New Movie Shorts

GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS

And pastiche will be pastiche. For our sins, we have been given Jacqueline Susann’s All About Eve, done up as extra-smutty dinner theater with an aesthetic somewhere between The Golden Girls and Strangers With Candy. Evie is a sex-starved starlet 30 years beyond her expiration date who’s never met a substance she didn’t abuse; Coco keeps having abortions because of her crush on the doctor at the women’s clinic; and Varla is the big-boned ingénue with an axe to grind and a can of spray cheese to gargle. In an odd coincidence, writer-director Richard Day has cast three actresses with distinctly unfeminine names (Jack Plotnick, Clinton Leupp and Jeffery Roberson, respectively), all of whom look rather, well, mannish. What little plot there is serves only as a delivery system for occasionally funny but relentlessly one-note one-liners: e.g., the old dirty whore making fun of the fat, dirty whore to the crazy, dirty whore. But then it can’t be misogynistic tripe if they’re really all men, baby! --Ryan Godfrey (Ritz Five)

HONEY

Starring Jessica Alba as a club dancer whose brush with stardom only roots her more closely to home, the hip-hop fable Honey doesn’t yearn for the old days themselves, so much as their ideals: It’s nostalgic for nostalgia. That the "Manhattan" of Billie Woodruff’s Toronto-shot tale looks as fake as its ersatz graffiti is almost appropriate, since its perils-of-fame plot owes more to the backlot than the back streets. Jessica Alba, who’s rarely been more than eye candy in movies before, makes you believe in her own fresh-faced innocence: Even if you see the inevitable betrayals coming, you like her more for not suspecting them. But her character’s no-you-first deference hardly makes her a realistic candidate for discovery, and hardly fits in a world where bragging has literally been raised to an art form. Missy Elliott’s brief but riotous cameo near film’s end cracks right through Honey’s squeaky-clean surface. Her bold brashness gives the lie to the film’s apologetic self-effacement. --Sam Adams (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

PARTY MONSTER

Macaulay Culkin is the feature creature in Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s fictionalized account of the rise and fall of ’80s New York club kid and convicted killer Michael Alig. Bailey and Barbato made an engrossing 1998 documentary with the same title about the misfit Alig’s quest for ultimate fabulousness through costumes, sex, drugs and disco, but this rambling dramatization suffers by comparison. Seth Green steals what there is to steal as Alig’s flamboyant mentor James St. James, but was the world crying out for the return of Culkin? Now that he’s ten years removed from playing "cute," his inadequacies as an actor, particularly as a lead, are apparent and fatal. Why does his attempt at gay speech patterns sound like a high-school actor’s impersonation of Barbara Stanwyck? If the film were better in other ways, his performance could be explained away as the character’s disaffectedness, but he’s not the only problem. How can a story about the excesses of hedonism cut away chastely before its sole display of sexuality, a male kiss? Why do we keep getting retread movies about the amoral nihilism of the trust fund set? Why is Chloé Sevigny in all of them? --R.G. (Ritz at the Bourse)

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