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Also this issue: Punch Drunk The Langue Goodbye De-mock-cracy |
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August 22-28, 2002
movie shorts
LITTLE SECRETS
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
Young violinist,
You must keep the town’s secrets.
And bore us to tears.
(UA Riverview)
SERVING SARA
“My job sucks,” says Matthew Perry at the beginning of Reginald Hudlin’s peculiar romantic comedy. He plays Joe the process server, sent to serve Elizabeth Hurley divorce papers, thus ending her status as “trophy wife” to insufferable Texas millionaire Bruce Campbell. As Perry tells it, his life sucked at the time he was making the film, bouncing between the Friends set, rehab and movie locations in New York and on Ross Perot’s ranch in Dallas. (Since the film was shot when the industry was panicked about an actors’ strike, he had to show up, period.) Perry describes Joe as “dark,” but mostly, he looks anxious. Then again, this film might make anyone nervous: Joe has to fall for egocentric Hurley, avoid Campbell’s snakeskin-boot-wearing thug (Terry Crews, whose mere appearance makes an elevator-full of white people scatter), beat out rival server Vincent Pastore and outsmart his own boss (Cedric the Entertainer, who spends most of the film alone in an office, literally phoning in his performance). Perry also has to be smacked down by a pair of gangsters, ride an airport baggage belt, outrun a monster truck, and out-Tom Green Tom Green when he sticks his arm inside a temporarily impotent bull. Nasty. Jazz bassist Marcus Miller composed the score, which, aside from the requisite guitar plunking theme to indicate so-called serious moments, is sharper than anything in the film. --Cindy Fuchs (UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
SIMONE
Or, My Computer Program Is an Actress. The most infuriating media satire since Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing -- whose distributor at least had the good graces to cancel its release after screening it for press -- Andrew Niccol’s flaccid, toothless tale lays bare what was already evident in Gattaca (which he also wrote and directed) and The Truman Show (which he just wrote): Niccol’s grasp of the complexity of modern media is dwarfed by the average PlayStation-literate eight-year-old. Presumably inspired by the digital performance-tweaking George Lucas used for The Phantom Menace -- using different parts of an actor’s face from different takes, and so on -- Simone stars a lost-looking Al Pacino as a studio-sponsored art-film auteur (as if such creatures existed) whose latest pic is in danger of being shelved after his temperamental lead actress (Winona Ryder) walks off the set and threatens to sue if they use any of her footage. Enter Elias Koteas as an eyepatched inventor who drops off a computer program capable of creating a virtual actor -- or, how catchy, “vactor” -- before conveniently dropping dead. Pacino hesitates, but eventually grasps the potential to be the world’s ultimate control freak, replacing human vicissitude with computerized certainties. That the resulting films look like snatches of beer-commercial Fellini doesn’t stop them from being hugely successful, or creating a media frenzy surrounding the identity of their “reclusive” starlet. Like Hartley, Niccol frames his story as a fable, mainly so he doesn’t have to do his research, but his generalities are preposterously off-target, his contemptuous misreading of pop culture so overwhelming, that the result is about as meaningless as it’s possible for a movie to be. Niccol’s lame attempts to ape Sullivan’s Travels only add insult to idiocy. --Sam Adams (AMC Andorra; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
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SPIKE AND MIKE’S FESTIVAL OF ANIMATION
The latest installment in this brushed-up version of S&M’s traditionally gross-out showcase includes some humdingers. Aussie Adam Elliot’s Brother is a bittersweet but bawdy childhood reminiscence, Jonathan Hodgson’s The Man With the Beautiful Eyes a haunting, scratchy adaptation of a Bukowski poem, Pixar’s For the Birds (seen before screenings of Toy Story II) a whimsical take on bird-eat-bird politics. There are some stinkers, too, like Cameron McNall’s dull The Last Drawing of Canaletto -- a test study of moving light that goes nowhere, but not fast -- and Jonah Hall’s Metropopular, in which cities, animated and personified, compete for the country’s affection. (And, dude, New Haven makes the cut but we don’t? See me after class.) But it’s all worth it for Don Hertzfeldt’s manic Rejected, which ostensibly begins as a collection of rejected TV idents and quickly spirals into hilarious, rapid-fire madness. Hertzfeldt, known for his shaky-pencil animation and dark humor, makes a quantum leap from such shorts as Billy’s Balloon and Lily and Jim, shifting gears with abandon and deepening the grossout into the genuinely disturbing. --S.A. (Roxy)
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