January 17–24, 2002

movie shorts

Snow Dogs

This bizarre fever dream of a movie, scripted by five men and directed by Brian Levant (The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas), seems only the next step in the increasingly peculiar career of Cuba Gooding, Jr. Here, the Oscar winner plays a Miami dentist, contented to be assisted by his mother (Nichelle Nichols) and a fey little fellow with bleached hair (Sisqo!). When he learns he’s adopted ("Maybe I was meant to be someone else!"), he heads to Alaska to find his roots. There he meets a town full of eccentrics (including Graham Greene, apparently hard up for work like everyone else in this film), a beautiful kickboxing saloon owner (Joanna Balcaso) and his dead mother’s sled dogs, whose eyebrows rise and fall to indicate emotions. And so, he decides to learn to mush, aided by the man with whom his mother shared a long-ago one-night stand (James Coburn!). It’s hard to describe the sheer weirdness of this movie’s many go-nowhere pathways, paternity and identity issues, race politics and dog stuff. Suffice it to say that when, after a romantic evening with Balcaso, Gooding wakes up in bed with his favorite female dog, Snow Dogs is well on its way to being one very funky flick.

—Cindy Fuchs

(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA Sameric; UA 69th St.)