May 13-19, 2004

movie shorts

New Movie Shorts

BREAKIN' ALL THE RULES

Dumped by his model girlfriend (Bianca Lawson), Jamie Foxx quits his job at Spoils publishing, stops shaving, writes the best-selling Breakup Handbook, then falls for his cousin’s girl (Gabrielle Union). He doesn’t quite feel guilty, because his self-absorbed cousin (Morris Chestnut, who already starred in this movie, when it was called Two Can Play That Game) asks him to help him break up with Union. A subplot to this set of subplots (there’s no main plot that matters) involves the publisher at Spoils, whiny Peter MacNicol, who’s looking to break up with his manipulative, gold-digging girlfriend (Jennifer Esposito). Watching Union watch Heather Headley sing at a club, Foxx becomes determined to win her over, despite the fact that he’s lying to her and she’s lying to him. Without an original idea in sight, the movie stoops to jokes about flatulent pugs, and puts Union (who is a nurse) through cliched and repetitive harassment from her elderly, white male patient. Despite all this, Union is terrific, as always, showing yet again that she should be acting in a real movie, with a real script and some meat on her role. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

HIDING AND SEEKING

Director Oren Rudavsky (A Life Apart: Hasidism in America) investigates modern Jewish attitudes toward the gentile world through this frank, tidy documentary. The son of Holocaust survivors, Menachem Daum has learned to reconcile his faith with the horrors his family has endured, leading a religious but open-minded life in New York. His adult sons, however, have inherited the previous generation’s fear of gentiles, and have moved to Israel, studying at yeshivas where they are taught to distrust outsiders and live in the isolation of a tightly-knit religious community. Hoping to demonstrate that holiness means believing in the goodness of all people, Daum takes his family to Poland to search for traces of his family’s history. The sons, who have scoffed at their father’s project, stand in the ruins of a synagogue and eventually meet the family that hid Daum’s father-in-law during the war. While Hiding and Seeking is a "journey" film with a fairly predictable, straightforward trajectory -- Menachem’s voice-over narrative tells us exactly what he is setting out to do -- Rudavsky allows a subtler psychological portrait to emerge through the nuances of the Daum family’s interactions, their own cruelty and their own prejudices. --Elisa Ludwig (Ritz at the Bourse)

NÓI

An albino in a snow-covered landscape, Icelandic high-school student Nõi (Tõmas Lemarquis) makes himself doubly invisible by routinely skipping school and barely interacting with his dotty grandmother (Anna Fridriksdõttir) and drunken father (Thr°stur Leõ Gunnarsson). As he digs himself out of the 5-foot snowdrift outside his front door, the resigned frustration on Nõi’s face reflects his daily struggle against oppressive surroundings. Change is promised by the arrival of Iris (Elín Hansdõttir), the beautiful new cashier at the local gas station, but the town’s monotony, so implacable that an attempted armed robbery can’t shatter the calm, may prove an insurmountable obstacle. As in 101 Reykjavik, Iceland is depicted as a monochromatic wasteland (inside as well as out -- the interiors are almost uniformly shot under a sickly green light) populated by sleepwalkers dreaming of escape to warmer climes. Dagur Kári’s feature debut is heavily indebted to Jim Jarmusch, from the deadpan static-camera style to one character’s Elvis obsession, but remains grounded by its affecting portrait of intelligence squandered by lack of opportunity. The deus ex machina finale offers a measure of hope while providing a stark lesson about the price of freedom. --Shaun Brady(Ritz Five)

SUPER SIZE ME

If you view documentaries as means to an end, you have to give it up for Morgan Spurlock’s grease-raking doc, which depicts the gruesome consequences of Spurlock’s monthlong all-McDonald’s diet: Shortly after its Sundance premiere, the company announced it was striking the Supersize option from its menu. But Spurlock’s egocentric premise is more echo chamber than exposé. The doctors he engages to check his progress (and safeguard his health) uniformly express astonishment that anyone could do such damage to their body so rapidly with a high-fat diet, a good indication of just how contrived Spurlock’s Big Mac binge really is. (I imagine if you ate nothing but broccoli for a month, your body wouldn’t like it too much either.) Ignoring matters of race, social class and gender with astonishing blitheness, Spurlock paints the U.S. as a nation of people who eat crap by choice, as if Whole Foods and KFC were fighting for the same demographic. With its zippy graphics and easy-to-swallow factoids, Super Size Me is the Happy Meal of investigative documentaries, its bite-size satisfaction followed by a sour aftertaste. --Sam Adams (Ritz East; Ritz 16)

YOUNG ADAM

Finding a body afloat in dark water, coal-barge worker Joe (Ewan McGregor) pulls it out, with the help of his employer Les (Peter Mullan). What follows is a complexly structured, provocative mediation on amorality, centered on Joe’s rather self-conscious self-centeredness. A self-described writer, his descriptive talents and sexual voraciousness impress Les’ wife (the ever extraordinary Tilda Swinton), at least to the point that they embark on an affair that she will use to provoke her husband’s departure. David Mackenzie’s film, based on Alexander Trocchi’s novel, cuts back and forth in time, revealing Joe’s slow movement toward his current state, which his ex (Emily Mortimer) describes as "in bed with the illustrious working classes." The film’s explicit and unromantic view of his activities (and McGregor’s willingness to show his penis on screen) earned it an NC-17, though the images are compellingly thematic, concerning his dispassion and carelessness. Joe’s trajectory through postwar Glasgow and Edinburgh takes on a dread inevitability; he has a history with the corpse that reconfirms and expands your sense of his many lacks. --C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

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