June 24-30, 2004

movie shorts

New Movie Shorts

NAPOLEON DYNAMITE

The bastard child of Rushmore and Welcome to the Dollhouse, Jared Hess' debut marries Wes Anderson's 2-D compositions and deadpan smash-cuts to Todd Solondz's misfit grotesques, but lacks his predecessors' flair for empathy. Named, for no discernible reason, after an Elvis Costello pseudonym, Napoleon (Jon Heder) wears an ever-present look of clueless disgust and converses in brusque outbursts. He can't tolerate his family: older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) is embroiled in a chat-room romance and Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) buys a homemade time machine to revisit his varsity football heyday, circa 1982. School is even worse, but Napoleon finds some sense of purpose by managing his friend/sidekick Pedro (Efren Ramirez) in his campaign for student body president. Heder throws himself vigorously into the role and can't help but earn some laughs along the way, but the endless variations on the same joke soon grow tiresome and Hess too often resorts to laughing down at his characters. Only Tina Majorino, as Napoleon's would-be love interest, creates anything resembling a human being; the rest of the cast are one-note caricatures and clothes hangers for thrift store kitsch. --Shaun Brady (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

THE NOTEBOOK

Midway through Nick Cassavetes' assembly-line melodrama, Alzheimer's patient Gena Rowlands interrupts James Garner's narration: "I think I've heard this before. Perhaps more than once?" It's tempting to hear a winking confession from the filmmakers, but their low estimation of the audience's intelligence is betrayed by how long they wait to reveal the staggeringly obvious identities of Garner's and Rowland's characters. Based on a novel from the shameless pen of Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook trudges through well-worn territory. We get the rich girl (Rachael McAdams) and the boy from the wrong side of the tracks (Ryan Gosling), the meet-cute, the slow-dancing alone to music only they can hear, the poetry-reading boy's secret hideaway wherein secrets are revealed, etc. Disapproving parents and WWII separate them, but each situation is rushed through with a shrug, as if they're being checked off a list of requirements for Official Tearjerker Certification. We're meant to believe that the young lovers belong together because they're the archetypal young lovers, certainly not because of any particular chemistry between the leads. No one involved seems up to the effort of creating conflict; even wealthy suitor James Marsden and Joan Allen's glowering Mom turn out to be pretty nice people once you get to know them. --S.B.(Ritz Five; Ritz 16; UA Grant)

TWO BROTHERS

Back to the wild for The Bear's Jean-Jacques Annaud, who here focuses on a pair of tigers (Kumal and Sangha, who get above-the-title billing, the divas) in 1920s French Indochina. After an extended Disney-style cutefest shot against lush backdrops in Cambodia and Thailand, famed explorer Guy Pearce intrudes and kills the cubs' father while plundering an ancient temple. Kumal ends up in a circus and Sangha is adopted by the son of a corrupt French administrator (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), introducing moustache-twirling villains and a cute kid to eat up screen time better spent on the nature photography. When the brothers escape back into the wild, Pearce is called in to hunt down the maneaters, but a nascent conservationist instinct has been awakened by an attractive village girl and that pesky kid. Apparently doubtful of holding an audience's attention with a dialogue-free story, Annaud falls back too often on the crutches of human characters and cartoon storytelling. Through judicious editing and a ham-fisted score, the director anthropomorphizes his stars to an absurd extent, but it is only when the camera allows the tigers to speak for themselves that Two Brothers comes to life. --S.B. (UA Riverview)

WHITE CHICKS

FBI Agents Kevin and Marcus (Shawn and Marlon Wayans) masquerade as wealthy white girls over a Hamptons weekend. Initially, they're proving to their perpetually angry chief (Frankie Faison) that they're good agents and can locate the girls' potential kidnappers, but in the end, they become better black men — more respectful of black women (say, Marcus' wife, Faune Chambers) and less dismissive of white girls (the nice ones, anyway, including Busy Philipps and Jessica Cauffiel — Paris Hilton types Jaime King and Brittany Daniel remain lost causes). This emotional/moral/political makeover ranges from antic (the undercovers school the girls on mama jokes and the pleasure of saying the n-word when no black folks are in sight) to homo-neurotic (in-drag Marlon's courted by extra-muscular basketball player Terry Crews) to nonsensical (rich daddy John Heard connives to undermine the boys/girls' efforts). While the movie has some sense of gender-class-race roles (and so more on its mind than Soul Plane), it's also fond of the lactose-intolerance diarrhea jokes. --Cindy Fuchs (Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)