NEW RELEASES
BIKER BOYZ
What does it say about a cinema culture in which something like The Fast and the Furious would serve as an inspiration for other movies? Nevertheless, this obvious take-off, adapted from a New Times article about African-American motorcycle gangs though doubtless greenlit because of the success of that 2001 racing hit, arguably emerges as the ever-so-slightly better film: If its visceral thrills aren’t as memorable as those in F&F, the tradeoff is that we’re exposed to characters (and actors) that on the whole are more interesting. Derek Luke, the star of Antwone Fisher, again holds the screen, this time playing a young cycle ace who decides to compete for the title of California’s top racer, a crown long held by the cool-under-fire Smoke (Laurence Fishburne). Michael Gougis’ original article presumably gave more insight into this hidden culture than this movie’s screenplay (penned by Craig Fernandez and director Reggie Rock Blythewood), which largely uses this fascinating setting merely as a backdrop for the usual melodramatic conflicts involving a young man who won’t listen to anyone, a mother who fears for her child’s safety, and a father who’s trying to resolve issues with his hot-headed offspring. Good performances help in making us swallow all this, but ultimately, the picture isn’t especially fast or furious, just fleeting. 
TALK TO HER
Writer-director Pedro Almodovar’s latest effort may not provide the level of satisfaction obtained through his Oscar-winning All About My Mother, but it’s still a memorable experience that, like many of his works, presents weighty issues colorfully wrapped up in his own idiosyncratic strain of kitschy goodwill. It almost sounds like the start of a tasteless joke: Did you hear the one about the two women in comas? Yet with this angle, Almodovar fashions a meditative piece in which two men — a nurse (Javier Camara) and a journalist (Dario Grandinetti) — come to know each other as they lovingly tend to the two stricken women in their lives: a ballet dancer (Leonor Watling) and a bullfighter (Rosario Flores). As always, Almodovar’s plate is full: Communication between the sexes, the melding of masculine and feminine traits, and the fine line between devotion and obsession are just some of the issues tackled here. Yet if the end result occasionally feels more calculated than expected (not uncommon in some of his works), there’s still great tenderness and compassion on view here, as well as the filmmaker’s usual outrageous touches.
CURRENT RELEASES
CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND
“Never let them see you sweat” is a tagline that apparently went unheeded by George Clooney, who huffs and puffs mightily in his directorial debut. This adaptation of Chuck Barris’ memoirs, in which the creator of The Gong Show (among other TV inanities) claims to have been an assassin-for-hire for the CIA, is a genuine mixed bag, full of entertaining moments but also bogged down by Clooney’s overwhelming desire to emulate his frequent screen collaborator Steven Soderbergh. Trying for an air of hip irreverence that, let’s be honest, has never been Soderbergh’s strongest filmmaking attribute either, this follows Barris (Sam Rockwell) as he balances a successful TV career and a steady sweetheart (Drew Barrymore) with his clandestine activities for the government, represented here by a CIA mentor (Clooney) and a sexy super-spy (Julia Roberts). Appearing in virtually every scene, Rockwell (The Green Mile) is well-cast up to a point, but he has yet to provide any afterlife to any of his screen personas; he doesn’t inhabit his characters as much as get assimilated by them. But Clooney as actor nicely underplays, while Roberts is used far more effectively than in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven. 1/2
DARKNESS FALLS
The tagline reads, “Evil Rises. Darkness Falls,” but they clearly forgot the third caveat: “Slumber Ensues.” The sort of lazy endeavor that gives shockers a bad name, this dreadful flick concerns itself with the legend of the Tooth Fairy, an elderly woman who was wrongly lynched 150 years earlier and whose spirit has since terrorized the coastal town of Darkness Falls, killing anybody who dares to look at her directly. The only person to have survived her reign of terror is Kyle (Chaney Kley), who saw her as a child and has now returned to town as an adult to help a former friend (Emma Caulfield) protect her little brother (terrible Lee Cormie) from the wicked witch. Darkness Falls makes less sense as it ambles forward, constantly changing the rules of its own myths and tripping over itself in an effort to provide the sort of fake scares that are emblematic of bad horror films. My favorite: A black cat !!SUDDENLY!! leaps onto the hood of the heroine’s car, letting out a Dolby-enhanced screech as it does so. Cats leap all the time, so why would this one wail as if its eyeballs were being gouged out by a white-hot poker? Answer: Because without such manufactured moments of terror, the filmmakers would be left with a horror film that wouldn’t frighten even the most susceptible of audience members.
THE HOURS
Like The English Patient and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Hours is one of those reputedly “unfilmable” novels that has nevertheless bucked the odds to emerge as an exquisite motion picture in its own right. Adapting Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize winner, director Stephen Daldry and scripter David Hare have crafted a richly textured film that spans decades to concentrate on three troubled women who are all connected in one way or another to British author Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. First, there’s Woolf herself (played by an unrecognizable Nicole Kidman), battling the mental illness that is starting to overtake her as she begins to write Mrs. Dalloway in the 1920s. Then there’s Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a suburban housewife in 1950s Los Angeles who, while reading the book, begins to focus on her own misery and how she might best change her lot in life. And finally, there’s Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a New York book editor — and modern-day Clarissa Dalloway — who’s busy preparing a party for a former lover (Ed Harris) now dying of AIDS. It’s deeply rewarding to witness how the movie jumps between time periods, using an event in one storyline to beautifully segue into one of the others — the result is a film of great cumulative power, sparked in no small part by a superlative cast. Added bonus: A rich score by Philip Glass that might be the year’s best. 1/2
MAX
A terrific premise receives only so-so treatment in this fictional yarn that details the strained relationship between a young Adolph Hitler and a Jewish art dealer. John Cusack stars as Max Rothman, a one-armed World War I vet running a successful art gallery in Munich right after the close of the war. Max makes the acquaintance of Adolph Hitler (Noah Taylor), a nerd with no family and no friends who wants to become an artist; he attempts to befriend and encourage this temperamental loner even as the young Adolph begins to realize he has a special skill as an orator, delivering explosive political diatribes. Early claims that Max should be banned because it dares to show Hitler as human were ludicrous, not only because the movie hardly presents the future dictator in a sympathetic light but also because Hitler was human and the picture makes the contention that the evil that men do hardly springs full-formed from birth but is instead cultivated by the choices made and directions taken in one’s life. But for all the food for thought offered by the film, its overall success is diminished by the fact that there’s too much Max and not enough Hitler; indeed, the scenes focusing on Max’s strained home life, his flirtations with a mistress (Leelee Sobieski), and his business dealings can’t begin to match the sequences that concentrate on his touchy affiliation with the budding Fuhrer. And a final plot twist that would be more at home in a dopey Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy doesn’t help, either. 1/2
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
Charles Dickens’ assorted works have been brought to the screen on close to 100 occasions, but the number of Nicholas Nicklebys can be counted on one hand with the thumb tucked out of sight. This new Nickleby, the first since 1947, has been pared down from the original text by writer-director Douglas McGrath, who previously brought Jane Austen’s Emma to the screen in 1996. Whereas the Royal Shakespeare Company’s landmark stage production ran nine hours, this film clocks in at a little more than two hours; yet this Reader’s Digest approach is remarkably fluid and full-bodied, if lacking the emotional wallop of the recent Austen adaptations. As Nicholas, a decent young man determined to protect his family and friends from the harsh circumstances that seemingly dog their every move, newcomer Charlie Hunnam is passable (though rather modern, in that GQ-hunk sort of way); he’s surrounded by an able cast of familiar faces, including Christopher Plummer, Nathan Lane, Timothy Spall and, in a pair of standout performances, Jim Broadbent as Wackford Squeers, the cruel head of a decrepit boys’ school, and Billy Elliot‘s Jamie Bell as Smike, the abused orphan that Nicholas takes under his wing.
THE PIANIST
Perhaps mellowing with age, the unpredictable Roman Polanski has made one of the most traditional pictures of his storied career, a Holocaust drama that rarely ventures from the path already trodden by such exemplary efforts as Schindler’s List and the TV miniseries Holocaust. Yet the director, whose mother died in a concentration camp, has also made one of the most personal and heartfelt pictures of his career, and his anger and sadness emanate from virtually every frame. Winner of the top prize at Cannes, this recounts the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a Polish Jew and classical musician who, through the kindness of strangers and breaks of good fortune, managed to survive the Holocaust. The first half of the picture centers on the Nazi atrocities occurring to those around Szpilman, while the second part shifts gears as it concentrates on how he basically had to spend the remaining part of the war hiding out on his own, spending countless months with nothing to do, nothing to see, and usually nothing to eat. More reflective and deliberately paced than many films of this nature, this nevertheless contains some truly disturbing scenes that will be tough for many viewers to take.
RABBIT-PROOF FENCE
After years of Hollywood servitude as a hired-gun (Sliver, The Saint), Australian director Phillip Noyce came charging back last year with two comparatively small-scale gems: Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American (opening locally February 14). Fence, one of those “based on a true story” sagas that showcase humanity at its vilest, concerns itself with an Australian policy (in effect until 1970) that allowed the government to take half-caste children (part white, part Aborigine) away from their Aboriginal families and integrate them into white society (the idea was that after a couple generations, all traces of “native” blood would be erased from the family line). Here, the focus is three girls ages 14, 10 and 8 (earnestly played by non-professionals Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan); stolen from their moms and sent to a school 1,200 miles away, they soon escape and attempt to walk the entire distance back home. Despite sounding like a human version of Disney’s popular Incredible Journey films (indeed, with a PG rating, this would be fine for older children), this isn’t exactly an uplifting tale of the indomitability of the human spirit; rather, there are many heartbreaking moments, and the coda delivers an additional wallop. The great David Gulpilil, 31 years after Walkabout, co-stars as a veteran tracker, while Kenneth Branagh appears in several scenes as A.O. Neville, the misguided bureaucrat who plays God with the country’s indigenous people.
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2003.
