January 6-12, 2005

movie shorts

Continuing Movie Shorts

THE AVIATOR

Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) is pulled from the crash of an XF-11, suffering burns over 70 percent of his body. In the hospital, the harrowing is hardly over. Hughes' accountant Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) hovers by his bedside, bearing another warning: The U.S. has grounded his prospective fleet and Hughes Aircraft is going under. Hughes is undeterred. As retold by Martin Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan, the spectacular deterioration of Howard Hughes here takes a pause so that he can play American Hero, the mind behind TWA, fighting the evils of big business — namely the mutual back-scratching of government. Focused on his grandest years, The Aviator portrays Hughes as a rebel, a genius and naive romantic — not only in his thinking about aviation as a means to benefit humanity, but also in his appeal for one of Hollywood's most beautiful iconoclasts, Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett). --Cindy Fuchs (Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

BEYOND THE SEA

In this misbegotten Bobby Darin biopic, Kevin Spacey can't sing, can't dance, and is 20 years too old for the part (Darin died at 37; Spacey is 45). None of that, however, is as big an obstacle as the kind of actor Spacey's become — visibly arrogant, rigid, so closed-off that even playing emotionally stunted characters can't cover his lack of involvement. The film threatens to evolve into something when the tuxedo-clad Darin, anguished over his failing marriage to alcoholic Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth), tries to reinvent himself as a Vietnam-era folksinger. The audience's hostility to "Bob" Darin may be a self-serving portrait of a misunderstood artist, but it also casts Spacey as a man desperate to reveal his inner self to an unfeeling audience who only wants what they've already seen. --Sam Adams (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

BIRTH

Given its premise — wealthy widow is stalked by a 10-year-old who claims to be her dead husband — it's tempting to dismiss Birth as New Age piffle, if not for the people involved: Sexy Beast director Jonathan Glazer and co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriére (That Obscure Object of Desire). Rarely has a director placed so much trust in an actress: Nicole Kidman's conversion from skeptic to believer is conveyed in an unbroken three-minute take focused solely on her face as Wagner blares around her. As her suitably baffled fiance, Danny Huston redeems himself for Silver City, and Lauren Bacall is a magnificent ice sculpture as Kidman's society-matron mother. But the movie belongs to Cameron Bright as the maybe-he-is 10-year-old. --S.A. (UA Riverview)

BLADE: TRINITY

Wesley Snipes attempts to channel Clint Eastwood for a third time as stoic badass Blade, in the process dumping dead-weight mentor Kris Kristofferson in favor of Jessica Biel, her midriff and a comic relief band of vampire hunters. Armed with an arsenal of high-tech weaponry, they take on a group of well-financed bloodsuckers led by Parker Posey and WWE wrestler Triple H (seriously) in order to once again make the world safe for Goth chicks. --S.B.(AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

CLOSER

Alice (Natalie Portman), a stripper, has fled New York for London, and meets Dan (Jude Law) when she's hit by a car. He gets her to the hospital, and a year later they're a couple; she's waiting tables, and he's hoping his soon-to-be-published first novel will get him off the obituaries desk. But Dan is soon making eyes at Anna (Julia Roberts) while she's attempting to snap his dust-jacket photo. Anna hooks up with Larry (Clive Owen), a dermatologist with a fondness for sex chat rooms, but gradually succumbs to Dan's obsession with her. Alice gets kicked around like a doe-eyed football and eventually goes back to stripping. And Larry, the self-described "caveman," exerts the only power he has: He pays Alice to expose herself to him, although Nichols positions the camera so Owen's head squarely blocks Portman's crotch. In essence, that shot is everything that's wrong with Closer, a movie that wants credit for candor without exhibiting any. — S.A.(Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

DARKNESS

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Just like House Party

except replace Kid n' Play

with ghosts n' murder

(AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

FAT ALBERT

America's favorite crotchety grandfather, Bill Cosby, brings his '70s cartoon out of the television and into modern-day North Philly, thereby proving himself out of touch with several generations at once. Didactic as it may have been, the original show depicted a group of inner-city kids dealing with actual problems; the gang's transformation into clueless aliens unable to comprehend the world of today is almost too easily linked to their creator's recent well-publicized tirades. The script, by Cosby and Charles Kipps, is cruelly dismissive of the original characters, gradually shedding each of their distinctive idiosyncrasies and ridiculing their platitudinous problem-solving at the same time as they indulge in it. --S.B. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Finding Neverland

Johnny Depp plays J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan and the center of Marc Forster's film, as an ordinary man yearning to create something extraordinary. Stuck in a passionless upper-class marriage, his playwrighting career on the wane, Barrie takes up with widow Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her four young boys, all rattled by her husband's recent death. (In real life, she had five sons, and her husband survived to see the play's premiere, but who's counting?) Promptly buckling his swash, Barrie spins yarns that raise the kiddies' spirits and his own, though dubious Peter (Freddie Highmore) keeps one foot on the ground. There's the widow's grinchy mother-in-law (Julie Christie) sporting a hook for a hand, and the door in Barrie's house that seems to open into a jungle wilderness. Finding Neverland ostensibly charts the real-life origins of Barrie's enduring fantasia, but its main purpose is to ratify escapism, which seems less like a defense of Barrie's work than the film's own. — S. A. (UA Riverview)

FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX

The 1965 original version of The Flight of the Phoenix may have been no masterpiece, but the film's director Robert Aldrich was always a keen observer of men under pressure. The remake's script, by Scott Frank and Edward Burns, sticks closely to the original plotwise, but jettisons original screenwriter Lukas Heller's clearly delineated personalities in favor of a multi-culti, one-from-each-column gaggle of races, accents and genders. The focus therefore shifts from characters in conflict to action set pieces, one-liners and, of course, pop-song montages. Dennis Quaid is better suited to the rugged captain role than Jimmy Stewart, perhaps, but he is convinced to help reconstruct his mangled plane by the hoariest "everyone has hopes and dreams" speech possible short of breaking into song. --S.B. (UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS

House of Flying Daggers is as fond a tribute to martial arts classics as the Kill Bills, if a significantly less frenetic one. Unlike the abstract backdrops of Zhang Yimou's belatedly released Hero, House is set in familiar locations: two-tiered teahouses, bamboo forests, opulent palaces. But Zhang's vibrant lyricism, his operatic dynamics, give the genre new aesthetic life, while the film's fluid, fantastic action sequences pay mind to its basic appeal. Self-consciously classicist, the story of two police deputies trying to track down an anti-imperial secret society is shamelessly thin, merely thread strung between torrid, neck-up love scenes and awesome battles as unreal as they are captivating. It takes nothing away from Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro, who play the pursuing, identity-switching deputies, to say that the movie rests squarely on Zhang Ziyi's supple shoulders. As Mei, a blind courtesan recruited to infiltrate the Flying Daggers, she manifests a faraway calm that shifts to a knife-edge acuity the moment she goes on the attack. — S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

THE INCREDIBLES

After Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) and wife, Helen (Holly Hunter), who used to be better known as Elastigirl, are forced into super-hero retirement, but return to fight Syndrome (Jason Lee), a powerless human who's been jealously killing off supers so he can take their place. Death may have been the pretext of Pixar's Finding Nemo, but in The Incredibles it's a constant presence. Writer-director Brad Bird doesn't abandon the rubbery expressiveness of cartoon characters, but the world around them is, at times, stunningly realistic. The Incredibles suggests that the smart money is on making cartoons more like people, rather than turning people into cartoons. — S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Riverview)

KINSEY

The fact that his work was sex made Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) something of a sensation during his lifetime. It also makes him alarmingly relevant today, as conservative movements increasingly seek to close down sex education, even discussions about sex (and evolution, for that matter). How strange this argument would be to Kinsey, whose dedication to science led him to reject moral judgments so that he might discover the ways that desires create social and political systems, dictate norms and create uncertainties. As they recur throughout the film, Kinsey's interviews with patients serve as a structural motif, a frame on which to hang a set of biographical flashbacks. Such resolute honesty leads to misunderstandings when he starts experimenting sexually. He feels the need to confess to his wife, the stunningly perceptive Clara McMillen (Laura Linney), whom he meets when he's a professor and she's a student at Indiana. All these factual events appear in the film as bits of scenes, gestures toward plot that don't so much explain or even reveal the man's life as much as they set up the more intricate and less delineated emotional journeys both Kinsey and Mac undertake. -- C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse)

LEMONY SNICKET'S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS

It's likely that no treatment of Lemony Snicket's, er, Daniel Handler's morbidly fascinating young-adult series about the manifold travails of the Baudelaire orphans — Violet, Klaus and baby Sunny — at the hands of their evil guardian Count Olaf (Jim Carrey) would completely satisfy hardcore fans. But, attempting to weave together the plotlines of the serial's first three installments — there are now 11, with two more on the way — the film skimps on pacing and the development of the series linchpins: the Baudelaires. Silberling seems in a rush to give face time to his name stars, including Meryl Streep (Aunt Josephine), Billy Connolly (the criminally underdeveloped Uncle Monty), Cedric the Entertainer (shoehorned in as "detective") and Jude Law (narrator Snicket). This is to say nothing of slapdash plotline chicanery and the revelation of series secrets that those who've read through Book the Eleventh: The Grim Grotto had yet to discover. It's one thing to flub a movie adaptation and quite another to cannibalize the source material. --Brian Howard (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU

At its heart, Wes Anderson's film is an ardent, eloquent defense of artistic fakery, and its ability to trigger emotions that are themselves quite real. Like the cast of any adventure movie, Steve Zissou's crew is a motley one, which Anderson composes with internationalist flair, from the Sikh cameraman to the Brazilian mate (City of God's Seu Jorge). There's Willem Dafoe as right-hand man Klaus Daimler; Owen Wilson as Ned Plimpton, the commuter pilot who may or may not be Zissou's illegitimate son; and Cate Blanchett as Jane Winslett-Richardson, the visibly pregnant British journalist whose story may be Zissou's last shot at a comeback. It seems audiences have begun to suspect that Zissou's documentaries are not, shall we say, entirely factual, which may explain why Zissou's boat seems to boast many more filmmakers than oceanographers. Anderson quite explicitly couldn't care if Zissou's films are real or not; the moment when Zissou exclaims, "It's a documentary — it's all really happening!" comes at the end of a bravura tracking shot designed to reveal that Zissou's four-story boat is, in fact, a giant cutaway set. — S.A. (Bala; Ritz East; Ritz 16)

THE MACHINIST

Christian Bale is so skinny he'd disappear if you looked at him from the wrong angle, which unfortunately goes for this movie as well. Director Brad Anderson whips up plenty of industrial-noir style, but the movie's semi-sci-fi look feels like an affectation, more reflexive than reflective. An insomniac who says he hasn't slept in a year, Bale is menaced by an unseen presence who leaves Post-its on his refrigerator and apparently removes the light bulbs in his Stygian apartment. Anderson's technically skilled enough to make you feel like a satisfactory explanation's coming, but that just heightens the disappointment when it doesn't. --S.A.(Roxy)

MEET THE FOCKERS

Jinx the cat returns, as do neurotic nurse Greg Focker (Ben Stiller), his banal fiancee (Teri Polo), her parents — grumpy Jack (Robert DeNiro) and long-suffering Dina (Blythe Danner) — and their infant grandson. All take Jack's Kevlar-reinforced RV to Miami to meet Greg's sex-therapist mom (Barbra Streisand) and retired lawyer dad (Dustin Hoffman). As in the original film, the predominant mode here is over-the-top: Unlike former CIA agent Jack, the Fockers are brash, generous and fond of whipped cream in bed. They reject Jack's militarism, celebrate their son's mediocrity and encourage Dina to experiment with new seduction techniques. Framed alongside DeNiro's rubber face, Stiller's stunned stutter and Hoffman's leathery grin, the women are generally reduced to reacting. The exception is Streisand, of course, who brings her own barrage. — C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

NATIONAL TREASURE

"In order to protect the Declaration of Independence, we have to steal it," says maverick historian Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage), providing a trailer-friendly plot summary. National Treasure ought to be merely laughable: Director Jon Turteltaub hits the ground flat-footed, Cage stumbles over his pseudo-erudite witticisms, and Justin Bartha adds another notch to his shame belt as Cage's non sequitur-spouting sidekick. But there's something deeply offensive about a movie that implies the only way to get Americans to value the country's founding document is to stick a treasure map on the flip side, not to mention one whose America is functionally whites-only. On the plus side, the filmmakers do seem to know which way the Reading Terminal Market is from Independence Mall, if not how long it takes to run the distance. But they can only yell "Fifth and Chestnut!" so many times. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Narberth; UA 69th St.; UA Riverview)

OCEAN'S TWELVE

This sequel to a flyweight remake gives Steven Soderbergh and his slightly expanded cast the chance to take it easy. But if Andy Garcia's casino boss has threatened to bury all 11 of the first movie's thieves unless they return his $160 million, with interest, there's no reason that should stop them cracking wise. Apart from a few maudlin interludes, most involving Catherine Zeta-Jones' newly assigned Europol detective, the film's resolute determination not to take itself seriously is its most charming asset. But if you're hoping to get by on nothing but ambient coolness, it's not wise to lock up Bernie Mac for most of the movie. With gliding zooms and grainy stock, Soderbergh does his best to loosen things up a la Altman, but Elliott Gould and a few film references can't turn Ocean's Twelve into The Long Goodbye. When The Limey followed Out of Sight, it seemed Soderbergh might be on his way to developing his own brand of inventive genre storytelling, but his movies since have been split between aggressively substanceless entertainments and self-conscious art-house fare, as if there were no way to reconcile the two. Soderbergh has shown he has the skill, but he evidently lacks the will. — S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Narberth; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

Ostentatious and cumbersome, Joel Schumacher's adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's opera maintains the essential vulgarities. Aspiring singer Christine (Emmy Rossum) must choose between her teacher, the Phantom (Gerard Butler), who promotes "the music of the night," and her childhood sweetheart, Raoul (Patrick Wilson). Turned mean by reactions to his ravaged face, the Phantom can only possess and demand; rich kid Raoul, on the other hand, is the new owner of the Opera Populaire and so offers a career (as Christine replaces Minnie Driver's ridiculous diva) as well as stolen kisses on a snowy rooftop. A flashback structure (fading from black-and-white "present" Paris to the colorful "past") awkwardly replaces the stage show's acts. --C.F. (Narberth; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

THE POLAR EXPRESS

A digitally animated version of Chris Van Allsburg's children's book, the film was created using "performance capture" technology that uses real actors' movements and facial expressions as the basis for animation. Tom Hanks "plays" five characters, among them a little boy who boards a magical North Pole-bound train on Christmas Eve, the train's conductor and an evanescent hobo. But The Polar Express doesn't expand on the idea that most of the people in the boy's fantasy are extensions of himself. Like most Christmas movies, it's an elaborate, overstuffed ploy that pays lip service to faith and goodwill while serving up a decadent banquet of ocular trinkets. — S.A. (AMC Orleans; Narberth; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

RAY

There's nothing outstanding about Taylor Hackford's Ray Charles biopic, but it's satisfying all the same: Just try not to grin like a damn fool as Ray (Jamie Foxx) cobbles together "What'd I Say" in the studio. Foxx's expert mimicry notwithstanding, the arc of James L. White's script is straight out of Great Men 101, complete with childhood trauma (blindness, his brother's death) and phony resolution — Ray kicked junk, quelled his demons and got rich, end of story. Charles' gift for synthesizing black gospel, white pop and country is explicitly referenced, but Ray doesn't add anything to understanding his music, though regular doses are dispensed with gratifying regularity. Here's a high-toned, high-budget Hollywood production cast almost entirely with black actors, so good, one after the other — Kerry Washington, Regina Kina, Clifton Powell, Harry Lennix, Aunjanue Ellis, and that's just for starters — it shames the industry that underexposes them. --S.A.(UA 69th St.; UA Riverview)

SIDEWAYS

Miles (Paul Giamatti) is a glum, nervous schoolteacher and unpublished novelist; Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is a sun-baked soap-opera actor who's spending the last week before his impending marriage with Miles in the Santa Ynez Valley, shuttling between vineyards and rundown steakhouses with killer wine lists. Giamatti and Church's worn-in ease with each other smashes buddy-movie conventions. It's a real friendship. As Sideways rolls on, you get the sad sense that it's also a friendship whose end is nearing. Miles may have a week of wine-bibbing in mind, but Jack is looking for one last fling before the door slams shut on his bachelor days. The film follows Miles' long-standing crush on Maya (Virginia Madsen), a pretty waitress at one of those oenophile steak shacks; Jack, meanwhile, has no difficulty jumping into bed with Stephanie (Sandra Oh), a winery bartender, but their no-strings-attached sexual relationship gets tangled when Jack discovers she has a young son. — S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

SPANGLISH

The mix of cross-cultural romance and midlife crisis in James L. Brooks' uneven comedy evokes feelings of love and loathing, and not just for the characters. The instantly cloying narration (in the voice of a Latina Princeton applicant) sets your teeth on edge, but once Paz Vega's Spanish-speaking domestic meets Tea Leoni's wealthy housewife, the sap starts to evaporate. Cultures and child-rearing strategies clash, especially in a finely tuned scene where we realize that each woman's daughter is the other's ideal. Vega's warmth gives the movie a center, Leoni's dismissive dizziness its spin. And then Adam Sandler shows up. As Leoni's husband, a four-star chef who longs for a "three-and-a-half-star life," Sandler wears a hangdog expression like a steel collar. Unable to build him up, Brooks settles for tearing Leoni down. A nimble comedian whose skills are too rarely tapped, she ends up on the wrong end of every joke; in a scene as appalling as anything in American Beauty, Leoni straddles Sandler and thrusts her way to the ugliest orgasm of all time. There are moments of truth wedged between the back-stabbing, but as the movie progresses, it's farther and farther between them, until it seems like little more than a reproach of women who don't put their husband's lives ahead of their own. --S.A. (Bridge; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; Ritz 16)

THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE

When Plankton (Doug Lawrence) undertakes Plan Z to take over Bikini Bottom, SpongeBob (voiced by Tom Kenny) and buddy Patrick Starfish (Bill Fagerbakke) are the only souls courageous (or foolhardy) enough to journey forth in search of King Neptune's (Jeffrey Tambor) missing crown. On the road, they encounter an Eastwoodian hit man (Alec Baldwin), Mindy the mermaid (Scarlett Johansson) and a Diver Dannish menace, only to be rescued at last by David Hasselhoff, in person. Some jokes are quite clever, some pointed. All fly by with the spastic energy that has sustained the show for over five years. --C.F. (UA 69th St.; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film begins by telling us that "Five condemned soldiers were escorted to Bouchanesnes, at the Front in the Somme." But don't despair: As the film is made by the folks who brought you Amélie, these dire conditions soon give way to quirk. Based on a novel by Sébastien Japrisot (a pen name for crime writer Jean-Baptiste Rossi), A Very Long Engagement follows two tracks. The first is set in and around No Man's Land, where the prisoners have been convicted of cowardice — essentially, trying to elude their duties by wounding themselves. Unwilling to shoot them outright, their fellow Frenchmen send them into the dark divide, assuming the Germans on the other side will do their dirty work for them. The second story concerns Mathilde (Audrey Tautou), the dedicated fiancee of Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), nicknamed "Cornflower" by his comrades. When Mathilde learns that Manech has been "lost" in No Man's Land, she determines to discover the details of his fate. Indeed, believing that he must yet live (as she can feel this in her heart), she spends some three years and lots of money on the project. Mathilde's fairy-tale quest forms a sort of narrative backbone as it sets up even the soldiers' experiences, their truths and deceptions unveiled through her discoveries. But A Very Long Engagement is most compelling when battle scenes consume the stage. As much as each wound reinscribes the ache of love and longing, it also compels Mathilde's search for answers. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)