Continuing Movie Shorts

BAD SANTA

After Ghost World (the documentarian Terry Zwigoff’s first foray into fiction), which showed the world from an outcast’s point of view, Bad Santa encourages us to heap scorn on its benighted characters -- in other words, all of them. Billy Bob Thornton’s Willie Soke, an alcoholic safecracker who robs department stores of their Christmas Eve takes by posing as a shopping-mall Santa, deserves every bit of abuse the world can heap on him, as does his accomplice, a foul-mouthed midget (Tony Cox) whose only redeeming characteristic is his disgust for his partner. Bernie Mac manages to find a zest for life in his corrupt security chief, and John Ritter’s inept store manager is mainly seen as a buffoon. Bad Santa might have been a better, or at least less intolerable, movie if it had been made by a less talented director, one who would have played the movie’s more appalling moments for gross-out comedy, rather than lavishing on them a realism that only makes them genuinely disgusting, and not humorously so. (Fake dog poop is funny. Real dog poop just stinks.) That Bad Santa is as vile and stupid as Ghost World was insightful and touching is something Hollywood has no interest in measuring. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview; Roxy)

BUS 174

"Look at me!" screamed Sandro do Nascimento, and for the afternoon of June 12, 2000, much of Brazil complied. His head bound in a T-shirt, the figure who took a city bus and its 11 passengers hostage never identified himself, and though José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda’s documentary doesn’t show us any of the media coverage that blanketed the country that day, the indications are that do Nascimento was portrayed as a lunatic, a ranting crazy who deserved to be put down like a mad dog. In part, Bus 174 sets out to fill in that reductive sketch and sees crime as society’s distorted reflection, a funhouse mirror enlarging defects to the point where they’re impossible to overlook. None of the victims or policemen who witness the crime can provide a straightforward explanation of what do Nascimento hoped to gain by hijacking the bus. As the drama plays out, his demands grow more urgent without becoming any clearer; the few that remain consistent and intelligible are patently absurd (i.e. a repeated request for grenades). It’s left to a sociologist to theorize, a bit too neatly, that do Nascimento was "hungry for social existence," an appetite that the throngs of camera crews surrounding the bus eagerly fed. Though he screams out, "This isn’t a Hollywood movie!" do Nascimento was very much ready for his close-up. Bus 174 exposes a system where police officers are poorly paid and ill-trained -- it’s a job of last resort -- and children without homes must survive largely on their own, forming an expansive network of juvenile drug dealers, assassins and petty criminals. -- S.A. (Ritz Five)

Dr. Seuss' The Cat In The Hat

Who is more cynical: the Hollywood corporate synergy machine that hopes no one cares -- or even notices -- that a beloved children’s book has been turned into cloying purple glop, or the gnarled, lonely film critic, who knows that no one will? Dr. Seuss’ elliptical, oddly-metered paean to childhood secrecy and punctuated irresponsibility provides the merest of frameworks on which to hang even an 80-minute feature-length film: Two bored latchkey kids are entertained by a destructive, anthropomorphic feline and his species-challenged, ambiguously subjugated Things. El Gato Ensombrerado is played by mugging schtickster Mike Myers, dipped in Lloyd Webber-esque fur. Director Bo Welch’s shrill suburban Las Vegas Republican aesthetic -- immaculate, identical hot-pink houses and lime cars -- is the model of taste compared to the assaultive, Skittle-tinted Caligari cabinet that the kids’ house becomes once the Cat and the Things make everything capital-F Fun, yet somehow capital-R Responsible. --R.G. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

ELF

Will Ferrell is a big baby -- or close to it. A human raised in Santa’s workshop by elves too polite to reveal his real origins, Ferrell’s Buddy grows up (and up, and up) oblivious to the fact that he doesn’t fit in. An overheard comment alerts Buddy to his human parentage: His real father abandoned him to an orphanage (whence he stowed away in Santa’s sack) after Buddy’s mother’s death. Despite the fact that his real father, even worse than being human, is on Santa’s "naughty" list, Buddy will journey to the big city and seek him out -- just like that. Played by a marvelously pinched-looking James Caan, Buddy’s dad, a children’s book publisher who’s succumbed to pressure to watch the bottom line, has no such compunctions. The running gag in Elf is that Buddy’s total lack of self-consciousness, rather than being a vulnerability, makes him all but unstoppable. Likewise, after he’s accidentally found work as a department-store elf at Gimbel’s (whose resurrection is part of the movie’s faintly nostalgic tone), Buddy bulldozes his way into a friendship with his antisocial co-worker, Jovie (Zooey Deschanel, repeating her performance from The Good Girl in an elf suit), by being deaf to her blunt brushoffs. Director Jon Favreau, working from a script by David Berenbaum, is on shaky ground here, and he knows it. Yesterday’s touching fable is today’s insufferable schmaltz. Elf tries, and mostly succeeds, to strike a delicate balance between the sweet and the bittersweet. Ferrell makes you believe that a human being can eat nothing but candy, then stay up all night making paper snowflakes. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

GOTHIKA

The ghost of a good movie flits through Mathieu Kassovitz’s first English-language feature, but it’s hard to pick out of the flashing lights. Halle Berry plays a prison psychiatrist (yuh-huh) who is haunted by visions after a rainy car accident and her husband’s death and confined to the very prison psych ward where she once worked. (Look, kids -- irony!) The prison is slick and modern (Lucite cells, etc.) when Kassovitz and DP Matthew Libatique want it to be, then dank and medieval when they’ve run out of ways to make florescent lights flicker. The one constant is that Berry will quiver, wail and almost show her breasts. Though his role (love interest? confidant? plot device?) makes no sense, Robert Downey Jr. manages to stretch Berry out in overlapping-dialogue confrontation. No time for that, though -- there’s a contrived twist ending to get to! --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

THE HAUNTED MANSION

The latest Disney theme-park attraction to coincidentally also be turned into a feature film -- small world after all, eh? -- stars a smarmy Eddie Murphy, keeping it Realtor as Jim Evers, who sees scary-big dollar signs when his realty-firm partner and wife Sara (the lovely English actress Marsha Thomason) gets a call that the Gracey mansion is to be sold. It seems the charming Mr. Gracey and his altogether-ooky staff are ghosts, and that Sara is a dead-ringer for Gracey’s ill-fated fiancée. Director Rob Minkoff (the Stuart Little films) obliges; the standard flying candelabras, animated sculptures and evaporating ghoulies populate the nooks and crannies of the house, which is designed to be the PG-rated distillation of every haunted movie house from the last 50 years. You could quite easily take it for the ride, and Disney will be happy to return the favor. --R.G. (AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

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. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

THE LAST SAMURAI

As Civil War veteran Capt. Nathan Algren, Tom Cruise introduced in 1876, depressed and drunk, raging at atrocities he was ordered to commit, in particular by one General Custer. His former commanding officer, the aptly named Col. Bagley (typecast Tony Goldwyn) shows up with an offer of seeming redemption: A new gig training soldiers for Japan’s anxious Emperor Meiji (Shichinosuke Nakamura), besieged by rebel samurai. Following a bloody battle with the samurai, Nathan fights valiantly, killing a warrior in red armor before he is wounded and taken prisoner by the unspeakably charismatic samurai warlord Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe, who would steal this film completely if not for its incessant worship at the shrine of Cruiseness). Carted back to Katsumoto’s mountain village, Nathan is nursed back to health by the widow of the red-armored fellow. Taka (Koyuki) is visibly unhappy about this arrangement, but does her duty as assigned by Katsumoto. Nathan, being the crass American, is slow to realize the precise nature of the pain he’s inflicting by his very existence, and remains determined to demonstrate his manly fortitude. In "conversations" with the conveniently English-speaking Katsumoto, Nathan gradually comes to revere Bushido (the Way of the Warrior), and trains to fight like a samurai. But as he finally recognizes the absolute destructive power of "modern" U.S. industry, weaponry and global contracting, Nathan is also the means for the film to undermine its own carefully constructed respect for this very traditional culture. He not only decides to throw in with Katsumoto, he also reminds him of his own values and codes. That the white man becomes the most ferocious, respected and committed samurai in sight is no small problem. --Cindy Fuchs(AMC Orleans; Bridge; Narberth; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION

Without "Duck Amuck," the sublime 1953 Merrie Melodies short, Joe Dante’s Back in Action would be hailed as a comic and cinematic landmark; a veritable tour de farce. As is, with 50 years of exponentially accelerating intra- and extratextual snapcrackle in our pop cultural cereal bowls, the film and its rat-a-tat parade of self- and genre-referential gags is merely passably entertaining and then pleasantly forgotten. What I do remember: As in "Amuck," our put-upon antihero is Daffy Duck (rendered, like all the animated characters, in something like two-and-a-half-D), who gets fired from the very movie we’re watching, then sets off with lovable live-action doofuses Jenna Elfman and Brendan Fraser to save the world from Steve Martin’s evil-dork Chairman of Acme Inc. (think Bill Gates channeling Dirty Rotten Scoundels’ Ruprecht). Yeah, compared to his work in "Amuck," Daffy’s slumming, but the duck’s still clever, and enough good sense to not make Space Jam II. --R.G. (UA Riverview)

LOVE ACTUALLY

Richard Curtis’ directorial debut is a roundelay of romances -- budding, breaking or seeming. Written by Curtis, the film includes multiple mini-narratives and Hugh Grant’s irresistible impishness. Here he plays a Tony Blairish PM, lusting after his assistant, Martine McCutcheon, while tangling with an arrogant Texan-born U.S. prez (Billy Bob Thornton). The PM’s sister, Emma Thompson, watches her husband (Alan Rickman) be seduced away by a vampy secretary (Heike Makatsch); cuckolded writer Colin Firth falls for his Portuguese, non-English-speaking maid (Lúcia Moniz); token Yank Laura Linney devotes herself to her handicapped brother; and Liam Neeson helps his stepson deal with mom’s death and first love. Best by far is pop star Billy Mac (Bill Nighy), on a comeback with a terrible cover of "All You Need is Love," retaining dignity against the film’s excessive goo. --C.F. (Bala; Bryn Mawr; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz East; Ritz 16)

MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD

Grandly heroic and stylishly ponytailed sea captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) has command of a British ship during the Napoleonic wars (1805). Attacked by a mysterious and superior French vessel, he initiates a lengthy pursuit (some 12,000 miles), accompanied by his best friend Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany). Based on the popular novel series by Patrick O’Brian, Peter Weir’s film, at its best, focuses on this intimacy, based in mutual respect, friendly competition, and appreciation for chamber music. They come into conflict when Jack’s focus on the French ship becomes obsessive, leading to spectacular dangers (for old salts and little boy officers alike). --C.F. (Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

THE MISSING

As Maggie, a "healer" in 1885 New Mexico, Cate Blanchett spends weeks on dusty trails in search of daughter Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood), who is, within minutes of the film’s start, kidnapped by a band of miscreants with plans to sell her to nasty Mexicans. Salvatore Totino’s camera repeatedly seeks out her face, and it never fails to convey complex emotional mixes. But while Maggie has wisdom and grit beyond most women in Westerns, she’s also confined by an increasingly contrived plot. Her long-absent father, Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones), has suddenly returned. How fortunate: Not only can Samuel track the kidnappers, he’s also guarded over by a mystic hawk, plays action hero (leaping through windows and off cliffs, punching and kicking) and has an old Indian buddy, Kayitah (Jay Tavare), seeking the same marauders who happen to have taken his son’s wife-to-be. Head kidnapper, Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig), a psychotic Apache brujo (witch), casts evil spells and snarls so as to accentuate the scars on his face. That they will be selling their "merchandise" south of the border only compounds the dilemmas that the film only touches on. Maggie the Indian-hater learns to appreciate Samuel’s usefully potent magic, but her budding tolerance looks toward a melding of cultures that never quite occurs. --C.F. (Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

MY ARCHITECT

Directed by Louis I. Kahn’s son, Nathaniel, My Architect is a simple attempt to track down the father Nathaniel hardly knew. But there’s nothing recriminatory about the film, and it doesn’t settle for simple explanations. In a sense, it’s Nathaniel’s attempt to see his father as the rest of the world saw him, as a visionary genius rather than an absentee father, or at least find some way to reconcile the two. In addition to interviewing his father’s colleagues, Nathaniel and cinematographer Bob Richman lovingly film his structures. When people in My Architect talk about Louis Kahn, the film often inserts images of his work, rather than the man himself. --S.A. (Ritz Five)

MYSTIC RIVER

Clint Eastwood, directing but not acting, is onto a deep, ugly subject, via Brian Helgeland’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel: the way crimes of sufficient awfulness can scar not only their victims, but witnesses and whole communities, and how the perpetrators of such crimes are often victims themselves. Three young boys in working-class Boston are reprimanded by men who claim to be cops, and take one of them off in their car. Decades later, Dave (Tim Robbins) is still haunted by the four days the men held him captive and sexually abused him, and his once-inseparable friendships with Jimmy (Sean Penn) and Sean (Kevin Bacon) have languished or dissolved. But an even more horrible crime stirs up all the old anguish and resentments, and the men find themselves no better equipped to cope as grown-ups than they were as children. --S.A. (Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; Ritz East)

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)

PIECES OF APRIL

Written and directed by What’s Eating Gilbert Grape novelist Peter Hedges, this grimy-looking DV melodrama stars Katie Holmes as a punkish Manhattanite whose estranged family has grudgingly consented to turkey-day at her grungy pad. That becomes a problem when it emerges that she literally and figuratively can’t cook; after she’s shoved whole celery stalks into her slippery bird, she discovers that her oven has been turned off, and her landlord is out of town. A comedy of neighbors ensues, with Holmes desperately canvassing her (of course wacky) next-doors, who include a grating Sean Hayes, whose monologue on the virtues of his expensive new oven should be a how-not-to example in screenwriting classes everywhere. --S.A. (Bala)

THE STATION AGENT

A dwarf train enthusiast, a manchild coffee vendor and a mother getting over the death of her child bond and form an unlikely, unconsummated love triangle. Luckily, Tom McCarthy’s debut feature, set in the wilds of New Jersey, has lots to offer beyond its plot. Chief among those offerings is a dry, unsentimental performance from Peter Dinklage as Fin, whose brooding intensity is the closest thing imaginable to a 4-foot-5 James Dean. After Fin inherits a disused train depot from a fellow train buff, he falls in, reluctantly at first, with a misfit crew including the beefy, garrulous Bobby Cannavale and bereaved mom Patricia Clarkson. There’s a certain rote quality to the way The Station Agent brings its characters together, not to mention its bland people-are-people assurances, but the freshness of Dinklage’s performance makes for a handful of memorable moments. --S.A, (Bala; Ritz at the Bourse)

TIMELINE

Paul Walker and a crew of avid archeologists travel through a "wormhole" to Castlegard, France 1357 (during the Hundred Years War), to rescue their sent-back mentor (and Walker’s dad) Billy Connolly.With only a six-hour window, the crew -- including Walker’s romantic object (Frances O’Connor); Scottish action-heroic André (Gerard Butler); gung-ho John (Neal McDonough); and exquisitely timid François (Rossif Sutherland) -- assemble and act. Declaring his belief that "You make your own history," André promptly falls in love with a French Lady (Anna Friel), who speaks English intermittently and conveniently, and all the travelers kill someone -- rites of passage that would, presumably alter the future from whence they come. --C.F. (Bridge)

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