August 14-20, 2003

movie shorts

New Movie Shorts

FREDDY VS. JASON

Over ten years in the conceiving, the showdown between New Line’s most persistent franchise players offers much slashing of knives and spurting of blood. Yet another generation of Elm Street teens comes to realize that adults are useless when it comes to Freddy (Robert Englund). Feeling "forgotten" since his last outing (in New Nightmare) nine years ago, he schemes to reignite the teens’ fear (recently suppressed by drugs), resurrecting Jason (Ken Kirzinger) to kill some kids and rattle the others. (On seeing Jason act out, one stoner mutters, "Dude! That goalie was pissed about something!") But when Jason refuses to leave Freddy’s ’hood, homeboy fights back. Teens Monica Keena, Kelly Rowland and Jason Ritter do heartfelt battle (and explain the plot about four times), but the point is the lengthy showdown, occurring in and out of Jason’s "nightmare." Director Ronny Yu’s staging is wild and wireworky, with limbs flying and bodies smashing into various basement, hospital, and construction site props. No surprises, many penetrations. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Grind

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

"He was a sk8er

boi, I said see you later

boi." --Avril Lavigne

(AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

THE MAGDALENE SISTERS

Enervating and edifying, Peter Mullan’s second film as a director doesn’t let its anger muddy the waters, but it certainly lets enough of it through to give you a good jolt. Based on the church-run "laundries" to which Irish women were confined, sometimes for life, if they were perceived to have sinned (or really, posed inconveniences to their families or communities), the film follows three of them: unwed mother Rose (Dorothy Duffy), Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), sent off after she’s raped by her cousin, and headstrong orphan Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), condemned for being pretty enough to excite the attentions of local boys. Though Mullan’s portraits of the tyrannical nuns can sink into caricature (less because the characters are inaccurate than because they’re too familiar), the performances from his young (and often inexperienced) cast are uniformly extraordinary. --Sam Adams. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

ON_LINE

As clumsy as its title is cumbersome, Jed Weintrob’s online-dating cautionary tale would be instantly outdated if it were made yesterday, so biased is it in favor of matters of technology over matters of character. John (Josh Hamilton) and roommate Moe (Harold Perrineau, whose failure to appear in a single decent movie extends all the way to The Matrix Reloaded), are roommates who run an online service called Intercon-X, which allows members to converse, ogle and even (virtually) hook up with each other, all without leaving their homes. Rife with glib generalizations about internet addiction (the film’s I-net junkies are all damaged, introverted loners or sex-crazed nymphos, as if that didn’t describe 90 percent of Old City on a Friday night), On_Line mistakes technological advances for a change in human behavior; either that, or it’s just an attempt, like the trendy split screens, to tart up an otherwise unremarkable story. --S.A. (Roxy)

OPEN RANGE

Galloping horses, yearning heroes and tragically shrinking horizons. The clichés that define the Western are everywhere in Kevin Costner’s earnest new film, which pits a crew of "free-grazers" (Costner, Robert Duvall, Abraham Benrubi, and Diego Luna, as a Mexican orphan named "Button") against an Irish immigrant cattle rancher (Michael Gambon, with so little screen time that his evil barely registers: He needs killing because that’s his role). Scripted by Craig Storper from Lauran Paine’s novel, the film entails the usual mythology: The West "died" when corporate thinking encroached on the boundless spirit of the cowboys (omitting other, less romantic, episodes, such as the decimation of populations or resources). When Gambon’s flunkies do violence, Costner seeks vengeance, despite his efforts (like Clint Eastwood before him) to forget a gnarly past. He also finds love with the town doctor’s daughter (Annette Bening, seeming infinitely patient). The inevitable shootout is slow in coming, as DP James Muro takes time to detail sweeping vistas and drenching rains, barroom tensions and Bening’s tea set. For all the obvious talent and care invested, however, the film remains essentially banal. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS

Alan Rudolph tends to make movies that are either brilliant (Afterglow) or simply awful (Trixie, Breakfast of Champions). Dentists, surprisingly, is neither. Insightful if heavy on the self-satisfied quirk, the film -- based on Jane Smiley’s story "The Age of Grief" -- explores mid-life marital discord among the Hursts, who share a dental practice, a house and three kids, but perhaps not the same vision of a healthy marriage. Campbell Scott, who seems to have hit his stride in his early 40s, makes poetry of his character’s cuckolded stiffness, though Hope Davis, as his wayward wife, flounders a bit in an underwritten role. Craig Lucas’ script is over-reliant on gimmickry; Denis Leary pops up as a foul-mouthed phantom adviser, while Rudolph dramatizes the hallucinations brought on by a household flu epidemic by having Robin Tunney’s dental assistant materialize in a shimmery dress and sing "Fever." (Get it?) Luckily, Secret Lives’ close-to-the-bone observations outweigh its excesses, although you wish they didn’t have to do battle quite so often. --S.A. (Ritz East; Ritz 16)

UPTOWN GIRLS

Poor Brittany Murphy. First, her rock star dad goes and dies in a crash. (Mom too, but who cares: She wasn’t famous.) Then her accountant swindles her out of all her dough, and she’s forced to get a job. Horrors! Hardly a goofy story by H-wood standards, and one that a different movie star might’ve been able to pull off. But Murphy looks too worn in to have been coddled all her life, and she doesn’t have the grace to pull off the movie’s broad (pun intended) physical comedy. Amazingly, the day is almost saved by 9-year-old Dakota Fanning, who plays the bratty (but, of course, tender-hearted) rich kid BM’s assigned to baby-sit. Assured without being creepy (in that Haley Joel Osment way), Fanning’s preternatural calm is a welcome salve to Murphy’s agitation; you wish the proportions of their appearances could’ve been flipped. Boaz Yakin’s direction is never more than workmanlike, and the movie’s foregone conclusion is a cringer, but at least when Fanning’s on screen, you believe the fairy tale. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Roxy; UA Grant; UA Riverview)