New Movie Shorts

CALENDAR GIRLS

A sweet movie that doesn’t leave a saccharine aftertaste, Calendar Girls is a feel-good movie that actually feels good. Helen Mirren and Julie Walters play rural ladies’ leaguers who create a charity calendar to raise money in honor of Walters’ late husband. Since the typical fare -- church steeples, local flowers -- generates double-digit sales, a drastically new approach is needed, and found: They’ll pose nude. The question of who will fill out the remaining ten months dissolves to another, more painful one: Will anyone want to buy a calendar full of naked pictures of women in their 50s? The answer, as in the real-life story on which Calendar Girls is based, is a resounding yes, sparking worldwide sales and a nude charity calendar craze that’s made it all the way to Northern Liberties. The movie’s post-fame section bogs down in moralistic cliches, but the first hour is fairly glorious, with Mirren and Walters turning in finely tuned comic performances, and director Nigel Cole steering with a deft hand. Though its lesson on the beauties of maturity might be as boilerplate as anything in Mona Lisa Smile, it’s a darn sight less common, and less cynically conveyed. The comparisons to The Full Monty are inevitable, but they run deeper than the spectacle of disrobing Britons; both movies are fundamentally about reclaiming dignity, and both treat their characters with respect, not as conveniences of plot. As bad as such movies can be, Calendar Girls reminds you why they make them in the first place. --Sam Adams (Ritz 16; Ritz at the Bourse)

THE COOLER

A vintage Hollywood movie five decades too late, The Cooler loses faith in the simplicity of its premise, though William H. Macy and Alec Baldwin turn in memorable performances. Macy is a "cooler," a guy so unlucky that casinos hire him to brush up against gamblers on a streak, hoping his ill fortune will rub off on them. Macy’s unlucky everywhere, not just in the pit: He’s got a son he hasn’t seen in years, no romantic prospects and the closest he’s got to a friend is Baldwin’s casino manager, who’d break his legs before letting him retire. Baldwin and Macy seem to get the picture’s tone better than director Wayne Kramer (not the former MC5 guitarist), who gunks up the proceedings with grandstanding camera movements, and Maria Bello, whose Methody performance rasps harshly against Macy’s iconic simplicity. The love story between Macy and Bello’s cocktail waitress is classic Hollywood nonsense (later explained through an entirely predictable plot twist), though their well-choreographed love scenes would have made the Hays Office choke on its Danish. Though Kramer gets solid performances from his male cast, which also includes Ron Livingston as a ruthless new-management type and Joey Fatone as an oily lounge singer, the movie lacks the appropriate tough-guy simplicity. --S.A.(Ritz 16; Ritz at the Bourse)