New Movie Shorts

BOBBY JONES: STROKE OF GENIUS

The inadvertently masturbatory subtitle is all too apt for a movie which opens with the words, "Bobby Jones, LLC Presents." Starring Jim Caviezel as the adult version of the Jazz Age golf champ (Devon Gearhart and Thomas Lewis play younger version), Stroke of Genius never met a cliche it couldn’t wring the life from. Good shots arc neatly onto the green, while bad ones invariably hit trees or land in traps, inspiring much comical ducking in the gallery. Despite Jones’ reputation as a club-throwing spitfire, Caviezel’s characterization is devoid of life, a cipher in baggy knee pants. Bland as buttermilk and as safe as a pair of blunt scissors, this bloated TV movie is being marketed to Christian groups as family-friendly entertainment, which is fine if you don’t mind your kids growing up without a brain. Truth be told, I only made it through half of Stroke of Genius’ two-plus hours, but you don’t need to go 18 holes to know you’re playing with a duffer. --Sam Adams (Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

ENVY

Ben Stiller and Jack Black are best friends, neighbors and co-workers at a sandpaper plant, the former slightly snooty and the latter slightly unfocused. When Black makes a gazillion dollars on a spray that disappears dog poo ("Va-poo-rize"), Stiller succumbs to jealousy: "It’s all from shit!" he mutters repeatedly. Black and wife Amy Poehler conspicuously consume: yellow Lamborghini, gaudy mansion, bowling alley, carousel, pool and a horse named Corky in the backyard. Stiller fumes until his wife (Rachel Weisz, who does her best to pretend she’s got a role here) wearies of his increasing obsession with what he’s missing and leaves with the kids. Enter Christopher Walken as a "bum" who encourages his new buddy Stiller to seek revenge (or, as he puts it, to "shake things up"). The disasters that follow are muddled and slow-moving, with occasional time-outs for Black or Stiller to act out his signature silliness. Scheduled to open a year ago, Envy is as dopey, uninventive and smug as you’d expect from a movie that’s "all from shit." --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

GODSEND

At the beginning of Nick Hamm’s misshapen, derivative unthriller, Greg Kinnear is headed home with a birthday present for 8-year-old Adam (Cameron Bright). Shortcutting through an alley, he’s almost mugged by a former student (Merwin Mondesir). The kid lets him go: "He’s cool man, he’s the best teacher I ever had," he tells his mugging-buddy. While the reason for this scene is hardly obvious, it does suggest that Kinnear should know something about biology -- which he then goes on to ignore completely when Adam dies tragically and grieving mom Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is approached by an old teacher of hers, odious Robert De Niro. Short version: he clones Adam and relocates the family so he can oversee all they do. When Adam 2 starts having nightmares and misbehaving, the movie lifts from multiple sources (The Omen, Pet Semetary, and Ö listen for the barely revised quotation from The Shining: "Danny isn’t here, Mrs. Torrance!"). Long on atmosphere (snowy streets, echoey hallways, abandoned buildings that conjure windstorm effects as soon as you walk inside) Kinnear puts the pieces together (with the help of Janet Bailey’s wise, damaged nanny), Romijn puts herself in danger and the kid puts hammers in a couple of skulls. All preposterous, all the time. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

LAWS OF ATTRACTION

Radiant as ever, Julianne Moore here reveals game comic timing, in particular with Frances Fisher, who plays her mother. Unfortunately, she spends more time on screen with romantic object and rival divorce attorney Pierce Brosnan. Ostensibly smitten on their first antagonistic meeting, he pursues her by showing her up, repeatedly, as if she must be "put in her place" in order to realize her own deep feelings for Mr. Too Cool for School. The film takes what seems a very long time to get the couple hooked up, split, reunited, then split and reunited again, by way of a nasty divorce case that takes them both to Ireland (Brosnan’s favorite location of late), where they endure It Happened One Night-ish road-tripping. While it might aspire to the witty fun of Adam’s Rib, Peter Howitt’s film doesn’t even manage the clever obnoxiousness of Intolerable Cruelty. The pace is plodding, the jokes grating and the lesson for Moore (as a tough dame who’s vulnerable on the inside, indicated by her affection of Hostess Sno Balls) means that her man gets to have his way. --C.F.(Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

POWER TRIP

Paul Devlin’s documentary chronicles the attempts to bring safe, reliable and, of course, profitable electric power to the former Soviet state of Georgia. But with the typical bill exceeding the average Georgian’s monthly salary, the Georgian-American hybrid AES-Telasi is losing an estimated $120,000 a day, while 40 percent of the 1.2 million citizens of Tbilisi get their power by making their own illegal (and sometimes deadly) connections. The power lines running through the city’s streets are a mass of electrified spaghetti, a perfect metaphor for the country’s chaotic state. Shot over a period of years, Power Trip encompasses a painful process of learning on both sides: executives learn how to deal with the populace, and the Georgians, used to living under communism, learn what happens if they don’t pay their bills on time. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

ROBOT STORIES

As even a casual science-fiction fan knows, stories about robots are really stories about humans, a truth vividly borne out in Greg Pak’s four-part anthology. "The Robot Fixer," in fact, isn’t even nominally sci-fi, focusing on a mother (Wai Ching Ho) whose grief over her comatose son manifests itself in an obsessive desire to complete his childhood collection of toy robots. Coincidentally, it’s also the only story that feels like it’s just the right length. Both "My Robot Baby," where a professional couple try out a mechanical infant to win the right to have a real child, and "Clay," where a dying sculptor resists computerized immortality, leave tantalizing possibilities unexplored, while the tiresome "Machine Love," starring Pak as a robotic office temp who starts to develop urges of the flesh, wears out its welcome in 15 minutes. But better too many ideas than too few, especially in the benighted field of modern film sci-fi. (Maybe Pak can work out some kind of exchange program with the Wachowski brothers.) The film’s minuscule budget unavoidably detracts from the seductiveness of its visions, but Pak turns chintziness into a virtue; the Weeble-like design of the first segment’s robot baby only underlines the segment’s comic absurdity. Cash-poor but concept-rich, Robot Stories stimulates the imagination instead of suffocating it. --S.A. (Ritz Five)

SHADE

First-time director Damian Nieman has recruited a who’s who of B-list stars for this tale of high-stakes Vegas grifters. But the plot never stops twisting stop long enough to let their characters to develop. Gabriel Byrne, Stuart Townsend and Thandie Newton play a trio of con artists aiming to outfox "the Dean" of crooked poker (Sylvester Stallone) while on the run from Mafia hit men. The story is an impersonal pastiche of genre conventions, and Nieman’s stylistic gimmicks -- multiple dissolves, jump cuts, freeze frames -- aren’t enough to disguise the somnolent pace and disinterested performances. The end result is claustrophobically reliant on other people’s films; Shade is at least three generations removed from authentic emotion. --Shaun Brady (UA Riverview)

SHAOLIN SOCCER

Seeking a "union of mind and foot," a ragged group of Shaolin monks team up to fight evil on the soccer field in Stephen Chow’s goofy, pinball-machine romp. Comically out of shape, the players are whipped by their first opponents, who aren’t above hiding the occasional monkey wrench in their shorts, but Team Shaolin magically (and inexplicably) get their groove back, leaping through the air as if it’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Fullback. (The likably cheesy digital effects provide a helping hand.) Chow hops styles as nimbly as his players hop defenders, swerving from affectionate martial arts homage to James Bond parody, always keeping the ball moving. Best of all, it’s a sports movie that limits itself to a single shot of a scoreboard. Miramax has kept this one inexplicably sitting on its shelves for years. A red card for them, but the movie gets nothing but net. --S.A. (Ritz Five)