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Also this issue: Killing Time Sayles Event Movies |
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July 12-18, 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 at the Bourse)
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. (Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
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
)
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; Roxy
)
HEY ARNOLD! THE MOVIE
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
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 Five)
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. (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)
LIKE MIKE
Think: Shirley Temple with a wicked jump shot. That’s not say that Jermaine Dupri protégé Bow Wow (in the process of dropping the Lil’ from his name, now that he’s 15) is at all into ringlets or animal crackers. It is to say that for his first starring role (having already made an impression in Ice Cube’s All About the Benjamins), the kid plays Calvin, an orphan living in a rickety inner-city Group Home (run by Crispin Glover -- very scary). There he shoots hoops with fellow waifs Brenda Song and Jonathan Lipnicki (who seems not to have grown an inch since Jerry Maguire -- slightly less scary), and hopes to be adopted by the perfect family. When he finds a pair of old kicks with the initials “MJ,” Calvin can fly beyond his wildest dreams. He earns a spot on the L.A. Knights, where he’s coached by infinitely patient Robert Forster and hounded by fans, you know, like a rap star. Conveniently, the franchise player (Morris Chestnut) is in need of focus, which he finds in his new buddy-roommate-son-figure Calvin. Co-produced by the NBA and conceived by Philadelphia’s own Michael Elliot (once a rapper himself, as well as Krush magazine publisher and radio host), Like Mike is more like a lengthy commercial than a movie, but the kid’s appeal is worth contemplating, and you see some of how it works, here, for girls, boys and young women. Sexy, innocent, cute, tough, authentic, pop-fake, self-conscious, delirious -- he can do it all. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA 69th St.; UA Riverview)
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)
MEN IN BLACK II
Like the first Men in Black, II is a blessedly terse affair -- if nothing else, director Barry Sonnenfeld makes no bones about the business of a summer entertainment: get in, distract ’em, and get out before they notice their wallet’s missing. Sonnenfeld fills out his cast with ace comedians like returning veterans Rip Torn and Tony Shalhoub, and new recruits Patrick Warburton (Will Smith’s hapless new partner), Jack Kehler and Mr. Show’s Jay Johnston -- not to mention David Cross, who re-ups despite have been devoured in the first installment. (And that’s without mentioning the ace comic timing of Tommy Lee Jones.) Turns out, though, that it’s so easy for Sonnenfeld to pare down his material -- MiBII clocks in somewhere under the 80-minute mark -- because when you strip away the nods and the winks, there’s precious little left. For every moment when the comedy hits every mark, there’s one where the bottom drops out, and considering what dead spots do to a nightclub act, it’s not a pretty end result. The biggest hole in the picture is roughly the shape of Lara Flynn Boyle: As the malevolent alien villainess (or rather, the current form of a shape-shifter inspired by a Victoria’s Secret ad), Boyle emits malice but no glee, which is to say you hate her, but you don’t love it. And pity poor Rosario Dawson (you know, the busty Pussycat), who as Smith’s love interest is stuck mugging into the camera of a director who’s more energized by Rube Goldberg gags than the simplicities of the heart. As in the original, an awareness of race surrounds Smith but rarely touches him -- the talking pug makes more jokes on the subject -- although it’s worth noting that his character’s dialogue has been significantly streeted up. (He actually uses the word “jawn.”) Who knows what corners of the universe he’s been visiting. -- S.A.(AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA 69th St.; 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 POWERPUFF GIRLS
Apart from the joys of watching three animated preschool girls kick large amounts of ass -- which are, it should be noted, not to be underestimated in the slightest -- the anarchic pace of The Powerpuff Girls TV show is necessarily toned down for this feature-length outing, although doing so lets out a lot of steam. The filmmakers wring laughs (and not a few sniffles) out of the girls’ uneasy adjustment to “normal” life. Everything goes fine on their first day of kindergarten, until they’re introduced to the game of tag, which they play so energetically that they end up laying waste to a good chunk of the city. But the mixture of self-referential fun and all-out corn is a delicate one, and The Powerpuff Girls too often gets the sap without the spunk. Even the show’s perennial supervillan, megalomaniacal monkey mastermind Mojo Jojo (Roger L. Jackson) is a few bananas short of a bunch. Apparently McCracken and co. have started to take the Girls’ status as preteen role models seriously, which means a lot of homey talks from their father/creator Professor Utonium (Tom Kane) about their “unique specialness” and how not everyone will understand it. That kind of stuff works fine in small doses, but here it’s a little bit deadly, and more dangerous than a gaggle of rampaging chimps. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bryn Mawr; Roxy; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
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; UA Grant; 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. (UA Grant)
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 (Ritz 16)
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)
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)
