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Also this issue: On the Ball On the Line Screen Picks |
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April 3- 9, 2003
movie shorts
ASSASSINATION TANGO
The elements in Robert Duvall’s latest directorial effort, following six years after The Apostle, don’t fit together any better than the title suggests. Duvall plays a New York-based hitman who’s finally starting to settle down late in life when he’s sent to Argentina on a job. There, he becomes enraptured by the tango and falls in love with a beautiful dance instructor (Duvall’s 30-year-old squeeze, Luciana Pedraza) while awaiting a shot at his target. An actor whose best performances always have something of the unfinished about them, Duvall shows a similarly spontaneous side as a director, but Tango lacks what an acting teacher would call a spine. At times, Duvall’s mumbling performance verges on Tourettic, and the groups of no-doubt fascinating people he’s gathered together on screen have so little to do that the movie feels like a collection of asides. (Ironically, it takes a stronger directorial hand to create the feeling of spontaneity.) Tango isn’t nearly as embarassing as it could be, given that the plot is nakedly structured around Duvall’s own obsessions and the female lead went to his girlfriend, who’d neither acted nor danced the tango before. But it’s not steps that make a dance; it’s motion, and Assassination Tango goes too many ways at once. --Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM
Talented young footballer Jess (Parminder Nagra) loves David Beckham. But her parents, first generation immigrants to the London suburbs, want her to focus on a proper marriage to a nice Indian boy, much like her sister (Archie Panjabi). Gurinder Chadha’s charming, energetic movie charts Jess’ efforts to hide the fact that she’s signed on with a girls’ auxiliary team, befriended teammate Keira Knightley (a Mia Hamm fan), and developed a crush on their sensitive Irish coach (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Unlike most teen romances, this film takes the girls’ perspectives and complicated feelings seriously, detailing their daily negotiations of culture differences (race, nation, gender, class, and generation). And while it includes some standard contrivances, it uses them to reveal the ways that assumptions shape experiences, particularly, girls’ experiences. Various conflicts come to a head in a colorful finale that crosscuts between a final football match and a traditional Indian wedding. Cultures continue to clash, but in ways that are increasingly responsive to one another. --Cindy Fuchs (See Cindy Fuchs’ interview with writer/director Gurinder Chadha.)(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
DYSFUNKTIONAL FAMILY
Eddie Griffin might be one of our greatest standup comedians. Or, he might be one of our worst. You won’t find out watching Dysfunktional Family, which has the distinction of being the most incompetently directed performance film I’ve ever seen. Griffin’s family and his threadbare upbringing are at the center of Griffin’s act, so the decision to mix in documentary footage of Griffin going home for a family reunion isn’t totally off-the-wall, but director George Gallo’s decision to intercut the real-life characters with Griffin doing his act, often in mid-sentence, totally robs us of any chance to watch Griffin strut his stuff. No sooner does Griffin start talking about his Uncle Lou, an amateur porn buff and would-be director, than the movie cuts to the uncle in the flesh -- it’s so busy establishing that there’s a real basis for Griffin’s comedy that we never get to see the actual comedy. When Gallo isn’t disrupting Griffin’s performance with extraneous footage, he’s shitfing angles like an AVID stuck in high gear, shredding routines until they end up as so much tattered celluloid. --S.A.(AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)
THE GUYS
Do you remember Sept. 11? Could you possibly have forgotten it? Compressed into a manageable series of bloodless digits, "9/11" has become a cultural commodity, a knee-jerk invocation of a common understanding that’s purely illusory. So perhaps there’s a usefulness to The Guys, first-timer Ann Nelson’s born-from-the-wreckage play about a journalist (Sigourney Weaver) who’s drafted to help an NYC firefighter (Anthony LaPaglia) eulogize the men under his command who died helping people out of the World Trade wreckage. Nelson’s play was designed to capture a specific time and place, dashed off quickly and performed in a Lower Manhattan that still smelled of smoke, but a permanent celluloid record demands more clarity (or at least a clearer lack thereof), and The Guys is, sometimes, merely incoherent. Representing proprietary American rage -- "This is about us!" -- is one thing, but it has to be answered, placed in context, not least because a deliberate, manipulated blindness is what’s got both Americans and Iraqis dying overseas for reasons they mostly don’t understand. --S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
A MAN APART
Following his debut with Friday, F. Gary Gray has made a nice little career out of turning ridiculously conventional shoot-’em-ups into much better movies than they deserve to be (see also: The Negotiator and Set It Off). His trick is no big secret; he merely elicits strong acting out of his stars -- in this case Vin Diesel and Larenz Tate. Diesel is an undercover narcotics cop in Los Angeles who arrests a Mexican kingpin and ends up with a dead wife when the new cartel takes over. He and partner Tate go after the nascent honcho, who calls himself Diablo (aren’t druglords always called Diablo?), until Diesel steps over the line and has to turn in his badge. The end. Nah, just kidding. He actually takes the law into his own hands! Like I said, so conventional it should be wearing a nametag and eating lunch at the Reading Terminal Market. But it all somehow works, because Gray gets a career-best performance from a damaged, haunted Diesel, and whattaya know, we consequently care for the character. One movie will not make me a Vin Diesel fan, but count me in on the F. Gary Gray bandwagon. Now someone get him a script apart. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
WHAT A GIRL WANTS
Warner Bros. is hoping that what a girl in the 7-14 demographic wants is an exact tonal replica of The Princess Diaries, only with Amanda Bynes. She’s a headstrong but button-cute working-class American teen who decides to spend the summer with her blue-blood English father (Colin Firth), who has yet to find out he’s been a dad for 17 years. To complicate matters, daddy is running for Parliament, and he’s also about to get married to an evil stepmother, who comes complete with an equally evil daughter. Nominally based on the arch 1958 Sandra Dee/Rex Harrison fish-out-of-water comedy The Reluctant Debutante, What a Girl Wants is instead as bland a corporate calculation as a corporation can calculate. Characters are motivated into action -- say, causing a hubbub at the uptight formal ball, or flying tearfully back to America without saying goodbye -- not by anything happening on screen, but because that’s what such characters are supposed to do at that particular timestamp. Firth, clear-eyed and debonair, is terrific as usual, but he’s overpowered by the banality of the modern fairy-tale formula. This will probably end up being your niece’s favorite movie, until what a girl wants is this same film with, oh, let’s pick Mandy Moore. --R.G. Baederwood; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Riverview; Roxy)
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