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Also this issue:

What Nobody Expects
A startling film combines the talents of two filmmakers.
-Cindy Fuchs

Michael Moore
-Sam Adams

Home on the Range
Bowling for Columbine may be scattershot, but it hits plenty of targets.
-Sam Adams

Adam's Crib
Adam Sandler plays a manchild (again), but troubled (for once), and gives P.T. Anderson a boost.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

Continuing

repertory film

showtimes

October 17-23, 2002

movie shorts

New

ABANDON

According to a piece he wrote for the New York Times last month, Stephen Gaghan set out to make a movie about “college students under far too much pressure.” You can see that movie in Abandon, but it’s rather obscured by the miserably rattly plot laid on top of it. At its center is November’s Cosmopolitan cover girl and Movieline’s choice for “Hollywood’s Jackpot Star,” Katie Holmes: She’s about to graduate from a small New Hampshire college, her thesis is due, she has nightmares about her father leaving her, a huge job interview and a “townie cop” (Benjamin Bratt) is asking questions about the disappearance of her boyfriend (Charlie Hunnam, of the U.K. Queer As Folk). That happened two years ago, when Joey -- er, Katie (Holmes’ character’s name here) -- was a wide-eyed, hopeful sophomore and boyfriend was a wealthy genius-poet-performer-archaeologist-musician-whatever-else. Now she’s feeling murky and frazzled, not quite confiding in her scene-stealing roommate Zooey Deschanel or friends Gabrielle Union and Gabriel Mann, and strangely attracted to the detective, even as she starts seeing Hunnam on campus. The plot descends quickly into nonsense. Katie goes into the requisite nearby scary abandoned building without a second thought. The cop (also a recovering addict) falls for her, despite the fact that mousy Julie (Melanie Lynskey) and about 12 other characters warn him not to. And no one else notices Hunnam skulking about, despite the fact that he’s something of a local legend. The film’s time-warpy structure and darkly elegant composition don’t quite make up for this silly plot. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans)

BELOW

An ungainly amalgam of submarine picture and ghost story, Below still manages to hold your attention, even as it sinks into hokum. David Twohy (Pitch Black, The Arrival) has been down this road before, but Below isn’t the inspired hybrid Pitch Black was -- you can feel the parts of the story rasping against each other. Set on an American sub in the Atlantic in WWII, the film (co-written by Requiem for a Dream’s Darren Aronofsky) is conspicuously without subtext; it’s about survival, and not much else. Twohy finds plenty of ways to put his fellas -- a fine cast of unsung players, including Bruce Greenwood, Olivia Williams, Nick Chinlund, Matthew Davis and Scott Foley -- in peril, though, and has pressurized atmosphere to spare. Below is goofy, and it doesn’t demand you think about it a minute after it’s over, but it’s not cheap or haphazard, and it plays by the rules. --Sam Adams (UA Riverview)

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE

See Sam Adams’ review and interview with director Michael Moore. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

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FORMULA 51

In Ronny Yu’s rock-’em-sock-’em careener, Samuel L. Jackson plays McElroy, a chemical whiz busted for smoking reefer on his graduation from pharmaceutical college in 1971 (under Buddy Miles’ “Them Changes”). Thirty years later: Declaring that he’s invented the ideal party drug (“51 times stronger than cocaine, 51 times more hallucinogenic than acid and 51 times more explosive than ecstasy,” all over-the-counter ingredients), he kills off his former bosses (in a drug biz headed by Meat Loaf), dons a kilt and heads to Liverpool, where he befriends amiable gangster Robert Carlyle. While they seek out a buyer (Rhys Ifans) for the super-drug (a “personal visit from God”), they’re stalked by Carlyle’s ex, super-assassin Emily Mortimer (so great in Lovely & Amazing, so bereft of a role here). With music by the Headrillaz (including tracks by PJ Harvey and Nelly), and Poon Hang Sang’s creative camerawork, the film moves, but nowhere special (except for the historical payback punchline, long time coming). Amid the shooting, car chasing and buildings exploding, executive producer Jackson suffers black-penis jokes, his own signature shouting-spree (curse Quentin Tarantino for giving him that brilliant “When I lay my vengeance upon you” speech, as he’s been asked to repeat those rhythms ever since) and, worst of all, overseeing the white folks’ romance. Enough with the helpful black buddy already. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.)

HEAVEN

See Cindy Fuchs’ review. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

JONAH: A VEGGIETALES MOVIE

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Christian cucumbers?

Spiritual sprouts? Question is:

Which would Jesus eat?

(UA Riverview)

MAN FROM ELYSIAN FIELDS

Andy Garcia is feeling inadequate, a novelist who can’t catch a break, supported by his lovely, stoic wife (Julianna Margulies). Encouraged (effectively seduced) by the proprietor of Elysian Fields escort agency (Mick Jagger), he tries upscale “dating,” and lands a huge catch right off: the delicately sensuous Olivia Williams, married to multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning and recently reclusive author James Coburn. Servicing the wife, Garcia also comes to service the husband, by helping him to complete (reshape, rewrite) his last novel. Trite as they are, these plot pieces might have come together in a compelling whole, except that the plight of Garcia’s sulky novelist remains stuck at the level of his limited vision, with most events leading to further confirmation that he is destined to ruin everything: He’s dishonest with the perfect wife, sulky with the perfect lover, self-involved with the perfect mentor. Mick Jagger, in fact, has the clearest sense of what’s actually going on and offers the wittiest observations (trouble is, he appears infrequently). Alas, when it seems that Garcia’s destiny is self-fulfilling (he will fail because he can’t imagine another way), the movie backs off and gives him the (close-to) happy ending that everything else here argues against.--C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE

See Sam Adams’ review. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

The Ring

The director of Mouse Hunt and The Mexican doesn’t seem like the greatest choice to remake a cultishly popular Japanese horror movie, but The Ring is easily the most terrifying movie to come out of Hollywood in years. (That is not, by the way, a cue to gird yourself for the fright of a life, then come out and brag that “it wasn’t that scary.” Too many people ruined The Blair Witch Project for themselves that way.) Despite a foolish opening nod to Scream (which probably played a lot better in Japanese), The Ring is blissfully free of the deadend self-consciousness that has rendered American horror movies almost unwatchable. The premise is simple, creepy, and inescapable: a videotape which kills everyone who watches it after exactly seven days. Skeptical reporter Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive) watches the tape after her niece dies mysterious, and then the clock starts ticking. Though Watts’ investigation takes her all over gloomy Seattle (and even off the coast), you hardly ever see more than two or three people in the frame -- the film thrives on isolation, the product of a society centered around the TV. (At one point, Watts stands on her apartment balcony and gazes at the building across, each apartment with its television facing outward, communicating more than the back of the person watching it.) Though The Ring abuses the loud-noise scare, it successfully rachets up the tension and never goes slack, meaning you keep having to find new edges on your seat. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Narberth; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.)

WELCOME TO COLLINWOOD

Based on Mario Monicelli’s 1958 film Big Deal on Madonna Street, this George Clooney-Steven Soderbergh production is a jolly little heist movie set in Cleveland, in which petty loser-crooks pursue a Bellini, a dream job. As in Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks (also inspired by Big Deal), a motley crew -- bad boxer Sam Rockwell and homies William H. Macy, Isaiah Washington, Patricia Clarkson, Michael Jeter and Andrew Davoli -- find out (from Luis Guzman) about a jeweler’s safe waiting to be cracked, with a relatively easy entry through the wall of an adjoining building. Following safecracking instruction by an expert now limited in his movements due to his being in a wheelchair (quietly raucous George Clooney), Rockwell undertakes to seduce a maid (Jennifer Esposito) working for this building’s owners, but actually falls in love by accident, which makes using her for access a little dicey. One thing after another goes wrong on heist night, which allows for much broad physical comedy, balanced by the performers’ sharp relational nuances. Economical, mostly clever and quite pleased with itself, the film offers minor diversion. --C.F. (Ritz 16)