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April 24-30, 2003 movie shorts ContinuingANGER MANAGEMENT "I think Eskimos are smug." This observation, by anger management patient John Turturro, is easily the loopiest in all of Peter Segal’s ridiculous and redundant buddy flick. For the most part, the movie trudges along, pitting anger management "guru" Jack Nicholson against his newest court-ordered patient, Adam Sandler. (The judge who so orders is the late Lynne Thigpen, who, as ever, weathers all insanity with integrity.) Arrested for ostensibly untoward behavior on an airplane ("This is a very difficult time for the country," notes the security guard), Sandler must endure in-home counseling from the wholly obnoxious Nicholson, who not only has him interacting with classmates Turturro and Luis Guzmán, but also arranges his meetings with trannie prostitute Woody Harrelson (self-named "Galaxia") and pretty barfly Heather Graham. Ostensibly, this leads to Sandler’s repairing his relationship with the absolutely perfect Marisa Tomei. But really, it’s all about the boys. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview) ASSASSINATION TANGO The elements in Robert Duvall’s latest directorial effort, following six years after The Apostle, don’t fit together any better than the title suggests. Duvall plays a New York-based hitman who’s finally starting to settle down late in life when he’s sent to Argentina on a job. There, he becomes enraptured by the tango and falls in love with a beautiful dance instructor (Duvall’s 30-year-old squeeze, Luciana Pedraza) while awaiting a shot at his target. An actor whose best performances always have something of the unfinished about them, Duvall shows a similarly spontaneous side as a director, but Tango lacks what an acting teacher would call a spine. At times, Duvall’s mumbling performance verges on Tourettic, and the groups of no-doubt fascinating people he’s gathered together on screen have so little to do that the movie feels like a collection of asides. (Ironically, it takes a stronger directorial hand to create the feeling of spontaneity.) Tango isn’t nearly as embarassing as it could be, given that the plot is nakedly structured around Duvall’s own obsessions and the female lead went to his girlfriend, who’d neither acted nor danced the tango before. But it’s not steps that make a dance; it’s motion, and Assassination Tango goes too many ways at once. --Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
Talented young footballer Jess (Parminder Nagra) loves David Beckham. But her parents, first generation immigrants to the London suburbs, want her to focus on a proper marriage to a nice Indian boy, much like her sister (Archie Panjabi). Gurinder Chadha’s charming, energetic movie charts Jess’ efforts to hide the fact that she’s signed on with a girls’ auxiliary team, befriended teammate Keira Knightley (a Mia Hamm fan), and developed a crush on their sensitive Irish coach (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Unlike most teen romances, this film takes the girls’ perspectives and complicated feelings seriously, detailing their daily negotiations of culture differences (race, nation, gender, class, and generation). And while it includes some standard contrivances, it uses them to reveal the ways that assumptions shape experiences, particularly, girls’ experiences. Various conflicts come to a head in a colorful finale that crosscuts between a final football match and a traditional Indian wedding. Cultures continue to clash, but in ways that are increasingly responsive to one another. --C.F. (Bala;Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
Michael 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. Bowling begins, of course, with our fondness for guns, but Moore pushes past that answer, pointing 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..--S.A. (Roxy) BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE Lonely, depressed tax lawyer Steve Martin meets witty, well-read "lawyer girl" in a chat room. How surprised he is when she arrives on his doorstep: Boisterous ex-con (and executive producer) Queen Latifah wants him to help her clear her record of the felony burglary for which she was framed. And how unsurprised you are that she teaches this uptight white man to shake his booty, open up to his two kids, lust after his ex (Jean Smart) and even outsmart Latifah’s thuggish ex (Steve Harris). The broad comedy derives from standard class and race frictions, helped along by Martin’s neighbor, Betty White (fearful of "Negroes") and his no. 1 client, Joan Plowright (fond of plantation songs that remind her of childhood servants). Latifah is delightful, and as the man who wisely falls in love with her on first meeting, Eugene Levy brings a welcome dryness to the otherwise predictably soppy proceedings.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Narberth; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview) BULLETPROOF MONK Perhaps best known for directing Mariah Carey"s ³Honey² video, Paul Hunter here tries to pull together a clutter of clichés into yet another movie-based-on-a-comic-book. Assigned to protect a Sacred Scroll from nefarious Nazis, a noble No-Name Monk (the great Chow Yun-Fat) is reduced to mentoring smart-ass pickpocket Kar (a.k.a. Stiffler, a.k.a. Seann William Scott) and Russian mafia princess Jade (James King). Their interactions include clever choreography (by Wong Wai Leung) and exceedingly well-worn paths to enlightenment (with, it must be said, a fun getting-to-know-you scene involving cocoa puffs). For the most part, the film combines elements from Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Karate Kid, even a moment or two from Subway's underground battling, featuring a chiseled torso of a thing (Patrick Hagarty), all without much innovation. To an extent, the film parodies its own corniness (Kar has learned his initial skills from kung fu movies, Monk dispenses wisdom in riddles), but the jokes (³Good luck with that enlightenment stuff,² ta-tas Kar when he thinks, wrongly, of course, his learning is done) aren"t smart enough to make up for the reckless race and culture stereotypes. --C.F.(AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview) CHASING PAPI Even if you don't recognize the TV pedigree of the director (The Bernie Mac Show's Linda Mendoza) and the actors (sitcom/soap bit-parters Roselyn Sanchez, Sofía Vergara and Eduardo Verástegui; Christian-pop star Jaci Velasquez; Freddy Rodriguez in gayface), the setup and delivery scream lesser-network small-screen farce. Papi (Verástegui) has three fiancées in three cities, and they all come to L.A. to surprise him. Papi freaks out, takes too many tranquilizers, and spends most of the movie weekending at Bernie's. The women -- the stuck-up rich girl, the resourceful sexpot cocktail waitress and the nerdy lawyer -- are at each other's throats until they have to join forces. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; UA Riverview)
Set in Depression-era, tabloid-driven Chi, Chicago splits off Kander and Ebb’s cracking songs from the rest of the story, setting them in a fantasy nightclub space that is interwoven with the real-life setting. Following in Stanley Donen’s footsteps, Rob Marshall is a choreographer turned director, and the movie’s dance sequences fall together like little bits of magic, though the faux-retro salaciousness sometimes comes off more Broadway crass than le jazz hot (and Catherine Zeta-Jones is too hippy for her high-cut costumes). Zellweger, though, proves to be an honest-to-goodness triple threat; while hardly a belter, she finds her way into Roxie’s go-getter bite, and she’s as light on her feet as any good comic actress. Who knew, what’s more, that Richard Gere had been hiding a mean lyric tenor all these years? Chicago may not rank with the classics, but it’s the best traditional movie musical in many a moon. --S.A. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Grant) 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. It’s well known that Frida (played by Salma Hayek) 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.--C.F. (Bryn Mawr) THE GOOD THIEF An uncanny companion to The Truth About Charlie, Neil Jordan's The Good Thief works many of the same back alleys: movie directors in principal roles (Emir Kusturica and twin directors Michael and Mark Polish), African music and French rap to convey polyglot fusion, a palette saturated with neon blues. But Jordan adds layer upon layer, referencing both his stars' real-life personae (Nick Nolte plays a recovering junkie, with mug shots that look not unlike the actor's well-publicized own) and a cultural lineage traced from the U.S. to France and back again. Ultimately, The Good Thief twists itself in too many circles. Still, there's something worth savoring about The Good Thief, an aftertaste more satisfying than the meal itself. --S.A.(Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16) HEAD OF STATE From its start -- Nate Dogg in front of Mount Rushmore flanked by dancing white girls dressed in skimpy red, white and blue -- Chris Rock’s crossover dream is obvious and derivative. (Lumpy white people fo-shizzling is tired already.) Picked by party regulars to lose a race for president, D.C. alderman Rock shakes things up by running a hip-hop campaign and naming his bail bondsman brother (Bernie Mac) as his running mate. He encourages poor folks to get mad ("That ain’t right" becomes his slogan, set off against his opponent’s "God bless America, and no place else!"), flirts with adorable Tamala Jones and impresses his ostensible handlers (Dylan Baker and Lynn Whitfield) and snooty white folks with slang and song (Nelly, Jay-Z, DMX). Written by Rock and longtime collaborator Ali LeRoi, the movie is bogged down by predictable, easy jokes, so that the political points (racism is everywhere, CEOs get away with murders, kids need to get "knocked out!") look weaker than they are.--Cindy Fuchs. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.)
Camp Green Lake isn't a camp so much as a juvenile detention center in the middle of B.F., Texas, and there's no longer anything green or lakey about it. Why are the ³campers² -- with Goonies-ish names like Armpit, Zero and X-ray -- each required to dig a new hole in the middle of the desert every day? To tell too much would spoil the fun, which comes by the shovelful, but here's a teaser: What do peaches and onions have to do with a kissing bandit, a family curse and Latvia? You'll just have to figure it out along with Stanley ³Caveman² Yelnats IV (Shia LeBeouf), who's sent to Green Lake for stealing shoes, and who has to deal withstern warden Sigourney Weaver and ³counselors² Jon Voight and Tim Blake Nelson. Based on the Newberry-winning book by Louis Sachar (who adapted it for screen), Holes is the rare adolescent movie that doesn't pander. It delves into the fantastical without shying away from real-world issues like peer acceptance, homelessness and intolerance, but it never stops being engaging popcorn entertainment for all ages. Who woulda thunk? A teenage buddy comedy that actually engrosses. --R.G. (Bridge; Narberth; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview) HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (Not reviewed.) A haiku: Dear Rob Zombie, this is your least plausible film since Battlefield Earth. (UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview) LAUREL CANYON Performances stand out in Lisa Cholodenko's follow-up to High Art. As a California record producer whose medical resident son (Christian Bale) and his thesis-writing fiancee (Kate Beckinsale) take up temporary residence in her house/studio, Frances McDormand has the earthy naturalism of a woman who's cut her own path in the world. And as the incipient rock star who's cutting an album in her house, Alessandro Nivola is a revelation, incarnating the kind of nascent sex god whose appeal is only increased by his seeming effortlessness. Bale and Beckinsale's squares aren't nearly as compelling; at bottom, you feel like they're just sounding boards for the film's more freewheeling characters. (The squares loosen up, but the free spirits don't get any less free.) Despite its endorsement of the laissez-faire life, Laurel Canyon is as neat as a military bed; it would've been a lot more effective if Cholodenko had left some of the seams showing. --S.A.(Bala; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16) MALIBU’S MOST WANTED Aspiring Jewish rapper and Malibu homeboy B-Rad Gluckman (Jamie Kennedy) makes the small step from TV's Jamie Kennedy Experiment to a wholly pedestrian movie, enabled by writers Fax Bahr and Adam Small. When Brad's routine embarrasses his governor candidate dad (Ryan O'Neal), the wily campaign manager (Blair Underwood) arranges to have him kidnapped by thug-actors Anthony Anderson and Taye Diggs, to scare the ³black out of him,² whereupon all are threatened by real banger Damien Dante Wayans. One more in the exceedingly tiresome line of white-folks-acting-black jokes, the film notes that gangsta-ism is also a performance for black kids, but what it misses completely is that oppression works by race and class, and performance is not the ticket out (except for the most fortunate few).--C.F. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
Following his debut with Friday, F. Gary Gray has made a nice little career out of turning ridiculously conventional shoot-’em-ups into much better movies than they deserve to be (see also: The Negotiator and Set It Off). His trick is no big secret; he merely elicits strong acting out of his stars -- in this case Vin Diesel and Larenz Tate. Diesel is an undercover narcotics cop in Los Angeles who arrests a Mexican kingpin and ends up with a dead wife when the new cartel takes over. He and partner Tate go after the nascent honcho, who calls himself Diablo (aren’t druglords always called Diablo?), until Diesel steps over the line and has to turn in his badge. The end. Nah, just kidding. He actually takes the law into his own hands! Like I said, so conventional it should be wearing a nametag and eating lunch at the Reading Terminal Market. But it all somehow works, because Gray gets a career-best performance from a damaged, haunted Diesel, and whattaya know, we consequently care for the character. One movie will not make me a Vin Diesel fan, but count me in on the F. Gary Gray bandwagon. Now someone get him a script apart. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Riverview)
A surprisingly affectionate tribute to the folk boom of the 1960s, Christopher Guest's A Mighty Wind never quite sinks its teeth into its subject, but the substitution of sweetness for satire makes for a fair trade. Kicked off by the death of an Albert Grossman-esque folk promoter, the ersatz documentary follows the reunion of three folk acts for a concert in his honor: the Kingston Trio-esque Folksmen (Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, a.k.a. Spinal Tap), the shiny, happy New Main Street Singers (an insufferably cheery bunch who, in a Tap-ish bit of humiliation, play at amusement parks in the shadow of noisy roller coasters), and onetime duo Mickey and Sylvia (Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara), whose legendary career ended along with their marriage. Folk music should be just as ripe a target as heavy metal, but Guest and co. (many of whom, of course, grew up during the 1960s) don't have the heart to tighten the screws. Instead, you get Levy's ceaseless mugging, and a smattering of jokes, which are less frequent as well as less pointed. A handful of zingers fly by, but what draws you in is the camaraderie between the erstwhile Tappers, and the genuinely moving chemistry between Levy and O'Hara's ex-lovers. --S.A. (Ritz East; Ritz 16) NOWHERE IN AFRICA The winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, German director Caroline Link’s adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s autobiographical novel is careful, elegiac and occasionally self-important. Still, its focus on a young girl’s understanding of traumatic events lends it an admirably narrow focus, set against a huge backdrop. A family of German Jews -- idealistic father Merab Ninidze, pampered mother Juliane Köhler, and spunky, open-hearted daughter Regina (played as a child by Lea Kurka and as a teen by Karoline Eckertz) -- flee Germany in 1938, leaving behind family, friends and dad’s career as a lawyer. In Kenya, he works someone else’s farm with a crew of black workers whom he respects; his wife, meanwhile, resents her classed descent and makes him pay by withholding sex. Regina takes immediately to her new home, befriending their loyal cook, Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), and adapting to local customs and beliefs. While her parents struggle to keep their marriage together and come to understand their own prejudices (sort of), she looks back wistfully (for 138 minutes), as an adult narrator, able to see details they missed. Her sad but youthfully hopeful story forms the basis for a Holocaust film that doesn’t show the Holocaust.--C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16) PHONE BOOTH The premise of Phone Booth couldn't be simpler: A guy named Stu (Colin Farrell) answers a phone on the corner of 53rd and Eighth in New York City. As it turns out, the caller has his eye on Stu, literally, watching him through a high-powered rifle scope. To underline his threat, the sniper takes out a loud-mouthed pimp, at which point the cops and the press amass, assuming Stu is the shooter. For the rest of the movie, Stu -- accused by the killer-caller of being too selfish and cynical, too modern mannish -- is caught in that phone booth.--C.F. (AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Cinemagic; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview) THE QUIET AMERICAN Phillip Noyce’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s avowedly "anti-American" novel makes the political personal, collapsing a pivotal moment in the history of American involvement in Vietnam into the story of two men battling over a woman. Fowler (Michael Caine) is a British journalist who’s living the good life in 1952 Saigon until Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) walks into the picture. Fowler starts to see a darker side to Pyle when he introduces him to the beautiful Phuong (The Vertical Ray of the Sun’s Do Thi Hai Yen), who’s been Fowler’s girlfriend for the last two years. Pyle seizes on the fact that Fowler cannot get a divorce from his long-estranged English wife and begins to woo Phuong, always in the name of what’s best for her, but ruthlessly all the same. However, Greene’s love-triangle allegory is so overwhelming, however, that the film loses sight of the larger questions it makes signs of addressing. We’re stuck looking through Fowler’s eyes, never getting a sense of what life was like for the Vietnamese, any more than, for all the arguing Fowler and Pyle do over what’s best for Phuong, we get a chance to hear her own thoughts on the subject.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16) RUSSIAN ARK Aleksandr Sokurov's latest movie is genuine cinematic singularity -- an entire movie filmed in a single 90-plus-minute shot. Sokurov stages his time-traveling film inside The Hermitage, the camera gliding past the arrayed throngs of Russia's imperial past, Tilman Büttner's camera floating like a specter through halls, while a disembodied voiceover takes note of what it/we/the camera see. Wafting through the entry on the wake of incoming ballgoers, the camera-ghost soon encounters a tall, slim figure clad in a high-collared black coat. Played by Sergei Dreiden, the character is identified in the credits as ³the Marquis.² Together, mostly, the pair moves from room to room, encountering figures from Russian history (most of whose identities aren't clear until the closing credits), discoursing on art, history and the Russian character. If this sounds like being stuck in the corner at a particularly boring cocktail party, well, you're not far off the mark. A far cry from the purposeful time-shifting of Béla Tarr or Hou Hsiao-Hsien (to name just two masters of the extended take), Russian Ark often seems to be an impressive achievement, but it's more of an object than a movie.--S.A. (Ritz Five) WHAT A GIRL WANTS Warner Bros. is hoping that what a girl in the 7-14 demographic wants is an exact tonal replica of The Princess Diaries, only with Amanda Bynes. She's a headstrong but button-cute working-class American teen who decides to spend the summer with her blue-blood English father (Colin Firth), who has yet to find out he's been a dad for 17 years. To complicate matters, daddy is running for Parliament, and he's also about to get married to an evil stepmother, who comes complete with an equally evil daughter.--R.G. 
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