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November 14-20, 2002 movie shorts Continuing8 MILE If there is raw ambition and desire in 8 Mile, most of it is in the syncopated blasts of “Lose Yourself,” Eminem’s advance-released single from the film’s soundtrack. The movie shows only how Rabbit, an aspiring rapper whose character is modeled after Eminem, arrives at a point where the passion starts to brew. Director Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential) gives us the semi-glossy, semi-gritty life of a clan of young adults in 1995 Detroit. Rabbit is the group’s quietest member, revered for his lyrical skills but mocked for his “hot” mother (Kim Basinger). Frustrated and ambivalent, Rabbit can’t seem to find a way to show off his talents. In steps Mekhi Phifer, with astoundingly phony dreadlocks, plays Future, who hosts a weekly MC battle at a downtown club and urges Rabbit to freestyle. It’s a credit to Eminem that he can play a role close to home and make us forget, if only occasionally, that he is Eminem. Most of the time, Rabbit looks more fragile than angry: The bleached blond hair has been replaced with a buzzcut and even when he gets physically violent, there is a boyish look of fear in Rabbit’s eyes. There’s also a discomfiting sense that 8 Mile is some kind of apologia for Eminem the pop star. Amid his friends, Rabbit is the center of wisdom and calm. In one scene we find Rabbit rapping about the difference between “faggots” and “gays”; what he objects to is cowardice, not homosexuality. Too often, he is portrayed as an innocent victimized by his mother, by poverty and by his own fear. What Hanson seems to forget is that Eminem is a compelling persona precisely because of his conflicts and contradictions. Rabbit’s onstage antics have all the self-deprecating humor and wordplay of his real-life prototype. Only here do we understand how an art form can both inspire these characters and provide them with needed escape. But it also raises the deep suspicion that Eminem’s life might be best told through his own songs.--Elisa Ludwig (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
The people in All Or Nothing greet each other with “all right?,” which is funny, because none of them are. The characters in Mike Leigh’s movie are linked by their residence in a bleak block of council flats, as well as a sense of despair which manifests itself either in lethargy or anger. Timothy Spall, with floppy blond hair that makes him look like a sad-eyed badger, falls definitely into the lethargic camp: A cab driver who sleeps through the morning rush, he apologetically scrounges spare change from his wife (Lesley Manville) and daughter, while defending his obese son’s right to lie on the couch and not look for a job. Perhaps Leigh’s most unrelentingly bleak movie since Naked, All or Nothing is tempered by Andrew Dickson’s elegiac score and by Spall’s wrenching peformance, which doesn’t lend grandeur so much as uncover it -- he’s King Lear as an unhappily married cabbie. The final notes of optimism are faint and hard-won, but they sound deeply. --Sam Adams (Ritz 16)
AUTO FOCUS Perhaps it’s simplistic to say you shouldn’t make a movie with a subject you have no empathy for, but when all’s said and done, Auto Focus feels like it’s disinterred a corpse, only to drag him through the mud. Bob Crane, whose minor celebrity as the star of Hogan’s Heroes started him on a downward path of sex addiction that led to his ugly death in a Scottsdale, Ariz. motel room, may not have been anyone’s idea of a role model, but Paul Schrader, who wrote and directed, treats him like a hapless, conscienceless schmuck who more or less deserved what he got. Greg Kinnear does a commendable job of incarnating Crane’s aw-shucks exterior, but he can’t bring inner life to a character that was deliberately created without one. Schrader talks a good game about how Crane is a metaphor for the corrupting power of celebrity, but he was also a man, and deserves at least the slightest measure of respect, not to be treated as a vessel for Schrader’s more and more tiresome exploration of his own dead-end Catholic guilt. Empathy is the cornerstone of art, and Auto Focus has none. --Sam Adams (Ritz East)
Barbershop As The Girl in Barbershop, Philadelphia’s own E-V-E shows again that she plays very well with boys. In her first extended film role (that is, more than the few lines she had in XXX), she holds her own on screen with some very charismatic actors, including Ice Cube, Sean Patrick Thomas, Cedric the Entertainer, Anthony Anderson, Michael Ealy and Keith David. The film, directed by Tim Story, has the sort of charm and easy pacing of one of Cube’s Friday films -- the characters, most of whom work in Cube’s Chicago barbershop, share experiences and jokes (with Cedric, unsurprisingly, generating most laughs). The plot is basic, though more strained than it needs to be, with Cube selling the shop (in his family for over 40 years) to gangster David in the morning, then endeavoring to reverse the decision over the rest of the day, and Anderson and his partner Lahmard Tate wrestling, quite literally, with an ATM they’ve stolen, transporting it from place to place in hopes of getting access to its hidden riches. Cube comes to realize the importance of the shop as community gathering place. And everyone learns a useful lesson.--C.F. (UA CheltenhaM)
If watching Bloody Sunday isn’t like reliving the events in question -- and it would be foolish to pretend that it could be -- it’s still as visceral an experience as you’re likely to get from a fictional film. Shot in jagged, hand-held style, the film recreates the events of Jan. 30, 1972, when British troops fired into a crowd of civil rights demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing 13. Writer/director Paul Greengrass, working from Don Mullan’s non-fiction account, leaves some questions open, like the matter of which side fired the first shot, and clearly depicts angry Catholic youths firing (albeit ineffectually) at British troops. But there’s no ambiguity as to the deaths involved, the one-sidedness, or the fact that the victims were unarmed civilians. Greengrass’ approach means those unfamiliar with the tragedy (or who only know the song) won’t be able to pick out most of the characters, although James Nesbitt makes a strong impression as Ivan Cooper, the pacifist politician who orchestrated what was supposed to be a peaceful civil rights protest against the odious practice of “internment without trial.” But you don’t need to develop sentimental attachments to understand the horror of what’s going on -- Bloody Sunday makes you feel every bit.--S.A. (Bryn Mawr)
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Michael Moore, even if, or especially if, you agree with his politics. Moore specializes in political theater, but his record on follow-up isn’t great, to say nothing of his willingness to trim the truth to fit an easy argument. That’s what makes Bowling for Columbine such a surprise: it’s not afraid to ask questions it doesn’t know the answers to. Calling it disorganized or inconclusive misses the point; Moore has deliberately taken on a subject -- the American propensity for violence -- that can’t be explained, just to see how close to the impossible he can get. Ranging all over the place, both physically and thematically, Bowling begins, of course, with our fondness for guns, but Moore, an NRA member and former child marksman, pushes past that answer; Canada, he points out, has more guns per household, although nothing remotely approaching our gun deaths. Moore points fingers at retailers who offer cut-rate ammunition, at racial and economic disparities, and at a media that makes it seem like we’re more violent than we actually are. He goes to Columbine, and to Littleton, interviewing people from Marilyn Manson to South Park’s Matt Stone -- who, with his account of growing up bullied in Colorado, emerges as the movie’s voice of reason -- to NRA President Charlton Heston, who blames the U.S.’s rate of violence on “ethnic mixing.” Bowling is a sprawl, it’s true, but it’s ambitious, not confused.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
The first single off the Brown Sugar soundtrack is Erykah Badu’s “Love of My Life (Ode to Hip-hop),” and the first scenes of Rick Famuyiwa’s film offer an ode of their own. A series of hip-hop artists -- including Common, Kool G Rap, Pete Rock, Talib Kweli, Big Daddy Kane, ?uestlove, and Russell Simmons -- describe their passion for their art and culture. With hip-hop as its primary metaphor, history and setting, this romantic comedy gets over on its standard plot: Sanaa Lathan, newly hired NY editor for XXL must discover and declare her love for her childhood friend, Taye Diggs, now a producer at a commercial label, even as they both become entangled in other relationships. That is, he marries upper-crusty Nicole Ari Parker, and she thinks about marrying basketball star Boris Kodjoe. Supporting plots include Diggs’ signing of cab driver/ MC Mos Def, and Lathan’s friendship with Queen Latifah (who warns her that she’s “turning into a Terry McMillan character, which she was, in HBO’s Disappearing Acts). Lathan also provides ongoing narration of her efforts to reconcile her love for the ideals of hip-hop and its commercial imperatives, often crass: the example here is a duo called the Hip-Hop Dalmatians (Erik Weiner and Reggi Wyns), complete with spotted fur jackets, who cover McCartney and MJ’s “The Girl is Mine” as “The Ho is Mine.” Jokes aside, the film is earnest about its dedications -- to hip-hop and, happily, to strong women overcoming familiar plot set-ups. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview) COMEDIAN Christian Charles’ documentary purports to document Jerry Seinfeld’s return to standup, following his decision to walk away from the most popular sitcom in television history. Charles and producer Gary Streiner followed Seinfeld (also credited as a producer) around for more than a year, as well as another, supposedly up-and-coming comedian repped by Seinfeld’s agent George Shapiro, Orny Adams. That Adams comes off as unkind and self-involved, and Seinfeld as humble and hardworking hardly seems a coincidence, but maybe it’s just “real life.” Jerry’s efforts to develop a solid 50 minutes of material don’t seem so strenuous, but he does spend some time in front of the camera not speaking, pondering. He brings the (pregnant) wife and kid on the comeback tour, to clubs in New York, New Jersey, California and Ohio, ending with the big-deal, new-suited appearance on Letterman. He spends time in the clubs chatting comedic strategies with buddies Colin Quinn, Chris Rock, Ray Romano and Gary Shandling, and meets with role models Robert Klein and Bill Cosby (to whom he is especially deferential, as well he should be: the man does two sets of 2 hours and 20 minutes each, in his 60s). The movie doesn’t document Seinfeld’s return or even his ways of working, so much as it offers glimpses of same. Its 81 minutes of muddy-looking digital tape are culled from some 600 hours, and the sketchy shape seems a function of the necessary major lopping. --Cindy Fuchs (Bryn Mawr; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16) FEMME FATALE Brian De Palma is doing to himself what he used to do to Hitchcock, which is to say Femme Fatale is to Dressed to Kill as Dressed to Kill is to Vertigo. Somewhere in the generations, the image has gotten blurred, because I’d rather sit through Snake Eyes again than even think about De Palma’s latest, a sleazy, leering metathriller whose thrills are too common to enjoy and too cheap to last. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, whose idea of acting the tough girl is dropping her “g”s, plays a jewel thief who double-crosses her fellow heisters, then hides out for seven years, when, with the help of a nosey papparazo (Antonio Banderas), her past starts to catch up with her. The film begins with a bravura heist sequence set during the Cannes Film Festival -- oh, the self-referentiality of it all! -- but De Palma pushes the audience away at the same time he reels them in. (Ryuichi Sakamoto’s absurdly lush score is a prime offender.) Romijn-Stamos’ role, that of a chameleon who switches accents and personalities like changing her socks, would be a stretch for a real actress, not that De Palma’s even shown any interest in working with them -- this is, after all, a man who used Melanie Griffith more than once. The film loops back on itself and plays endless tricks, but De Palma seems to have lost any feel for connecting with an audience, or even the desire to do so. It’s about as exciting as watching someone else jerk off, unless you like that sort of thing, in which case it’s not. --S.A. (AMC Andorra; Bridge; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA Riverview) FRIDA The innovative melding of art and biography grants Taymor’s film -- written by Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, and based on a biography by Hayden Herrera -- an uncanny and welcome grace. Certainly, some moments reflect the reasons for making the movie to begin with: the rich textures of the artist’s experience, the grand scope of the legend that has since grown up around Frida Kahlo. They don’t come often enough, so that the film lapses into mundane biopic structure. But when they do come, they suggest something of the artist’s brilliance, as well as her struggles with perpetual, various pain. It’s well known that Frida (played by Salma Hayek, who spent some eight years pulling this project together) suffered mightily and throughout her life, emotionally, spiritually and physically: a 1925 trolley wreck breaks her back and leaves her in a body cast for years. This pain became the primary source of her art (her many self-portraits are her most famous legacy) as well as a dreadful, inevitable focus. Throughout Frida’s recovery, her photographer father (Roger Rees) dotes on her, while her mother (Patricia Reyes Spíndola) frets that her chance for proper marriage is over. This standard parental divide more or less sets up Frida’s lifelong investment in genderfuck: She rejects expectations that girls should stay home and cook, throwing herself into her painting and politics (she and her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) were dedicated Communists) with bracing enthusiasm. When Diego asks her to marry him (admiring that she is “a woman with cajones”), she articulates these principles and so, the film’s thematic focus: If Diego, 21 years her senior, cannot promise fidelity, he must be loyal. He agrees, they wed, serial disasters ensue.--C.F. (Bala; Ritz East; Ritz 16) GHOST SHIP Directed with speed but no energy, Ghost Ship efficiently cranks up the tension for a while, but the energy is released without event. It helps to know that director Steve Beck’s only previous credit is the William Castle remake Thir13en Ghosts, since this one’s similarly shameless about milking the shocks. Gabriel Byrne (who hasn’t been an even half-decent movie in how long?) plays the captain of a tugboat full of sea-beaten salvagers who happen upon a rusted ocean liner that’s been missing for 40 years. (No guessing how the passengers perished; that’s revealed in a too-clever-by-half opening sequence.) Wouldn’t you know it, the darn boat seems to have this nasty habit of killing people, and so it does in increasingly gruesome ways. Borrowing heavily from The Shining (the little girl ghost is a dead ringer for those creepy kids) and going so far as to rip off The Lost Boys, Ghost Ship is most notable for reuniting ER’s Carol (Julianna Margulies) and Shep (Ron Eldard). Really, there’s nothing else. -- S.A. (AMC Andorra; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Riverview)
Philippa (Cate Blanchett) enters a Turino office building, goes up in the elevator and deposits a homemade bomb in a trash can. Once she’s descended again, she stops at a pay phone to call the carabinieri to inform them of the explosion, now seconds away. What Philippa cannot know is that a janitor has picked up the trash and gotten on one of those elevators that crawls up the building’s side, with a man and his two young daughters. The explosion kills them. Minutes later, armed officers burst into Philippa’s apartment and drag her down to headquarters. Interrogators call her a terrorist and demand to know her affiliation. Unaware what has happened, she is horrified to learn that she killed innocents; she crumbles and faints. When she comes to, she insists -- in English translated by novice policeman Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi) -- that her target was one wealthy businessman, Vendice (Stefano Santospago), who sells drugs, in particular to her recently overdosed husband. Her interrogators see her as a terrorist. Filippo falls in love with her and helps her escape. Weird, startling and heartbreaking, Heaven combines the interests and sensibilities of two remarkable filmmakers. Written by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (with Krzysztof Piesiewicz), and intended as part of a trilogy (Heaven, Hell and Purgatory), it explores accident and fate, guilt and grief, time and truth. These themes also interest the expansive and provocative director Tom Tykwer, used to exploring desire and need, fear and audacity, individuals in perpetual search of companionship and hope for a future that might only be imagined, all through the trope of “lovers on the run.” Heaven breathes delicate new life into all of these ideas, in Tykwer’s peculiarly deliberate fashion. The questions emerging in Philippa and Filippo’s trajectory -- toward capture? toward flight? -- are unanswerable and increasingly abstract. Alongside such intangibles, the pain and ecstasy revealed in Blanchett’s and Ribisi’s equally luminous performances are surprisingly corporeal.--C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse) I-SPY At last, Eddie Murphy has found and committed to the role that makes him he most money. His version of Kelly Robinson, the tennis player/spy Robert Culp made famous on television, is (quite unbelievably) a champion middleweight boxer, as fast- and foul-mouthed as you’d expect. Teamed with Owen Wilson (pretending to be part of the boxer’s entourage), he heads to Budapest (one of the primary movie locations for evil doings) to find an invisible plane, stolen by Malcolm McDowell and now up for bids by especially wealthy evil-doers. The action is uninspired (car chasing, plane flying, some minor fighting), the spy-gadgets regular, the plot flaccid. The buddies argue, misbehave and engage in a little homoerotic lusting after fellow spy Famke Janssen, by way of a camera-contact lens that allows Murphy to see what Wilson sees, namely, her body in mid-strip. During this scene, Murphy plays Cyrano, ventriloquizing Wilson’s attempted seduction of his would-be paramour. But, as the shared perspective/split screen effect suggests, girlfriend is only a diversion: the real love story involves Wilson and Murphy, seeking a franchise and entertaining each other immensely.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Grant; UA Riverview) JACKASS: THE MOVIE (Not reviewed.) A haiku: Hi Johnny Knoxville, I'm nine and I think you're cool. Watch me burn my nuts. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview) MOSTLY MARTHA Martha (Martina Gedeck) lives a precise life. The much-acclaimed chef at a fine Hamburg restaurant, she makes perfect food, maintains a strict routine, and sees a shrink because her boss (Sibylle Canonica) thinks she’s neurotic. (True, she hides in the freezer at work for “time out,” but she is admirably efficient, proud of her control of all “logistics.”) All this changes when her niece Lina (Maxime Foerste) comes to live with her. Suddenly, Martha’s routine is undone: she’s sleeping on the couch (giving Lina her room), cooking an 8-year-old who refuses to eat, and repeatedly late getting her to school. Almost worse: there’s a new chef hired to helped out in her kitchen, an Italian (Sergio Castellitto) who plays “Volare” and dances while working. While the rest of the plot is wholly unsurprising, Gedeck’s convincingly taut performance (food is full of “issues” for her, not just a means to externalize her inner glow and nourish others) and director Sandra Nettelbeck’s preference for crisp, careful compositions help the film avoid both the mushiness of a “food” movie like Chocolat and the sensual-saturation of a Babette’s Feast. --C.F. (Bala) MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING Toula (Nia Vardalos) is Greek, 30 and unmarried. It’s the last part that is killing her hyper-Hellenic family, who thinks she should quit dabbling at college courses (“She’s got enough education for a woman” says her father) and just settle down and start a family. So when Toula falls in love with Ian, the man of her dreams (Sex in the City’s John Corbett), everything’s just wonderful -- except he isn’t Greek. What follows is essentially Meet the Greek Parents: The large, gregarious family is suspicious of Ian the Protestant and -- gasp -- vegetarian, who tries his best but obviously doesn’t fit in, and Toula becomes increasingly embarrassed by her ethnicity’s eccentricities. Will the couple gain the family’s approval and end up having the wedding? If so, will it be big, fat and Greek? Well, I don’t want to give anything away. Second City alum Vardalos wrote the screenplay, based on her semi-autobiographical one-woman show, so her knowing, frazzled performance and many of the details of her character’s over-attentive family life ring true. Michael Constantine and Lainie Kazan shine as Nia’s restaurant-owning parents; Dad Gus’s fixation on Windex as a panacea is particularly amusing. If director Joel Zwick’s staging is a smidge too hammy and sitcommy to work completely, keep in mind that this 25-year TV vet learned ethnic comedy working with the likes of Chachi, Balki and Mork.--Ryan Godfrey (UA Grant; Ritz East; Ritz 16)
PAID IN FULL The third film from Damon Dash and Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Productions (following the concert documentary Backstage and the gangsta tale State Property), Paid In Full is based on a true story. Wood Harris plays Ace, a dry cleaning shop employee who becomes an infamous dealer in ’80s Harlem; his boys include flashy Mitch (Mekhi Phifer) and mundane Calvin (Kevin Carroll). When he scores a connection with living-lovely Lulu (Esai Morales) and Mitch does a stint in prison, Ace moves on up, quickly. And yet, no matter how fine the new ride or heavy the drug traffic, this anti-Nino Brown stays cool (“Live and maintain”), advising his minions to do the same. Betrayal rears its ugly head in the form of Roc artist Cam’ron (making his film debut), jumpy, ambitious and too gaudy for Ace’s taste, especially when he and his girl (who happens to be Mitch’s sister) have a baby. It’s good to learn lessons, no matter how late and even if the costs, for others and yourself, are tremendous. But, for all the generous efforts by Harris, Phifer and Cam, as well as director Charles Stone III (who made the Budweiser “Whassup” ads and whose next film, Drumline, is already well-buzzed), the film is tired. --C.F. (UA 69th St.; UA Riverview)
Part of growing is admitting your age. So if Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love strains less overtly for “mature” themes than his overreaching Magnolia, it’s because Anderson is beginning to stop pretending to be his 60-year-old idols. That interest is repaid in a performance of surprising depth from Adam Sandler, who plays Barry, a variation on his own honed-to-bluntness comic persona -- with the catch that the world around him is anything but comic. Sandler is as much of a manchild here as in any one of his tiresome movies, but his boyish façade is frequently shattered by explosive fits of rage. When, at a family gathering, Barry is pressed by his many sisters (including the wonderfully sluggish Mary Lynn Rajskub) about his awkward meeting with the shy Lena (Emily Watson), he frets and writhes, and just when everything seems to have calmed down, puts his foot through the sliding glass door. Since at times, Anderson seems merely to be testing his audience’s capacity for annoyance, the challenge for Sandler and Watson, then, is to meet cute amid the din, which they do with ample charm. Anderson still loves his damaged dreamers, and still thrives on outré plot twists: in this case, Barry calls a sex chat line one lonely night, and ends up targeted for theft and beatings by the service’s sleazy owner (Anderson vet Philip Seymour Hoffman). But Punch-Drunk Love has the focus that’s been missing from Anderson’s films, along with a manic energy all its own.--S.A. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)
Ana (excellent America Ferrera) is graduating from Beverly Hills High School. But unlike her privileged classmates, she can’t count on going to college. Though she applies to Columbia, with the help of her teacher (George Lopez), Ana must go to work: her mother Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros) and sister (Ingrid Oliu) need her to work at the sister’s sweatshop. Equally stubborn and impassioned, Carmen and Ana argue vigorously -- about Ana’s curvy body, Carmen’s unlikely pregnancy, Ana’s white boyfriend, and “real women’s” expectations and desires. Written by George LaVoo and Josefina Lopez (based on her play), and winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Dramatic Audience Award winner, Patricia Cardoso’s first feature is alternately soapy and rousing, predictable and resourceful. Everyone in Ana’s family code-switches, speaks English and Spanish, performs one way for the white folks and another way with one another, and while they all want something “more,” they’re also caught up in getting through each day. Carmen can’t imagine alternatives, and so she worries that Ana will move on and that she won’t (as both possibilities reflect on her). Ana, for her part, wants both to show up her mother and support her family; she’s equally afraid of failing and leaving what she knows, especially her beloved grandfather (Soledad St. Hilaire). A refreshing alternative to most high school movie girls, Ana has a sense of who she is and where she comes from. --Cindy Fuchs (Ritz Five; Ritz 16) RED DRAGON As Red Dragon begins, we’re invited to titter as Hannibal Lecter, many years before The Silence of The Lambs, serves the brains of an inept flautist to the symphony orchestra’s board; Lecter’s transformation into a cannibalistic comedian is complete. Serial killer movies have spread like mold in the years since Silence, often featuring a profiler who can catch the killer because somewhere, deep down, they’re just alike. Never mind that profiling is a borderline sham science with a success rate about equal to ESP; the profiler’s presence is the rationale for the movie’s existence -- it’s not prurient or seedy or exploitative, it’s about us. Red Dragon, based on the same book that spawned 1986’s Manhunter, steals more than a few pages from Silence’s book; plot dictates that Lecter be found in the same cell where he’d be visited by Clarice Starling years later, but director Brett Ratner (the Rush Hours) seems like he’s determined to copy the infinitely superior film shot for shot, at least in the confrontations between Lecter (Anthony Hopkins, once again) and profiler Will Graham (Ed Norton). The setup is similar to Silence, with Lecter enlisted to help catch a killer (Ralph Fiennes) who’s been murdering families and replacing their eyes with shards of mirror. It’s the most vicious of Thomas Harris’ books -- at one point, the killer bites the lips off a tabloid reporter who’s gotten in the way -- but Ratner’s affectless hack direction abandons any moral sense; it’s all show business, folks. At this point, you’d have to say the series’ true auteur is producer Dino de Laurentiis, who’s steered the films ever more towards cheap sensationalism, to the point where they’d have to climb up to be in the gutter. --S.A. (UA Riverview)
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 Andorra; AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
Roger Dodger opens with a bravura sequence, the kind that either elevates or sinks an entire film. Drunk less on alcohol than on his own glibness, Roger (Campbell Scott), a mid-level ad exec who’s enjoying a boozy lunch with several colleagues, launches into a spellbinding explanation of how men are about to become “extinct.” They’ve had their traditional roles usurped, -- all that’s left is for women to figure out how to reproduce without sperm and men will be nothing more than a source of cheap labor. It’s hogwash, the worst kind of antifeminist drivel, but Scott puts it across with conviction. That’s pretty much what Dylan Kidd’s debut feature is about. There’s no particular insight into relations between the sexes; Kidd doesn’t have the heart for real provocation. And the plot’s just enough to serve: Roger is abruptly saddled with his teenage nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), who’s decided it’s time for Uncle Roger to teach him the finer points of wooing the fairer sex. Roger jumps at the chance -- but as is usually the case in a movie set in the span of a day, Roger is near his breaking point. Like a lot of mid-scale indies, Roger Dodger is essentially a one-character movie, but there are worse actors to focus your attention on than Campbell Scott.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16) THE SANTA CLAUSE 2 If the most original idea in the 1994 The Santa Clause was killing Santa, in Michael Lembeck’s 8-years-in-the-making sequel, it’s dressing up his till-now contented replacement, Tim Allen, as Plastic Fascist Santa, complete with military uniform, epaulets, an army of 8-foot wooden soldiers, and an fierce determination to give all kids coal for Xmas. The motivation is dual: Allen must tend to his son (Eric Lloyd), who’s been tagging school walls with pro-Christmas graffiti; and he must fulfill the Second Clause, which is to marry by Christmas Eve or the “de-santafication process” will rob all children of the holiday forever. His subsequent romancing of the son’s principal (Elizabeth Mitchell) is by the numbers, but the duplicate Santa he leaves at the plant, to look after the multi-culti elves’ last-minute toy production, is increasingly loony-tunes, occasionally even funny. The action split, however, means that the regular Santa story is more markedly tedious by comparison. The liveliest players get the briefest screen time. Santa’s fellow Legendary Figures include Aisha Tyler as Mother Nature (who oversees the wedding “by the power vested in me, by me”), Peter Boyle as Father Time, Art LaFleur as the Tooth Fairy (who so desperately wants a new name), Kevin Pollak as Cupid, and Michael Dorn (last seen as Worf, Star Trek’s Last Angry Black Man) as The Sandman. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
Somewhere between the phantasmagorical revolving station of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame and the cramped quarters of a Volkswagen bug (and a major improvement over Mir -- the decrepit Soviet space home that deserved a tabloid headline of “Oy, Vey Is Mir”) the International Space Station is lofty testament to the wonders of worldwide cooperation in the name of science. It also makes for some amazing cinematography. Space Station, the latest IMAX film, gives viewers the typical IMAXian bird’s-eye view of things -- in this case, life aboard a space station -- with a twist. The film, a co-production of IMAX and Lockheed Martin, was shot by astronauts, who not only master the elements of space travel, but do a very fine job taking pictures as well. As astronaut Brian Duffy explained at a press conference, he and his fellow space travelers spent nearly three years not just training for their mission, but they learned the intricacies of filmmaking as well. All in all, Space Station is one small step for man, one giant leap for audiences.--Howard Altman (Tuttleman Imax Theater, Franklin Institute) SWEET HOME ALABAMA Golden girl/good sport Reese Witherspoon has been calling this lackluster romantic comedy a “return” to her own Southern roots (including her sweet home accent). But Andy Tennant’s film only revisits a pile of clichés. She plays a fancy-pants NYC fashion designer, planning to marry up-and-coming Patrick Dempsey, son of snippy, egotistical NYC Mayor Candice Bergen. But before she does, she has to go home to sort out her secret past. First, she is not the daughter of a plantation owner, but of poor folks (Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place) and second, she’s still married to childhood sweetheart (Josh Lucas), once a good old boy and now -- to her surprise -- turned cute, thoughtful and successfully entrepreneurial. This last allows her to make the right decision (the one indicated by the film’s title) and not have to live in a double-wide. The performances are pert, the characters stale and the inevitable showdown between suitors (and mothers) quite humdrum. Tellingly, the most enthusiastic audience response came not when Witherspoon and her beau clinch, but when her gay designer mentor from the city (Nathan Lee Graham) exchanges meaningful glances with her gay best friend from the country (Ethan Embry): Perhaps that’s the movie that Tennant should have made. --C.F. (Ritz 16) THE TRANSPORTER Ex-Special Forces operative Jason Statham transports packages for wealthy, not exactly legal clients. He doesn’t want to know reasons or contents, just destinations and payments. He’s a brilliant fighter (director Cory Yuen is also an action choreographer), phenomenal driver (the film opens with a terrific chase scene), and painstaking planner, keeping his tricked-out BMW in perfect order and adhering to a strict set of rules to ensure he never gets caught off guard. When he discovers that one of his packages is a girl in a duffel bag (Shu Qi), his order comes undone, and he must save her, stop a plot to enslave a truckload of illegal Chinese émigrés, take down a smarmy villain called Wall Street (Matt Schulze) and perform any number of breathtaking martial arts, underwater and road-warrior-style stunts. Speedy, colorful and clever, this Luc Besson-produced film sets up Statham as yet another next-generational, hybrid action hero, fond of Bondish gizmos, haul-ass extreme like Diesel, supremely confident like The Rock, and phenomenally, precisely athletic like Jet Li. The fact that he’s survived his share of Guy Ritchie films doesn’t hurt either. --C.F. (UA Riverview) THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE Here’s a great idea: Jonathan Demme pays homage to the French New Wave. Here’s a not-so-great idea: Marky Mark in a beret. In fact, The Truth About Charlie, Demme’s nouvelle vague remake of Stanley Donen’s Charade, is a hapless mishmash of spy-movie cliches and an aimless attempt to undercut them. As in the 1963 original, Regina (played here by Thandie Newton) is a freshly married woman who returns from vacation to find her apartment stripped bare, her husband Charlie vanished along with all her worldly possessions. The police report that he’s dead, apparently thrown from a train outside town, but more uncertainties are soon to follow -- like the matter of her husband’s real name, or the fact that he was some sort of government operative instead of an art dealer. Joshua Peters (Mark Wahlberg) is ostensibly a kind-hearted stranger who just happens to keep turning up whenever Regina needs help, but of course, we know better than to trust that assessment, even though he does prove useful in helping her escape the trio of baddies (Lisa Gay Hamilton, Joong-Hoon Park and Ted Levine, Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill) who keep threatening her for the money she didn’t even know her husband had. Demme throws in references both visual and textual and Tak Fujimoto’s camera zooms around with abandon, but if Demme was trying for anything like an anti-genre genre pic, he should have jettisoned the original script, rather than make attempts to create chemistry between his patently uninterested stars. Demme has taken flak for casting Wahlberg in the Cary Grant role, but the response has been that he wanted to get “as far from the original as possible,” and in that, he has succeeded. The problem is, he hasn’t managed to go anywhere.--S.A. (UA Riverview) WHITE OLEANDER Bad enough to ensure you never read the novel (by Janet Fitch) it’s based on, White Oleander seems like Warner Bros.’ bid for American Beauty gold, but it’s not even as good as that overheated chestnut. Based on ideas about womanhood that never quite translate themselves into, you know, drama, the story follows young Astrid (Alison Lohman) as she bounces from her murderous mother (a not-entirely-convincing Michelle Pfeiffer) to foster home to foster home, meeting born-again stripper Robin Wright Penn and fragile actress Renée Zellweger along the way. “They don’t destroy us; we destroy them” is the movie’s idea of profundity, though Astrid never shows any signs of following her mom down the boyfriend-poisoning route. Perhaps the idea is that womanhood can itself be toxic, whether to others or oneself. It’s hardly worth figuring out, since the movie’s sappy denouement removes what few teeth it’s shown along the way. Nice puppy-dog stuff between Lohman and Almost Famous’s Patrick Fugit, though. --S.A. (Ritz 16) 
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