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Also this issue: Just Her Type Pleasure Principals 8 Women Screen Picks |
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September 26-October 2, 2002
movie shorts
Ballistic: ECKS VS. SEVER
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
"That guy’s in it, Dad!"
"Antonio? Yes, I know.
It’s still not Spy Kids."
(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Bryn Mawr; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
THE BANGER SISTERS
Goldie Hawn loses her job at the Whiskey a-Go-Go and, finding herself unable to work the street as she once did, decides to head to L.A. to ask one-time best friend and fellow groupie Susan Sarandon for a little stopgap cash. When her car breaks down, she hitches a ride with twitchy, neurotic writer Geoffrey Rush, whom she quickly beds in her expert manner, transforming him suddenly into a happy, generous soul. She has a similar experience with Sarandon, whose currently uptight beige family life (with stiff lawyer husband Robin Thomas and rebellious daughters Erika Christensen and Eva Amurri) needs serious retooling. How heartening to see that a haircut, followed by a night of drinking, dancing and perusing collected photos of rock-stars’ cocks, brings on such miraculous self-recovery! Put another way: as everyone knows, it’s perennially difficult for women over 40 to get much action in Hollywood, and seeing the enormously vibrant and courageous Sarandon and Hawn reduced to these schematic roles only underlines the problem.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
Barbershop
As The Girl in Barbershop, Philadelphia’s own E-V-E shows again that she plays very well with boys. In her first extended film role (that is, more than the few lines she had in XXX), she holds her own on screen with some very charismatic actors, including Ice Cube, Sean Patrick Thomas, Cedric the Entertainer, Anthony Anderson, Michael Ealy and Keith David. The film, directed by Tim Story, has the sort of charm and easy pacing of one of Cube’s Friday films -- the characters, most of whom work in Cube’s Chicago barbershop, share experiences and jokes (with Cedric, unsurprisingly, generating most laughs). The plot is basic, though more strained than it needs to be, with Cube selling the shop (in his family for over 40 years) to gangster David in the morning, then endeavoring to reverse the decision over the rest of the day, and Anderson and his partner Lahmard Tate wrestling, quite literally, with an ATM they’ve stolen, transporting it from place to place in hopes of getting access to its hidden riches. Cube comes to realize the importance of the shop as community gathering place. And everyone learns a useful lesson.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; 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; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
FEARDOTCOM
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
A killer website
uses Flash animation
to bore you to death.
(UA Main St.)
THE FOUR FEATHERS
Though Shekhar Kapur’s tale of bloodshed in the Sudan is front-loaded with former colonial subjects -- Kapur is Indian, while stars Heath Ledger, Kate Hudson and Wes Bentley hail from Australia and the U.S. -- it’s a surprisingly non-revisionist take on British imperialism. Beginning, almost literally, on the playing fields of Eton, the film focuses on issues of character rather than politics -- Ledger quits the military as his regiment is about to ship out to Khartoum, then follows on his own to make up for his cowardice. As in his Elizabeth, Kapur is too enamored of royal splendor to mount a serious critique. Though Ledger has a (conveniently English-speaking) native (Amistad’s Djimon Hounsou), the ending still comes down to who fares best against the “Mohommadan fanatics.” It’s a little late for Lawrence of Arabia II, don’t you think? --Sam Adams (AMC Andorra; Ritz 16; UA Grant; 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. As The Good Girl begins, she doesn’t even picture escape anymore. Instead, she’s “good” -- responsible, quiet, resigned until she aches. Other folks in Justine’s small East Texas town find ineffective ways “out.” Her housepainter husband Phil (John C. Reilly) smokes pot with his best friend. Her coworker Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel) dresses “punk” and rolls her eyes at the middle-aged ladies who shuffle through her checkout line. Into Justine’s black hole of a routine walks Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), glowering, self-consciously poetic and self-named for Salinger’s angry young hero. He and Justine are equally needy and inexperienced, in different ways. During lunch breaks, he regales her with the stories he’s writing, all involving doomed teen romance and suicide. Justine can relate “I saw in your eyes that you hate the world. I hate it too,” she tells him. Their evolution from friendship to sexual trysting at the local motel occurs awkwardly and earnestly, both grateful. But Justine soon realizes the relationship itself is doomed. 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. Superficially, the finale looks conventionally “happy.” But here, the family unit is uncertain and the smiles aren’t so comforting.--C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse)
HOW I KILLED MY FATHER
Anne Fontaine’s How I Killed My Father is as prickly a description of the father-son relationship as they come. “I’m not obligated to love you” is the film’s version of paternal-filial communication, and Fontaine (Dry Cleaning) paces her subtle allegory with icy reserve. The metaphorical killing of the film’s title refers not to a hot-blooded act of passion but a slow grinding down, a son’s lifelong attempt to distance himself from his absentee father. The film’s struggles are more internal than external, belied by the placid surface of the material comfort, which Jean-Luc (Charles Berling) has worked so hard to acquire. Fit and attractive at 40, Jean-Luc has built a carefully ordered life and set himself at the center of it. Small wonder that something comes along to disturb it. Indigent and alone in his last years, Maurice (Michel Bouquet), Jean-Luc’s long-unseen father, is unrepentant about the life he’s led, but our own sentiment keeps telling us that he wouldn’t show up on his son’s doorstep unless he hoped to resolve their relationship -- or would he. “What’s between us will always be there, whether we’re alive or dead,” Jean-Luc says coldly, not as a promise of connection but an affirmation of discontent. People are who they are, and it’s only a matter of how long it takes you to figure it out.--S.A. (Ritz East)
IGBY GOES DOWN
Burr Steers’ first feature is populated by extremely quirky characters, most related by blood. Bad mom Susan Sarandon dies in the first scene, attended by her sons, harried Igby (Kieran Culkin) and supercilious Oliver (Ryan Phillippe). Flashbacks recount how they’ve come to this moment, part liberation, part horror show. Participants in this disaster include increasingly incapacitated dad Bill Pullman, wealthy godfather Jeff Goldblum, his junkie-dancer girlfriend Amanda Peet, her performance-artist caretaker-friend Jared Harris and Igby’s inadvertent girlfriend Claire Danes, who really wants to be sensible but can’t help but be sucked into the eccentric vortex. Though it’s structured as a series of clever dialogue exchanges (the sort of things people don’t say, but wittily literate characters do), striking compositions (shot by Wedigo von Schultzendorff), and dire, occasionally violent vignettes (the things these characters do to one another!), Igby Goes Down doesn’t feel remote, strangely. In part, you may be sucked in by Culkin’s admirable performance, subtle and not too earnest. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz 16; Ritz Five)
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IN PRAISE OF LOVE
Widely derided as anti-American, Jean-Luc Godard’s latest (which did the festival circuit as Éloge de l’amour) does indeed have some pretty simplistic things to say about this here country of ours, not least, “You have no history, so you buy other people’s.” History and memory are central concerns here -- you can tell by the way people keep saying “histoire” and “mémoire” -- in a story tied together by a filmmaker’s attempts to turn a tale of Holocaust resistance into filmic art. Once the representatives from “Spielberg and company” turn up, it’s clear Godard’s taking potshots at Schindler’s List, but his thoughts on the degradation of history are well-honed, the film’s beautifully grainy black and white cinematography a vivid rebuke (at least for the first half; with typical perversity, Godard stages the second half flashback in saturated color video). Praise is demanding, even obtuse -- Godard flirts with narrative but spurns its advances -- but far kinder than anything he’s done in many years. --S.A. (Roxy)
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. (Roxy)
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)
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.--Ryan Godfrey (UA Grant; UA Main St.; Ritz Five;
Ritz 16)
NOTORIOUS C.H.O.
Margaret Cho takes the stage like an animal bursting from its lair, though at times she doesn’t seem to know what prey she wants to stalk. At times, Notorious cuts almost uncomfortably close to the bone, as when Cho goes into hilariously, if squirmingly, graphic detail about her sexual relationships -- her difficulty in getting off, the not-so-fine points of cunnilingus -- but also goes off on comic tangents that seem too much like isolated “bits,” good for no more than a couple of laughs. To an extent, Cho seems stuck between meat-and-potatoes standup and the confessional one-woman territory she’s tried to stake out for herself, the latter of which is far less forgiving of digressions. It’s a more coherent show than Sandra Bernhard’s, and Cho’s 9/11 joke is a lot funnier, but it suffers from the same dilemma. When you set yourself up as a truth-telling “outlaw,” being funny isn’t enough. --Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse)
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. (Bala; UA Grant; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
SEX & LUCIA
(No review.) A haiku:
Oh Spanish waitress,
Forget your damn dead boyfriend.
You must go have sex!
(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz East)
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. (Cinemagic; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; Ritz 16)
SPIRITED AWAY
As impossible as authorship is on any commercial film, it’s trebly so for animation -- who could divine the difference between John Lasseter’s Toy Story 2 and Peter Docter’s Monsters, Inc.? But his singular vision is only one of Hayao Miyazaki’s accomplishments. The most success ful director in Japan, Miyazski pursues his visions with unbridled imagination, and Spirited Away is as pure an expression of that vision as we’ve seen. Melding the child’s-eye view of Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro with the dark, spiritualist overtones of Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away takes Chihiro, its young female protagonist into an enormous bathhouse for wayward spirits, where she’s mystified, occasionally enchanted, and often threatened, most notably by the tyrannical Yubaba, who resembles John Tenniel’s drawings of the Queen of Hearts -- if her head inflated to equal size with the rest of her body. Miyazaki never fails to reimagine each aspect of his world; you can get the greatest joy from the tiniest of details. Chihiro’s adventures take her throughout the towering bathhouse and include run-ins with polluted river gods and ill-tempered, oversized babies, not to mention the dragon spirit (who’s also a cute boy) who volunteers to help rescue her parents who’ve been turned into pigs after stumbling into spirit territory. Chihiro’s escapades don’t always proceed one from the other, but let yourself go and you’ll be swept away as well. --S.A.(Ritz East; Ritz 16)
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; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)
STEALING HARVARD
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
Jason Lee needs cash
To send his neice to Harvard.
Tom Green needs to die.
(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Riverview)
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 Riverview)
TRAPPED
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
Where's your kid, Charlize? Me and Courtney Love stole her. Hugs, Kevin Bacon.
(AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; 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; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
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