New Movie Shorts

ANYTHING BUT LOVE

Love may not be blind in Robert Cary and Isabel Rose’s affectionate tribute to the golden age of song, but it’s starting to go a little bit tone-deaf. Thankfully, Rose’s schoolgirl-prim rendition of the title song turns out to be a plot point, but by the end, she’s only gone from tepid to lukewarm. Rose’s table-waiting nightclub singer is near the end of her rope, or at least her career, belting out standards to pensioners at the airport HoJo’s when opportunity comes knocking in the baseball-capped form of Andrew McCarthy, a washed-up tickler of the ivories who tumbles for her hook, line and C-sharp. Unfortunately, she’s already engaged to a square-jawed corporate lawyer, but sure as minor turns to major, as things get serious, ol’ anvil-chin starts to resent her taste for Gershwin and vintage dresses, not to mention emancipation. Rose, who co-authored the screenplay -- originally titled Standard Time and based on an off-Broadway production -- is mildly likable enough, but she hasn’t got a fraction of the oomph of the women who hang on her dressing-room wall. Standard’s the word. --Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse)

GEORGE BATAILLE'S STORY OF THE EYE

"Conceived in a haze of marijuana and finished in a firestorm of tequila" (saith the press notes), Andrew Repasky McElhinney’s third feature wants to push your buttons -- or more to the point, play with your joystick. Dedicated to silent serialist Louis Feuillade and Café Flesh director Stephen Sayadian, Story of the Eye is, possessory credit notwithstanding, more an homage to Georges Bataille’s violently erotic (and vice versa) novel than a straightforward adaptation. But where Bataille’s pseudonymous text scandalized a nation, McElhinney’s transgressions are more prosaic in nature: explicit sex scenes and distended interludes that leave you too tired to be shocked. A skeletal narrative casts the sex acts as figments of an extravagantly bored party boy’s imagination; the chair in which we see him listlessly fondling himself (oooh!) appears in the background of several scenes, and he reappears at the end to put the camera out of its misery. While it’s not a total washout, and certainly not thoughtless, Story of the Eye is perverse in all the wrong ways, trapped in a theoretical straitjacket that finally chokes off all life. --S.A. (Roxy)

IN AMERICA

The kind of movie you feel like a sap for liking and a Grinch for resisting, Jim Sheridan’s autobiographical fable is pure movie magic, which is to say, you’ll believe it if you want to. Sheridan’s family of Irish immigrants -- Paddy Considine, Samantha Morton and sisters Emma and Sarah Bolger as their daughters -- fib their way into the country and promptly set up shop in a Harlem tenement. When the family sees Times Square for the first time, you remember for a moment what it was like the first time you really saw New York; Sheridan’s eye for detail is acute, and the movie has the feel of memory lived, not manufactured. The movie has a tendency to double-underline its points, as when the father suddenly remembers his recently-deceased son, and the camera pans over to one of his pictures on the wall, and then Da yells out, "I can’t feel anything!" Though Djimon Hounsou brings first fury and then tenderness to the role of a downstairs neighbor dying of AIDS (though the disease is never named), his role feels like a neatly packaged contrivance. Sheridan set out to make a movie about what it means to be American, in America and elsewhere, and his deeply-felt examination treads ground no other current movie dares to. Sheridan himself spent eight years living in the city in the 1980s, but the movie is deliberately timeless; References to E.T. might gibe with Sheridan’s visit, but his daughter’s handheld camcorder is a forceful anachronism. Declining to fix itself to one time, or really even one place, In America takes places just where its title says. --S.A.(Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

LOVE DON'T COST A THING

It wasn’t hard to buy actual dork Patrick Dempsey as an onscreen dork who rents the affections of the most popular girl in high school in the ’80s teen staple Can’t Buy Me Love. It’s more difficult to get a purchase on Nick Cannon (Drumline) in the same role in Troy Beyer’s up-tempo retelling. The transparently toothsome Cannon’s arrhythmic, Urkelesque Alvin is the Y-chrom equivalent of the mousy girl who learns how to take off her glasses and let her hair down and presto! She’s Rachael Leigh Cook or some such. Becoming all that, however, always requires a makeover by association, in this case with hot cheerleader Paris (Christina Milian), who secretly agrees to be Alvin’s temporary girlfriend in exchange for his buying the parts to fix her car. Appropriately arm-candied and pimped out in Sean John, Alvin soon becomes the most popular guy in school, and the most loathsome. The remake’s gotten a pimped-out makeover of its own, and it’s just as obnoxious as Alvin’s; everywhere the original was sweet, the update is just smutty. Bikinis, navel jewelry, bootyvicious humpty-dancing: Even for California, it seems a tad excessive for homeroom. There’s more T and A in this high school than in frittata; poor, innocent Patrick and I would have exploded. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

STUCK ON YOU

Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s preoccupations -- repulsive protagonists, physically challenged supporting players, chicks who like sports -- are consistent enough to satisfy the most devout auteurist, but seven films into their career, they haven’t progressed past thinking in gags. The gags in Stuck on You, most involving Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon as conjoined twins with divergent aspirations, are sublimely realized, some subtly, some with the Farrellys’ trademark outrageousness. The physical comedy reaches a delirious peak when the brothers fistfight each other, while the less violent jokes typically involve them forgetting they’re literally joined at the hip, a trick the beaming Kinnear pulls off better than the anxious Damon. Despite the impressive feat of coming up with new ways to satirize Cher -- and the even more impressive feat of getting Cher to do the satirizing -- Stuck on You finally rings a bit hollow; your cheeks ache from laughing, but your pulse never quickens. The Farrellys keep casting better and better actors, but the better the actors, the more conspicuous the Farrellys’ inability to create real characters for them. (Eva Mendes, for one, is wasted here.) The better the Farrellys get, the more their limitations show. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

SUDDENLY

Written and directed by Argentinian Diego Lerman, this laconic first feature is a road movie where the destination is always just around the corner. Two delinquent lesbians nicknamed Lenin and Mao kidnap a Buenos Aires shop girl nursing a broken heart; while Mao makes a fervent effort to get into her pants, Lenin takes them to her great-aunt’s house, where relationships flutter around each other like dust motes. No big revelations here, just a lazy few days spent in the hot sun. Fans of Love and Rockets and Stranger Than Paradise should make haste. --S.A.(Ritz Five)

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there