Also this issue:

Tick Tock
Counting down the minutes in Spike Lee's resonant 25th Hour.
-Cindy Fuchs

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

Continuing

Repertory Film

Showtimes

January 9-15, 2003

movie shorts

New

JUST MARRIED

Sarah (Brittany Murphy) and Tom (Ashton Kutcher) are the cute Ugly Americans whose unsinkable romance founders when they honeymoon in Europe. The usual tensions are in play: Sarah's a pampered 90210er, Tom's from the other side of the tracks, and Sarah's dad thinks Tom's not good enough for his princess. (However the kids' marriage turns out, it has to be better than supposedly faithful mom and pop's: the 'rents both have blue eyes, while Sarah's are deep honey brown. Bonus cheap laugh: mom's name is Pussy.) Of course, both Tom and Sarah are harboring decidedly inconsequential secrets from the other. And Europe does what it always does to Americans in comedic films and very special sitcom episodes, which is to say, it turns them into spastic buffoons. The movie's crepe-thin joke is that these two in-and-out-of lovebirds are too busy giving each other accidental bloody noses and destroying hotels to consummate their marital bliss. It's a relief to see Kutcher not playing a completely dim bulb for once, and when his character's not completely unlikable his moments of sputtering apoplexy are almost reminiscent of Oliver Hardy. The talented Murphy's not up to channeling Stan Laurel for this paycheck, though, and it's perfectly understandable. A movie set in an Alpine castle shouldn't be this drafty and moldering; a movie set in Venice shouldn't be this soggy.--Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

NARC

Everything in Joe Carnahan's Narc happens with a crash or a bang, or some sound-engineering combination of the two. Carnahan (Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane) desperately wants to grab your attention, but once he catches your ear, all that spills out is a mess of cop-movie clichés and pedestrian dialogue. Oddly, for every amped-up chase scene -- such as the handheld number that opens the movie, with Nick (Jason Patric) sprinting after a syringe-wielding junkie -- there's an aimless monologue that goes nowhere, and takes its time doing it. (In one such case, the camera seems more interested in the reflections in a car window than what's being said; you can't blame it.) Patric plays a discharged undercover cop who's been given a shot at reinstatement if he can help solve the murder of another cop, the catch being that he needs the help of burly loose cannon Oak (Ray Liotta) to do it. Since the movie really has only enough plot to fill out half a Law & Order, Carnahan vamps, either with morbid anecdotes (a pothead who blows his own head off when he takes "shotgun" too literally) or aimless depictions of investigative grunt work (a checkerboard montage that show the cops working the street for information, but unfortunately never gives enough consistent sound in any given quadrant to tell what the hell is going on). Both Liotta and Patric's performances have been drawing some raves, but while they're both pleasant to watch, Carnahan's idea of "drama" is so pedestrian -- throwing things around the room, dropping to a squat and clutching the head in the hands -- that they never stop acting and start being. With his unflinching fealty to style, Carnahan might be his generation's answer to Michael Mann, except that while Mann made the small screen bigger, Narc feels like a rogue TV show that's strayed into the movie theater, putting on its best face but still hopelessly outclassed.--Sam Adams (Bridge; UA Riverview)