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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

New

Repertory Film

Showtimes

December 12-18, 2002

movie shorts

Continuing

8 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 (Bridge; UA Riverview)

ADAM SANDLER’S EIGHT CRAZY NIGHTS

It’s not news that Adam Sandler loves himself too much. His characters all follow the same trajectory: vulnerable and full of self-effacing charm, they worm their ways into the hearts of great girls and achieve a moral rightness. In his first foray into animation, Sandler voices three characters: gnarly smalltown screw-up Davey, and the twin elderly folks -- volunteer basketball referee Whitey and his stay-at-home sister Eleanore -- who take him in when his trailer burns down. At least he’s not playing the girl (that would be a little too creepy, even for Sandler). Fresh off his astounding good use in Punch Drunk Love, the erstwhile-Opera-Man-meets-Scrooge can’t get out of his own way, piling up poop jokes, fat jokes, feet jokes, wig jokes and epilepsy jokes, and a few complaints about Xmas and Hanukkah. All this turns mushy when 33-year-old Davey, an angry drunk for most of the 75-minute cartoon, finds love, from himself/Sandler, disguised as the 70-something Whitey, who also needs love, from himself, disguised as his sister and also as Davey. Add to this some reindeer who hang around watching over Whitey, with little squeaks also voiced by Sandler: enough, we surrender. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

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ANALYZE THAT

Back for a second session, Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal return as a troubled mobster and his equally neurotic therapist, in a rote sequel that’s sporadically funny but woefully disorganized and often plain tedious. The two are thrown together after De Niro feigns psychosis to get out of prison and is released into Crystal’s custody, thus connecting them at the hip for the rest of the movie. There are moments of inspiration -- De Niro and Crystal warbling selections from West Side Story, Anthony LaPaglia as the star of a Sopranos-esque TV show, anything involving Lisa Kudrow -- but the whole mess seems shockingly underdeveloped, or would if we weren’t used to seeing barely fleshed-out premises get greenlit on a regular basis. If comedy is all about timing, then comic films are all about structure, and Analyze That is a half-built bungalow.--Sam Adams (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Bryn Mawr; Cinemagic; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

ARARAT

Atom Egoyan’s Ararat opens with a close shot of paintbrushes; in the background stands an easel and, nearby, artist Arshile Gorky (Simon Abkarian), painting a portrait of himself and his mother. Quietly, this first scene sets up everything that follows, including its evocation of Gorky’s own troubled past. He survived the Armenian massacre by the Turkish army during World War I, losing his mother in the city of Van, near Mount Ararat. The movie follows a zig-zag route, moving in and out of times and settings, breaking down characters’ experiences, recollections and self-images. Gorky is the subject of scrutiny throughout the film, by multiple writers and readers. Art historian Ani (Arsinée Khanjian) has written a book on Gorky, citing his survival of the massacre as a source for his art. In turn, she’s hired to consult on a film about the genocide by screenwriter Rouben (Eric Bogosian) and director Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour), seeking just such an identifiable character to propel their commercial enterprise. All being of Armenian descent, each has a personal stake in telling the story, and the actors, including Martin (Bruce Greenwood) and the half-Turkish Ali (Elias Koteas) rethink some of their own self-identifications. Elsewhere, Ani’s tangled familial relationships, particularly with her18-year-old son Raffi (David Alpay) inspire chaos and meanness as much as understanding and generosity. Elegant and deliberate in its evocation of these terrible but also revelatory experiences, Ararat is both intellectual and deeply passionate. Beyond recounting this story, Ararat investigates the nature of storytelling, the reasons for particular stories and the ways that stories are interpreted. History and familial lore become a collection of stories that are told and retold, repressed and refashioned to suit emotional, political and economic needs.--C.F. (Ritz Five)

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE

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)

DIE ANOTHER DAY

Ouch, ouch, ouch. As Die Another Day opens. James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is being tortured almost to death. Captured by North Koreans, following a chase scene that ends in the apparent death of young and vociferous Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee), Bond spends 14 months being half-drowned, stung by scorpions, electrocuted and kicked. By the time Bond is exchanged for another prisoner, the dastardly Zao (Rick Yune), he’s hairy and beat-down. When M (Judi Dench) sees him back at HQ, she tells him she thinks he divulged info while drugged and that he’s “no longer useful.” Well, that’s enough for Bond: Within seconds, he’s escaped, trying to find out who betrayed him in North Korea and redeem himself. From here, the 20th film in the series delivers what you expect -- numerous stunts, excellent cars (Bond’s turns invisible), fabulous ice and Madonna as Verity the fencing instructor. The Korean villain is so self-hating and driven to rule the world that not only does he engineer a satellite that’s a combination artificial sun/laser-style weapon, he also engages in some genetic replacement. Bond’s own issues also have to do with self-identity: Not only does he feel rejected, he’s also looking older, he squints more and shows strain when engaged in major stunts. Brosnan carries all this well, but here enters Halle Berry, as Jinx, who’s good with puns, a good shot and decently mimics Ursula Andress’ infamous rise-from-the-sea. Aside from Berry’s celebrity, Jinx brings into Bond’s white-guy heroic world a black woman who can not only keep up and save him, but also whoop him. The downside is that the climactic sequences are spread over the two heroes’ clashes with villains, inevitably leading to dilution, while Jinx looks cooler -- more threatening and slinkier -- in the formfitting camouflage than Bond does.--C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

EL CRIMEN DEL PADRE AMARO

The most remarkable thing about Carlos Carrera’s melodrama is that it managed to win the condemnation of the Catholic Church despite being based on a novel more than 125 years old -- which just goes to prove that the Church hasn’t developed an ounce of public-relations cunning in the last century and a quarter. If it hadn’t been for the Church’s condemnation, it’s doubtful this soapy fare would’ve been a hit even in its native country, despite the presence of Y Tu Mamá También hottie Gael García Bernal in the lead; this tale of inflamed passions and covert sin is pulp-novel stuff. It doesn’t help that by recent standards, Bernal’s Padre Amaro is practically a piker when it comes to church corruption -- sure, he breaks his vow of chastity and sells out a fellow priest who’s gone to help campesinos in the mountains against his bishop’s will, but if that makes him a bad priest, it doesn’t make him a horrible person. Really, the Catholic Church has worse things to worry about.--Sam Adams (Ritz East)

THE EMPEROR’S CLUB

It’s a peculiarity of Hollywood cliches that education is only a fit subject when it concerns the very privileged or the very not. The Emperor’s Club falls into the former category, set at a prestigious boarding school (transparently modeled after Philips Exeter, right down to the motto) and focusing on the conflict between beloved teacher Kevin Kline and problem child Emile Hirsch. Hirsch, the spoiled child of a U.S. senator, has intelligence but no character -- “character” is a word that gets used a lot here -- which we find when the class reunites in the movie’s ungainly closing third, when we come out of what’s apparently been only a long flashback. Replacing actors we’ve been watching for more than an hour is a risky (and, really, foolhardy) move -- the grownups don’t look a thing like their young counterparts, and the restaging of the school’s “Mr. Julius Caesar” says less about character than it does about daffy prep-school traditions.--Sam Adams (Bala; Ritz 16)

EMPIRE

Of the many crazy gangster movie clichés in Franc. Reyes’ movie, Isabella Rossellini’s big fat hair has to be the loony-toonsiest. She plays drug queenpin La Colombiana, peeved but intrigued when her best dealer Vic (John Leguizamo) says he wants out, to pursue “legit” opportunities. These come his way through Peter Sarsgaard (if it matters, his girlfriend Denise Richards goes to college with Vic’s, Delilah Cotto), an upscale investment banker who promises lavish returns on Leguizamo’s $4 million. But greed is bad now, and slick-yapping white boys in Armani suits are as cutthroat and dim-witted as Vic’s fellow dealers and homies (among them, Vincent Laresca, Fat Joe, Treach and Carlos Léon, better known as Madonna’s baby-daddy -- he ends up with a bullet in his forehead). The first film produced by the Hispanic-focused Arenas Entertainment (a division of Universal), the film is painfully predictable and feels like it’s been edited with a lawnmower, but features a sharp score by Rubén Blades, some fabulous lighting, and the always brave, always compelling Leguizamo, who swaggers more convincingly than Paul Muni, and more subtly than Al Pacino.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

EQUILIBRIUM

After this and Reign of Fire, Christian Bale movies are starting to seem like a seriously bad idea. (Fans of Newsies and Swing Kids are invited to register their protest.) Bale’s choice of lead roles, American Psycho included, seems to have more to do with scoping out opportunities to doff his shirt and look serious than anything resembling a worthwhile script. Writer-director Kurt Wimmer, who seems to take himself very seriously indeed, has cooked up a dour Orwellian retread in which Bale plays a high-ranking Clerick [sic], part of a militaristic force charged arresting “sense offenders” -- people who flout the rules of dystopian Libira by going off their mandated government Prozac-type medication and daring to feel. Bale accidentally drops his dose one day, and before you know it, he’s turning away from his ambitious partner Taye Diggs and towards comely revolutionary Emily Watson (Metroland reunion, anyone?). Wimmer’s schematic, derivative vison is bad enough, but the bland brew turns rancid when he throws in large stretches of Matrix-style action (the intense training allowed by emotion-free lives having turned humans into fighting machines). The Matrix’s disingenuous rationale for allowing the hero to gun down legions of enemy soldiers without consequence slipped by because the movie was so obviously a cartoon, but Equilibrium is too monotonously grim to allow for any such embellishment; it just lets Bale gun people down because it looks cool. That a movie devoted to individuality is so willing to treat characters like cannon fodder would be a killing irony, if Equilibrium weren’t already dead on arrival.--S.A. (UA 69th St.; UA Riverview)

EXTREME OPS

(No review.) A haiku:

So we're like skiing?

And these bad guys are all like

“Dude, you're gettin' killed.”

(UA Riverview)

FAR FROM HEAVEN

Todd Haynes’ magnificently obsessed version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama introduces Cathy (a blond, peppy Julianne Moore), the perfect suburban wife and hostess, with two children, a black maid (Viola Davis) and a hard-working husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid). But all is not well in the Magnatech household. Frank slips out of work one night, to a dimly lit underground bar. In a real ’50s melodrama, this is as far (farther, even) than we’d go: Audiences of the time wouldn’t have missed the implication that Frank was drifting into a life of sexual perversion, and he’d end up either dead or doomed by the final reel. But Haynes twists the genre against itself -- Frank’s plight is portrayed as it would have been at the time, but we’re understanding, not clucking our tongues. The resurgence of the passion Frank thought he’d quelled is hardest on Cathy, who turns to her gardener Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) for help. Trouble is, Raymond is black, and in 1950s Hartford, their relationship is more than unseemly; as her marriage to Frank grows worse and eventually dissolves, Cathy’s relationship to Raymond grows deeper, more emotionally intimate (although the two hardly even touch). Unlike traditional melodrama characters, though, Cathy isn’t brought low because of her faults, but because of her strengths. However frowned upon for her relationship with Raymond, Cathy never actually cheats on her husband, even after she knows he’s cheated on her. When Frank unburdens himself to Cathy, draped almost completely in the shadows of their split-level living room, Quaid’s voice reaches an anguished pitch, but his body remains almost perfectly erect, as if he’s so trapped by the codes of masculine behavior he can’t draw breath. Far from Heaven is a stylistic marvel: though it’s still a little more impressive than impassioned, the sophistication with which Haynes has intermingled the modern and postmodern is awe-inspiring.--S.A. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

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)

FRIDAY AFTER NEXT

“I look at myself and the movies I do as a brand,” Ice Cube tells Variety. No doubt, he works hard for the money, but this subset of the brand is particularly weak. Just in time for “Christmas in the hood” (and the “ho, ho, ho” joke is too obvious and unfunny), first-time director Marcus Raboy has Craig and Day-Day (Cube and Mike Epps) start new jobs as rent-a-cops down at the mall. They’re short on rent money, this time out because they’ve been robbed by a raggedy Santa in orange sneakers. Conveniently, Craig’s Willie (John Witherspoon) and Elroy (Don “D.C.” Curry) also work down at the mall, in their new BBQ joint. And on this Friday, they do what they always do: complain about their money situation, run from thugs, call each other names, smoke weed, flirt with a pretty girl, tangle with church ladies and fear the Tiny Lister stand-in (here, Terry Crews as a lunky ex-con with a hankering for sex with short men, say, a mini-pimp played by Katt Williams). And they end up throwing a party, where Clifton Powell brings girls and Witherspoon has bowel issues. In other words, nothing’s changed, except maybe that you’ve seen this before, twice, and Chris Tucker has moved on to more lucrative jokes.--Cindy Fuchs (Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS

The first Harry Potter was perhaps the only literary adaptation in memory to be better loved by those who had read the books than those who hadn’t -- Chris Columbus’ literal-minded faithfulness may produce insufferably lengthy films (the new one clocks in at 2 hours, 41 minutes), but they also allow you to pass leisurely through J.K. Rowling’s magnificent plots. (You can tell they’re bad movies based on good books.) At least they continue to pick good actors to add to a cast that includes Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Alan Rickman and the late Richard Harris (who sounds as if he barely made it through production). This time around, Kenneth Branagh joins the cast as the pompous, vain Gilderoy Lockhart (funny how well Branagh can play an arrogant prick) and The Patriot’s Jason Isaacs steps in as Lucius Malfoy, father of the bratty Draco. Columbus’ pacing is still murderously slow, his ideas as pedestrian as the worst TV -- an evil character gets a band of light across the eyes, and so forth. More than the exits, what Chamber makes you impatient for is the day when Y Tu Mamá También’s Alfonso Cuarón takes the helm with movie no. 3. Now that should be something to see. --Sam Adams (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Bridge; Narberth; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

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 (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

PERSONAL VELOCITY

Delia’s (Kyra Sedgwick) tale is the first of “Three Portraits” in Miller’s Personal Velocity, adapted from her collection of seven short stories, and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year. Much like that first glance at Delia, the film gives good surface, courtesy of Miller’s spare, observational prose and Ellen Kuras’ incisively agile digital video work. At the same time, it raises good questions about that surface, about what you’re looking at, and, more importantly, how you’re looking. Delia’s tale quickly descends from that moment of self-confidence to a dreadful scene at dinner. As her three kids look on, her husband, Kurt (David Warshovsky), launches into a horrific, unprovoked and apparently routine rage, slamming her head into the table. Hiding in the closet, Delia comes to a realization: It’s time to leave. She sneaks out while Kurt’s asleep. As she begins to see herself again, reflected in eyes that are not Kurt’s, Delia also sees the distinction and connections between her self-image and her responsibilities to her kids. The film helpfully flashes back to her childhood, when she learned how to use sex to her advantage, despite and because of her own sense of distance. Where Delia’s self-awareness feels intuitive, the second section, “Greta,” features a painfully articulate Manhattan cookbook editor (Parker Posey). She long ago gave up law school to resist her big-deal attorney father (Ron Leibman) and now she’s feeling increasingly frustrated with her alternative career and worse, with terminally sweet grad-student husband, Lee (Tim Guinee). She suddenly lands a choice job editing a young superstar’s second novel, and begins to test herself, cheating on Lee. She’s changed, Greta tells herself, she has ambition. And now, she’s “going to dump her beautiful husband like a redundant paragraph.” The last portrait concerns Paula (Fairuza Balk), a kohl-eyed punk also desperate for change, following a freak car accident that kills her companion, whom she’s only just met at a bar. (The film’s “gimmick” comes in here -- all the stories touch on the story of this accident, underlining that they all take place at the same time.) Paula’s story, like the others in Personal Velocity, allows sympathy without resorting to heavy-handed redemption, insight without instruction. Imperfect and shifty, the film never stops moving.--C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES

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 at the Bourse; 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; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

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. (UA Grant; UA Riverview)

SOLARIS

Though fans of Andrei Tarkovsky’s original will no doubt grouse that Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris has turned the story into soap opera, what he’s actually done is deftly locate the emotional core without sloughing off its philosophical elements. George Clooney, in a performance of stunning vulnerability, plays Chris Kelvin, an Earthbound psychiatrist called to investigate a disturbance on a space station orbiting the distant planet Solaris, whose crew has all but fallen out of contact, after mission commander Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) sends a cryptic S.O.S. Fortunately, Kelvin, after the loss of his wife (Natasha McElhone), has little to leave behind. Arriving on board, Kelvin finds no answers, just a lot of open space. There are blood stains and bodies in the morgue, but the remaining crew members won’t tell Kelvin what went on. “I could tell you what’s happening,” says Snow (Jeremy Davies), “but I don’t know if that’d really tell you what’s happening.” Those warnings might apply equally to Solaris as a whole. Divulging the film’s scant, and slowly unraveling, plot might provide a sense of structure, but it wouldn’t explain its delicate layers of meaning, or the deftness with which Soderbergh flips between Kelvin’s ordeal and his life back on Earth. Not only is it clear that the planet is causing the delusions that have affected the entire crew, but Solaris is responsive to their presence: It’s an intelligent world. Mirrors and reflections are constantly evoked in images and in dialogue, but they’re less reflections than refractions, overlapping pieces of an inconceivable whole. The film’s strategy is to bury its revelations in the background, and then give you plenty of time to sort them out, as the characters do the same. We’re united with Kelvin in his quest to make sense of Solaris (and, in our case, Solaris), and in his eventual decision to submit rather than dissect.--S.A. (Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

SPACE STATION

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)

STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN

Clearly cast in the mold of Buena Vista Social Club, Paul Justman’s documentary struggles with structure to the point where it’s still introducing characters a half-hour before the end, but the story it’s got to tell is so strong that the minor flubs don’t matter. The Funk Brothers were the unofficial conglomeration of musicians who backed virtually every hit from Motown’s Detroit era, and as an opening title claims, played on more No. 1 hits than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and Elvis combined. Based on Allan Slutsky’s biography of legendary bassist James Jamerson, Shadows mixes interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers with new performance footage, where Chaka Khan, Bootsy Collins, Ben Harper, Joan Osborne and others step in for Motown’s greatest vocalists. Based on an orchestral style that kept individual musicians from standing out and a factory mentality that discouraged the lifting of the curtain, these musicians have languished in obscurity despite being part of some of pop music’s best-known songs. (It didn’t help that most of Motown’s albums were released without credits, or that Motown discouraged them from sharing the spotlight.) It seems inconceivable now that you’ve never wondered who played the guitar riff on “My Girl” or the drums on “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” but you don’t feel educated so much as elated -- by the music, and the sense of a lingering wrong finally redressed. --S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse)

THEY

(No review.) A haiku:

Don't get me wrong, Wes:

I am, as they say, pro noun,

But They is no Them.

(Cinemagic; UA Riverview)

TREASURE PLANET

Oh, the crimes that are committed in the name of literature. No doubt the folks who made this outer-space travesty of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island did so in the name of introducing kids to the original story, but like most such patronizing attempts, it grossly underestimates its audience’s intelligence, as well as overestimating its ability to be manipulated. Crap rock music and a location transplant do not excitement make, especially when leaving the story intact means making Long John Silver a robot with an electric eye patch (que?) and having the young Jim scrape space barnacles off the ship’s hull. Purists will balk at the fact that Long John’s parrot is now a perky shape-shifting blob, and fans of pirate impressions will bemoan the absence of a single “Arrr, Jim lad” -- he calls him “Jimbo” instead. You’d think Titan A.E. would’ve taught people that a few impressive effects aren’t enough to pull younger viewers in -- that takes real imagination, which has unfortunately been forced to walk the space plank. --S.A.(UA Grant; UA Riverview)