New Movie Shorts

CINEMANIA

You know them, though probably not their names. Every time you go to a screening at the Prince or International House, when you skip work to take in an afternoon revival, they’re in the audience, always watching. Call them cinephiles, or film buffs, or just people with time on their hands, but if you recognize their faces, you might be one of them. Fortunately, at least for them, Philadelphia’s film opportunities limit their ability to indulge. No such luck for the New York-based film obsessives of Cinemania. Jack freely admits he’ll skip a family member’s funeral to attend a screening. Bill, a 38-year-old who hasn’t had sex in years, calls film "a substitute for life." Elderly, stooped Roberta was banned from the Museum of Modern Art after she assaulted a ticket taker who defiled one of her precious stubs. These are not, to put it bluntly, your average movie nuts. And there lies Cinemania’s rub. The further Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak take us into their cinemaniacs’ lives, the more it seems their obsessions are as much a product of mental illness as a love of film. Roberta stockpiles not only movie programs, but Metrocards; Jack alludes to being a diagnosed schizophrenic, while shy Bill pops anti-anxiety pills. The list of movies Jack’s seen might prompt you to guiltily update your Netflix queue, but it’s hard to envy the cluttered apartment and the towering stack of papers from which it’s produced. Much as it stimulates your need to watch (and hey, I saw three other movies the day I watched Cinemania), the film makes you feel a lot better about all the movies you haven’t seen. That relief is by design: Like Capturing the Friedmans, Cinemania subtly dehumanizes its characters under the guise of understanding them. --Sam Adams(Roxy)

DR. SEUSS' THE CAT IN THE HAT

Who is more cynical: the Hollywood corporate synergy machine that hopes no one cares -- or even notices -- that a beloved children’s book has been turned into cloying purple glop, or the gnarled, lonely film critic, who knows that no one will? Dr. Seuss’ elliptical, oddly-metered paean to childhood secrecy and punctuated irresponsibility provides the merest of frameworks on which to hang even an 80-minute feature-length film: Two bored latchkey kids are entertained by a destructive, anthropomorphic feline and his species-challenged, ambiguously subjugated Things. El Gato Ensombrerado is played by mugging schtickster Mike Myers, who, dipped in Lloyd Webber-esque fur and bouncing around vocally between Linda Richman, the Cowardly Lion and Paul Lynde, is constantly threatening to break into song. Occasionally, he makes good on the threats. Director Bo Welch’s shrill suburban Las Vegas Republican aesthetic -- immaculate, identical hot-pink houses and lime cars -- is the model of taste compared to the assaultive, Skittle-tinted Caligari cabinet that the kids’ house becomes once the Cat and the Things make everything capital-F Fun, yet somehow capital-R Responsible. If Seuss’ Cat was the incarnation of childhood id, it should not surprise that the Hollywood equivalent is childhood idiocy. --Ryan Godfrey (Bridge; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

GOTHIKA

The ghost of a good movie flits through Mathieu Kassovitz’s first English-language feature, but it’s hard to pick out of the flashing lights. Laying to rest those nasty rumors that she can act, Halle Berry plays a prison psychiatrist (yuh-huh) who is haunted by visions after a rainy car accident and her husband’s death and confined to the very prison psych ward where she once worked. (Look, kids -- irony!) The prison is slick and modern (Lucite cells, etc.) when Kassovitz and DP Matthew Libatique want it to be, then dank and medieval when they’ve run out of ways to make florescent lights flicker. The one constant is that Berry will quiver, wail and almost show her breasts. Though his role (love interest? confidant? plot device?) makes no sense, Robert Downey Jr. manages to stretch Berry out in overlapping-dialogue confrontation; for one giddy moment, you can actually see Downey pushing her to forget herself and, y’know, act. No time for that, though -- there’s a contrived twist ending to get to! There’s just enough in Sebastian Gutierrez’ script to suggest that the named-by-committee film could have amounted to some small something, but it’s obvious no one bothered. --S.A. (Bridge; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.) Five; Ritz 16)