July 14-20, 2005

movie shorts

New Movie Shorts

HAPPY ENDINGS
Beginning with what seems to be an unhappy ending (a panicky Lisa Kudrow is hit by a car), Don Roos' quirky sex-roundelay comedy goes on to raise questions about how stories get told. It features multiple characters with intersecting trajectories: Kudrow and Mexican masseur boyfriend Bobby Cannavale make a documentary with scamming/AFI-aspiring Jesse Bradford; conniving karaoke singer Maggie Gyllenhaal seduces wealthy Tom Arnold; and Steve Coogan makes a crisis concerning Laura Dern and Sarah Clarke's new baby — is the father his boyfriend David Sutcliffe? Stepsiblings Kudrow and Coogan have stayed in touch following a one-night stand when both were 17, which led to her pregnancy and now, 20 years later, a child, at least according to Bradford, who may be lying. The movie's most interesting aspect is its use of text commentary in split screens, providing a kind of anti-narrative in the form of motives, backstories and even future projections. Each comment reframes what you're looking at in the visual frame (less sardonic than Christina Ricci's voiceover in The Opposite of Sex, but the same idea). Like Roos' other work, the movie considers the ways that lies, loyalty and desperation shape relationships: the closing montage of who ends up where (under Gyllenhaal's effectively sad version of "Just the Way You Are") feels improbably pat. --Cindy Fuchs (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
Performance artist Miranda July goes (slightly) mainstream with this loose-knit story of undeveloped souls struggling to connect. The pivot is July's character, a struggling artist who seems more like a stand-in than a signature, a means of exposing the filmmaker's own vulnerabilities as well as her characters'. Me and You works with the kind of squirmy discomfort performance art often (intentionally or not) calls up, the feelings that things close to the surface are best left buried. At times, it teeters boldly on the edge of preciousness, but its twee is tempered by frankness; even the kids have sex lives, which July sketches with astonishing honesty and insight. In fact, they seem to out-mature the adults, particularly John Hawkes' newly single father of two. But July takes her kids seriously even when they're grown up. --Sam Adams (Ritz East; Ritz 16)

SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL
"To me, it seemed like going back into hell," says a dark-eyed Lt. Gen Roméo Dallaire in Peter Raymont's chilling documentary. Dallaire, the commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in the months before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, has never returned in the decade since, a period in which he openly admits to using alcohol and pills to quiet his raging memories. (He apparently struck bottom when he was found drunk, sleeping under a park bench.) Subtitled The Journey of Roméo Dallaire, Raymont's doc sticks close to its subject, sometimes too close to acknowledge Dallaire's ambiguous position. On the one hand, he's the perfect symbol of the West's failure to act (although Dallaire clearly blames himself for not making the case for intervention more strongly); on the other, he's one more white man at the center of a story that ought, for once, to be mainly about Africans. But if nothing else, Shake Hands is invaluable as a correction to the Hollywood heroics of Hotel Rwanda; rather than console himself with the hundreds of lives he did save, Dallaire can only, like Oskar Schindler, mourn those he didn't. Imagine if he'd had some help. --S.A. (Ritz Five)

UNDEAD
Harassed ever since she won the title of Miss Catch of the Day in teeny Berkeley, Felicity Mason embarks for the big city, only to be waylaid by a zombie invasion. While this saves her from exploitation by her wholly creepy agent, it leaves her holed up in a basement with the sort of motley crew that assembles under such circumstances — husband and pregnant wife, a pair of inept cops and the gunslinging, fantastically somersaulting Marion (played by Mungo McKay and named for John Wayne). The Romero-Raimi-Jackson-inspired Spierig brothers shot their horror-film pastiche in 41 days and added the special effects on their home computers. But the resulting pieces don't come together as comedy or satire or even homage. Indeed, the film seems to be all about limits: Just as Mason is unable to escape her past, so the crew, once they leave the basement, run smack into a literal wall dropped across the landscape by aliens. That is, the zombies are created by aliens looking to "cure" humans of their self-destructiveness. Or something like that. --C.F. (UA Riverview)

WEDDING CRASHERS
Divorce mediators Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn crash weddings to eat hors d'oeuvres and get laid. This is the premise of David Dobkin's frantic comedy, described as a return to R-rated jokes (in the hair gel mold) against a PG-13 tide. But the R is less risky than a predictable basis for more explicit language, sexual situations and adolescent humor. That they meet the women of their dreams (sisters played by dreamy Rachel McAdams and hyper Isla Fisher) and so change their attitudes only sets the stage for Meet the Parents-style deceits, revelations and redemptions, with two Ben Stillers. The dad this time is Secretary of the Treasury Christopher Walken (the scariest thought raised by this movie), accompanied by horny wife Jane Seymour. And the boyfriend-in-the-way is not Wilson, but manically mean Bradley Cooper, who clobbers Vaughn repeatedly during a Hyannisporty football game. (Granted, it's a slapstick boy comedy, but even so, McAdams' infinite patience with Cooper's abuses stretches credibility.) Usually, a little Vaughn goes a long way, but here he becomes a respite from Wilson's supposed romantic lead, in particular when Vaughn confesses his feelings to a priest played by Henry Gibson (this following an evening when Fisher's brother, played by very creepy Crispin Glover wannabe Keir O'Donnell, tries to "seduce" Vaughn, after she's left him tied to the bedposts). Somehow, the movie is both smarmy and, eventually, sickly-sweet: quite the tiresome combination. --C.F. (Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

YES
A film of dazzling images and sometimes dumbfounding ideas, Sally Potter's romance in verse is anything but flowery. Joan Allen, an unhappily wed microbiologist, and Simon Abkarian, a Lebanese man living in London, occasionally exchange amorous declarations, but their obvious passion for each other is tempered by cultural and political confusion, not to mention the familiar tension between masculine assertiveness and female independence. To the extent that it filters the tensions between Middle East and West through the prism of a love story, the film is at its weakest when it tries to line up Abkarian's response to a racist assault and the corresponding fissure in their relationship. But the film's discreetly scorching eroticism is a marvel, its political sophistication practically without peer. Sam Neill and Shirley Henderson round out a flawless cast that executes the dialogue with naturalism and flair. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)