New Movie Shorts

BOLLYWOOD / HOLLYWOOD

True to its title, Deepa Mehta’s entertaining romantic comedy is one part Bollywood musical, one part Pretty Woman. Rahul Seth is a young Indian-Canadian man who likes white girls, much to the chagrin of his widowed, melodramatic mother. When Rahul’s sister, Twinky, and her boyfriend announce their engagement, Rahul’s mother threatens that she will cancel the wedding unless Rahul finds himself an Indian wife. Under pressure to save his sister’s special day, Rahul meets an attractive, mysterious woman named Sue in a bar and pays her to pose as his fiancee. What follows is the predictable whoops-I-accidentally-fell-in-love-with-the-imposter scenario. Not always predictable is the colorful wit in B/H’s musical sequences and its parade of quirky characters that includes Rahul’s Shakespeare-quoting grandmother and his cross-dressing chauffeur. Mehta’s best work has used that sense of whimsy to highlight more fortifying subject matter. B/H, on the other hand, is a self-cannibalizing satire that seems to subsist entirely on merriment. --Elisa Ludwig(Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

CASA DE LOS BABYS

Treading water between larger projects -- last year’s Sunshine State and the just-started Silver City -- John Sayles squanders a dynamite cast on the aimless Casa de los Babys. With the exception of Passion Fish, Sayles’ character pieces tend to be less satisfying than his sociopolitical treatises; You don’t remember the moments from his movies, so much as the ideas. Centered around a group of six American woman who have gone to an unnamed Latin American country (though not the same unnamed Latin American country as in Men With Guns) to adopt children, Casa gives about equal screen time to Lili Taylor, Marcia Gay Harden, Mary Steenburgen, Daryl Hannah, Susan Lynch and Maggie Gyllenhaal, all waiting out a substantial, if undefined, residency requirement before they’re allowed to go home with their children. Add in Rita Moreno (acting in Spanish for the first time) as the owner of the hotel where the woman are staying, not to mention Vanessa Martinez as the hotel maid who gave her own children up for adoption, and you’ve got a story that goes in too many directions, and only rarely seems to be getting anywhere at all. Despite a few fine scenes -- particularly one where Lynch and Martinez unburden themselves to each other despite their lack of a common language -- Casa has so little shape that it’s a real shock when it ends. It’s as if Sayles simply got to the end and stopped. --Sam Adams (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

DEMONLOVER

The best way to make an interesting movie about the Internet is to leave the Internet out of it. The mundane machine many people spend their days glued to might do for a romantic comedy, but it seems woefully inadequate in any kind of speculative fiction, which is why you only see a computer once in The Matrix, and never in eXistenZ. For all its jaded future shock, Olivier Assayas’ demonlover can’t see past the machines, and so seems laughable rather than apocalyptic. Set in the cutthroat world of corporate intrigue, demonlover contrives a series of betrayals and counter-betrayals -- virtual personalities, maybe -- all involving a pending contract between a French financier and a Japanese concern that promises to develop the cutting-edge in animated violent pornography. Assayas’ pretense of sophistication is undermined, though, by his laughably superficial view of I-net technology, and a jumbled plot that never quite reaches the virtual stage. Assayas seems more interested in collecting images -- Chloë Sevigny playing video games naked, Connie Nielsen in a latex jumpsuit -- than in formulating more than the usual Luddite cliches. The only thing worse than people who know more than you do is people who act like they do, and don’t. --S.A. (Ritz East)

MAMBO ITALIANO

Oh, to be gay and Italian and living in Montreal. Actually, it’s not such a great gig, if director ...mile Gaudreault’s semi-comic adaptation of Steve Galluccio’s play is to be believed. Wannabe-TV writer Angelo (Luke Kirby) is happily cohabitating with cop Nino (Peter Miller) until he decides to come out to his parents, who have a big fat Italian freakout. What follows is about $8.00 worth of gay jokes and ethnic bluster and slapping each other in the back of the head. It’s not all meant to be as funny as it sounds, though: The film takes a serious tack with the ups and downs of Angelo and Nino’s relationship after the outing. Which is odd, because the whole thing is lit, art-directed and shot like a particularly grating Fox sitcom. (Does every shot have to be a zoom?) As Angelo’s father, Paul Sorvino is the only believable Italian in the cast, maybe because he’s nigh on the only actual Italian in the cast. The filmmakers seem to mean well, but the net effect of the film is the reinforcement of molti gay and Italian stereotypes. More mambo please, and less minstrel show. --Ryan Godfrey (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

OUT OF TIME

A dopey thriller with a few worthwhile flourishes, Out of Time is yet more evidence that the art of moviemaking continues to find new lows. A handful of decent scenes -- including a fiery confrontation between small-town police chief Denzel Washington and washed-up ex-athlete Dean Cain, whose wife Washington just happens to be sleeping with -- make clear the potential for a first-class thriller, but first-timer David Collard’s script intently pushes on towards its utterly predictable twists, which mainly serve to make a mockery of everything that’s gone before. Director Carl Franklin, who’s been searching for a worthwhile project since Devil in a Blue Dress, gives this mess far better than it deserves: a sizzling cast (Sanaa Lathan, Eva Mendes and the surprisingly credible Cain), a lush, lurid look and snappy camerawork that only falls apart under the most crass of circumstances (i.e. when he’s forced to re-stage the balcony scene from Stick). By the end, though, all that effort just seems to add insult to injury. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)