002
movie shorts
ABOUT A BOY
Hugh Grant is really, really dreamy. It’s important to keep that in mind while watching About a Boy, since the overgrown child he plays does some rather dramatically unlikable things, including pretending to be a single father to score dates with single mothers. Directed by Chris and Paul Weitz (American Pie) from Nick Hornby’s novel, About a Boy is the latest salvo in Hornby’s attempt to comprehensively chronicle every form of arrested development known to man. Here, Will (Grant) befriends Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), the son of suicidal mom Fiona (Toni Collette), who’s got her hands so full with her own problems that she can’t begin to understand what her 12-year-old child needs. Luckily, Will’s only a few years older on the inside, and is able to offer the perfect counsel on Marcus’ incipient adolescence. The Weitz brothers bring a tidy gloss to Hornby’s already slightly-too-pat story, but in going for sentiment over pop cultural commentary, they extract a workable story all the same (though references to Xena, Warrior Princess and Mystikal now seem contrived and out of place). Most importantly, though, Hugh Grant manages to kick and scream so, so adorably as he’s dragged into early adulthood. What could possibly matter more? --Sam Adams (Bala;Ritz 16; UA Riverview)
THE BREAD, MY SWEET
What does it say about a movie about Italians whose only major Italian cast member, so near as I can determine, is Scott Baio? What does it say that he’s not too shabby in it? Baio plays Dominic, a man who quits his job as a corporate downsizer so he can spend more time at his family-owned biscotti bakery with his brothers. When Bella (Rosemary Prinz), the kindly immigrant who lives upstairs, gets the cancer, Dominic decides that for Bella’s sake he needs to locate her daughter Lucca (ER’s Kristin Minter, who will appear at Friday’s premiere), bring her back to Pittsburgh and marry her. Despite the inevitable homespun baked-goods platitudes -- “You’re a piece of bread, good and simple” or “Life is like a cookie, fragile and sweet” -- first-time writer-director Melissa Martin kneads real emotion and a dash of humor into her paean to immigrant culture, which was shot at her husband’s actual bakery in Pittsburgh. If the pacing seems a bit labored and the dialogue is poco non realistico, hey: I was absorbed enough in the lives of the characters to not think to call it Chachi in Charge until after I left the theater. --Ryan Godfrey (Ritz East)
THE MYSTIC MASSEUR
There’s probably a perfectly nice straight-to-Cinemax lone-sax-and-high-hat softcore exploitation flick that will never be made because this title has already been used up. And that’s too bad, because at least that film would serve eight to twelve minutes of purpose. Ismail Merchant’s thoroughly misguided adaptation of V.S. Naipaul’s novel of Indian life and politics in pre-post-colonial Trinidad misplaces all of the Nobel laureate’s wit, bite and meaning, leaving only desiccated husks of what could have been satire. Ganesh (Aasif Mandvi, of ABCD and American Chai) is a failed schoolteacher who decides to become a great author, supporting himself and his new wife by taking up the family massage business. He’s not very good as a masseur or a writer: his first book, 101 Questions and Answers About Hinduism contains entries like “47. Who is the second greatest living Hindu?” But Ganesh manages to quell a boy’s fevered hallucinations, and over time he becomes a legendary holy man, visited daily by dozens of locals for healing and inspiration. Is he a con man or a saintly rube -- Elmer Gantry or Chauncey Gardner? I don’t know; just thinking about the shambling aimlessness of Masseur gives me a crick in my neck. --R.G. (Ritz Bourse; Ritz 16)
STOLEN SUMMER
A nostalgia piece set in 1976 Chicago, Pete Jones’ debut feature is best known as the winner of Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and HBO’s “Project Greenlight” competition. According to the HBO reality series about the film’s production, poor Jones learned quickly that $1 million doesn’t go very far and ego clashes complicate “art.” The film itself is even more obvious and dull than this object lesson. Irish Catholic third-grader Pete (Adi Stein) decides to get his Jewish friend (Mike Weinberg) into heaven by putting him through a series of “tests” over the summer. As the kids swim, run, and ride bikes in the sun, their respective fathers -- fireman Aidan Quinn and rabbi Kevin Pollak -- endure and, of course, learn from their own travails (raising 8 kids on a fireman’s salary and recovering from a house fire). Though the kids (and Brian Dennehy as the local priest) are awkward and too-cute, some performers do fine (especially Bonnie Hunt as Quinn’s saintly wife). But the movie is corny and flimsy, problems stemming from its script, suggesting that the Greenlight judges need to rethink their criteria before a second go. --Cindy Fuchs(Ritz Bourse)
