New Movie Shorts

BENJI: OFF THE LEASH
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

There have been many
Benjis over the years, kids.
All but this one died.

(UA Riverview)

THE EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Sorry, Paul Schrader,
they prefer Cutthroat Island
to Taxi Driver.

(Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

FESTIVAL EXPRESS
Woodstock without the zeitgeist, Monterey Pop without Otis, the 1970 Festival Express had two things going for it: a lineup that included the Grateful Dead, the Band, Janis Joplin and Buddy Guy, and the fact that the performers traveled across Canada via train, en masse. Exhumed after decades of neglect, the footage in Bob Smeaton's documentary isn't the grail you might hope for: Joplin is two weeks from death and looks it, the Flying Burrito Bros., who get all of five seconds in Gimme Shelter, finally get their closeup — without Gram Parsons — and the train-car jam sessions that ought to be the highlights often devolve into drunken caterwauls. (In a present-day interview, the Dead's Bob Weir notes that most of the performers were experimenting with a new drug — alcohol.) The Band turn in a handful of keepers, and the Dead, in the year of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, are surprisingly concise, but the highlight is Buddy Guy's scorching "Money," not least for the moment when Guy breaks free of the stage and walks toward the crowd to deliver this message: "Your loving gives me a thrill/ But your love don't pay my bills." Inspired, if that's the word, by Woodstock and other "free" festivals, the tour was met in Winnipeg and Calgary by crowds demanding free entry. (In Calgary, the mayor joined the chorus.) Then and now, it seems, the promoters and performers were having none of it. "I gave the public too much," says promoter Ken Walker, "and they didn't deserve it." Janis and Jerry might have disagreed, but Weir denounces the crowds as "pathologically anti-authoritarian," then admits, "I know because I'm that way myself." — Sam Adams (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

WE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
Best friends Jack (Mark Ruffalo) and Hank (Peter Krause) are bored. English professors at a small New Englandy college, they're spending the summer in different states of rebellion. Hank is revising his much-rejected novel and hitting on grad students; Jack is having sex with Hank's sad wife, Edith (Naomi Watts), while his own, Terry (excellent Laura Dern), rages, drinks and forgets to change her son's wet bed. While Jack takes this as a sign of her negligence, she's fighting back in her own way against his selfishness. Written by Larry Gross and based on two short stories by Andre Dubus, the film has solicited much attention for its "adult" storylines, such as romanceless desires, financial frustrations, emotional ambiguities. But the most unusual aspect of John Curran's second feature is its interest in the watchful children of these feckless parents. While the grown-ups tend to be preoccupied, when the kids do interject, you realize they are absorbing their parents' self-absorption. In addition to asking the usual questions ("Are you and mommy getting divorced?"), their observations can be dead-on: Hank's daughter (Jennifer Bishop) asks whether he'll be making up stories today, even as Terry and Jack's kids (Haili Page and Sam Charles) worry out loud about their increasing differences. --Cindy Fuchs
(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

WITHOUT A PADDLE
Seth Green is a tiny, tiny man. The perennial comic-relief actor's stature might not seem to offer comic potential enough for an entire film, but there's precious little else here. Strung together as lifelessly as the bottom half of a '40s kiddie matinee (think The Dead End Kids Do Deliverance), this collection of "city boys in the wilderness" cliches follows Green and buddies Matthew Lillard and Dax Shepard as they reunite to search for D.B. Cooper's treasure, pining for their '80s childhood. (The nostalgia for 20-year-old pop culture is especially incongruous in a film geared toward 14-year-old boys.) The gags rely on the audience's presumed homophobia and arrested sexuality (Dear Penthouse Letters: My friends and I were lost in the woods when we came across a pair of gorgeous hippie-chicks living in a tree and bathing each other in rain water …), not to mention laziness. Each scene is a variation on Introduce obstacle (bear, rapids, drug-dealing rednecks); Show leads running around, flailing arms and screaming; Repeat. Regular Adam Sandler director Steven Brill attempts to inject a similar note of man-child-grows-up pathos, but compared with Green's whining hypochondriac doctor, Sandler looks like Chaplin. --Shaun Brady (Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)