Also this issue:

Cleaning Up
Jennifer Lopez plays down-to-earth to live out on-screen fantasy.
-Cindy Fuchs

Just Beat It
Fun with percussion in the rousing Drumline.
-Cindy Fuchs

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

Continuing

Repertory Film

Showtimes

December 12-18, 2002

movie shorts

New

The Hot Chick

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

In an alternate

Universe, this movie will

Get Rob Schneider laid.

(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

JUST A KISS

I’m starting to think that digital video cameras must come with an instructional manual on how to make your own ensemble drama about self-loathing city dwellers. From Chelsea Walls to Full Frontal to Just a Kiss, Fisher Stevens’ entry in the miserability derby, they all have two things in common: They look like shit, and I’d rather drive nails through my hands than watch them again. Stevens adds a dollop of rancid black comedy to the fetid brew, but he never bothers to convince us that any of his lovelorn, self-obsessed yuppies is worth a pixel of our time. How narcissistic are they? Well, when Peter (an awkward, distracted Patrick Breen, also culpable for the script) decides he needs to tell his estranged girlfriend he still loves her, he pulls out his cell phone despite the fact that he’s on a plane, and when the interference causes the plane to crash, he never pauses to consider the fact that he’s killed everyone in coach (although the film does stop to make a joke about it). Ron Eldard, Kyra Sedgwick, Marisa Tomei and Taye Diggs get roped in along the way, but their characters have no humanity to act; it’s all just one big superior joke. Not enough ones, and far too many zeroes. --Sam Adams (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

STAR TREK:NEMESIS

The fourth film to feature the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Nemesis begins with a wedding, ends with a significant character’s death and is filled with everything you’d expect from a Star Trek movie: ugly aliens, Kirk-style hand-to-hand combat, phaser battles, cloaking devices, starship Mexican standoffs, photon torpedoes, damaged shields, hull breaches and -- as if I have to mention it -- the obligatory dune buggy race. What has always distinguished the Star Trek shows and movies from more conventional sci-fi explodathons, however, is their concern with weightier issues than the mere fate of the civilized universe. A future filled with androids, shape-shifters, sentient holograms and perfect genetic carbon copies makes it clear that the final frontier isn’t space, it’s the uncharted bounds of humanity and identity. Case in point: the nemesis in Nemesis (Black Hawk Down’s Tom Hardy) is Captain Picard’s youthful clone, incubated and discarded by Romulans, only to take over their empire and seek the obliteration of Earth and the Federation. Writer John Logan (Gladiator) is shooting for the Shakespearean stars -- there are traces of Othello’s jealousy, Macbeth’s primal ambition, Lear’s dissolution of family, Hamlet’s Oedipal rage. It will surprise no one that this star soap is a positron more prosaic than all that, but for Star Trek fans, parting with your nine bucks will be no great tragedy. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; UA 69th st; UA Grant; UA Main St.)

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THE WEIGHT OF WATER

Back in May, when Kathryn Bigelow’s K-19: The Widowmaker was about to open (and sink), she told The New York Times, “Cinema is a great opportunity to safely explore the extremities of things.” Most often, Bigelow’s extremities have been of the action film variety, but the release of her long-delayed psychological thriller/historical romance (shelved since 2000) suggests another angle. The film, based on Anita Shreve’s novel, takes up two stories of betrayal and desire, as photographer Catherine McCormack visits New Hampshire’s Isles of Shoals to research a 19th-century murder. She brings along her poet husband Sean Penn, his brother Josh Lucas, and Lucas’ bodacious girlfriend, Elizabeth Hurley. McCormack uncovers that a Norwegian immigrant, Maren (Sarah Polley), ravaged by loneliness and desire, killed her sister (the late Katrin Cartlidge) and sister-in-law (Vinessa Shaw). Absorbed by her project, McCormack pretends not to notice the obvious lust between Penn and Hurley (both quite in love with their own talents); the tangling of the two tales leads to much heavy breathing and sidelong glancing, as all relationships are rocked on the conveniently increasingly turbulent sea. Admittedly overrun by inflated acting and clammy clichés -- uninteresting extremities -- the movie offers alternately nuanced and unsubtle observations of “women’s work” (in various senses) over time. --Cindy Fuchs (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)