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BROWN SUGAR As far as I'm concerned, Brown Sugar is nothing if not aptly titled, seeing as how my review for director Rick Famuyiwa's previous film, 1999's The Wood, dismissed it as "a movie so light and sugary that it could easily be mistaken for an artificial sweetener." His follow-up feature is equally as saccharine, a predictable romantic comedy about two lifelong best friends, music business executive Dre (Taye Diggs) and music magazine editor Sidney (Sanaa Lathan), who spend the entire movie fighting the fact that they're meant for each other. Or at least that's what Famuyiwa would have us believe, but Lathan (so terrific in Love & Basketball) and Diggs (so bland in just about everything) are never able to convince us that their characters are truly meant to be together. What's more, the movie's whole point is that these two are forever linked through their love of hip-hop, but despite the obligatory music biz cameos and lots of lip service from the leading characters, hip-hop rarely comes alive as its own fire-breathing entity in this picture, meaning that Dre and Sidney might as well be joined together by a mutual love of pro wrestling, Alan Rudolph flicks or Pokemon trading cards. Rapper Mos Def, memorable in a small role in Monster's Ball, effortlessly steals this film in the key supporting role of a wisecracking hip-hop musician whose integrity won't allow him to sell out as an artist.
PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE After the grandiosity of both Boogie Nights and Magnolia, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson works on a decidedly smaller scale with Punch-Drunk Love. Yet while his canvas (and running time) may be significantly lessened, his imagination runs unfettered (indeed, he earned the Best Director prize at Cannes this year), resulting in a romantic comedy that operates by the rules of its own self-contained universe. Adam Sandler, stretching about as far here as Jim Carrey did in The Truman Show (in other words, both comedians didn't reinvent their screen personas as much as they simply toned down the expected schtick), delivers an interestingly off-center performance as Barry Egan, a toilet-plunger business owner whose lifelong mental abuse at the hands of his six sisters would seem to go a long way toward explaining his delicate emotional state and his social ineptitude. Driven by his loneliness, Barry finally elects to call a phone sex service, a decision he regrets once he starts getting harassed by members of this shady outfit. And things get even more complicated once he finds himself attracted to one of his sisters' co-workers (Emily Watson), though the love of this good woman might be just what he needs to pull him out of his disturbed state. Anderson, who packed the Boogie Nights soundtrack with 70s hits and the Magnolia one with haunting Aimee Mann tunes, uses Shelley Duvall's rendition of Harry Nilsson's "He Needs Me" (from the Popeye score) as the centerpiece song here, just one tip-off to this film's radical, off-the-wall approach. Sandler's character, an insecure introvert prone to destructive outbursts, isn't exactly cut from the Cary Grant mold, and if the film fails to use its exemplary supporting players (Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman) to their fullest potential, it still scores points for displaying how the redemptive power of love could transform even a seeming lost cause like Barry Egan.
THE RING An American remake of a 1998 Japanese smash that spawned a pair of sequels, a TV series and a cult following, The Ring centers around the existence of a videocassette that causes death to anyone who dares watch it. So what exactly is on this terrible tape? Outtakes from The Anna Nicole Show? Footage of the Liza Minnelli-David Gest wedding? The torturous Vanilla Ice bomb Cool As Ice? Actually, none of the above; instead, it turns out to be a series of grainy, bizarre images that would be right at home in a music video by, say, Nine Inch Nails or Metallica. After her teenage niece and her friends mysteriously die exactly seven days after viewing the video, a reporter (Naomi Watts) suspects this may be more than an urban legend, so she tracks down the tape and watches it. Quickly realizing she's now doomed, she sets about studying the footage for hidden clues that might end up saving her life. In his short movie career, director Gore Verbinski has certainly been someone to watch, having helmed Mouse Hunt and The Mexican. Yet the quirky light touch that served him well on those projects has hampered him here: For a movie built around a piece of film containing unsettling images, The Ring is itself a rather tame undertaking, never building the finger-curling sense of dread that's demanded by the material. At the same time, Verbinski clearly takes the genre seriously (overall, the movie's on a par with the '98 original), and he scored a casting coup by landing Watts in her first appearance since her amazing breakthrough performance in last year's Mulholland Drive. 1/2