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Also this issue: Shot by Both Sides Preschool Confidential Screen Picks |
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July 5-11, 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; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16)
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
There’s never been a movie that justifies the existence of digital video better than this one. It’s one thing to empower MTV-schooled film brats, and quite another to facilitate a six-month shoot in the Canadian Arctic with a 90 percent Inuit crew. As wielded by Norman Cohn (a New York transplant), the camera captures the brilliant harshness of Arctic light, and eavesdrops on the minutest details of Inuit life. Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq) and his brother Amaqjuaq (Pakkak Innukshuk) are raised in a tribe beset by an evil shaman who preys on the tribe’s worst instincts. At nearly three hours, Atanarjuat, self-consciously designed to be a landmark of Inuit culture, arguably suffers from a touch of self-importance, but the sense of occasion is justified by the film’s mesmerizing storytelling. --S.A. (Ritz East)
BAD COMPANY
Chris Rock first appears in Bad Company playing Kevin, a supersmooth, Harvard-educated CIA agent. He’s not very convincing, which may have something to do with the fact that he’s dead within minutes. Cut to Chris Rock again, this time as Kevin’s twin brother Jake, a speed-chess hustler and ticket scalper. Jake is a clever guy, raised in the projects and going nowhere fast. How lucky for him that his brother -- whom he never knew existed, as they were orphaned at birth and sent off to different foster homes -- has been murdered. How lucky indeed, that he’s offered a gig with the CIA, impersonating Kevin and saving the world from Eurotrashy nuclear terrorists. All this passes for premise in Bad Company, directed by intrepid Joel Schumacher and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Preposterous doesn’t begin to cover it: Anthony Hopkins (as Kevin’s mentor and Jake’s new boss) in an vaguely comic action picture; Rock in a vaguely dramatic action picture; and oh yes, that nuclear threat plot point, responsible for pushing the film’s release date back from last year, because terrorism in NYC didn’t look like such a good subject for Chris Rock’s ironic twisting back then. Now, while the subject might be less immediately traumatic, the twisting is just painful. Bad Company’s timing is still off. --C.F. (UA 69th St)
THE BOURNE IDENTITY
Separating itself from The Sum of All Fears or Bad Company, The Bourne Identity’s CIA is a sinister and duplicitous organization, funded by a blissfully ignorant Congress, determined to do and cover up its self-assigned work. Based on Robert Ludlum’s popular novel, the film is directed by Doug Liman, starring Matt Damon and featuring the usual spy picture’s preposterous premise, namely, that Damon’s Jason Bourne is a super-operative who’s lost his memory due to some recent on-the-job trauma. As he gradually learns who he is and how he’s come to have these startling killer skills, he decides to fight against the very Agency that made him. It’s cockamamie, yes, and by all rights, it shouldn’t work. But The Bourne Identity is so free-fallingly bizarre, so in love with its own narrative absurdities, violent bone-crunching and stylistic flourishes, that, after a while, you just go with it. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
CINEMA PARADISO
Miramax, who also released Apocalypse Now Redux, is once again bending over backwards to avoid using the words “director’s cut.” The only thing “new” about this version of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo Cinema Paradiso is the 51 minutes that were cut after early audiences found the nearly three-hour film too much to bear. It doesn’t take a die-hard populist to say they were right. At such expansive length, the film begs an epic designation it simply doesn’t merit, unless schmaltz is a substitute for sweep. The restored coda, in which the film’s hero (Jacques Perrin), after returning to his childhood home, finds the girl he lost and engages in one last fling, is wrong-headed in every way, a literal-minded climax to an allegorical story which has the effect of making Phillppe Noiret’s projectionist seem paternally cruel and arbitrary. It’s hard to imagine the film would be much better at shorter length -- the three-hour version hardly makes you want to sit through even the most truncated form of the story again -- but at least you’d get to its heart-rending final images more quickly, which might be the only part it gets definitively right. --S.A .(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
The premise behind Peter Care’s coming-of-age tale is good enough you wish a better filmmaker had gotten a hold of it. The fantasies of the film’s core group of four Catholic school teenagers are played out in animated comic book-style sequences, which, for example, incorporate an authoritarian nun (Jodie Foster) as a motorcycle-riding arch-villain called Pegleg. But Care’s film heads in so many directions that the fantasy sequences have nothing to match up to, and its attempts to instill seriousness by inserting soap opera twists fall painfully flat (although Jena Malone is good enough to make you believe the drivel coming out of her mouth). Apart from the fact that the fantasy sequences initially involve the quest to unite a sword and a pearl, the scenes, designed by the execrable Todd MacFarlane (Spawn), go for facile charms instead of mythic resonance. Oh, what Buñuel could have done with the idea. Instead, Lives flops in different directions without choosing a course, and winds up spinning its wheels. --S.A. (Bala; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD
On a dark and unstormy night, four young girls gather round a small fire in the woods for a special bonding ritual, cutting their palms and exchanging blood, then raising their voices in unison: “Loyalty forever! Ya-Ya!” Sparks fly up, the camera pulls out, and yet another ensemble chick flick is born. Based on Rebecca Wells’ popular novels, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Little Altars Everywhere, Callie Khouri’s film traces the episodic lives of these girls, sort of. Actually, the movie uses the trajectory of one girl, group leader Vivi (who grows up to be Ellen Burstyn), to make mundane observations about the ways that girls become women; betray, support and inspire one another; and, in the end, make sense of life’s chaos. It doesn’t help that the Sisters -- Vivi, Teensy (Fionnula Flanagan), Necie (Shirley Knight) and Caro (Maggie Smith) -- are grandly “Southern.” While this grants them a certain cinematic “tradition” (Steel Magnolias comes to mind) and historical context (racism, class and gender anxieties), it also tends to make them histrionic and eccentric stereotypes.--C.F.
(
Roxy; Ritz 16; UA Grant
)
THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES
Ian Holm plays Napoleon, twice, in this thin, occasionally diverting historical “what if?” Instead of dying on St. Helena in 1821, he escapes, leaving behind an underclass lookalike named Eugene (also played by Holm), who eventually decides that living the life of a deposed military monster is okay, as he gets to eat, take baths and dictate memoirs all day long. Meanwhile, the real emperor makes it to France, where he’s taken in by a melon vendor named Pumpkin (Iben Hjejle), with whom he falls in love and begins to settle down -- after marshalling all the local fruit sellers to market efficiently and profitably. (He can’t stop planning campaigns.) Holm is charming (and how pleasantly surprising to see him cast as a romantic lead), and Hjejle is engagingly warm. The tale, adapted from Simon Leys’ novel The Death of Napoleon, is, of course, a stretch by definition. Still, it moves like a TV movie with a great location budget, with little bits of plot set against stunning backdrops. The big comeuppance -- as Napoleon tries, for a minute, to insist he is who he really is -- takes place in an asylum, where he’s suddenly surrounded by delusional crazies who think they’re him as well. It’s a great concept, but the film lets the real delusional and murderous crazy off the hook, so long as he opts for being a good husband and father in the end. For a romantic comedy, it’s a little bit creepy.C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
ENIGMA
The story of the British cryptologists who cracked the Nazi code and helped win WWII is no doubt a fascinating one -- too bad it’s only nominally the subject of Michael Apted’s preposterous thriller. Set at Bletchley Park, the home of Allied codebreaking, the story, adapted by Tom Stoppard from the novel by Richard Harris, has more than its share of similarities to A Beautiful Mind, among them a mathematical genius (Dougray Scott) who suffered a nervous breakdown and has only reluctantly returned to work. Kate Winslet, apparently under a dictum to appear as mousy as actorly possible, wears ludicrous Granny glasses and pinches her nose to play the “glorified file clerk” who helps Scott in his search to unravel a mystery involving the woman whose departure sent him into a tailspin. Reeking of an attempt to sex up the unglamorous subject matter, Enigma starts with historical fact and then runs from it doublequick. Only Jeremy Northam, as a slimy intelligence agent assigned to keep tabs on Scott, has any fun at all. . --S.A. (Bala
)
HEY ARNOLD! THE MOVIE
You must save our town
from mean industrialists,
football-headed freak!
(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
Oliver Parker (An Ideal Husband) hasn’t aimed for anything like a definitive version of Oscar Wilde’s best-known comedy. He and his prodigiously talented cast treat the playscript like sheet music, which is not to say that they feel free to muck up the proceedings with improv-y business, but that they’re happy to take the opportunity to have as much fun as humanly possible. The result is pleasantly jazzy, as refreshing as a brisk walk and as sharp as a ruby-handled dagger. Rupert Everett (Algy), Colin Firth (Jack), Frances O’Connor (Gwendolen), Judi Dench (Lady Bracknell), Tom Wilkinson (Dr. Chasuble) and Anna Massey (Miss Prism) polish Wilde’s hard little gems with evident glee, and even if Reese Witherspoon’s English accent only barely passes muster (and you have no idea how it pains me to admit that), her comic timing is at least the equal of her limey peers (that’s better). If it doesn’t strive for posterity, this Earnest achieves the height of momentary delights, and that’s probably quite as Oscar would’ve had it. --S.A. (Ritz East)
INSOMNIA
The inability to get any sleep is, for Al Pacino’s significantly named Dormer, thematic, much as Leonard Shelby’s lack of short-term memory was in Christopher Nolan’s previous effort Memento. Detective Dormer’s called in to solve a horrific murder, the brutal beating death of a high school girl, at the hands of someone who then washed her hair and clipped her nails before he left her body at the local garbage dump. But Dormer, too, knows something about stepping over lines. He comes equipped with a complicated, evidently shady history, and there’s tension between him and his partner Hap (Martin Donovan). This argument leads eventually to what appears to be a terrible accident, Dormer’s fatal shooting of his partner while they’re chasing the shadowy suspect, Finch (Robin Williams), across a foggy terrain. Will says the now-disappeared suspect shot Hap, and since no one saw anything, it looks like he’ll get away with it. Finch, a cheesy crime novelist who professes “admiration” for Dormer’s profession, then names himself Dormer’s new “partner,” since he knows what happened with Hap. Their relationship evolves speedily, all about looking and being afraid to look, bobbing and weaving. Into the midst of this boy-boy action steps Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), the eager young detective assigned to help get Dormer around town. Even when she suspects something’s not quite right, she hopes her idol will pull it out and not be the fallible, if well-intentioned vigilante he seems to be.--C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
Juwanna Mann
Where Tony Curtis, Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams and Martin Lawrence have gone before, so now goes Miguel A. Núñez Jr. That is, into the frightening world of makeup, high heels, curlers, bras and self-loving suitors. In first-time director Jesse Vaughan's comedy, Nuñez is a star basketballer kicked out of the league for his stubbornly egocentric behavior (namely, stripping at a game and tossing his jock on a fan's hotdog). Abandoned by his fans, friends, no-longer-patient agent (Kevin Pollak) and expensively dressed wife (Lil’ Kim), he decides to do better, that is, join the women's league. Hired by the Charlotte Banshees (whose screaming girl logo is not a little obnoxious), he falls for their star player, Vivica A. Fox (who plainly can do anything, as she makes even this sorry role look good). Playing good-sorta-lesbian girlfriend to Fox, resisting oh-no-is-he-gay-ish advances by Tommy Davidson (as a gold-toothed rapper named Puff Smokey Smoke), impressing his sensible aunt (Jenifer Lewis) with his newfound sincerity and learning to be a dependable and generous teammate, Nuñez becomes a better man. Next.--C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
LATE MARRIAGE
So realistic you half-expect a second camera crew to accidentally walk into frame at any moment, Dover Kosashvili’s feature debut is a clear-eyed look at the high cost of arranged marriages. Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi) dresses like the Israeli equivalent of a 31-year-old indie rocker; a philosophy doctoral student who still buys groceries with his parents’ credit card, he’s only unhappy when his parents, or anyone else, is pushing him. Unfortunately, that’s most of the time. Playing out with elegant thoroughness, near-real-time scenes followed by sudden jumps in the action, Late Marriage is pitched at the crisis point, where Zaza can no longer continue the life he’s been leading -- gamely going on marriage interviews with his parents, while carrying on a lengthy affair with a divorced single mother (Ronit Elkabetz). Based on the fact that there’s not a happy couple in the movie, the results don’t seem promising, but Kosashvili so respects the moment that nothing ever seems like a foregone conclusion. Late Marriage doesn’t have the self-importance to be called a tragedy -- it’s more like watching a prized heirloom fall off the shelf. Time slows down, and if everything doesn’t make sense, you’ve at least got time to ponder your own powerlessness. --S.A.(Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
Lilo & Stitch
The latest Disney animated offering puts the fun back in dysfunctional. First there is Stitch, who looks like a shorter, four-armed version of Gizmo from Gremlins and has a temperament that makes a rabid pitbull seem cute. Stitch was created by an evil scientist with four eyes who for some reason has a Russian accent (voiced by David Ogden Stiers). Then there is Lilo, a 5-year-old rugrat who packs a mean Hawaiian punch. In one of her first scenes, Lilo is straddled atop a dance school classmate, pummeling her with her right fist. Lilo -- whose parents died in a car crash -- lives with her 19-year-old sister Nani in a filth-strewn oceanside villa and is visited by a gargantuan social worker named Cobra Bubbles. Bubbles threatens to take custody of Lilo yet incomprehensibly a) gives the kids three days in which to get their house in order before removing said brat and b) is decked out in a black suit even though he is in Hawaii. Eventually Lilo meets Stitch, intergalactic hijinx ensue and everyone lives happily ever after. --Howard Altman (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Baederwood; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
Minority Report
Adapted from Philip K. Dick’s short story by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, the story proceeds linearly from a devilishly simple premise: What if the government had the ability to stop crimes before they happened? In 2054, the world has been transformed by the introduction of the Department of Pre-Crime, whose officers use data obtained from a triune oracle to pinpoint the date and time of murders before they happen, and then intervene to prevent them from occurring. At times, the film plays like what, by the numbers, it is: the product of a handful of intensely commercial personalities doing their best to make an uncommercial movie. As a pre-crime officer, has never been more somber, less raffishly charismatic. Minority Report is short on whimsy and long on ambience, which misfires almost as often as it succeeds. --S.A. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
MR. DEEDS
Even on paper, Mr. Deeds must have looked like a bad idea. Its makers have updated Frank Capra’s classic Mr. Deeds Goes to Town into an Adam Sandler vehicle. Once again, Sandler plays a backwoods, illegitimate dimwit whose purity of heart triumphs over the smart-alecky hijinks of various antagonists. Here, he’s pizza-parlor owner Longfellow Deeds, also the unknowing heir to a $40 billion fortune. When his will-less uncle dies suddenly, conniving exec Chuck Cedar (Peter Gallagher) hauls Deeds down to NYC to sign over his shares in his dead uncle’s humongous corporation. A secondary antagonist, tabloid TV news host (Jared Harris), puts his most vivacious reporter on Deeds’ story -- Babe Bennett (Winona Ryder). She pretends to be a damsel in distress: Deeds saves her by beating the bejeezus out of her pretend-mugger. (Someone on the set thought Deeds’ repeated recourse to pummeling and body slamming was a terrific idea.) Deeds falls hard for the pretend-virginal Babe, romancing her on a series of dull “dates.” The single sliver of sly humor comes from John Turturro. As loyal valet Emilio, he plays a foot fetishist who prides himself on being “sneaky, sneaky.” When he espies Deeds’ black foot (supposedly deadened by frostbite), Emilio’s eyes roll back: “De hideousness of dat foot will haunt my dreams!” he shudders. Much like dis movie.--C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING
Toula (Nia Vardalos) is Greek, 30 and unmarried. It’s the last part that is killing her hyper-Hellenic family, who thinks she should quit dabbling at college courses (“She’s got enough education for a woman” says her father) and just settle down and start a family. So when Toula falls in love with Ian, the man of her dreams (Sex in the City’s John Corbett), everything’s just wonderful -- except he isn’t Greek. What follows is essentially Meet the Greek Parents: The large, gregarious family is suspicious of Ian the Protestant and -- gasp -- vegetarian, who tries his best but obviously doesn’t fit in, and Toula becomes increasingly embarrassed by her ethnicity’s eccentricities. Will the couple gain the family’s approval and end up having the wedding? If so, will it be big, fat and Greek? Well, I don’t want to give anything away. Second City alum Vardalos wrote the screenplay, based on her semi-autobiographical one-woman show, so her knowing, frazzled performance and many of the details of her character’s over-attentive family life ring true. Michael Constantine and Lainie Kazan shine as Nia’s restaurant-owning parents; Dad Gus’s fixation on Windex as a panacea is particularly amusing. If director Joel Zwick’s staging is a smidge too hammy and sitcommy to work completely, keep in mind that this 25-year TV vet learned ethnic comedy working with the likes of Chachi, Balki and Mork.--R.G. (Ritz Five;
Ritz 16)
THE PIANO TEACHER
Where Michael Haneke’s multifaceted Code Unknown flung its tendrils in numerous directions, his The Piano Teacher is an almost monolithically focused character study. Erika (Isabelle Huppert) is a piano teacher whose method of instruction is equal parts musical exaction and psychological intimidation. Students whose resolve weakens aren’t punished so much as destroyed. Erika lives at home with her mother and seems to have little time or patience for men, until the wealthy, fair-haired Walter (Beno#206t Magimel) comes into her life. The Piano Teacher feels too narrowly focused, as oppressively narrowed as the characters it depicts. There’s a certain integrity in that approach, but a certain narcissism as well, as if turning the audience’s stomach were an end in its own right. The Piano Teacher’s remove is what gives it strength, but it’s also what makes it uncomfortable to watch. We never get close enough to the characters to do more than stare. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)
SCOOBY-DOO
The first single off the Scooby-Doo soundtrack is OutKast’s “Land of a Million Drums,” a brilliant, sinuous, fast-beat delight. The video for the song includes a few scenes from Raja Gosnell’s movie, mostly having to do with the (implicit) stoner identities of Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and digital Scooby (voiced by Neil Fanning). The movie doesn’t spend much time on this beloved in-joke, left over from the TV series, instead offering a blander Scooby gang, constituted by Scooby-snack-munching Shaggy, perpetual damsel Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), self-loving Ken doll Fred (Freddie Prinze, Jr.), and smarty-pants Velma (Linda Cardellini), who remains un-outed, despite pre-release rumors that she and Daphne would be kissing in the film. Badly plotted (something to do with teens being turned into zombie-ish “human-suits” for monsters who need cover during the daylight) and badly digitized (Scooby never quite looks like he’s in the same realm as the “live” actors), the film drags. Called to solve the zombie mystery by island theme park owner Rowan Atkinson, the gang encounters a series of disjointed, frightening specters, including the aforementioned monsters, plus a few humans -- a tribal priest, a voodoo man, and worst of all, Sugar Ray and Mark McGrath, who play themselves as zombies.--C.F. ( AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Narberth; UA Grant; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
SPIDER-MAN
Think of Spider-Man as Batman in reverse. Tobey Maguire makes a perfect Peter Parker, the rare actor who looks more at home playing the alter ego than he does the super-hero. But once billionaire military contractor Willem Dafoe samples his own strength-enhancing drugs, is driven mad, and becomes the scowling, villanous Green Goblin, it’s all over but the spidey-sobbing. Director Sam Raimi, who’s floundered film by film ever since leaving the world of low-budget genre satire behind, finds the perfect mix for the movie’s first half, an aw-shucks populism that’s both tongue-in-cheek and utterly affecting. David Koepp’s script spoons on the schmaltz, but coming out of Tobey Maguire’s wide-eyed visage, you almost believe it. (Love interest Kirsten Dunst fares less well, looking more vapid than vampy.) Unfortunately, and bewilderingly, Dafoe is allowed no room for camp, which means his Goblin is all scowl -- at least, what you can see of it behind his cool-looking but ultimately self-defeating helmet. (At times, his dialogue might as well be dubbed in Japanese.) Raimi’s self-deprecating touch works wonders without being disingenuous, but eventually, genre requirements win out, as they always do. --S.A. (Cinemagic; UA Grant; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
THE SUM OF ALL FEARS
Action-packed, full of elaborate plots, exotic locations and itself, the fourth Jack Ryan movie is, more than anything else, alarmingly out of date. While it may be pretty to imagine that the CIA does a bang-up job of monitoring terrorists, plots and wayward nuclear devices, the truth is that faith in the Agency was waning long before Sept. 11. Directed by Phil Alden Robinson, The Sum of All Fears sees super-analyst Ryan (this time played by Ben Affleck, following Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford) outsmarting his Cold War-fixated superiors. Since you know he’s going to live for at least two more movies, it’s hard to be too worried by the many clear and present dangers that pop up -- say, a nuclear warhead that’s been missing since the Israelis lost it in the desert in 1973. He can’t die. Shoot, he can’t even be seriously maimed. And so, Jack Ryan persists -- even, preposterously, in the face of nuclear holocaust. Stretching possibilities this time out, Alan Bates plays Dressler, an Austrian neo-Nazi with a ferocious grudge against the axis that beat down Hitler and lots of cash to spend. He hunts down the missing nuke, steals some Russian scientists, and smuggles the bomb in to the Super Bowl in Baltimore, which U.S. President Fowler (James Cromwell) happens to be attending, as a display of national “unity” and confidence. Such a tactic now hardly looks as farfetched as it might have when the film was made. But predictably, Jack’s day-saving looks fairly anti-climactic after this special-effects jamboree.--C.F (AMC Andorra;
AMC Orleans
; Ritz 16; UA Riverview; UA Cheltenham)
THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING
Jill Sprecher’s low-budget, closely plotted, philosophically bent film is a function of fate. Not only is it inspired by the director/co-writer’s (with her sister Karen) own NYC experience of being mugged and hit in the head (twice), it also considers the ways that chance, as much as ambition or desire, shapes the experiences of various characters’ intersecting experiences (organized into four general stories). Physics professor John Turturro leaves his wife (Amy Irving), to escape what he sees as “entropy” (the subject of a class lecture), pursuing an affair with colleague Barbara Sukowa; Clea DuVall and Tia Texada are maids with conveniently opposite outlooks (optimistic and pessimistic), until Duvall is hit by a car (suffering head damage), driven by attorney Matthew McConaughey, who in turn feels debilitating guilt about leaving the scene; this accident happens just after McConaughey, excited because he’s just won a case, meets gloomy insurance company claims examiner Alan Arkin at a bar. Arkin, in his own turn, painfully compares himself to his ever blissful employees (William Wise), and eventually plots his downfall, which doesn’t quite work out the way he expects, because, well, fate and desire interfere. At times, the pieces fit too neatly, but the actors’ precision, in their fragmented, tightly configured roles, within stylized, compressed sets, is often breathtaking --C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
UNDERCOVER BROTHER
Keep that funk alive. Between NBA commercials, Snoop videos, and the recently increased visibility of Bootsy Collins and George Clinton, the funk seems to be everywhere, including the Net, where Undercover Brother, the animated series, has been holding it down at urbanentertainment.com. The titular hero spends his time kung-fu fighting, afro-picking and generally delighting the ladies; recently he kicked Eminem’s ass. Now comes the big screen version, written by the series creator and novelist John Ridley and Michael McCullers, directed by Malcolm D. Lee and starring Eddie Griffin in a wide wig, porkchop sideburns and skinny leather pants. The plot operates on the Austin Powers/Charlie’s Angels level of satire, but brings a welcome socio-political edge that fart and t&a jokes tend to squash. Even better, it’s funny. UB joins the underground B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D. -- including Aunjanue Ellis as Sistah Girl, hilarious Dave Chappelle as Conspiracy Brother, Chi McBride as the Chief, and Doogie Howser as their eager intern -- in order to fight The Man, by way of The Man’s minion (Chris Kattan), who just can’t help but dance when he hears Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair.” UB “passes” in the white world by learning details of past Friends episodes, tangles with she-devil Denise Richards (they rightfully butcher “Ebony & Ivory” at a karaoke bar), gets on the Love Train and, above all else, protects his funky ’fro. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
WINDTALKERS
The movie is essentially about two couples, each composed of a Navajo “code talker” and the soldier assigned to protect him -- or rather, to protect the code. Beginning in 1942, several hundred Navajo Americans were recruited as Marines and trained to use their native tongue as a kind of indecipherable code-speak. Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage) already has a host of problems, when he’s assigned to “baby-sit” Private Ben Yahzee (Smoke Signals’ Adam Beach), who’s just arrived from his reservation. Enders’ duty might extend to killing his fresh-faced charge rather than let the code fall into enemy hands. The same dilemma plagues the whey-faced Ox Henderson (Christian Slater) and Charlie Whitehorse (Roger Willie). Windtalkers is self-consciously Important at every turn, from James Horner’s plodding, clumsily martial score to John Woo’s sudden leap into “documentary-style” filmmaking.. --S.A. (Ritz 16)
Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIéN
High schoolers Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) are looking forward to what appears an uneventful summer. Shortly after saying goodbye to their girlfriends at the airport, they meet beautiful, Spanish-born Luisa (Maribel Verdú), married to Tenoch’s pretentious novelist cousin, Jano, and they invite her to drive with them a made-up beach they call “Heaven’s Mouth.” Though Luisa’s plainly 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 that challenge assumptions you may have about the characters’ desires and backgrounds. The journey is punctuated by images of what goes on in Mexico: police checks along their route to the sea, poverty-stricken neighborhoods, and community activities. For another, a voice-over cuts in frequently, narrating not so much what’s happening on screen, but what you don’t see and can’t know. These audio flashes forward and back have very little to do with Julio and Tenoch’s present “action,” that is, their evolving friendship (complicated by their classed differences), their sexual liaisons with Luisa, their expected “coming of age” stories. But, taken as interventions into the usual linearity of a road-trip movie, these stories become profoundly relevant, some glimpses of truth unavailable to the characters as yet, and showing how the characters invent and perform themselves. 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 Five)
