Movie Shorts

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 Orleans; UA Grant; 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)

NEVER AGAIN

The frustrations inspired by Eric Schaeffer’s new film are many, not least being that it leaves Jill Clayburgh pledging her troth to exterminator Jeffrey Tambor while wearing a knight’s costume she bought at the local dildo shop. A dreary teen sex farce with middle-aged characters, Never Again gives its protagonists gender-specific “issues” -- hers: daughter leaves for college and mom meets an Internet date who turns out to be a dwarf; his: can’t get it up and tries meeting a transvestite (Michael McKean) -- and sympathetic best friends -- hers: Sandy Duncan and Caroline Aaron; his: Bill Duke, looking even more put upon than he did in Predator. Oh yes, he also has a monster-mom (Dolores McDougal). They meet uncute at a gay bar, where he mistakes her for an M2F with an excellent boob job. They fall madly in love, find they share sexual fantasies (asphyxiation, strap-ons) and fears of commitment (hence: “never again”), and then run into preposterous troubles. He breaks it off, she cries, he gets knocked down by a horse in Central Park. --C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

REIGN OF FIRE

“Envy the country that has heroes? I say, pity the country that needs ‘em.” So roars Matthew McConaughey, the earnestly angry, elaborately tattooed, bald-headed, cigar-chomping American (of the “Kentucky irregulars”), trying to chastise a band of raggedy Brits who are, as it happens, celebrating McConaughey’s own heroic act, namely, his slaying of a fire-breathing dragon. It’s only one of the many incoherencies in Rob Bowman’s movie that this holdover notion of “countries” still exists in 2020, when most all of the planet has been burned up by the aforementioned dragons. (They eat ash, “live on death,” as McConaughey poeticizes it, at least until it’s more convenient for them to eat people, or each other.) McConaughey disrupts the isolationist life of Christian Bale and crew, who are hiding from dragons rather than fighting them, until the Yanks storm through with big guns, a tank and a chopper, piloted by Izabella Scorupco and equipped with daredevil parachutists called “archangels.” Efforts to slay the swooping dragons appear to be extremely ill-conceived, and in between, Bale (who has a dragon-slain mom in his past; i.e. “personal demons”) and McConaughey (who seems to have no past at all) argue repeatedly over fighting vs. hiding. The film pays homage to Star Wars and rips off The Road Warrior and Godzilla movies, but the pieces never come together. – C.F. (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

READ MY LIPS

Neither hearing-impaired Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) nor Paul (Vincent Cassel), a hearing man, is a particularly admirable type -- both are sullen and manipulative. But if Jacques Audiard doesn’t love them, exactly, he pays them the greater tribute of depicting them with even-handed reserve in Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lèvres. Carla is a put-upon corporate secretary whose hopes of moving up are constantly frustrated; in the cafeteria, she can lip-read the derisive comments of her co-workers. Paul is an ex-convict without much desire to reform. When he shows up at Carla’s office looking for a straight job, she has no reason to believe him when he says he’s computer literate, but she takes him on anyway. It’s hardly that simple, though. She blackmails Paul into stealing critical files from a co-worker who’s stolen her place in the queue, but in return, he muscles her into helping him get back at a loan shark who’s out to collect some pre-penal obligations. It’s at this point that Read My Lips starts to morph into a semi-conventional thriller, but you can’t root for the characters the way you normally would.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

ROAD TO PERDITION

Maguire (Jude Law), a freelance photographer, specializes in images of corpses, and, rather ingeniously, secures his employment by murdering his own subjects. His latest assignment is Irish mob hit man Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks), anti-heroic protagonist of Sam Mendes’ latest dysfunctional family saga, Road to Perdition. Sullivan initially appears possessed of a pleasantly upper-middle-class existence, ensconced with his quietly supportive wife, Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and two young sons. Sullivan is introduced from the perspective of Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin); sent to fetch dad for dinner, he pauses in the hallway outside his parents’ bedroom, watching his father carefully remove his jacket and gun. The shot through the narrow doorway, inspired by the film’s source, Max Allan Collins’ 1998 graphic novel, exposes Michael’s complex mix of fear and love for his father. Though Michael knows enough not to ask about his father’s occupation-- namely, killing people for Chicago boss John Rooney (Paul Newman) -- he’s also curious enough to check it out for himself. The trauma begins one stormy night, when he stows away in the back of the car and inadvertently sees his dad shoot several men with his Tommy gun. Though Sullivan assures his employers that Michael “understands” and business can continue as usual, it’s immediately clear that whatever familial equilibrium they all pretend to share is destroyed. Sullivan and Michael go on the run, and the film’s father-son romance begins in earnest. They embark on a six-week series of Midwestern bank robberies, conveyed in a montage that looks like a graphic novel in motion. The film’s manifest reverence for its source, its artful darkness and precise composition are stunning, and almost make up for the tired plot (Eastwood and Costner’s A Perfect World comes to mind), in which a boy sees his father (figure) redeemed by good intentions, if not acts.--C.F. (Baederwood; Narberth; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

STUART LITTLE 2

It’s good to know that even mice can fall for the wrong chick. But if Stuart Little knew anything about Melanie Griffith, the voice of his pseudo-love interest -- a bird named Margalo -- he would have driven away, very fast, instead of taking her home to the swank little Victorian the Little family calls home, across the street from Central Park. It’s hard not to like this follow-up to the original Stuart Little movie, about a family that adopts a talking mouse. Michael J. Fox, the voice of said rodent, is an animator’s dream, bringing life and emotion to the title role. The always-kooky, always-sexy Griffith also gives great voice and Nathan Lane as the woeful, puffy old queen of a cat is a scream. Geena Davis is always nice to look at even if her mother-smothering character rightfully makes one squirm. With just enough action to keep things moving and enough simulated mayhem to get a PG rating, SL2 entertains children and adults alike without wallowing in schmaltz. Well, not too much schmaltz. Well, not so much schmaltz that it still isn’t a pleasure to watch a screen mouse not named Mickey. --H.A. (AMC Andorra; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

SUNSHINE STATE

It’s hard to believe there are any John Sayles fans who don’t agree with his politics. A devoted social chronicler and champion of so-called ordinary people, Sayles is more artisan than artist, which is to say his movies tend to be about their subjects rather than inside them. Still, it’s hard to miss the point that Sunshine State, like the more polished Lone Star, is about history, since characters keep referring to it, such as when one dressed in historical-reenacter’s garb tells another, “You can’t live in the past.” (Get it?) Covering the same ground as Lone Star but without a genre to bounce off, Sunshine State is often shrill instead of clever. There’s no perspective-altering twist at the end, just a slice of poetic justice. Set on a small island off the Florida coast, Sunshine State takes a dim view of tourism and development, which isn’t particularly surprising, as positions go: Sayles caricatures the developers and chamber of commerce toadies without much mercy or interest. Mary Steenburgen’s desperate inventor of an ersatz holiday called “Buccaneer Days” exists mainly to have comic points scored off her, as does her bumbling husband (Gordon Clapp), a bank employee who’s embezzling to feed his gambling habit. Sayles excels at imagining the interrelations between and within communities, but apparently some people deserve more imagination than others. What Sunshine State does best is expand on the tension between the ugly reality of history and the myths we create to cover it up. Tom Wright’s college football sensation, once the pride of all-black Lincoln Beach, returns as a car salesman with a busted knee and a few dark secrets to hide. The town is practically void of spring breakers and retirees, but in a sense it seems everyone there is retired from their former glory, rarely chasing it, but just accepting that such things lie in the past.--S.A. (Bala; Ritz East)

SWIMMING

You could watch Lauren Ambrose all day and never catch her acting. That’s not to say the Six Feet Under star is unskilled, quite the contrary: She’s such a natural actor she doesn’t have to make a show of anything she does. Without Ambrose’s utter lack of (visible) calculation, Robert Siegel’s subdued coming-of-age tale would undoubtedly be much less than it is. Ambrose plays Frankie, a soft-spoken, pale-skinned tomboy who, with her bullying older brother, runs a restaurant on a South Carolina boardwalk, where her unwillingness to partake in beachfront bacchanalia separates her from the madding crowd. Per standard c-o-a format, Frankie’s life is shaken up by the arrival of the cartoonishly feminine Josee (Joelle Carter), who seems to bend men (including Frankie’s brother) to her will without effort, and whose power and self-possession mesmerizes the impressionable Frankie, endangering her lifelong friendship with the headstrong Nicola (Jennifer Dundas Lowe), who runs the tattoo shop next door. Lisa Bazadona’s script, based on her own experience working in a tattoo shop on Myrtle Beach (Siegel and Grace Woodard are credited writers as well), is laced with small details and unanswered questions, which gives the film a kind of open-ended pleasure. When Frankie says she doesn’t like to go swimming, you wince in anticipation of the moment she’ll stick her toe in the water, but thankfully, it never comes. You’re left to imagine it. --S.A. (Roxy)

TADPOLE

15-year-old Oscar Grubman’s (Aaron Stanford) crush on his dad’s wife Eve (Sigourney Weaver) is wholly understandable. Oscar is at first frustrated in his attempts to talk to her at a party she and his dad (John Ritter) are hosting; at evening’s end, he takes himself to a bar to drown his sorrow. On his way home from the bar, he runs into Diane, who takes him home to sober up, and before you know it, they’re in bed. Mortified in the morning, Oscar swears Diane to secrecy, believing news of the tryst will ruin his chances with Eve. In another movie, we’d probably be deep inside Oscar’s fantasy world here, but not in Tadpole. As written by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller and directed by Gary Winick, this look at one teen’s urgent desires takes a mostly blithe approach.--C.F. (Ritz Five; 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)