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Also this issue: La Fiesta Continua Screen Picks |
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April 10-16, 2003
movie shorts
ANGER MANAGEMENT
"I think Eskimos are smug." This observation, by anger management patient John Turturro, is easily the loopiest in all of Peter Segal’s ridiculous and redundant buddy flick. For the most part, the movie trudges along, pitting anger management "guru" Jack Nicholson against his newest court-ordered patient, Adam Sandler. (The judge who so orders is the late Lynne Thigpen, who, as ever, weathers all insanity with integrity.) Arrested for ostensibly untoward behavior on an airplane ("This is a very difficult time for the country," notes the security guard), Sandler must endure in-home counseling from the wholly obnoxious Nicholson, who not only has him interacting with classmates Turturro and Luis Guzmán, but also arranges his meetings with trannie prostitute Woody Harrelson (self-named "Galaxia") and pretty barfly Heather Graham. Ostensibly, this leads to Sandler’s repairing his relationship with the absolutely perfect Marisa Tomei. But really, it’s all about the boys. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:
Dear Rob Zombie, this
is your least plausible film
since Battlefield Earth.
(UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)
STEVIE
"Where does our responsibility to people … end?" asks the manager of a rural Illinois general store in Steve James’ harrowing documentary. It’s just about his only line in the movie, but when an otherwise inessential character is kind enough to summarize the theme of your movie, you leave the shot in. James, a co-director of Hoop Dreams, began the film in 1995, 10 years after moving to Chicago and leaving behind Stevie Fielding, a troubled child to whom he’d served as a Big Brother during college. James promised to stay in touch, but didn’t, and returns to find Fielding’s life as bad as he could have imagined: Still living with his grandmother as he nears 30, Fielding has been in and out of jail, never held a steady job and still has a vicious relationship with the mother who abandoned him in spirit, leaving him to grow up within yards of her trailer but with no real connection to her. James is so shaken by his first encounter with Fielding, he doesn’t return for two years, and by the time he comes back, Fielding is in trouble again, this time seriously, accused of sexually molesting his 8-year-old niece. Fielding’s life has been so unforgiving that even the victim’s mother begins to show him sympathy, but Stevie confronts the fact that sympathy may not be enough to save him; as Fielding’s relationship with his mother is rekindled, he only gets worse, reopening wounds that had been scarred over. James watches, sometimes impotently, sometimes trying to help, always torn between his relationship with Fielding and his need to live his own life; James invites Fielding and his fiancee to his house in Chicago, but won’t allow his kids to interact. (His wife, who counsels sex abusers for a living, does her best to help, but never harbors any doubts that Fielding is guilty.) Insight comes from surprising sources, as in a wrenching scene where a palsied classmate of Fielding’s fiancee recalls her own experience with sexual abuse. James does anything but make himself the hero of the piece; at times, Stevie verges on a feature-length confession of powerlessness, of both James and the documentary form itself. After all, though James was Fielding’s Big Brother before he was a filmmaker, the process of ingratiation and abandonment is perfectly analogous to documentary filmmaking, with rare exceptions. The film’s conclusion offers no easy answers, in some ways no answers at all, but the questions it has asked are so profound that easy solutions would only trivialize them. --Sam Adams
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