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Also this issue: Crack Shot Gangs of Brazil TV or Not TV? Screen Picks |
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January 23-29, 2003
movie shorts
25th HOUR
Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) is going to prison, "to hell for seven years." That Spike Lee's 25th Hour sets Monty's individual story against the almost unfathomable backdrop of Ground Zero is only one of its audacious ambitions. Gorgeously shot on digital video by Rodrigo Prieto, with a screenplay adapted by David Benioff from his novel (published in 2000), the film cuts between Monty's last day and the incremental events that brought Monty to his unbearable present. While his dad, James (Brian Cox) guiltily believes his past alcoholism and debts pushed his son into dealing, Monty harbors his own rage and self-hate, which he turns on his girlfriend, Naturelle Rivera (Rosario Dawson), suspecting she turned him in to the feds. But it's the next morning -- the 25th hour -- when Lee's movie delivers its most potent insights into what all this frenzy aspires to: hope, safety, self-possession. Stunningly, the movie doesn't resolve its own ending, doesn't let on what choice Monty will make. 25th Hour is an uncommonly urgent and resonant film.--Cindy Fuchs (Bala; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)
ABOUT SCHMIDT
About Schmidt isn't just the best performance Jack Nicholson has given in nearly two decades; it's practically the only one that matters. Nicholson doesn't so much discard his star image as aid director Alexander Payne in destroying it. It's easy for stars to play "brave" by dipping their manicured toes into the misery of "ordinary people," but it's far more honest to play outwardly unexceptional people as we all see ourselves: as the star of our very own show. From the outside, Nicholson's insurance salesman Warren Schmidt may seem like an average schmo, but seen through his eyes, he's King Lear. When we first meet him, he's sitting at his desk waiting for the wall clock to tick off the last seconds of his career. The best Schmidt's friends -- who, incidentally, we never see again -- can say of him is that he was an exceptionally enthusiastic drone. With the days at home with his wife (June Squibb) dragging on endlessly, Schmidt one night calls a number off the television to sponsor a young Tanzanian boy; before long he's sending letters off to the other side of the world on a regular basis, pouring out his heart in a way you sense he never has. When even his meager domestic security is stripped away from him, Schmidt hits the road in a 35-foot Winnebago: Crossing the Midwest, he discovers his childhood home has been replaced by a tire store, while his only daughter (Hope Davis) desperately tries to prevent him showing up even a few days before her impending marriage to a water-bed salesman (a rat-tailed Dermot Mulroney). The Midwest serves Payne as a satirist because it's so easy to play off coastal assumptions of heartland virtue: Schmidt has lost any reason to put on a good face, and any conviction that it would help.--S.A. (Baederwood; Bryn Mawr; Ritz East; Ritz 16; UA Grant)
ADAPTATION
"Do I have an original thought in my head?" The question plagues poor Charlie Kaufman. Flush with the success of Being John Malkovich, Charlie is hired to write a screenplay based on New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. Wrestling a series of related concepts -- adapting someone else's book, making that adaptation original, making that adaptation comprehensible not to mention vaguely marketable -- he frets, a lot. He frets himself right into the movie you're watching. The screenplay for Adaptation is credited to Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother, Donald Kaufman, a fictional sibling as self-confident as Charlie is insecure. The movie includes L.A. scenes in which Charlie and Donald (both played by Nicolas Cage) argue and Charlie works on his screenplay, as well as scenes where Orlean (Meryl Streep) meets with her book's subject, John Laroche (Chris Cooper). Charlie's version of Susan's story is about her rejection of a former life, her growing appreciation of her strange subject. (This version is, of course, related to Charlie's own desire to be appreciated.) She withdraws from her literary friends and husband back in Manhattan, reconsiders her own priorities, imagines herself reflected in Laroche. In him, she sees (or more precisely, Charlie sees her seeing) the passion she believes she lacks. Meanwhile, everywhere he turns, Charlie feels pressure to perform and produce, to make art. To adapt. This last takes a surprising turn, as Charlie begins to admire Donald, to absorb his lesson-by-example. Resplendently self-referential, Adaptation careens between fiction and confession, repetition and revelation. The second collaboration for Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, the film zips and zaps between scenes and realities. At first, Charlie insists that scripts should reflect "life," where people fail, where nothing happens. But Charlie, and his script, change. And Adaptation becomes -- ostensibly -- less heady, more thrilling, with a climax Donald might write, complete with car chase and sentimental self-disclosure. It's easy to read this turn as a descent, an abandonment of the film's initially giddy warps and spins. Or you might see it as an arrogant dismissal of the sort of formula that Charlie's been deriding all along. Still, the relentlessly self-critical Adaptation isn't about to reward sentimentality. It seeks originality. It seeks not to suck, but more than that, it seeks to survive sucking. Adaptation, the film proposes, is not about change as much as it's about survival.--C.F. (Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)
ANTWONE FISHER
After he responds to a white Navy shipmate's taunting with a violent outburst, Antwone Fisher (Derek Luke) must endure three sessions with the base shrink, Dr. Jerome Davenport (Denzel Washington). Antwone's indignant, but the good doctor is patient. Eventually, he knows, Antwone will talk. He has to. He's got a story that will touch everyone. This story is, as such stories tend to be, both terrible and inspirational. (The movie is based on Fisher's autobiographical script.) Born in the Ohio State Correctional Facility to a drug-addicted mother, his father murdered months before he's born, Antwone is given over to the state, then raised by a foster mother, Mrs. Tate (Novella Nelson), as dreadful a matriarch as has ever appeared on screen. By the time he's a teenager, Twone is living on the street; following yet another trauma, he joins the Navy. Here he repeatedly takes out his righteous rage against the men on his ship. Each fight lands him back in the doctor's vicinity and steers him to another disclosure, some dark secret -- cruelty, abandonment, violence -- from long ago. The film's single-mindedness reduces the story's obvious complexity. It surely does touch everyone, but Antwone Fisher doesn't always show how. --C.F.
(AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Michael Moore, even if, or especially if, you agree with his politics. Moore specializes in political theater, but his record on follow-up isn't great, to say nothing of his willingness to trim the truth to fit an easy argument. That's what makes Bowling for Columbine such a surprise: it's not afraid to ask questions it doesn't know the answers to. Calling it disorganized or inconclusive misses the point; Moore has deliberately taken on a subject -- the American propensity for violence -- that can't be explained, just to see how close to the impossible he can get. Ranging all over the place, both physically and thematically, Bowling begins, of course, with our fondness for guns, but Moore, an NRA member and former child marksman, pushes past that answer; Canada, he points out, has more guns per household, although nothing remotely approaching our gun deaths. Moore points fingers at retailers who offer cut-rate ammunition, at racial and economic disparities, and at a media that makes it seem like we're more violent than we actually are. He goes to Columbine, and to Littleton, interviewing people from Marilyn Manson to South Park's Matt Stone -- who, with his account of growing up bullied in Colorado, emerges as the movie's voice of reason -- to NRA President Charlton Heston, who blames the U.S.'s rate of violence on "ethnic mixing." Bowling is a sprawl, it's true, but it's ambitious, not confused.--S.A.
(Cinemagic)
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
With his suspiciously pleasing grin and supernatural guilelessness, Leonardo DiCaprio is perfectly cast as teenage con artist Frank Abagnale. He now helps the government and corporations catch the kind of crook he used to be, passed himself off as an airline pilot, a pediatrician and an assistant D.A. (among other things), floating on a cloud of bad checks and public confidence until he finally fell to earth. For each new guise, Frank studies cheap novels and TV shows to learn the jargon, which makes sense, but the sequence where he stares up at a suave Sean Connery Bond and then buys a suit "just like the one in the movie" is pure Steven Spielberg, the perfect fusion of movies and dreams. Unfortunately, try as John Williams' score might to drag the movie into the era of Henry Mancini, Catch Me gets tripped up by the need to psychologize, to pin everything down to Frank's pain over his parents' divorce. As Hanratty, the FBI agent who spent years tracking him down, Tom Hanks becomes a surrogate father, which might be a nice grace note if the movie didn't have to hammer on it like a chimp on a toy piano. But the movie goes on far too long after Frank's stopped running, grinding its victories into the dirt. --S.A.(AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Bala; Bridge; Narberth; Roxy; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
CHICAGO
Set in Depression-era, tabloid-driven Chi, Chicago splits off Kander and Ebb's cracking songs from the rest of the story, setting them in a fantasy nightclub space that is interwoven with the real-life setting. Following in Stanley Donen's footsteps, Rob Marshall is a choreographer turned director, and the movie's dance sequences fall together like little bits of magic, though the faux-retro salaciousness sometimes comes off more Broadway crass than le jazz hot (and Catherine Zeta-Jones is too hippy for her high-cut costumes). Zellweger, though, proves to be an honest-to-goodness triple threat; while hardly a belter, she finds her way into Roxie's go-getter bite, and she's as light on her feet as any good comic actress. Who knew, what's more, that Richard Gere had been hiding a mean lyric tenor all these years? Chicago may not rank with the classics, but it's the best traditional movie musical in many a moon. --S.A. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
DIE ANOTHER DAY
Ouch, ouch, ouch. As Die Another Day opens. James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is being tortured almost to death. Captured by North Koreans, following a chase scene that ends in the apparent death of young and vociferous Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee), Bond spends 14 months being half-drowned, stung by scorpions, electrocuted and kicked. By the time Bond is exchanged for another prisoner, the dastardly Zao (Rick Yune), he's hairy and beat-down. When M (Judi Dench) sees him back at HQ, she tells him she thinks he divulged info while drugged and that he's "no longer useful." Well, that's enough for Bond: Within seconds, he's escaped, trying to find out who betrayed him in North Korea and redeem himself. From here, the 20th film in the series delivers what you expect -- numerous stunts, excellent cars (Bond's turns invisible), fabulous ice and Madonna as Verity the fencing instructor. The Korean villain is so self-hating and driven to rule the world that not only does he engineer a satellite that's a combination artificial sun/laser-style weapon, he also engages in some genetic replacement. Bond's own issues also have to do with self-identity: Not only does he feel rejected, he's also looking older, he squints more and shows strain when engaged in major stunts. Brosnan carries all this well, but here enters Halle Berry, as Jinx, who's good with puns, a good shot and decently mimics Ursula Andress' infamous rise-from-the-sea. Aside from Berry's celebrity, Jinx brings into Bond's white-guy heroic world a black woman who can not only keep up and save him, but also whoop him. The downside is that the climactic sequences are spread over the two heroes' clashes with villains, inevitably leading to dilution, while Jinx looks cooler -- more threatening and slinkier -- in the formfitting camouflage than Bond does.--C.F. (Ritz 16)
DRUMLINE
Devon (Nick Cannon), high-school band drummer, expects a good reaction when he gets to Atlanta A&T, the university that recruited him for his skills. The school's show-style marching band is legendary, even if it has fallen on hard times over the past few years. The stakes are high: In this world, the football game provides a useful context for halftime, when the show really starts. Initially thrilled to be where he always dreamed of being, Devon soon learns that, once again, he's slightly out of place -- a raw if brilliant talent whose resistance to rules makes his hardworking teammates anxious. His mother is supportive, but his father, a onetime drummer now working for NYC transit, has been absent. And so he clashes immediately with would-be father figures, including senior/drumline leader Sean (Leonard Roberts) and the band director, Dr. Lee (Orlando Jones). While Devon's gift has allowed him to get over for most of his life, at A&T he has to submit to the "tree-shaking" that ranks musicians and determines who is on the line for any given weekend. Scripted by Shawn Schepps and Tina Gordon Chism, Drumline follows a basic boy-learns-life-lessons plot, complete with familiar secondary characters: the wise and supportive dancer-girlfriend, Laila (Zoë Saldana); Jayson (GQ), the Caucasian bass player who learns to "appreciate" his instrument after rhythmic instruction from Devon; and the tough girl, Diedre (Candace Carey), who puts the boys to shame with her one-armed push-ups. These foils serve their purpose; they make Devon look relatively complicated. Most importantly, he is the focus of the film's fierce, fun energy and -- no small thing -- first-rate drumming. Its enthusiasm is hard to resist.--C.F. (Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)
FAR FROM HEAVEN
Todd Haynes' magnificently obsessed version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama introduces Cathy (a blond, peppy Julianne Moore), the perfect suburban wife and hostess, with two children, a black maid (Viola Davis) and a hard-working husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid). But all is not well in the Magnatech household. Frank slips out of work one night, to a dimly lit underground bar. In a real '50s melodrama, this is as far (farther, even) than we'd go: Audiences of the time wouldn't have missed the implication that Frank was drifting into a life of sexual perversion, and he'd end up either dead or doomed by the final reel. But Haynes twists the genre against itself -- Frank's plight is portrayed as it would have been at the time, but we're understanding, not clucking our tongues. The resurgence of the passion Frank thought he'd quelled is hardest on Cathy, who turns to her gardener Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) for help. Trouble is, Raymond is black, and in 1950s Hartford, their relationship is more than unseemly; as her marriage to Frank grows worse and eventually dissolves, Cathy's relationship to Raymond grows deeper, more emotionally intimate (although the two hardly even touch). Unlike traditional melodrama characters, though, Cathy isn't brought low because of her faults, but because of her strengths. However frowned upon for her relationship with Raymond, Cathy never actually cheats on her husband, even after she knows he's cheated on her. When Frank unburdens himself to Cathy, draped almost completely in the shadows of their split-level living room, Quaid's voice reaches an anguished pitch, but his body remains almost perfectly erect, as if he's so trapped by the codes of masculine behavior he can't draw breath. Far from Heaven is a stylistic marvel: though it's still a little more impressive than impassioned, the sophistication with which Haynes has intermingled the modern and postmodern is awe-inspiring.--S.A. (Bala; Ritz at the Bourse)
FRIDA
The innovative melding of art and biography grants Taymor's film -- written by Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, and based on a biography by Hayden Herrera -- an uncanny and welcome grace. Certainly, some moments reflect the reasons for making the movie to begin with: the rich textures of the artist's experience, the grand scope of the legend that has since grown up around Frida Kahlo. They don't come often enough, so that the film lapses into mundane biopic structure. But when they do come, they suggest something of the artist's brilliance, as well as her struggles with perpetual, various pain. It's well known that Frida (played by Salma Hayek, who spent some eight years pulling this project together) suffered mightily and throughout her life, emotionally, spiritually and physically: a 1925 trolley wreck breaks her back and leaves her in a body cast for years. This pain became the primary source of her art (her many self-portraits are her most famous legacy) as well as a dreadful, inevitable focus. Throughout Frida's recovery, her photographer father (Roger Rees) dotes on her, while her mother (Patricia Reyes Spíndola) frets that her chance for proper marriage is over. This standard parental divide more or less sets up Frida's lifelong investment in genderfuck: She rejects expectations that girls should stay home and cook, throwing herself into her painting and politics (she and her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) were dedicated Communists) with bracing enthusiasm. When Diego asks her to marry him (admiring that she is "a woman with cajones"), she articulates these principles and so, the film's thematic focus: If Diego, 21 years her senior, cannot promise fidelity, he must be loyal. He agrees, they wed, serial disasters ensue.--C.F. (Bryn Mawr; Cinemagic)
GANGS OF NEW YORK
Martin Scorsese's tale of New York City in the mid-1800s begins in the Five Points, what today is part of Manhattan, but here is frontier country ruled by murderous, warring factions whose brutality is equalled only by their vocabulary. A snowy opening confrontation sets the anti-immigrant Natives, led by the mustachioed, cleaver-wielding Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), against the Irish Dead Rabbits, lead by by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), who's fond of dispatching his prey with a weighty iron crucifix. As Vallon lies bleeding to death in the snow, Bill proclaims him a worthy opponent. Big softie that he is, Bill spares Vallon's son, who grows up to be a goateed Leonardo DiCaprio, bent on revenging his dead father. Navigating the Five Points isn't easy, though; where there aren't gangs, corrupt cops (like the be-brogued John C. Reilly) rule the roost, themselves little more than uniformed street gangs. Trouble is, such a world requires characters of similar size, and rather than cast two titans, Scorsese uses a ham and a mouse, apparently hoping they'll balance each other out. Day-Lewis' Bill adopts a nasal bark of comical intensity, while, chin fuzz notwithstanding, DiCaprio is nowhere near convincing as a street tough with murder on his mind. Scorsese tries to soup up the action, stooping to techniques that hacks invented trying to imitate him (the use of AVID-spawned digital undercranking is particularly disheartening), but Gangs is all hue and no cry.--S.A. (Bala; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)
A GUY THING
Jason Lee is engaged to Selma Blair. But when he takes Tiki dancer Julia Stiles home after his bachelor party, it appears that the impending wedding is probably a bad idea. Toilet- and sex-related hijinks follow. Written by Greg Glienna, the film borrows heavily from his own Meet the Parents, from the in-law-to-be jokes (her rich parents: James Brolin and Diana Scarwid; his tacky ones: Julie Hagerty and David Koechner), to the pet trouble (here, a scary dog belonging to Stiles' psycho ex, Lochlyn Munro), to the stressful efforts to hide mistakes from the relentlessly clueless Blair. (To be fair, she's charming as the girl who will lose the guy.) As the romantic lead struggling to rise above tedious plot and diarrhea humor, Lee is best when he reminds you of Banky (his character in Chasing Amy), puzzling over his sexual desires (he's strangely enamored of the male dance instructor).--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
THE HOURS
Directed by Stephen Daldry and scripted by David Hare, The Hours translates the complex organization of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel -- three women in different times and places, each struggling with depression and desire -- as a kind of puzzle, each piece interlocking. Essentially three separate films, The Hours deploys clever matching shots to shift between them. The movie opens on the suicide of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), in the London suburb of Richmond, 1941. She writes a note to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), then walks down to the river, where she puts stones in her pockets and wades in. From here the film cuts back in time, to 1923, as Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway, visiting with her sister, Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson), and her children and confronting her own evolving madness. The second story takes place in 1951 Los Angeles, where housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and in the process, facing doubts concerning her marriage to gentle Dan (John C. Reilly), for whom she and her young son (Jack Rovello) endeavor to make a birthday cake. Dan sees her melancholy, but has no concept of how to help, or even talk with her. For her part, Laura is seriously considering Mrs. Dalloway's example, planning not only her husband's party, but also her suicide. The third piece, set in 2001 Manhattan, follows Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) as she puts together a party for ex-lover Richard (Ed Harris), a novelist now dying of AIDS-related illness. Much of The Hours is about grief, focused through the prism of women oppressed by culturally ordained and personally absorbed obligations. Its female subjects are, on one hand, unfathomable prisms of passion, rendered in brilliant performances. But they're also functions of a coherent narrative. As sensitive as Leonard, Richard or even Dan might strive to be, he just can't get it: Women's stuff remains mysterious. This seems somehow reductive, political oppression creating an insular emotional world where culpability and generosity may never be known.--C.F. (Bridge; Ritz 16)
JUST MARRIED
Sarah (Brittany Murphy) and Tom (Ashton Kutcher) are the cute Ugly Americans whose unsinkable romance founders when they honeymoon in Europe. The usual tensions are in play: Sarah's a pampered 90210er, Tom's from the other side of the tracks, and Sarah's dad thinks Tom's not good enough for his princess. (However the kids' marriage turns out, it has to be better than supposedly faithful mom and pop's: the 'rents both have blue eyes, while Sarah's are deep honey brown. Bonus cheap laugh: mom's name is Pussy.) Of course, both Tom and Sarah are harboring decidedly inconsequential secrets from the other. And Europe does what it always does to Americans in comedic films and very special sitcom episodes, which is to say, it turns them into spastic buffoons. The movie's crepe-thin joke is that these two in-and-out-of lovebirds are too busy giving each other accidental bloody noses and destroying hotels to consummate their marital bliss. It's a relief to see Kutcher not playing a completely dim bulb for once, and when his character's not completely unlikable his moments of sputtering apoplexy are almost reminiscent of Oliver Hardy. The talented Murphy's not up to channeling Stan Laurel for this paycheck, though, and it's perfectly understandable. A movie set in an Alpine castle shouldn't be this drafty and moldering; a movie set in Venice shouldn't be this soggy.--Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
KANGAROO JACK
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
"He stole the money
And he's not giving it back."
Because he stole it.
(AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
THE LION KING
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
Poor little Simba,
his dad is about to die
on a big, big screen.
(Tuttleman Imax Theater, Franklin Institute)
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS
Middle parts of trilogies don't have the best of reputations, composed as they are mainly of connective tissue between the introduction and the conclusion. It's no surprise that the characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers spend an awful lot of time walking. Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan) spend at least an hour of screen-time being carried through the forest by an ambulatory tree, while more intrepid Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) make it to the gates of the dread forest Mordor before backing off and trying an alternate route. Even if you're not familiar with the scope of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, this can't come as much of a surprise. Having decided in The Fellowship of the Ring that all their hopes rest on the success of Frodo's quest to drop the ring of power into the molten heart of Mount Doom, destroying it and the dark lord Sauron with it, this is the characters' only objective. However, the reduced burden of plot actually allows The Two Towers to be a better realized and more satisfying experience than its predecessor. For all the sorcery and swordplay, the film really offers us is a chance to inhabit Tolkien's world, which this time we get to do without worrying about how we got there or where we're going next. It begins with a great bang, a dream flashback to Gandalf's demise, and ends with one, too: the battle to protect the human stronghold of Helms Deep, which in the book occupies only a few dozen pages, but is here expanded to occupy most of the movie's last hour, in one of the most elaborate and complex battle sequences ever committed to film. Gollum, the shrivelled creature who once held the ring, and has been reduced to a reptilian hulk by its loss, was created entirely digital (though based on the movements of actor Andy Serkis), and seems nearly as real as the furry-footed hobbits he shares scenes with. And in essence, that's the secret to Jackson's approach, emphasizing the physical combat and military maneuvering without losing the historical and ecological underpinnings of Tolkien's tale.--S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
maid in manhattan
Written by Kevin Wade (Working Girl, Meet Joe Black) and directed by Wayne Wang, this "ethnic" revision of Pretty Woman uses the "iconic" Jennifer Lopez strategically. She plays Marisa Ventura, dedicated single mom, proud Bronx native. Every morning she rides the bus to school with her son Ty (Tyler Garcia Posey), then takes the subway to the Upper East Side, where she works as a maid at the upscale Beresford Hotel. Stunning in her form-fitting uniform, Marisa "strives to be invisible" and treats guests with utmost care and attention to detail. This sets up the film's basic Cultural Insight: rich, "upstairs" people are vain and selfish, and "downstairs" people -- including Marisa's maid-buddy Stephanie (Marissa Matrone) and butler/father-figure Lionel (Bob Hoskins) -- are earthy and compassionate. Boosted by them, Marisa looks fabulous: diligent, reliable, smart and energetic. Though she wants to apply for a management position, she also knows that maids are rarely moved up that particular ladder. Whatever Marisa's ambitions, this distinction between classes remains in place until she meets the man of her dreams, a classically beautiful scion of a wealthy political family and U.S. Senate candidate-to-be, Chris Marshall (Ralph Fiennes). The crossing-over is helped by the fact that he walks in on Marisa while she's trying on a Dolce & Gabbana white wool suit, and mistakes her for someone "like him." Chris is the cardboardiest of Prince Charmings, hanging on every word that Marisa utters concerning life in the projects (because, she admits vaguely, she grew up around there, and besides, he's plainly clueless and happy being so), resiliently unaware that Marisa is lying to him for days and, once they share a blissful night together, willing to marry her even when he learns of her elaborate deception. More tiresomely, Marisa's service-industry friends all aid in her deception: Ah, yes. In the world of "Jenny from the Block," this is an earnest fantasy.--C.F. (UA Riverview)
NARC
Everything in Joe Carnahan's Narc happens with a crash or a bang, or some sound-engineering combination of the two. Carnahan (Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane) desperately wants to grab your attention, but once he catches your ear, all that spills out is a mess of cop-movie clichés and pedestrian dialogue. Oddly, for every amped-up chase scene -- such as the handheld number that opens the movie, with Nick (Jason Patric) sprinting after a syringe-wielding junkie -- there's an aimless monologue that goes nowhere, and takes its time doing it. (In one such case, the camera seems more interested in the reflections in a car window than what's being said; you can't blame it.) Patric plays a discharged undercover cop who's been given a shot at reinstatement if he can help solve the murder of another cop, the catch being that he needs the help of burly loose cannon Oak (Ray Liotta) to do it. Since the movie really has only enough plot to fill out half a Law & Order, Carnahan vamps, either with morbid anecdotes (a pothead who blows his own head off when he takes "shotgun" too literally) or aimless depictions of investigative grunt work (a checkerboard montage that show the cops working the street for information, but unfortunately never gives enough consistent sound in any given quadrant to tell what the hell is going on). Both Liotta and Patric's performances have been drawing some raves, but while they're both pleasant to watch, Carnahan's idea of "drama" is so pedestrian -- throwing things around the room, dropping to a squat and clutching the head in the hands -- that they never stop acting and start being. With his unflinching fealty to style, Carnahan might be his generation's answer to Michael Mann, except that while Mann made the small screen bigger, Narc feels like a rogue TV show that's strayed into the movie theater, putting on its best face but still hopelessly outclassed.--S.A. (Bridge; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
NATIONAL SECURITY
It's a fairly cheap ploy to give your throwaway action comedy such a hot-button name, but don't be fooled, Mr. Ashcroft: National Security is the name on the shoulder patches of night watchmen/ wannabe cops Martin Lawrence (Earl) and Steve Zahn (Hank), who have been impelled by the buddy-movie gods to team up in spite of their mutual enmity to bust a ring of dirty cops while trying to clear their own good names. Zahn's at his best when he gets to play the unhinged dumb guy, but Lawrence is the big first-weekend draw: ergo, Earl gets to be the not-so-wisecracker (sample dialogue: "You have the right to shut the hell up."), and Hank merely the glowering straight-man cracker. There's something comforting about the warm, nostalgic '80s (and yeah, '70s and '90s) quaintness of black-white crimefighting banter and airborne cars lovingly slo-moing through warehouse siding, but Earl's unrepentant, unfunny racism puts the damp in Security's blanket. --Ryan Godfrey (Cinemagic; UA 69th St; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
the pianist
A Polish Jew hiding from the Nazis in Warsaw, sometimes looked after by friendly non-Jews, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), the titular artist, is near starving, his hair hanging in clumps off his skull, his skin pale and gray. Commanded to play something by a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann), he's playing for his life, but it's difficult to know exactly what that life might mean now. Yet Szpilman will survive this encounter. You know this because Roman Polanski's film is based on his memoirs (published in 1946). Opening in September 1939, The Pianist introduces the young artist as he is playing, refusing to acknowledge that life is already changed forever, that the Germans had invaded weeks before. Tragically, Szpilman and his family stay in their apartment; they can't quite act. And so they wait, until they too are moved to a barracks, and then taken to a camp. The film mostly takes Szpilman's view, showing the atrocities he sees; Polanksi and cinematographer Pawel Edelman hardly linger on any of these images. Finally forced to evacuate, Szpilman spends the rest of the film keeping out of sight. While the "action," such as it is, now decreases, the film becomes almost unbearably acute, approximating the man's psychic state, his process of internalization. This attenuation -- Szpilman's diminished view, his simultaneous dread of seeing and need to see -- is The Pianist's most startling effect. Brody's physical and emotional reduction is part of it, but even more extraordinary is the paring away of the film's self-image, its presumed capacity to elucidate and illustrate. The Pianist attends to the senses in ways that grander pictures cannot.--C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
RABBIT-PROOF FENCE
Based on a true story, Rabbit-Proof Fence is set in Western Australia in 1931, when mixed-race aboriginal children were regularly stripped from their families by their government "protector," Neville (Kenneth Branagh), and sent to government schools, supposedly so the "half-castes" might be more readily bred into white society, thus preventing the creation of "an unwanted third race." (The practice, incidentally, continued until 1970.) The titular fence, called the largest in the world, ran the length of the Australian continent, and it was that fence that the story's three girls used to find their way 1,200 miles home. This brief tale, more effectively than the ponderous American, exposes the 20th-century fallout of manifest destiny's last gasp -- governments that sought to conquer through management and intrigue rather than all-out occupation. Rabbit-Proof Fence is a simple story, told mainly with non-actors, but if Phillip Noyce's technique kills the feel of neo-realism, it lends lyricism and poignancy. If not on the level of Walkabout or The Last Wave (both of which, like Rabbit-Proof Fence, feature actor David Gulpilil, who offers a perfect, near-wordless performance as the native tracker sent to find the girls), it's a solid, heartfelt work worth seeing before it quickly vanishes. --S.A.
(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES
Ana (excellent America Ferrera) is graduating from Beverly Hills High School. But unlike her privileged classmates, she can't count on going to college. Though she applies to Columbia, with the help of her teacher (George Lopez), Ana must go to work: her mother Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros) and sister (Ingrid Oliu) need her to work at the sister's sweatshop. Equally stubborn and impassioned, Carmen and Ana argue vigorously -- about Ana's curvy body, Carmen's unlikely pregnancy, Ana's white boyfriend, and "real women's" expectations and desires. Written by George LaVoo and Josefina Lopez (based on her play), and winner of the Sundance Film Festival's Dramatic Audience Award winner, Patricia Cardoso's first feature is alternately soapy and rousing, predictable and resourceful. Everyone in Ana's family code-switches, speaks English and Spanish, performs one way for the white folks and another way with one another, and while they all want something "more," they're also caught up in getting through each day. Carmen can't imagine alternatives, and so she worries that Ana will move on and that she won't (as both possibilities reflect on her). Ana, for her part, wants both to show up her mother and support her family; she's equally afraid of failing and leaving what she knows, especially her beloved grandfather (Soledad St. Hilaire). A refreshing alternative to most high school movie girls, Ana has a sense of who she is and where she comes from. --C.F. (Bryn Mawr)
SPACE STATION
Somewhere between the phantasmagorical revolving station of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame and the cramped quarters of a Volkswagen bug (and a major improvement over Mir -- the decrepit Soviet space home that deserved a tabloid headline of "Oy, Vey Is Mir") the International Space Station is lofty testament to the wonders of worldwide cooperation in the name of science. It also makes for some amazing cinematography. Space Station, the latest IMAX film, gives viewers the typical IMAXian bird's-eye view of things -- in this case, life aboard a space station -- with a twist. The film, a co-production of IMAX and Lockheed Martin, was shot by astronauts, who not only master the elements of space travel, but do a very fine job taking pictures as well. As astronaut Brian Duffy explained at a press conference, he and his fellow space travelers spent nearly three years not just training for their mission, but they learned the intricacies of filmmaking as well. All in all, Space Station is one small step for man, one giant leap for audiences.--Howard Altman (Tuttleman Imax Theater, Franklin Institute)
TALK TO HER
It's notable that Michael Cunningham's The Hours shows up on a bedside table in Pedro Almodóvar's newest movie, because in a way, it more fully seizes the notion of improbable emotional connections than the novel's upcoming movie adaptation. The plot takes so many turns, it's unfair to reveal too much, but its basis is the relationship that develops between two men -- Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti) -- who are both attached to comatose women, the former professionally, the latter romantically. In fact, they first connect while watching a dance performance, when Benigno notices Marco tearing up, and it's a key clue to Almodóvar's real subject: the way fictions, either those created for us or the ones we create ourselves, fill the gaps between people, for good or for ill. Repeatedly making nods to other types of art -- including a mesmerizing silent-film interlude, filmed by the director, which is transportingly beautiful but hides a sinister meaning -- Talk to Her perhaps spreads itself too thin, but it's a movie about passions, so if they overrun, it's almost appropriate.--S.A.
(Ritz Five)
TWO WEEKS NOTICE
Any copy editor will tell you that there should be an apostrophe in the title of this Hugh Grant/Sandra Bullock romcom, and anyone who sees the film will tell you that there should be some justification for this snoozer's existence included with the price of admission. While I was sleeping, Bullock's schlumpy, idealistic community lawyer Lucy Kelson accepted a job with Grant's callow, womanizing multimillionaire developer George Wade in a bid to save the Coney Island community center from the wrecking ball. Over a few montage-y months, George W. grows utterly dependent on Lucy for her legal knowledge, shirt-choosing acumen and bimbo wrangling, so when she decides to leave Wade Corp. for something more liberal, fake movie love has just two weeks to work its impractical magic. Grant and Bullock have about 15 romantic comedies under their collective belt, so their collaboration here is both inevitable and inevitably ordinary. Writer and first-time director Marc Lawrence's script is so square, bland and twist-free, he may well have submitted it on ceramic floor tile. Hugh, Sandy, love ya, but it's time to think about giving your own notice to the genre. Hope you got plenty of severance pay. (In the U.K., I believe they call it redundancy.)--R.G. (Bala; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)
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