New Movie Shorts

BROKEN LIZARD'S CLUB DREAD

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

A psycho is loose

at a tropical resort,

killing sketch comics.

(UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

DIRTY DANCING: HAVANA NIGHTS

Romola Garai is Jennifer Grey, Diego Luna is Patrick Swayze, and Patrick Swayze is... still Patrick Swayze, only older, Garai’s dance instructor rather than her partner. She resists her Chrysler exec dad (John Slattery) and uptight mom (Sela Ward) by taking up with a local boy in 1958 Havana, thus adjusting the original film’s class-ethnic politics to class-race-national politics. These considerable changes are left mostly to serve as background for the impossible romance, though the fall of the Batista regime can’t really be secondary to anything (except maybe Ward’s hurt feelings). Adorably/annoyingly naive Garai brings her formal ballroom training (her parents used to dance before mom gave it up to raise two daughters -- that is, she’s resentful), while surprisingly lackluster Luna brings sex, sort of. And between beach and club montages, Swayze shows her how to bring it together. It’s too bad he’s only available for two minutes at a time, because he can really dance. Still. --Cindy Fuchs (UA Riverview)

OSAMA

In the opening moments of Siddiq Barmak’s film, shot in Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban, the camera is clubbed into submission by an angry soldier, which -- along with the title -- suggests a provocativeness the movie never quite lives up to. There is, of course, something inherently transgressive about its story, which concerns a young girl (Marina Golbahari) who poses as a boy named Osama to escape the Taliban’s repression (the film is set in 1996). The most overtly simple of styles, neo-realism demands the surest of hands, and Barmak sometimes shows his, not least in the scene where the girl undergoes a rite of manhood by bathing in a room full of boys, and yet somehow escapes detection. (The scene is effectively tense, but its implausibility costs the movie in the long run.) Similar to, though not as moving as, Majid Majidi’s Baran, Osama still offers a fairly astonishing (and almost unprecedented) deconstruction of Islamic masculinity, couched in terms too simple to merit such a bald description. --Sam Adams (See Sam Adams’ interview with director SiddiqBarmak.) (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

TAKING SIDES

Was one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich? Maestro of the Berlin Philharmonic Wilhelm Furtw…ngler was certainly a Nazi favorite: He was named to the Prussian Privy Council by Goering and made vice president of the Chamber of Music of the Third Reich by Goebbels. Yet he also helped many Jewish musicians to escape Germany. Director István Szabõ (Sunshine) means to conflict us with his melo-but-not-dramatic retelling of the real-life conductor’s symphony with the devil, however Furtw…ngler’s only real crime seems to have been a desire to subvert evil from the inside instead of fleeing his homeland and quitting his job. (He’d lose pretty handily in a complicity-off against, say, Leni Riefenstahl.) As a postwar American army investigator/grand inquisitor, Harvey Keitel does Ronald Harwood’s stage-adapted (and stagy) dialogue no favors with his inattentive, bombastic line readings. Stellan Skarsg"rd is terrific as the man who must face the music, managing shame and imperiousness in a single weary glance, but the material isn’t up to following his lead. --Ryan Godfrey (Ritz East; Ritz 16)

TWISTED

Ashley Judd stars in what seems like her 19th movie where she’s a tough yet vulnerable cop and then murders start happening and, holy jeez, maybe she’s next! This time Ashley’s a bit of a man’s lady whose one-night-stand boys keep ending up with their skulls caved in whenever she blacks out, which is whenever she drinks, which is all the time. Cop, potential victim and possibly the murderer? Philip Kaufman directs the film, who is known for middlebrow ruminations on perversity such as Quills and Henry and June. In fact, those are two of the three other films he’s made since 1990. There’s no good artistic reason for Kaufman to end his mini-Malick hibernation for the likes of Twisted, a standard curveball potboiler that tips its pitches. Was he drawn in by Judd’s really-quite-fetching Jean Seberg haircut? Or maybe the prospect of getting to work with Samuel L. Jackson’s Morgan Freeman impersonation? Or maybe making a film in which everybody smokes all the time, set in Clean Air Act California? Perversity, indeed. --R.G. (Bridge; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

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