SECRET WINDOW This dum-dum drama is about an author who's accused of plagiarism, and one has to wonder whether this irony was lost on writer-director David Koepp and author Stephen King (on whose novella this is based). Secret Window is nothing if not a pastiche of past big-screen thrillers, recycling most of its elements from The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half and just about every other King project this side of The Mangler. Yet even such a lazy dependence on been-there-done-that material might have been overlooked had the film managed to trick us with its climactic plot turn; instead, figuring out the "shocking" twist requires less brain power than a word search puzzle in a children's magazine. Johnny Depp, whose recent ascension to superstardom won't be damaged in the least by this recyclable nonsense, stars as Mort Rainey, a successful author still reeling from the fact that his wife (Maria Bello) left him for another man (Timothy Hutton) six months earlier. Holed up in his isolated cabin in the woods, Mort is startled one day by a visit from a Mississippi rube named John Shooter (John Turturro, too good an actor to be treading water in such a one-note role), a slow-speaking hayseed who accuses the writer of stealing his story. Bodies begin to dot the landscape and things start to go bump in the night, but the only thing scary about Secret Window is how effortlessly it manages to talk down to its audience. 1/2
TOUCHING THE VOID Everest Meets The Eiger Sanction in Touching the Void, which can be classified as both a documentary and a work of fiction. Falling best under the heading of "docudrama," the film centers on a 1985 climbing expedition in which Joe Simpson and Simon Yates attempted to climb a 21,000-foot mountain in the Peruvian Andes. Things went well until Simpson fell and broke his leg; Yates did everything he could to lower his injured friend down the mountain, but a treacherous situation forced him to cut the rope that connected them to each other. Certain that Simpson was dead, Yates made his own way back to base camp, little realizing that the other climber was embarking on his own against-the-odds trek to make it out alive. Director Kevin Macdonald decided that the best way to bring this riveting story to the screen was to combine fiction and nonfiction moviemaking, by having "talking head" interludes with the real Simpson and Yates interspersed with two actors (Brendan Mackey and Nicholas Aaron) cast as the pair and reenacting their mountain climbing misadventures. Purists of the documentary form may carp, but Macdonald's approach brings an immediacy to the tale that otherwise might not have been possible.
CURRENT RELEASES
BROKEN LIZARD'S CLUB DREAD The five-man troupe Broken Lizard presents this comedy in which the vacation resort Pleasure Island becomes a stomping ground for a masked maniac with a very large machete. Yet here's the kicker: Club Dread doesn't exactly feel like a comedy. The genuine laughs are few, the gore quotient is high, and the youthful characters are no more sophisticated than the dolts who populate Jason and Freddy movies. The result, then, is basically just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill slasher flick, with the usual amount of fleeting T&A tossed in to mollify the Playboy perusers in the audience. 1/2
DIRTY DANCING: HAVANA NIGHTS Just as Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey infused the 1987 hit Dirty Dancing with their vibrant personalities and swift moves, so do Diego Luna and Romola Garai provide some lift to this otherwise forgettable "re-imagining." Set in 1958 Cuba, on the eve of Castro's revolution, the film centers on an American student (Garai) who strikes up a friendship with a local lad (Luna) who shares her passion for dancing. The storyline is trivial in the extreme, and the film never establishes its explosive era in any believable sense -- despite some tacked-on moments of chaos, this might as well be set in 1986 Miami as 1958 Havana. Yet Luna and Garai make an appealing couple, while fans of the original Dirty Dancing will be rewarded with an extended cameo by Swayze as a dance instructor.
THE DREAMERS Yes, Bernardo Bertolucci's adaptation of Gilbert Adair's novel has indeed been awarded the NC-17 rating. And yes, there are copious amounts of full-frontal nudity (both male and female), as its young leads engage in sexual mind games in 1968 Paris. But the puritans who will lambaste this film for being about nothing more than sex will largely miss the point. Sure, there's sex, but there's also politics, cinema, psychology, and the sort of ruddy-faced idealism that once upon a time fueled numerous motion pictures made by filmmakers with international aspirations. But even though the movie is more ambitious than it initially appears, its overall success can't quite rival its heady intentions. 1/2
50 FIRST DATES Even many of the folks who don't like Adam Sandler have conceded that The Wedding Singer is fairly decent, with cinema's top-earning frat boy ably subverting his obnoxiousness in pursuit of a sweet romance with Drew Barrymore. This new film features an even more intense love story between the pair, yet this winning hand is repeatedly set down in order to make room for the sort of juvenile antics that will remind Sandler bashers why they hate this kid in the first place. Meshing Groundhog Day with Memento, this Hawaii-set comedy casts Sandler as an aquarium vet who falls for a school teacher (Barrymore) who suffers from short-term memory loss. Too bad lowbrow antics repeatedly get in the way of the agreeable love story. 1/2
THE FOG OF WAR Subtitled Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, The Fog of War might reasonably be expected to serve as a mea culpa on the part of the former Secretary of Defense for both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a plea for forgiveness for his role as one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War. Yet Errol Morris' latest picture, an Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, proves to be an infinitely more comprehensive -- not to mention more ambiguous -- piece of nonfiction, as McNamara discusses just about every facet of his life yet still remains tantalizingly opaque regarding certain subjects. The film does indeed offer many lessons to mull over, yet the most meaningful one might be the old axiom about history repeating itself: One look at the current mess in Iraq and it's chilling to note how little has been learned by those in charge.
HIDALGO A sprawling mess of a movie, Hidalgo is also the sort of old-fashioned popcorn entertainment that has become increasingly rare on the current movie scene -- and in this case, the pro far outweighs the con. Viggo Mortensen stars as a cowboy who, along with his trusty horse Hidalgo, is invited to take part in a grueling 3,000 mile race across the Arabian Desert, a contest in which most participants perish under the merciless sun and the few survivors must contend with duplicity and double-crosses at every turn. What follows is a rousing adventure yarn that includes breathtaking vistas, worthy comic relief, occasionally terrible CGI effects, a supporting role for Omar Sharif (as the Sheik overseeing the race), and plenty of exciting derring-do in the grand tradition of Indiana Jones.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST Many of Mel Gibson's movies have displayed a fetishistic fascination with blood and guts, and this one's no exception. In relating the saga of Christ from his betrayal by Judas through the crucifixion, Gibson has taken the greatest story ever told and turned it into a snuff film. The pacifist teachings aren't even allowed to take a back seat to the beatings suffered by Christ (played by Jim Caviezel) -- instead, they're locked away in the trunk, with Gibson paying them only fleeting lip service. The emphasis is squarely on employing the best visual effects, makeup designs and slo-mo camerawork that money can buy to lovingly reveal every whip mark slashed across Christ's back, every thorn driven into His head, every nail hammered into His flesh. It's Kill Bill for the churchgoing crowd, an unrelenting orgy of evangelical ire that's sorely missing any type of meaningful context.
STARSKY & HUTCH Having now appeared together in several films, it might be time to regard Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson as Hollywood's latest certified comedy team, a tradition that's included such twofers as Laurel and Hardy, Hope and Crosby, and Lemmon and Matthau. Like their predecessors, these guys are able to bring out the best in each other, a vital ingredient in making this more tolerable than most movies based on past TV shows. Wilson's Hutch, a rascally bad-boy cop, serves as the perfect counterpoint to Stiller's Starsky, a bungling, by-the-book detective, and this disheveled knock-off of the 70s series works best when the sheer force of their personalities overcomes the shoddy writing. Snoop Dogg is aptly cast as informant Huggy Bear. 1/2
TWISTED Ashley Judd has made more than her fair share of dum-dum thrillers (Double Jeopardy, High Crimes, etc.), yet Twisted stands out through the sheer fact that it's the worst one yet, a preposterous yarn about a detective who becomes a leading suspect in her own investigation when the victims all turn out to be her former lovers. Accounting for the risible dialogue, the gaping plotholes and the utter predictability of the killer's identity isn't too difficult -- after all, this is scripter Sarah Thorp's first produced credit -- but it's almost inconceivable that the director of this total misfire is Philip Kaufman, the immense talent behind The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June.
WELCOME TO MOOSEPORT Maybe Ray Romano's shtick works on TV, where undemanding sit-coms possess the ability to easily amuse undemanding couch potatoes. But as far as his big-screen debut is concerned, the man's a washout, a zero, a big fat nada. This movie about a former US president (Gene Hackman) who runs for mayor against the town's plumber has been designed to showcase Romano's comedic prowess, yet his performance is about as funny as Sean Penn's in Mystic River -- which is to say, not funny at all. Hackman's spirited performance is better than this picture deserves, while Maura Tierney, as the no-nonsense recipient of both men's amorous advances, brings warmth and resolve to an otherwise thin character. But the comedy quotient, waning from the start, becomes nonexistent whenever it's placed in Romano's clumsy mitts. 1/2
OPENS FRIDAY:
DAWN OF THE DEAD: Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames.
ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet.
TAKING LIVES: Angelina Jolie, Kiefer Sutherland.
TOUCHING THE VOID: Joe Simpson, Simon Yates.