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Self-named "brilliant novelist" Luke Wilson owes money to the "Cuban Mafia" (one thug played by hip-hop artist Chino XL), and needs to get unblocked and finish his next book fast (he has 30 days, as the script loosely alludes to Dostoevsky’s The Gambler). Sans laptop, he hires stenographer Kate Hudson. As he dictates a tale of cross-class passion, Wilson and Hudson play roles in the 1924 fantasy: He’s a poor tutor working for the lovely Sophie Marceau, who’s betrothed to wealthy David Paymer; Hudson is the au pair (adopting variously terrible accents depending on Wilson’s dictation that day). The premise is awkward at best, but laid over top of a couldn’t-be-duller romantic comedy (boy and girl are destined for earnest coupledom), the movie is stagnant from the first frame. The film cannot get out of its own way: Potentially odd moments fall flat, Hudson sounds more and more like her mother, and Wilson looks pained throughout. Last straw: They spend their day off in a drearily predictable montage, under a Norah Jones tune. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bala; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

There’s a certain primal scene quality to the vintage stag shorts collected in The Good Old Naughty Days. Watching these early 20th-century blue movies, intended to get customers of French brothels in the mood, isn’t exactly like walking in on your grandparents doing it, but it certainly puts paid to the notion that sexual perversity is a late 20th-century scourge. Eric Le Guen’s music probably adds an air of jauntiness that wasn’t present at the time, but it’s hard not to be charmed by, say, the assortment of awful (and unfortunately untranslated) food-sex puns in "The Musketeer’s Dinner," though there’s plenty to shock as well, including a three-way involving a man, a woman, and an eagerly lapping dog. Presented as camp, complete with nudge-nudge wink-wink introductions, the film has its share of historic import (some of the prints were restored by the Centre National de la Cinématographie), not least of which is the shorts’ unremarked polymorphousness; an abbot wanders in on a friar who’s peeping in on two nuns getting down to business, and promptly sets to buggering his charge rather than elbowing him aside. Despite the lack of silicone and Brazilian wax jobs, The Good Old Naughty Days shows that desires stay desires, regardless of the fashion. --Sam Adams (Roxy)

Remember how when Barton Fink was assigned to write a wrestling movie, he wrote about a man wrestling with his soul? If he’d taken a crack at Marvel Comics’ not-so-jolly-green giant, this would’ve been the result. Ang Lee and constant collaborator James Schamus have concocted a psychobabble-drenched tale where the Hulk (or, sorry, Hulk) is merely an outward manifestation of Bruce Banner’s memories of childhood trauma; if the X-Men are really teenagers in disguise, dealing with their changing bodies and social ostracism, then the Hulk is, literally, a big baby. That Nick Nolte stars as Bruce’s long-post pappy seems appropriate, given that he starred in one of the most literal minded daddy-didn’t-love-me movies of all time, Affliction. (That with his flyaway hair and scraggly beard he seemed to have transformed himself into James Coburn’s character in that movie is merely a plus.) As Bruce, Aussie Eric Bana has the thankless task of finding dozens of different ways to seethe, while Jennifer Connelly, in the Fay Wray role, gets a bunch of weepy, overwrought scenes, but is essentially The Girl, Oscar or no Oscar. Lee tarts up the movie with a variety of CGI wipes, partial dissolves, split screens and so forth, obviously trying to draw inspiration from his nine-panel source, but he’s so far from tapping the pulpy lifeblood of comic books you can only howl in frustration. (That he’s convinced a genetically modified poodle makes a scary antagonist is about all you need to say.) The movie Hulk most obviously wants to be is King Kong, but Hulk’s CGI beast doesn’t have the grandeur of his far-cheaper predecessor, and the movie’s so mired in hypnotherapy recriminations it just feels like a prolonged niggle. Hulk trash. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Baltasar Kormákur’s disappointing followup to 101 Reykjavík is a soggy soap opera whose generic portentousness is almost the opposite of 101’s quirky distinction. It’s like Tennessee Williams turned down several dozen degrees, in every sense. Gunnar Eyjólfsson plays the unsteady patriarch who’s charged himself with the welfare of his small Icelandic town, protecting the local fishing quotas against corporate invaders. Alas, that doesn’t seem to have left much room for good parenting, since his children are a resentful, bitter lot, from Ágúst (Hilmir Snaer Gudnason), who’s been secretly studying music while his father thinks he’s going to business school, to Haraldur (Sigurdur Skúlason), who’s been trying to sell the family business out from under his father’s feet. After the father calls his children home to make a mysterious announcement (just guess), recriminations unsue, buried resentments come to the surface, and people yell. A lot. It’s distraught, all right, but not particularly engrossing, at least not after the third or fourth skeleton has danced its way out of the closet. --S.A. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Like the paths to Hell and healthy living, it seems the road to gay film fest awards is paved with good intentions. Miles Swain’s writing and directing debut has a ton of both ambition and accolades (including being selected as the closing film of last year’s PIGLFF), but festival juries must have been voting on potential rather than what’s actually on screen. I understand that it’s hard to say no to a sweeping comedy-action-romantic allegorical road movie set against newsreels of the most crucial decade of gay America. But they should have. In Watergate-era 1973, Young Republican Alan (Larry Sullivan) abandons his yet-to-be-published, incendiarily homophobic book when he falls in love and moves in with boisterous activist Tommy (Steve Braun). One episode of That Gay ’70s Show later, it’s 1977, Anita Bryant’s anti-homosexual witch-hunts are making news, and Allen’s book comes back to haunt him. Cut to 1984, and Tommy and Allen are sunlit desperados trying to escape both Mexico and the specter of the new disease. It’s hard to grouse about a film with such Maupin- or Kushner-size dreams, but it would be easier to like if it managed to hit any of its targets squarely, or even if it only missed more interestingly. As countercultural epics go, this disappointing Trip is not particularly long, not particularly strange. --Ryan Godfrey (Ritz at the Bourse)

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April 25, 2002
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