May 6-12, 2004

movie shorts

Continuing Movie Shorts

13 GOING ON 30

After her 13-year-old consciousness skips into her 30-year-old body, Jennifer Garner’s Jenna is stunned to discover that she has bouncy new breasts and an apartment full of expensive outfits. This first awakening occurs just after the young Jenna has made a fairy-dusted wish to be grown up and popular, on her 13th birthday. As her initial excitement wears off, Jenna feels pressured by her high-power career and romance with a self-absorbed galoot of a New York Ranger (Samuel Ball). It’s also the occasion for Jenna’s reunion with old best friend Matt (now played by Mark Ruffalo). He’s now a scruffy, independent-minded photographer who’ll help rescue the magazine she works on from stodginess, exemplifying the moral course from which Jenna has strayed as she has so aggressively pursued cool-girlness. The concept is surely seductive and the fantasy part (at a slumber party with her 13-year-old girl neighbors, adult Jenna shares her delirious first kiss with Matt) is relentlessly charming, even thrilling. -- C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Grant; UA Riverview).

BOBBY JONES: STROKE OF GENIUS

The inadvertently masturbatory subtitle is all too apt for a movie which opens with the words, "Bobby Jones, LLC Presents." Starring Jim Caviezel as the adult version of the Jazz Age golf champ (Devon Gearhart and Thomas Lewis play younger version), Stroke of Genius never met a cliche it couldn’t wring the life from. Good shots arc neatly onto the green, while bad ones invariably hit trees or land in traps, inspiring much comical ducking in the gallery. Despite Jones’ reputation as a club-throwing spitfire, Caviezel’s characterization is devoid of life, a cipher in baggy knee pants. Bland as buttermilk and as safe as a pair of blunt scissors, this bloated TV movie is being marketed to Christian groups as family-friendly entertainment, which is fine if you don’t mind your kids growing up without a brain. Truth be told, I only made it through half of Stroke of Genius’ two-plus hours, but you don’t need to go 18 holes to know you’re playing with a duffer. --S.A. (Ritz 16)

BON VOYAGE

In comedy, they say, timing is everything. So while there’s not disputing the virtues of Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s well-mounted farce, it’s perhaps not unfair to suggest that this isn’t quite the moment for a wacky comedy about Nazi-era France. Starring Isabelle Adjani, Gérard Depardieu, Virginie Ledoyen and Peter Coyote, Bon Voyage recreates Vichy France with a luxuriousness that borders on nostalgia. The era of "les collaborateurs" is an open wound in the French body politic, one the recent debate over (non-)involvement in Iraq clearly ripped the scabs right off. But unlike André Téchiné’s Les 'garés or, from the sound of it, Bertrand Tavernier’s Safe Conduct (going straight to DVD in May), Bon Voyage is a mere Band-Aid, a cup of warm milk instead of a wake-up call. Were it released in a hermetically sealed bubble, Bon Voyage might be a minor triumph; in the open air, it seems like a pitifully inadequate response. --S.A. (Bala; Ritz East; Ritz 16)

CONNIE AND CARLA

Borrowing liberally from Some Like It Hot and Victor/ Victoria, Nia Vardalos’ new comedy is as self-absorbed as her first. After they witness a murder in Chicago, Liza-and-Barbra-loving airport bar singers Connie (Vardalos) and Carla (Toni Collette) escape to the West Coast, where they don big wigs in order to hide out as drag queens. This leads to Connie’s near-romance with Jeff (David Duchovny), homophobic brother of one of their new friends (Stephen Spinella). The film allows some questions concerning traditional gender, but its celebration of "being yourself" is a little strange, given the girls’ incessant lying to their generous and trusting hosts. --C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

ELLA ENCHANTED

Cursed at birth by her hardcore fairy aunt (Vivica A. Fox), Ella (Anne Hathaway) must obey every order she gets. Problem is, she’s a would-be social activist in a kingdom where the bad ruler (Cary Elwes, in a nicely snarky turn reversing his role in Princess Bride) has enslaved the ogres, giants and elves. And so Ella aspires to rebellion. Thwarting her are her stepmother (AbFab’s Joanna Lumley) and selfish stepsister (Lucy Punch); in her corner are an elf who wants to be a lawyer (Steve Coogan) and Prince Char (Hugh Dancy), about to be crowned king. Based on Gail Carson Levine’s book, the movie energetically pursues a finale where Ella can have her cake and eat it too (i.e., her proto-feminist independence and her prince). While Hathaway is surely lovely, she’s also hampered by a plot that’s simultaneously predictable and cluttered, criminal underuse of Parminder K. Nagra as Ella’s best friend, and too much general borrowing from Shrek. --C.F. (UA Riverview)

ENVY

Ben Stiller and Jack Black are best friends, neighbors and co-workers at a sandpaper plant, the former slightly snooty and the latter slightly unfocused. When Black makes a gazillion dollars on a spray that disappears dog poo ("Va-poo-rize"), Stiller succumbs to jealousy: "It’s all from shit!" he mutters repeatedly. Black and wife Amy Poehler conspicuously consume: yellow Lamborghini, gaudy mansion, bowling alley, carousel, pool and a horse named Corky in the backyard. Stiller fumes until his wife (Rachel Weisz, who does her best to pretend she’s got a role here) wearies of his increasing obsession with what he’s missing and leaves with the kids. Enter Christopher Walken as a "bum" who encourages his new buddy Stiller to seek revenge (or, as he puts it, to "shake things up"). The disasters that follow are muddled and slow-moving, with occasional time-outs for Black or Stiller to act out his signature silliness. Scheduled to open a year ago, Envy is as dopey, uninventive and smug as you’d expect from a movie that’s "all from shit." --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

Considering Charlie Kaufman’s obvious antipathy to cliche, it’s a shock to see him approaching the idea of romance, even with a pair of oven mitts. Eternal Sunshine is a love story, but a love story in reverse. Clementine (Kate Winslet) and Joel (Jim Carrey) fall for each other in the first 10 minutes, and then, all of a sudden, Joel is mourning her loss: One second she’s fetching her toothbrush, the next he’s sobbing uncontrollably behind the wheel of his car. Instead of not returning Joel’s phone calls, Clementine has hired a company to wipe all memory of him from her mind. No muss, no fuss. After some soul-searching, he decides to erase Clementine as well. In fact, we start to realize, he’s already made the decision: We’ve been watching his memories, which are being erased before our eyes. Director Michel Gondry gives Kaufman’s conceits weight and form, tethering them to earth. As the process further ravages Joel’s psyche, we get a sense of the hangover to come. Such convolutions require absolute simplicity from the actors, who also include Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst and Elijah Wood. Though Gondry makes sparing use of digital effects, most of his tricks are accomplished in-camera, or through simple stagecraft. With its endless slippages, Eternal Sunshine mimics the way memory works better than any movie since Sans Soleil, even if Gondry is more of a mad scientist than a film poet. --S.A. (Bridge; Ritz 16)

GLOOMY SUNDAY

Adapted and directed by Rolf Schübel, Gloomy Sunday grafts a tired period melodrama onto the legend of the titular song, made infamous in late ’30s Europe when media reports hyped it as the soundtrack to a rash of suicides. (The German subtitle is "a song of love and death.") The Jewish owner of a chic Budapest eatery (Joachim Krõl) hires a new pianist (Stefano Dionisi, a fictional stand-in for the song’s authors), with whom he must then share the affections of the restaurant’s beautiful manager (Erika Marozsán). The central threesome is played out with an unconvincing lack of complication, and the Holocaust is depicted as little more than an inconvenient intrusion into this blissful ménage. Facts are wholly discarded in favor of endless musing about the "true meaning" of the song, as if music was easily translatable into platitudes. -- S.B. (Ritz Five)

GODSEND

At the beginning of Nick Hamm’s misshapen, derivative unthriller, Greg Kinnear is headed home with a birthday present for 8-year-old Adam (Cameron Bright). Shortcutting through an alley, he’s almost mugged by a former student (Merwin Mondesir). The kid lets him go: "He’s cool man, he’s the best teacher I ever had," he tells his mugging-buddy. While the reason for this scene is hardly obvious, it does suggest that Kinnear should know something about biology -- which he then goes on to ignore completely when Adam dies tragically and grieving mom Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is approached by an old teacher of hers, odious Robert De Niro. Short version: he clones Adam and relocates the family so he can oversee all they do. When Adam 2 starts having nightmares and misbehaving, the movie lifts from multiple sources (The Omen, Pet Semetary, and Ö listen for the barely revised quotation from The Shining: "Danny isn’t here, Mrs. Torrance!"). Long on atmosphere (snowy streets, echoey hallways, abandoned buildings that conjure windstorm effects as soon as you walk inside) Kinnear puts the pieces together (with the help of Janet Bailey’s wise, damaged nanny), Romijn puts herself in danger and the kid puts hammers in a couple of skulls. All preposterous, all the time. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

GOOD BYE LENIN!

Germany’s capacity for overlooking its own history may be rivaled among Western nations only by the U.S.’s, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Wolfgang Becker’s toothless, cartoonish re-enactment of the fall of the Berlin Wall has been a commercial and critical hit at home. Alex (Daniel Brühl) is the son of a faithful East German party member (Katrin Saß) with no particular allegiance of his own. As a sullen 18-year-old, he narrates the end of East Germany: "Some people wanted to take a walk without the Wall getting in their way." The end of communism is too much for dear old mum; she has a heart attack and slips into a coma, and when she awakens, it’s eight months later and she has no idea what’s transpired. Trying to save her weak heart, Alex arranges an elaborate charade, keeping her bedridden, playing tapes of old GDR broadcasts so she’ll think nothing has changed. There’s a joke about communist-enforced amnesia buried not too far below the surface, but Becker botches the execution by reducing the difference between East and West to changing pickle-bottle labels. (Mom wants the good old East Germany stuff, but all Alex can find is gherkins imported from Holland.) There’s no sense of the culture that might have been lost, the opportunity squandered, when the Wall fell, nor of the gains made when it did. There are a few neat twists in Alex’s charade -- when mom spies footage of Germans flooding over the wall, Alex tells her it’s Wessies desperate to escape capitalist exploitation -- but Becker ultimately reduces history to a puppet show. --S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse)

HELLBOY

As Shelley Duval was born to play Olive Oyl, so too, Ron Perlman seems destined for Hellboy, protagonist of Mike Mignola’s beloved Dark Horse Comic. He swaggers and slumps, wolfs Baby Ruths and wields his huge stone hand, all with affable authority. The film around him is lovingly detailed by Guillermo del Toro (including some terrific Cronos-like gooey mechanics), but it’s also uneven, sometimes very smart and too often repeats superhero/SF movie conventions. A baby demon summoned to earth in 1944 by Nazi occultists and a resurrected Rasputin (Karel Roden), Hellboy currently works with his aging adoptive father (John Hurt) at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, battling monsters with Abe Sapien (embodied by Doug Jones, voiced by David Hyde-Pierce), filing his devil’s horns (so he can "fit in") and yearning for his one true love, firestarter Liz (Selma Blair), whose blue-flamey spurts are the film’s weakest. For all the impressive action and effects (Perlman’s bright-red makeup, courtesy Rick Baker; the hound of resurrection "Sammael"; the ninja-Nazi Kroenen), the film’s most effective scene has Hellboy receiving cookies and romantic advice from a nine-year-old boy. --C.F. (UA 69th St.; UA Riverview)

I'M NOT SCARED

Adapted by Niccol Ammaniti from his novel, Gabriele Salvatores’ film paints a simultaneously grim and romantic portrait of a child’s disillusionment. One hot summer’s day in southern Italy, 9-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Christiano) is playing with his friends, when he discovers a boy in a hole. Filippo (Mattia Di Pierro) is also nearly blinded by the weeks he’s been living in darkness. Michele overcomes his fear to feed and befriend this poor child, also 9. Even as Michele spends his evenings with his gentle mother (Aitana Sánchez-Gijõn) and stern father (Dino Abbrescia), he comes to understand Filippo’s fear, to empathize with his trauma. Though the plot occasionally lurches into melodrama, Italo Petriccione’s stunning cinematography and Massimo Fiocchi’s delicate editing make Michele’s journeys -- emotional and physical -- feel nuanced. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz East; Ritz 16)

INTERMISSION

Written by Mark O’Rowe and directed by John Crowley, both Irish theater veterans making their screen debut, the ensemble people-in-trouble drama Intermission has been persistently tagged with comparisons to Robert Altman, which just proves that most critics’ eyes don’t work any better than their heads. With their sideways-slipping camera, Altman’s movies are about the ways in which people, like it or not, are all connected; Crowley and O’Rowe’s fashionably nihilistic drama (with a slap-happy ending smushed on) is about the ways in which they don’t or can’t connect. Cillian Murphy’s anomic supermarket clerk and Kelly Macdonald’s put-upon girlfriend are the center of an ensemble cast that also includes Colm Meaney (a splendidly hammy turn as a tough-guy police detective), Collin Farrell (doing his charming bad-boy thing, again) and Shirley Henderson, who makes the most out of a fundamentally demeaning role. The men are indecisive, the women done-to instead of doing (none of them seem to have jobs, or lives that aren’t defined by their relationships with men), and despite a transit bus accident designed to make things "cinematic," the action is staid and stagey. Time out. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

JERSEY GIRL

The switch to "adult" material doesn’t make Kevin Smith’s latest movie any less juvenile. Though for once it doesn’t look like crap (courtesy of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond), Jersey Girl is even more putrid than Smith’s usual fare. The awkwardness of Smith’s writing is only thrown into relief by his focus on characters who inhabit something like the real world. As a PR flack putting his life back together after the death of his wife (Jennifer Lopez), Ben Affleck is moderately less annoying than he was in Gigli, but George Carlin compensates by turning in the most hamhanded performance of his career as Affleck’s Joe Lunchpail dad. Returned to Jersey after a bereaved temper tantrum (but, like, funny!) costs him his job, Affleck is humbled by the bounce from the Big Apple to his ancestral homeland of North Jersey, and forced to connect with his daughter (uncanny Lo-alike Raquel Castro), who can of course be counted on to say something precious and adorable whenever time permits. About the only person who comes of the mess unscathed is Liv Tyler, whose flirtatious vid-store clerk is the only thing close to a likeable character. Tyler has never been more natural or appealing on screen; it’s a pity her best performance is stuck in such an awful movie. --S.A. (Ritz 16)

JOHNSON FAMILY VACATION

Brand-new bride Solange Knowles plays Nikki, the willful adolescent daughter of Cedric the Entertainer, resisting a road-trip vacation to a family reunion in Missouri. While she’s dreading the days in her dad’s SUV with her mom/his estranged wife (Vanessa Williams), her wannabe rapper brother (Bow Wow), and baby sis (Gabby Soleil), she has better reason to worry than she knows: Christopher Erskin’s film proceeds as if by accident, a series of driving mishaps, fart gags, sexual innuendoes and naked Cedric jokes (the "script" is attributed to Todd Jones and Earl Richey Jones). Along the way, they pick up flaky hitchhiker Shannon Elizabeth, whose baby alligator escapes just in time to cause chaos then unity among the Johnsons. By the time they reach the reunion to compete for the family of the year prize (also coveted by Cedric’s smug brother, Steve Harvey), the film has devolved into complete incoherence. Exhibit A: Vanessa Williams singing backup for performing with Cedric and Bow Wow. -- C.F. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

KILL BILL, VOL. 2

In its first segment, Quentin Tarantino reminds you what a thrilling filmmaker he can be. The Bride (Uma Thurman) and Bill (David Carradine) square off in their first onscreen meeting, captured in widescreen black-and-white against a dusty Texas plain, the language of the Western rewritten to accommodate a dispute between ex-lovers. Unfortunately, QT quickly reminds you what a tiresome dilettante he can be as well, paying "tribute" to dozens of styles without making any of them wholly his own. What animates the best genre films is conviction, but Kill Bill is like a DVD changer on shuffle, its stylistic shifts conveying nothing except the breadth of Tarantino’s video collection. (An affectionately silly Shaw Bros. parody goes on punishingly long, practically demanding that audiences toke up in the bathroom first.) Any 20 minutes of Kill Bill might have developed into a great movie, but the only thing Tarantino was developing was film. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA Riverview)

THE LADYKILLERS

Joel and Ethan Coen’s remake of the 1955 Ealing Studios comedy retains only its premise: five would-be robbers rent a room from a old woman to plot their crime, then consider doing her in when she stumbles on their scheme. Irma Hall’s Marva Munson is an imposing widow. The "inside man" at the riverboat casino they plan to rob, Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans) butts heads with The General (Tzi Ma), a former North Vietnamese tunnel digger. The "muscle", Lump (Ryan Hurst), is similarly taciturn. And then there’s Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D (Tom Hanks). In a white three-piece suit and matching cape, with a soft Southern drawl, he’s a satanic Foghorn Leghorn, saved from damnation by his own incompetence. --S.A. (Ritz 16)

LAWS OF ATTRACTION

Radiant as ever, Julianne Moore here reveals game comic timing, in particular with Frances Fisher, who plays her mother. Unfortunately, she spends more time on screen with romantic object and rival divorce attorney Pierce Brosnan. Ostensibly smitten on their first antagonistic meeting, he pursues her by showing her up, repeatedly, as if she must be "put in her place" in order to realize her own deep feelings for Mr. Too Cool for School. The film takes what seems a very long time to get the couple hooked up, split, reunited, then split and reunited again, by way of a nasty divorce case that takes them both to Ireland (Brosnan’s favorite location of late), where they endure It Happened One Night-ish road-tripping. While it might aspire to the witty fun of Adam’s Rib, Peter Howitt’s film doesn’t even manage the clever obnoxiousness of Intolerable Cruelty. The pace is plodding, the jokes grating and the lesson for Moore (as a tough dame who’s vulnerable on the inside, indicated by her affection of Hostess Sno Balls) means that her man gets to have his way. --C.F.(Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

MAN ON FIRE

Either Donald Rumsfeld’s wet dream or the sequel to The Passion of the Christ, Man on Fire features Denzel Washington as God’s Warrior (Creasy to the ungodly), a Bible-reading former covert ops agent and current alcoholic whose vengeance is unleashed when the cuddly kid he’s bodyguarding (the preternaturally astute Dakota Fanning) is kidnapped and killed by a group of Mexican thugs. With scars on his hands and wounds (from the kidnapping) that won’t stop bleeding, he’s Dirty Harry with stigmata. You can only imagine adaptor Brian Helgeland saved all his good vengeance-related lines for Mystic River, leaving Christopher Walken to choke on shit sandwiches like "Creasy’s art is death, and he’s about to paint his masterpiece." By comparison, Irreversible seems like a work of philosophy and moral conviction. --S.A.(AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

MEAN GIRLS

When Cady (Lindsay Lohan) attends her first day of high school, she’s startled to see just how strictly the other kids adhere to their habits. This leads to one of Mean Girls’ repeated metaphors: As she’s spent her childhood being homeschooled by her anthropologist parents in Africa, Cady envisions her new classmates as inhabitants of a "wild" habitat. Luckily, she’s soon adopted by fellow mavericks, lesbian goth Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and flamingly gay Damian (Daniel Franzese). Most aggressive among the packs is the Plastics, comprised of Queen Bee Regina (Rachel McAdams) and her wannabe minions Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) and Karen (Amanda Seyfried). When Regina takes a liking to "new meat" Cady, Janis and Damien send her forth on a mission to infiltrate the enemy pod and return with information. Little does Cady know that Janis has a personal history with Regina, or that she will develop her own personal investment, in the form of a crush on Aaron (Jonathan Bennett), Regina’s ex, whom this uber-mean-girl immediately repossesses once she perceives Cady’s interest. Directed by Mark Waters (Lohan’s Freaky Friday), Tina Fey’s script reveals the multiple ways that kids mimic "grownup" behaviors, even as they resist them. -- C.F. (Bryn Mawr; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

MONSIEUR IBRAHIM

Gazing out his window in mid-’60s Paris, young Moses (Pierre Boulanger) is distracted by the hookers who work la rue Bleue. While Timmy Thomas’ "Why Can’t We Live Together" fills the soundtrack, the boy imagines escape from his depressive father’s dark, airless apartment. Moses finds some respite in the corner store, owned by a Sufi "from the Golden Crescent," Ibrahim (Omar Sharif), who teaches him generosity, joy and trust. Following some misadventures with a local girl and other crises, Moses accompanies Ibrahim on a drive to Turkey, where the mentor imparts more life lessons, including an appreciation of the sensual logic of dancing (demonstrated by a set of whirling dervishes). By the end, the film is written into a corner, resorting to the tritest of resolutions. Given its dependence on stereotypes and cliches -- the golden-hearted hookers, the flinty Jewish father -- the finale is not surprising, but it is disappointing. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

THE PUNISHER

Like the low-grade 1989 adaptation starring Dolph Lundgren, screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh’s first film is based on the Marvel Comics character, a dark, hard-R fantasy in which FBI agent Frank Castle (Thomas Jane) loses his family (some 30 people) when a Tampa, Fla.-based money launderer (John Travolta) orders a hit. Actually, his wife (Laura Harring) orders it, following the FBI’s accidental shooting of her son. Almost dead, Frank is nursed back to life by a black "witch doctor" in Puerto Rico (he’d look like a Magical Negro if he were more visible). He destroys Travolta’s business and personal life, kills hit men and makes friends with his neighbor and diner waitress (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos). -- C.F. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA Riverview)

ROBOT STORIES

As even a casual science-fiction fan knows, stories about robots are really stories about humans, a truth vividly borne out in Greg Pak’s four-part anthology. "The Robot Fixer," in fact, isn’t even nominally sci-fi, focusing on a mother (Wai Ching Ho) whose grief over her comatose son manifests itself in an obsessive desire to complete his childhood collection of toy robots. Coincidentally, it’s also the only story that feels like it’s just the right length. Both "My Robot Baby," where a professional couple try out a mechanical infant to win the right to have a real child, and "Clay," where a dying sculptor resists computerized immortality, leave tantalizing possibilities unexplored, while the tiresome "Machine Love," starring Pak as a robotic office temp who starts to develop urges of the flesh, wears out its welcome in 15 minutes. But better too many ideas than too few, especially in the benighted field of modern film sci-fi. (Maybe Pak can work out some kind of exchange program with the Wachowski brothers.) The film’s minuscule budget unavoidably detracts from the seductiveness of its visions, but Pak turns chintziness into a virtue; the Weeble-like design of the first segment’s robot baby only underlines the segment’s comic absurdity. Cash-poor but concept-rich, Robot Stories stimulates the imagination instead of suffocating it. --S.A. (Ritz Five)

SCOOBY-DOO 2: MONSTERS UNLEASHED

Someone’s stealing super-villainish costumes from the Coolsonian Criminology Museum, and transforming them into corny monsters. Egged on by a snotty reporter (Alicia Silverstone), the Mystery Inc-ers swing into action: Velma (Linda Cardellini) seduces a nerdy curator (Seth Green); Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar) briefly plays Buffy (martial-artsing the monsters); Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.) wears blue; Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) worries he’s not pulling his "heroic" weight ; and Scooby goes undercover in a pimp suit and Afro wig. --C.F. (UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham)

SHADE

First-time director Damian Nieman has recruited a who’s who of B-list stars for this tale of high-stakes Vegas grifters. But the plot never stops twisting stop long enough to let their characters to develop. Gabriel Byrne, Stuart Townsend and Thandie Newton play a trio of con artists aiming to outfox "the Dean" of crooked poker (Sylvester Stallone) while on the run from Mafia hit men. The story is an impersonal pastiche of genre conventions, and Nieman’s stylistic gimmicks -- multiple dissolves, jump cuts, freeze frames -- aren’t enough to disguise the somnolent pace and disinterested performances. The end result is claustrophobically reliant on other people’s films; Shade is at least three generations removed from authentic emotion. --Shaun Brady (UA Riverview)

SHAOLIN SOCCER

Seeking a "union of mind and foot," a ragged group of Shaolin monks team up to fight evil on the soccer field in Stephen Chow’s goofy, pinball-machine romp. Comically out of shape, the players are whipped by their first opponents, who aren’t above hiding the occasional monkey wrench in their shorts, but Team Shaolin magically (and inexplicably) get their groove back, leaping through the air as if it’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Fullback. (The likably cheesy digital effects provide a helping hand.) Chow hops styles as nimbly as his players hop defenders, swerving from affectionate martial arts homage to James Bond parody, always keeping the ball moving. Best of all, it’s a sports movie that limits itself to a single shot of a scoreboard. Miramax has kept this one inexplicably sitting on its shelves for years. A red card for them, but the movie gets nothing but net. --S.A. (Ritz Five)

WALKING TALL

After eight years with the U.S. Special Forces, Sgt. Chris Vaughn (The Rock) has fond memories of his old home in Washington state. He especially misses the smell of cedar chips at the mill where his dad used to work. But when Chris returns, bad news awaits him. The town has changed. As Chris walks from the ferry to his parents’ house, he passes signs of trouble: stores advertise porn and liquor, a mother has left her infant on the sidewalk while she scores drugs in an alley, the mill is closed. He frowns. Sheriff Watkins (Michael Bowen) happens by, just in time to explain, "It’s simple economics." So far, so like the 1973 version of Walking Tall. Like the first movie, this one is "inspired by the true story" of Buford Pusser, the righteous underdog who straightened out his corrupted Tennessee town by swinging a big stick. Here, he has a family to defend: his sister Michelle (Kristen Wilson) lives with their parents with her son, Pete (Khleo Thomas), who’s just rebellious enough to need schooling by a father figure. In tackling the local casino, true, he does lose his great big truck, but this version of Walking Tall offers no context and no particular lessons learned, except that big sticks work. -- C.F. (UA Riverview)