New Movie Shorts

Beautiful Boxer
The tag line for this Thai import — "He fights like a man so he can become a woman" — gives a sense of the extent to which the movie relies on overblown formulas to tell a story that ought to shatter them. Based on a transsexual boxing champion's true story, Boxer follows Toom (Asanee Suwan) from his first fascination with lip gloss to boxing matches in full makeup, never missing a chance to compound cliches; when Toom apologizes to his coach for disgracing him, the coach tells him to wear waterproof lipstick next time: "You look terrible when you sweat!" At times, the heady, campy brew cooked up by director Ekachai Uekrongtham threatens to send your brain into overload. When Tong sneaks out of the house to attend boxing lessons, it's no longer clear whether his transgression is boxing or transvestism, and the confluence is potent. But despite its delicious saturated imagery, Beautiful Boxer merely plays like the world's oddest TV movie. --Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Death Of A Dynasty
Roc-a-Fella honcho Damon Dash directs this satirical tale of a wigger wannabe (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, whose performance could make you pity white people) who becomes New York's most celebrated gossipmonger after reporting a rift between Dash (Capone) and Jay-Z (Robert Stapleton). The film's poignant message — rap magazines, industry big shots and Devon Aoki are out to destroy upstanding multimillionaire hip-hop entrepreneurs — will resonate deeply with all you upstanding multimillionaire hip-hop entrepreneurs out there. Anyone else will have to be satisfied with the "twist ending" — hardly a clever twist, but by that point any ending is a relief. --Keith Harris (UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Dolphins. There are many reasons why this long-awaited, much-feared adaptation of Douglas Adams' wry sci-fi doesn't work, but the first and most egregious is the fact that the movie opens with an interminable sequence of dolphins leaping, diving and swimming; you can practically see the smudgy fingerprints of the studio exec who decided the best way to set the tone for a satirical interstellar revue was to show the audience four minutes of aquatic mammals. The universe couldn't ask for a better Arthur Dent than The Office's Martin Freeman, but Mos Def and Zooey Deschanel seem lost in their roles, and Sam Rockwell's insufferable Zaphod Beeblebrox makes you wish the character had no heads instead of two. (A disembodied Alan Rickman steals his scenes as a depressive robot, and Bill Nighy's daffy Slartibartfast gives the movie a kick but arrives too late.) The elaborate and often impressive effects can't compensate for the fact that Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick's script is only halfway to a story (either too much or too little, depending on how you look at it), and every departure from Adams' dry-as-toast prose rings false. Like the Harry Potters, Hitchhiker's retains enough of the original to give audiences the idea that it's based on something good but never comes close to improving on its source. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Narberth; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

House Of D
David Duchovny, whose acting has just under two speeds, makes an unwelcome debut behind the camera with this miscalculated coming-of-age tale. Anton Yelchin plays a boy in 1970s New York; his father has just died, mother Téa Leoni is a wreck, and the only handy surrogates are Robin Williams' retarded delivery boy and Erykah Badu's worldly inmate:No wonder he grows up to be an artist. (Duchovny plays the role, looking as uncomfortable as he ought.) The film's minor success with teenage discomfort (not the toughest emotion to revive) is overwhelmed by its falseness in all other respects. --S.A.(Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

Intimate Stories
Historias mínimas is the original title of Carlos Sorin's road-movie trifecta, and minimas it is, so much so you wonder if the movie's ever going to start. Presumably retrieved from its 2002 completion to capitalize on the hotness of Argentinean film, the film follows a traveling salesman, an old shop owner and an impoverished villager on the road to the same Patagonian city (looking for love, a dog and a food processor, respectively). Like Pablo Trapero's similar Rolling Family, Sorin coasts on atmosphere, but Sorin's self-conscious miniatures start to feel confining after a while. The Argentine equivalent of a shoe-gazing Amerindie, Intimate Stories is so concerned with not making grand statements that its song dies in its throat. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

XXX: State of The Union
Ice Cube makes an unusual action hero, cooler and shorter than most. As the second coming of not-quite-licit agent XXX (taking over for skater boy Vin Diesel, officially pronounced dead here), he matches glares with scar-faced Sam Jackson, fights the power with Xzibit and cozies up to gearhead Nona Gaye. Even stranger than Cube leaping from bridges and onto flying choppers are the film's schizoid (and perversely compelling) politics. (This despite the snarly congressional aide girlie that Cube and Jackson take turns knocking around, as they note the evil that white bitches do.) The action is pretty much nonstop, with random bodies flying amid colorful explosions, but the plot involves U.S. prez Peter Strauss' plan to make nice with the rest of the world. This enrages gung-ho Secretary of Defense Willem Dafoe, who decides essentially to blow up the Capitol so he can keep on bringing freedom to the Middle East. The sight of D.C. overrun with Dafoe's tanks, choppers and Special Forces teams, only to be repelled by Cube and company's ragtag militia (Scott Speedman as token white boy) is, as they say, something: loud, brutal and all power-to-the-people-like. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

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