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September 12-18, 2002
movie shorts
AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER
After the third time in a row, it feels like Austin Powers could use a Viagra or two. Catapulted this time to 1975, Austin (Mike Myers, as snaggletoothed as ever) hooks up with the golden-’froed Foxy Cleopatra (Beyoncé Knowles) to fight Evil -- Dr. Evil, that is, along with new nemesis Goldmember, a lisping Dutchman with eczema and a 24-carat dingly-dangly (the original having been lost in an “unfortunate smelting accident,” a phrase that grows no funnier each of the many times it’s repeated). With each installment, the series has grown less focused, which means this time out Myers and director Jay Roach find themselves scraping the bottom of the pop-culture barrel, subsisting on lame Britney Spears jokes and references to movies that, while hardly old, are still past their referential prime (Mission: Impossible, Hannibal, The Matrix, possibly even a dash of Midnight Express). In particular, the movie founders on Knowles’ vacant performance. Though she’s named for blaxploitation heroes, she’s not fit to fill one of Pam Grier’s D-cups. --S.A.(Bryn Mawr; UA Riverview)
BLOOD WORK
Clint Eastwood has come to know himself. The Aging Clint knows his limits, his strengths, and his particular appeals as a movie star, actor and filmmaker. In Blood Work, he’s at it again. As Terry McCaleb, the hero of Michael Connelly’s L.A.-based detective novels, he’s an FBI profiler who, within five minutes, has a heart attack while chasing a particularly ornery serial killer. “Two years later,” he has a new heart, courtesy of surgeon Anjelica Huston, and a new case, courtesy of Wanda De Jesus, whose murdered sister provided him with that heart. He also has a friendly neighbor (Jeff Daniels), an enthusiastic supporter on the force (very sharp Tina Lifford), and a less happy cop (Paul Rodriguez) on his case. Though the plot is too neat and predictable (its structure is literary, with much play on the word and concept of “blood”), the look is shadowy-lush, the editing efficient and the Eastwood character at once grand and vulnerable. Okay, he feels most “alive” when he’s working (he calls it “connected”), he gets the beautiful girl (contrived), but when he takes off after a car with a shotgun, he’s Dirty Harry, old and still really mad (entertaining). The Aging Clint has also learned from his own past (say, True Crime), here using racial differences and identifications not only as “color,” but as complexities of plot and ideology. --Cindy Fuchs (Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
BLUE CRUSH
It’s hard to remember if surfing is the most visually beautiful of all sports, or if, after watching Blue Crush, it just feels like it. On one level, John Stockwell’s girls-on-boards yarn is standard-issue sports movie stuff, with its damaged central character building towards a chance at redemption which just happens to coincide with a major competition. But it reminds you what’s so potent about sports movies; they dramatize, perhaps better than any other genre, the idea that life comes down to moments, moments in which you either take your shot or wish you had. In the surfing scenes, David Hennings’ camera seems to be everywhere -- on the board, in the water, swooshing past the characters, diving beneath and rising up to meet them. It’s like what Raging Bull did for boxing. The feats performed are outlandish enough to prompt one couple leaving the theater to scoff “computer-generated,” but the press kit boasts not “a single blue screen or tank shot,” and the sheer rush of adrenaline makes you believe it. The film’s trio of surfer girls -- Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake -- are sure-footed on their boards, and though Bosworth is the nominal star, the movie doesn’t favor her unduly, and the offhand camaraderie among them feels as lived-in as their threadbare surroundings. Stockwell knows how to take the edge off his mandated plot points by throwing away on-the-nose lines (though the ending still crosses one too many Ts), and how to mix in non-professional actors (as he did in crazy/beautiful) without shattering the mood. Climaxing with a lengthy competition sequence which plunges you into the roaring waves again and again, Blue Crush sucks you in, and you emerge gasping for breath, but eager to head back out. --S.A.(AMC Orleans)
THE BOURNE IDENTITY
Based on Robert Ludlum’s popular novel, Doug Liman’s film stars Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, a CIA super-operative who’s preposterously 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, that, after a while, you just go with it. --C.F. (UA Riverview)
CITY BY THE SEA
Michael Caton-Jones’ City By the Sea is full of riddles, made more conspicuous because the bulk of what happens on screen is weighted with significance. Not only does Joey Nova (James Franco) stab his drug dealer to death -- sort of by mistake, while in a movie-style junkie-fugue (so he might remain “sympathetic”) -- his own father, Manhattan detective Vincent LaMarca (Robert De Niro), just happens to catch the case (because the body, dumped into the river, washes up in his jurisdiction). And not only is Vincent divorced from Joey’s mother, Maggie (Patti LuPone), because he abused her in some dim and distant past, but his own father was executed for murder, many years ago. All these horrors in one family might lead to questions concerning genetics and proclivity, codes of masculinity and violence. Indeed, these are the questions raised by the film’s source, a riveting 1997 Esquire article by the late Mike McAlary, called “Mark of a Murderer.” It’s easy to see why the filmmakers considered this a worthy outline, but it’s entirely unclear why writer Ken Hixon revamps the details so the plot becomes increasingly contrived and sensational. All events are arranged to bring about Vincent and Joey’s reconciliation, and all characters fodder to achieve that end. As masculine melodrama, City By the Sea is standard and weak. Struggling to be stoic, potent and aggressive, Vincent and Joey only end up being selfish and violent, unable to see a way out. Though the film implies they both learn hard lessons about generosity and forgiveness, the final image -- a familial unit “at peace” but static, removed from community, and tellingly void of women -- suggests otherwise.--C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; Narberth; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
FEARDOTCOM
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
A killer website
uses Flash animation
to bore you to death.
(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
THE GOOD GIRL
Turning 30, Justine (Jennifer Aniston) stands daily at her register at the Retail Rodeo, and her life looks like a prison sentence. Into her black hole of a routine walks Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), glowering and self-consciously poetic. He and Justine are equally needy and inexperienced, in different ways. Much like Chuck & Buck, the previous collaboration between screenwriter Mike White and director Miguel Arteta, the film plumbs the depths of human longing and manipulation, with similar legerdemain. And it resists easy resolution.--C.F. (Bala; Ritz East; Ritz 16)
I’M GOING HOME
Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli) is a famous actor of stage and screen, and we first see him on stage, performing the closing minutes of Ionesco’s Exit the King -- director Manoel de Oliveira stages much of the scene with Piccoli’s back to the camera. As Gilbert plays out Ionesco’s burlesque of an old man grasping at power while his life slips away, we see two men slip into the theater mid-performance and make their way backstage. After the play, we find out what the interruption is all about. Without giving it away, it’s safe to say that Gilbert’s life has been reduced in an instant to zero. We rejoin the story “some time later,” and Gilbert has settled into a new routine: he still spends time on the stage, and sees his grandson occasionally. The 93-year-old de Oliveira advances the plot in brief bursts, as when Gilbert’s agent pitches him a violent TV drama, an offer he turns down in disgust, or he’s approached by a respected American director (John Malkovich) to fill a vacancy in his film version of Ulysses. But mostly, the film savors the taste of Gilbert’s long, empty days, where he sits sipping coffee in a local cafe, always at the same table. (Sharp-eyed viewers will note that Gilbert is reading the exact same newspaper in each iteration, a subtle sign that de Oliveira is more in fable than fact.) Piccoli’s performance is informed by a great, slow sadness, but also by the ability of the man whose pleasures are few to take solace from the smallest things. The film’s energy falters toward the end, largely because the on-set scenes from Ulysses make their point quickly but belabor it at length. (Once we see Gilbert in his goofy wig, we don’t need to be told he’s wrong for the part.) I’m Going Home’s ending is a grace note rather than a resolving chord, a semicolon instead of a period. But if it’s not clear what it’s meant to suggest, it does instill the desire to ponder that same question.--S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
THE LAST KISS
“Everybody I know is in a crisis!” exclaims a character in Gabriele Muccino’s The Last Kiss (L’Ultimo Bacio), and based on what we see of his friends and family, the statement seems to be a pretty safe bet. Carlo (Stefano Accorsi) is freaking out because he’s soon to turn 30, and his girlfriend is pregnant; Adriano (Giorgio Pasotti) has a toddler of his own, and is chafing at the yoke of responsibility; even Carlo’s mother (Stefania Sandrelli) is at the end of her rope, stuck in a marriage whose inattentiveness is tantamount to cruelty. The subject, of course, is hardly new to the screen, but then, it’s hardly new to life, either. Writer-director Gabriele Muccino interweaves their stories and more with high velocity, often using camera motion to connect the scenes, as if the camera were perpetually swooping around Rome, stopping in just long enough to observe each new development. He also lets his characters make all kinds of mistakes, most notably when Carlo runs out and cheats on his wife with 17-year-old Francesca (Martina Stella). Adriano, meanwhile, is stricken with wanderlust, and considers joining his friends on a trip to Africa -- or, really, anywhere. The Last Kiss empathizes with that desire to break free, even as it recognizes the many unwise ways in which it manifests itself.--S.A. (Ritz Bourse; Ritz 16)
MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
Martin's so crazy,
You better see his movie
Or he might hit you.
(UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
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Metropolis
Seventy-five years after its premiere, Metropolis has been given new life by a comprehensive restoration which brings the film startlingly into the present. Far from an exhumed artifact, this Metropolis feels like it was made yesterday. Though this version, combining all the existing elements and using text intertitles to represent missing sections, still represents just under 80 percent of the film’s original length, it is, barring a miracle, as close as we will ever get -- and, indeed, as close as anyone who didn’t see the film in those precious first few weeks has ever gotten. While sizeable sequences, including a lengthy visit to the pleasure palaces of Yoshiwara, remain lost, the film’s overreaching scope is clearer than ever -- more than a parable, it’s clear Lang had in mind an overarching social saga, a futurist recasting of Balzac. Rather than concentrating only on leaders -- the mega-industrialist Joh Fredersen, his sentimental populist son Freder, the mad scientist Rotwang, the rebel leader Maria -- this Metropolis has time for ordinary men as well: Joh Fredersen’s yes-man Josaphat, whose firing sends him plummeting “into the depths” of the workers’ society; the faceless Worker 11811, who abuses Freder’s generosity and goes on a libertine bender. Most importantly, while other versions have attempted to impose order on Lang’s clash of contradictory ideals, the restored Metropolis lays them out in all their Babelling confusion. Condemned and acclaimed from both ends of the political spectrum, Metropolis has been claimed over the years by socialists and Fascists alike, the former latching on to its depiction of workers revolting against an alienating capitalist autocracy, the latter focusing on its culmination in chaotic, self-destructive mob rule, and the eventual re-imposition of order through the tacit acceptance of charismatic leaders. But not for nothing does the movie’s epigram exalt sentiment over all other forces -- the film’s ideology is deliberately, even pointedly, incoherent, a reflection of the trouble head and hands get into when not guided by the heart. --S.A. (Ritz Five)
MOSTLY MARTHA
Martha (Martina Gedeck) lives a precise life. The much-acclaimed chef at a fine Hamburg restaurant, she makes perfect food, maintains a strict routine, and sees a shrink because her boss (Sibylle Canonica) thinks she’s neurotic. (True, she hides in the freezer at work for “time out,” but she is admirably efficient, proud of her control of all “logistics.”) All this changes when her niece Lina (Maxime Foerste) comes to live with her. Suddenly, Martha’s routine is undone: she’s sleeping on the couch (giving Lina her room), cooking an 8-year-old who refuses to eat, and repeatedly late getting her to school. Almost worse: there’s a new chef hired to helped out in her kitchen, an Italian (Sergio Castellitto) who plays “Volare” and dances while working. While the rest of the plot is wholly unsurprising, Gedeck’s convincingly taut performance (food is full of “issues” for her, not just a means to externalize her inner glow and nourish others) and director Sandra Nettelbeck’s preference for crisp, careful compositions help the film avoid both the mushiness of a “food” movie like Chocolat and the sensual-saturation of a Babette’s Feast. --C.F. (Bala; Baederwood; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
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. (UA 69th St. UA Grant; UA Main St.; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
ONE HOUR PHOTO
“These snapshots are their little stands against the flow of time.” For 20 years, Sy (Robin Williams) has been the “photo guy,” working the Phototek counter down at the SavMart, meticulously calibrating the processor so all the colors on all customers’ pictures turn out just right. Day after day, hour after hour, he turns bits of film into memories, to be gazed on, framed, kept. Sy himself lives a life devoid of hues: Timid and lonely, he obsesses over the photos he develops for one perfect-seeming family, the Yorkins (read “your kin”): Nina (Connie Nielsen) and Will (Michael Vartan), and their son Jake (Dylan Smith). Making extra prints of all their pictures, Sy covers his TV room wall with them -- and he imagines himself inside the scenes, posing all-smiles with Jake, mom, and dad. From the start, of Mark Romaneck’s One Hour Photo, you know he’s headed to a bad end, as he appears in a police interrogation room, questioned by the sober Detective Van Der Zee (Eriq La Salle, whose character is named for the Harlem Renaissance photographer). The film, however, complicates its mundane stalker plot by its own attention to composition, which mirrors but also refracts Sy’s. In its attention to both the artifice and meaning of images, One Hour Photo is deftly creepy. It takes you inside Sy’s desperation, modeled on photos and happy family images that photo counters use to promote their services, images that ask, “Don’t you want these memories to be yours?” And worse, “If they’re not yours, what’s wrong with you?” Neatly, ominously, the film composes a bleak vision of Sy’s consumption of and by his culture.--C.F. (Baederwood; Bala; UA Grant; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
POSSESSION
Based on A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel, Neil LaBute’s new film interlaces two romances, one more interesting than the other. A pair of literary scholars (Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Brit again) tracks the secret relationship of a pair of Victorian poets (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle, both playing 19th-century again). The trick is that the relationships run perversely parallel. The 19th century writers (both already attached, he to a chilly wife and she to a passionate artist girlfriend) resist their attraction until they can stand it no longer; as they conduct their research -- some library work, but mostly lovely journeys to rendezvous points they discover in love letters -- the scholars (she’s involved with a snotty fellow scholar, he’s devoted to being a misogynist bachelor) do the same. While the plot surely concerns desire and fervor, the tone remains detached; LaBute calls it “emotional archeology.” Being a LaBute film, its not-so-very subtext is less love than power. And here, the gender roles seem all too fated: men believe they wield it, and are mystified to learn that women do. --C.F.(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. (Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)
SEX & LUCIA
(No review.) A haiku:
Oh Spanish waitress,
Forget your damn dead boyfriend.
You must go have sex!
(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
SIGNS
Signs doesn’t look much like an alien invasion movie. Rather than presenting climactic battles or fearsome big-eyed creatures, it focuses instead on establishing moods. These include familiar responses within the genre (wonder, dread, anticipation -- experienced by ex-priest Mel Gibson, his two kids and brother Joaquin Phoenix), but they are also remarkable in that, at least initially, they are predicated on not knowing and not seeing exactly what’s going on. Indeed, for about 90 minutes, M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie resists showing much of anything, relying instead on not-so-informative TV news reports and reaction shots to convey the scary business. Sadly, the movie eventually abandons its delicate ambiguity, its attention to such everyday things, to deliver a resolution which can only look contrived and reductive. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Main St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview; Ritz 16)
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. --S.A.(Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)
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)
SPY KIDS 2: THE ISLAND OF LOST DREAMS
Juni (Daryl Sabara) and Carmen Cortez’s (Alexa Vega) adventures form the center of Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams; Their perspective, part convincingly ingenuous and part movie-kid wise, organizes the film’s general view of things: Adults tend to err and children tend to save the world. As in their first excursion, the pair stumble into a case, here involving a gizmo called a Transmooker that shuts down anything that works by electricity, which is to say, just about everything the spies like to use. At film’s start, the Cortez children find themselves bested by their nearest rivals, Gary and Gerti Giggles. Then all four are sent to rescue the U.S. president’s daughter Alexandra (Taylor Momsen), who’s stranded on a ride at an amusement park. Juni saves the girl, but Gary retrieves the Transmooker. When it is, inevitably, stolen by a crew of villainous magnet-heads, Juni is removed from service until his sister hacks into the computer system, reinstates him and gets them assigned to a secret island, where they befriend “mad” genetic scientist Romero (Steve Buscemi), who’s afraid of his own creations, now “run amok.” These are different animals spliced together, like a spider monkey, catfish and something called a slizzard (part lizard, part snake). Looking less like state-of-the-art digital effects than like they’ve descended from Ray Harryhausen heaven, the beasts are corny and fun, not very scary. More cute diversion than thrillsville outing, Spy Kids 2 shows Juni having more trouble dealing with Carmen’s crush on smarmy Gary than with any of the island’s ostensible “dangers.”--C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)SWIMFAN
In an age where all thrillers aim to incorporate the “shocking” plot twist, John Polson’s unimaginative, predictable Swimfan should be comforting with its obvious blend: Fatal Attraction-for-teens plotline, unbearable soundtrack, heavy-handed foreshadowing and actors who don’t need to do much more than look cute. Jesse Bradford is Ben Cronin, the swimmer with the sweet girlfriend and the slightly checkered past. He’s not very smart, but we’re supposed to feel sorry for him anyway when Madison Bell (Erika Christensen) begins making his life miserable after their one tryst. The sex scene occurs in the pool, and may as well be lifted from a Lifetime made-for-TV movie, right down to Madison’s pleas for Ben to tell her he loves her. Guess what? He does. Guess what else? He grows to regret it. Don’t feel sorry for Ben. Feel sorry for Amy (Shiri Appleby), his simple, clueless girlfriend who ends up in the hospital. Feel sorry for Dante (James DeBello), the “weirdo who saves the day,” who isn’t that weird, and doesn’t actually save anyone. Feel sorry for Dan Hedaya, who plays the swimming coach, for having no business being in this movie. Feel sorry for yourself, for expecting an over-the-top gem of a teen romp, and getting a by-the-book non-thriller that wasn’t even bad enough to be funny.--Nancy Armstrong (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Main St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
XXX
XXX reeks of a kind of desperate hipness, the overwhelming sense that the movie’s 35-year-old star (Vin Diesel) and 53-year-old director (Rob Cohen, of The Fast and the Furious) would like nothing more than to win the hearts and minds of 15-year-old boys everywhere. That, of course, is the action game, but it’s rarely been played as cravenly as it is here. XXX feels like it was written by a marketing survey; the plot contrives to have Diesel snowboard, motorbike, drive a couple of sports cars real fast (one off a bridge) and even pseudo-skateboard (with a serving tray). Xander Cage, Diesel’s alter ego, has a crochety boss (Samuel L. Jackson), a bumbling gadget supplier (Joe Bucaro III), a sultry, accented co-spy who rebuffs his advances (Asia Argento). And, of course, he’s got a nebulous foe with a ridiculous name hell-bent on world destruction for no particular reason, in this case, a group of ex-Russian soldiers calling themselves Anarchy 99, which in real life is probably the Hotmail address of an 11-year-old in Topeka. If it weren’t so pathetic, it might be kind of amusing. The script shoehorns in numerous references to PlayStation and “first-person shooter” games and displays the same infantile, almost pre-sexual misogyny that kept James Bond in pussy galore. And there’s the rub: For all Diesel’s desperate positioning, XXX is no more than Bond with a pierced septum.--S.A.(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
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