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Also this issue: Second Chances Pandora's Box Screen Picks |
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April 17-23, 2003
movie shorts
BULLETPROOF MONK
Perhaps best known for directing Mariah Carey’s "Honey" video, Paul Hunter here tries to pull together a clutter of clichés into yet another movie-based-on-a-comic-book. Assigned to protect a Sacred Scroll from nefarious Nazis, a noble No-Name Monk (the great Chow Yun-Fat) is reduced to mentoring smart-ass pickpocket Kar (a.k.a. Stiffler, a.k.a. Seann William Scott) and Russian mafia princess Jade (James King). Their interactions include clever choreography (by Wong Wai Leung) and exceedingly well-worn paths to enlightenment (with, it must be said, a fun getting-to-know-you scene involving cocoa puffs). For the most part, the film combines elements from Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Karate Kid, even a moment or two from Subway’s underground battling, featuring a chiseled torso of a thing (Patrick Hagarty), all without much innovation. To an extent, the film parodies its own corniness (Kar has learned his initial skills from kung fu movies, Monk dispenses wisdom in riddles), but the jokes ("Good luck with that enlightenment stuff," ta-tas Kar when he thinks, wrongly, of course, his learning is done) aren’t smart enough to make up for the reckless race and culture stereotypes. --Cindy Fuchs(AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
CHASING PAPI
Even if you don’t recognize the TV pedigree of the director (The Bernie Mac Show’s Linda Mendoza) and the actors (sitcom/soap bit-parters Roselyn Sanchez, Sofía Vergara and Eduardo Verástegui; Christian-pop star Jaci Velasquez; Freddy Rodriguez in gayface), the setup and delivery scream lesser-network small-screen farce. Papi (Verástegui) has three fiancées in three cities, and they all come to L.A. to surprise him. Papi freaks out, takes too many tranquilizers, and spends most of the movie weekending at Bernie’s. (He’s in the trunk! He’s under the baggage cart!) The women -- the stuck-up rich girl with the canceled credit cards, the resourceful sexpot cocktail waitress and the nerdy lawyer on the verge of realizing she’s gorgeous when she takes off her glasses -- are at each other’s throats until they have to join forces to find sloppy Papi’s conked-out body and catch some rather unthreatening bad guys. Mendoza punches up this punchless scenario with a bag of TV tricks (candy colors, animation, After Effects-y scene segues), but it still feels like a TGIF reunion movie, only with Hispanics. Had it only been filmed in front of a live studio audience, we would know the appropriate times to laugh. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; UA Riverview)
CHAOS
Perfectly suited to the DV aesthetic, Coline Serreau’s dark comedy follows a bourgeois Parisian family as they split apart, spurred by the night when Hélène (Catherine Frot) and Paul (Vincent Lindon) watch a prostitute being beaten nearly to death from the safety of their luxury car, and speed off when she cries for help. Hélène becomes obsessed with helping the woman, who turns out to be an Algerian woman named Noémie (Rachida Brakni) who has turned to prostitution after running away from her traditionalist father. As Hélène spends more and more time away from home, often spending days at the hospital without calling her husband (who anyway seems more concerned with how to work the iron than if she’s all right), she begins to cut free from her life, including her son, who’s busy two-timing his live-in girlfriend. (Chaos won’t be winning any awards for gender balance; the women are uniformly put-upon and virtuous, the men without exception conniving and self-interested.) Chaos takes crazy and unexpected turns, decamping at one point for a lengthy narrated passage explaining Noémie’s history, but despite what might seem a fairly outrageous deus ex machina, the story never seems forced. Jean-François Robin’s camera perfectly captures the sterile frenzy of bourgeois life, and Frot makes her character’s potentially outlandish journey seem as natural as putting one foot in front of the other. --Sam Adams(Ritz at the Bourse)
THE GOOD THIEF
Given that Neil Jordan's remake of Bob le Flambeur is obsessed with the relationship between copies and originals, it's almost fitting that festivalgoers who turned up to see it on Sunday were rewarded with a screening of the other festival entry with (nearly) the same name. Chances are, though, ticket holders to the sold-out screening didn't feel that way, so the fest has added additional screenings -- appropriately enough, a pair of 'em. An uncanny companion to The Truth About Charlie, The Good Thief works many of the same back alleys: movie directors in principal roles (Emir Kusturica and twin directors Michael and Mark Polish), African music and French rap to convey polyglot fusion, a palette saturated with neon blues. But Jordan adds layer upon layer, referencing both his stars' real-life personae (Nick Nolte plays a recovering junkie, with mug shots that look not unlike the actor's well-publicized own) and a cultural lineage traced from the U.S. to France and back again. (In conversation, Nolte's Bob mocks the music of Johnny Hallyday, best know as the "French Elvis.") Ultimately, The Good Thief twists itself in too many circles -- The Limey pulled off what The Good Thief tries, but Jordan isn't a stylist of Soderbergh's caliber (though he is canny enough to nick a heist method from Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven remake). Still, there's something worth savoring about The Good Thief, an aftertaste more satisfying than the meal itself. --S.A. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
HOLES
Camp Green Lake isn’t a camp so much as a juvenile detention center in the middle of B.F., Texas, and there’s no longer anything green or lakey about it. Why are the "campers" -- with Goonies-ish names like Armpit, Zero and X-ray -- each required to dig a new hole in the middle of the desert every day? To tell too much would spoil the fun, which comes by the shovelful, but here’s a teaser: What do peaches and onions have to do with a kissing bandit, a family curse and Latvia? You’ll just have to figure it out along with Stanley "Caveman" Yelnats IV (Shia LeBeouf), who’s sent to Green Lake for stealing shoes, and who has to deal with being the new kid while staying a step ahead of stern warden Sigourney Weaver and "counselors" Jon Voight and Tim Blake Nelson (channeling Roscoe P. Coltrane and Deputy Cletus with giddy abandon). Based on the Newberry-winning book by Louis Sachar (who adapted it for screen), Holes is the rare adolescent movie that doesn’t pander. It delves into the fantastical without shying away from real-world issues like peer acceptance, homelessness and intolerance, but it never stops being engaging popcorn entertainment for all ages. Who woulda thunk? A teenage buddy comedy that actually engrosses. --R.G. (Bridge; Narberth; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
LAUREL CANYON
Performances stand out in Lisa Cholodenko's follow-up to High Art. As a California record producer whose medical resident son (Christian Bale) and his thesis-writing fiancee (Kate Beckinsale) take up temporary residence in her house/studio, Frances McDormand has the earthy naturalism of a woman who's cut her own path in the world. And as the incipient rock star who's cutting an album in her house, Alessandro Nivola is a revelation, incarnating the kind of nascent sex god whose appeal is only increased by his seeming effortlessness. Bale and Beckinsale's squares aren't nearly as compelling; at bottom, you feel like they're just sounding boards for the film's more freewheeling characters. (The squares loosen up, but the free spirits don't get any less free.) Despite its endorsement of the laissez-faire life, Laurel Canyon is as neat as a military bed; it would've been a lot more effective if Cholodenko had left some of the seams showing. --S.A.(Bala; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
MALIBU’S MOST WANTED
Aspiring Jewish rapper and Malibu homeboy B-Rad Gluckman (Jamie Kennedy) makes the small step from TV’s Jamie Kennedy Experiment to a wholly pedestrian movie, enabled by writers Fax Bahr and Adam Small (also responsible for a couple of Pauly Shore movies). When Brad’s routine embarrasses his governor candidate dad (Ryan O’Neal), the wily campaign manager (Blair Underwood) arranges to have him kidnapped by thug-actors Anthony Anderson and Taye Diggs, to scare the "black out of him," whereupon all are threatened by real banger Damien Dante Wayans. One more in the exceedingly tiresome line of white-folks-acting-black jokes, the film notes that gangsta-ism is also a performance for black kids, and parodies some famous scenes (the Korean store in Menace II Society, 8 Mile’s battles). What it misses completely is that oppression works by race and class, and performance is not the ticket out (except for the most fortunate few). The most clueless moments involve aspiring hairdresser Regina Hall, supposedly the sanest person in the room, who falls for Brad because that’s her job, in this most unoriginal of films.--C.F. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
A MIGHTY WIND
A surprisingly affectionate tribute to the folk boom of the 1960s, Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind never quite sinks its teeth into its subject, but the substitution of sweetness for satire makes for a fair trade. Kicked off by the death of an Albert Grossman-esque folk promoter, the ersatz documentary follows the reunion of three folk acts for a concert in his honor: the Kingston Trio-esque Folksmen (Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, a.k.a. Spinal Tap), the shiny, happy New Main Street Singers (an insufferably cheery bunch who, in a Tap-ish bit of humiliation, play at amusement parks in the shadow of noisy roller coasters), and onetime duo Mickey and Sylvia (Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara), whose legendary career ended along with their marriage. Folk music should be just as ripe a target as heavy metal, but Guest and co. (many of whom, of course, grew up during the 1960s) don’t have the heart to tighten the screws -- the affinity of white singers from privileged backgrounds for affecting the trappings of poverty and/or blackness is hinted at with a reference to an unseen folk legend named Ramblin’ Sandy Pitnick, but that’s as far as it goes. (The great Bill Cobbs, identified in the credits as a blues singer, appears at a party scene, but never gets a line in.) Instead, you get Levy’s ceaseless mugging -- with his white fright wig and ever-mobile eyebrows, he’s every bit the ’60s burnout (although a shot of empty medicine bottles on the table by his motel room bed comes close to mocking mental illness) -- and a smattering of jokes, which are less frequent as well as less pointed. A handful of zingers fly by -- John Michael Higgins’ born-again bandleader recalls, "There was abuse in my family, but it was mostly musical" -- but what draws you in is the camaraderie between the erstwhile Tappers, and the genuinely moving chemistry between Levy and O’Hara’s ex-lovers. (While they were married, the highlight of their act was a staged kiss, and while the suspense builds as to whether they’ll recreate the moment at the tribute concert, you may find your feet beginning to jiggle.) If they don’t outstrip the absurdity of the folk songs of the times, the film’s compositions (mostly written by the actors) at least equal it; a couple of them could even have been hits. (Catherine O’Hara boasts a particularly fine singing voice, not surprising given that her sister is the too-long-in-exile singer Mary Margaret O’Hara.) A Mighty Wind leaves your sides resoundingly un-split, but it sends you out feeling suffused with mild warmth -- an inferior pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. --S.A. (Ritz East; Ritz 16)
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