New Movie Shorts

APPLESEED
Less ravishingly beautiful and less philosophically opaque than last year's Ghost in the Shell 2, Shinji Aramaki's anime uses a similar blend of CGI backgrounds and hand-drawn characters, as well as a process called "cel-shading," which is meant to blur the boundaries between the two techniques. Based, like Ghost, on a Masamune Shirow manga, Appleseed similarly maps the permeable boundaries of human existence, here by creating a futuristic society, Olympus, where warlike humans are paired with emotionally neutral, infertile "bioroids." Warlike humanity has decimated the rest of the globe and stands poised to do the same to Olympus. It's not clear whether the military faction who want to wipe out all bioroids or the government fifth column who want to do the same to humans is the one precipitating the endgame. Convoluted plots and hokey introspection are par for the course, but even by anime standards, Appleseed stacks the deck, with lost loves, repressed memories and double-triple-crosses that make you wonder whether someone has sneaked in and dampened your emotional responses (the bad dub and incongrous soundtrack floor-fillers are more alienating than inviting). More lucid than Ghost in the Shell 2, Appleseed is paradoxically less involving, or at least its images don't linger in the mind the way Ghost's did. I'm not sure I'd want to see either movie again, but I know which one I'd rather have on my desktop. --Sam Adams (Roxy)

COACH CARTER
When Samuel Jackson's real-life-based high school basketball coach takes his job, the team's coming off a 4-22 record and no one supposes "these kids" (all looking too old to be in high school) will survive, let alone get to college. While some players struggle with personal issues — Cruz (Rick Gonzalez) is seduced by gangsterism and Kenyan (Rob Brown, still high school balling five years after Finding Forrester) doesn't know how to handle his girlfriend Kyra's (Ashanti) pregnancy — the basketball part looks easy (in a series of practice/game montages). But as the team is winning, the boys aren't going to class, so Carter padlocks the gym and cancels games, inciting outrage in the principal (Denise Dowse) and the community. While the outcome is obvious (it's an inspirational sports movie, there are generic rules to follow), Jackson is sharp and relatively restrained (no "And you will know my name is the Lord" speeches), and Mark Schwahn and John Gatins' script makes an effort to complicate the characters. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

ELEKTRA
Things didn't end well — or entendre-free — for Elektra in self-importantly trashy Daredevil, getting herself mortally hoist on Colin "Bull's-eye" Farrell's operatic petard. But prospects of a spin-off film franchise, like blind sensei mystic wickedness-fighting father-figures, have a way of bringing dead comics anti-heroes back from beyond. And as you might well suspect, the revivified Elektra (Jennifer Garner, affectless and refreshingly Affleck-less) is com-plex: She's still a gorgeous but prickly ass-kicker, but now she's also a clairvoyant mercenary assassin with OCD, a backstory and an agent. Like most superheroes, she's got nemeses with stupid names: maybe Stone, Typhoid and Tattoo's parents were hoping for American Gladiators. Beyond the obligatory comics schlock, though, there's a decent story and a hint of real emotion. Director Rob Bowman (The X-Files) lays the dime-store Freud on a little too thick for greatness, but there are worse ways to screw up a big-budget genre pic. He forgoes the Gothic cityscapes and murky mechanical set pieces that tend to hackney pictures of this ilk; most of the battles Elektra fights are outside in scenic meadows and forests. (Hey, if you're going to shoot in Canada, you might as well show it off.) Better comics movies are earnest and contained even as they deal in the preposterous, and Elektra is as serious and engaging as any film with exploding ninjas can hope to be. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

RACING STRIPES
Lacking the charm and wit of Babe, Racing Stripes fuses that film's misfit-makes-good message (complete with animals who speak only in the absence of humans) with a standard father-daughter relationship story. The tale of a zebra (voice of Frankie Muniz) laboring under the delusion that he is actually a racehorse, it all seems harmless enough until the arrival of Steve Harvey and David Spade, voicing a pair of flies responsible for a particularly repellent batch of fart, shit and snot jokes. The script is too lazy and predictable to interest any but the youngest viewers, but its bodily function jokes are paired with pop-culture references 10 years older than its target audience. Typical is Joe Pantoliano's turn as a wiseguy Brooklyn pelican, who spouts gangster-movie cliches then defecates on people from above. As if all that weren't bad enough, Bryan Adams is rescued from relative obscurity to provide one of his trademark soundtrack atrocities. Hopefully most kids are still too preoccupied with their Christmas toys to be bothered with movies just yet. --Shaun Brady (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)