CURRENT RELEASES
BROTHER BEAR Oh, brother, what a bore… Brother Bear has been plugged as the last gasp of the traditional animated film, but I’d hate to think the future of anything depended on something this mediocre. This soggy tale finds Disney raiding its own tombs for material, cobbling together pieces of The Lion King, Pocahontas and other hits to create a yawn-inducing yarn about a warrior who’s transformed into a bear. The human characters are dull, the requisite bear cub is cloying, the comic relief (doltish moose voiced by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) is annoying, and the songs by Phil Collins — how do I delicately put this? — suck. 
1/2
ELF While it could stand being a little more naughty and a little less nice, Elf isn’t a pre-fabricated piece of synthetic Christmas cheer like The Santa Clause or Gov. Schwarzenegger’s disastrous Jingle All the Way. While remaining mindful of the season-friendly PG rating, director Jon Favreau and scripter David Berenbaum manage to add a few splashes of Tabasco sauce to the expected puddles of syrup, thereby elevating this fable about a human (Will Ferrell) who, after being raised as an elf at the North Pole, heads to New York. Overcoming a sluggish beginning, both the picture and Ferrell’s broad turn become easier to take once this gets rolling, with some inventive touches (love those Etch-A-Sketch renditions!) and a game cast helping matters along. 1/2
THE HUMAN STAIN This adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel is an affecting picture in its own right, almost subdued in the way it tackles its myriad issues of race, loss, identity, and the lengths to which one man will reinvent himself to succeed in America. It traces the downward spiral of a college professor (Anthony Hopkins) after an innocent classroom comment is misinterpreted as a racial slur. Suddenly without a career or a family, he passes the days alternating between dwelling on secrets buried in his past and engaging in a tentative relationship with a complex woman (Nicole Kidman) who paints herself as the ultimate in trailer park trash. Hopkins hasn’t been this interesting in years, while Kidman’s amazing portrayal is merely the latest in her current winning streak.
IN THE CUT Meg Ryan delivers an appropriately dour turn in this psychosexual drama about a lonely New Yorker who falls for a roughneck detective (Mark Ruffalo) cryptic enough to make her suspect he might also be the serial killer who’s been hacking up women. On the most commercial level of a murder-mystery, this is a complete washout, jammed with gaping plotholes and a laughably obvious culprit. As a stylized study of the uneasy symmetry between the ache of sexual longing and the risk of violent retribution, the film occasionally threatens to spring to life, yet all potential is repeatedly forced to take a backseat not only to those tired thriller elements but also to director Jane Campion’s misplaced sense of artful abstraction.
LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION The term “specialized cinema” refers to art-house features, but this live-action/animation hybrid, a quantum leap over the wretched Space Jam, qualifies as much as any other movie that comes to mind. With its pleasures aimed at three specific segments of the moviegoing population, this might prove to be a tough nut to crack for anyone not keyed into its frenetic frequency. Yet children will enjoy the cartoon antics, diehard Looney Tunes junkies will embrace Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as they fill the big screen, and film buffs will delight in the endless array of in-jokes. Slapstick shenanigans, inspired non sequiturs and guest appearances by a dozen other LT regulars prevent the merriment from ever slowing down.
LOVE ACTUALLY Many movie romances make us willingly suspend our disbelief, but this colossal disappointment asks viewers to go to such extremes to disengage from reality that we’re actually open to seeing just about anything unimaginable take place in this film, even the sight of a T-rex attacking Gastonia, Darth Vader cutting loose at a disco, or Jennifer Lopez delivering an interesting performance. A great cast (Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, etc.) has been assembled for this multi-story piece in which various folks find love in London in the weeks leading up to Christmas, but there are absolutely no surprises (aside from the escalating preposterousness) in any of the choppy vignettes, almost all of which fizzle out with unlikely wrap-ups.
MAMBO ITALIANO Or, My Big Fat Gay Italian Wedding. Broad in the extreme, the story focuses on an Italian-Canadian family and what happens when Mom (Ginette Reno) and Dad (hammy Paul Sorvino, doing enough acting for 10 people) discover that their son (Luke Kirby) is gay and has settled down with a former schoolmate (Peter Miller). The script is timid when dealing with the young men’s relationship yet charges like a bull when it’s time for those wacky Italianos to start-a with the “meat-a-balls” and “whack-a you upside the head” routines. After watching the expected shtick play out repeatedly over 90 minutes, only one thought takes hold: Where are the GoodFellas when we really need them? 1/2
MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD Based on Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels, this casts Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey, a British naval hero assigned to bring down a formidable French vessel during the Napoleonic Wars. For a swashbuckling epic, the film is rather subdued in its approach, with director Peter Weir taking great pains to present an oft-times understated tale that’s about the art of warfare as much as it’s about the battles themselves. Paul Bettany, Crowe’s A Beautiful Mind co-star, portrays the ship’s doctor (and Aubrey’s best friend), and it’s the relationship between their two characters — coupled with Weir’s attention to minute detail — that largely drives the story.
THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS As a joyride of a movie, this final installment delivers the goods. But on a human level, it’s clear that the Wachowskis allowed the series to get away from them. Thus, fascinating characters introduced in Reloaded are almost completely forgotten, while the series mainstays have largely been drained of personality, existing only to stand around mouthing increasingly vague philosophies. Too bad. This is certainly no disgrace — it trumps most series’ third entries (Alien 3, anyone?) and will probably stand up to repeat viewings quite nicely. But for a series that began with audiences gleefully agreeing with Neo’s declaration of “Whoa!,” this one is sure to leave as many moviegoers shrugging, “So?” 1/2
PIECES OF APRIL A hit at Sundance, this pulls off a nice balancing act between humor and heartbreak as it makes its way toward its deeply satisfying finale. Set on that most American of holidays, the movie sits back and watches as estranged April Burns (Katie Holmes) does her best to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for her family — a family that’s quite reluctant to show up at all. The clan’s car trip provides Patricia Clarkson (The Station Agent) plenty of opportunities to strut her stuff as April’s bitter mom, a woman who’s dying of cancer, while the interludes between April and her assorted neighbors are the ones that best convey the spirit of the holiday being celebrated. With its cathartic ending, Pieces of April clearly earns its tears.
RADIO Inspired by a true story, this centers on a mentally challenged kid (Cuba Gooding Jr.) in South Carolina and the high school coach (Ed Harris) who transformed their lives. Films like this one are created solely to pummel our tear ducts, yet Radio left me unmoved. Maybe it was because Mike Tollin directed this with all the flair of an infomercial. Maybe it was because of the shameless script by Mike Rich (Finding Forrester). Maybe it was because Gooding is never allowed to play a three-dimensional character but rather a manifestation of a white man’s cause, human currency to be handed around whenever a character needs his or her consciousness raised. Then again, maybe it was simply because the theater’s air conditioning unit was drying up my contacts something fierce, making tears an impossible acquisition.
SCARY MOVIE 3 Scary Movie 3 features the likes of Charlie Sheen, Pamela Anderson, Simon Cowell and a Michael Jackson clone — certainly some folks’ idea of a good time, but little more than an act of sheer desperation as far as I’m concerned. Then again, this series has always been about low-brow entertainment, but at least the original picture delivered plenty of laughs. Operating like an inferior issue of Mad magazine with all the pages mixed up, this randomly ping-pongs between tepid take-offs of The Ring, Signs, The Matrix Reloaded and 8 Mile. The notion of Leslie Nielsen playing the US President is funny in theory, but this film even blows the comic potential of that situation. 1/2
SHATTERED GLASS Based on the real-life scandal involving writer Stephen Glass, who had fabricated 27 of the 41 stories he penned for The New Republic in the 1990s, it would be logical to assume that this film would rake the fourth estate over the coals, illustrating how it had continued to shift from a venerable source of reliable information into a circus act of celebrity reporters riding unicycles of distortion and deceit. Yet the surprise of the film is that it’s ultimately a celebration of journalistic integrity, emulating All the President’s Men in the manner in which it presents most of its characters as moral crusaders who will do whatever it takes to uncover the truth. As Glass, Hayden Christensen (a.k.a. Anakin Skywalker) delivers a solid performance. 1/2
THE SINGING DETECTIVE Dennis Potter’s same-named BBC miniseries has long been considered one of the greatest works ever created for TV, but this big-screen remake is a calamity. Robert Downey Jr. plays Dan Dark, a pulp fiction writer who suffers from a debilitating skin condition that fuels not only his deeply entrenched cynicism but also feverish daydreams in which he imagines himself as a musically inclined shamus. Making a movie that’s both bizarre and boring would seem unlikely, but this one manages this unenviable feat, as director Keith Gordon’s attempts to goose this material with poorly choreographed musical numbers and ham-fisted technical tricks instead only point out the sheer bankruptcy of the gumshoe angle and the increasingly tedious behavior of its central character. 1/2
THE STATION AGENT It can’t be a coincidence that the year’s two best films both center around lonely, troubled people tentatively reaching out to other isolated souls. But like Lost In Translation, The Station Agent is another splendid human drama about likable folks cutting through a surrounding haze of complacency long enough to make the sorts of connections that don’t require a dial-up tone. The focal character is Fin McBride (Peter Dinklage), a dwarf who, after moving into a decrepit train depot, only wishes that people would leave him alone. Instead, a few neighbors, most notably a tortured artist (Patricia Clarkson) and a hot dog vendor (Bobby Cannavale), manage to locate his dormant vein of compassion and bring it bubbling to the surface. Debuting writer-director Tom McCarthy is off to a blazing start with this exemplary seriocomic gem.
SYLVIA Failing to convey the imagination of Frida, the poignancy of Iris, or the profundity of Virginia Woolf’s plight in The Hours, Sylvia brings up the rear when it comes to films about tortured women trying to create art while contending with mental and/or physical anguish. Known in shorthand as the suicidal author of The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath won’t see that description expanded by this dreary effort that’s more interested in documenting a tragic love affair than getting inside this woman’s head. Whether Plath’s art and death were fueled by much beyond romance gone awry seems almost beside the point in this picture, which focuses almost exclusively on the soap opera angle and in effect paints largely unsympathetic portrayals of both Sylvia (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her husband, poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig).
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE Loosely based on the exploits of serial killer Ed Gein, both film versions (1974 and 2003) deal with five college-age kids whose ill-advised road trip through a desolate part of Texas puts them in contact with a murderous, cannibalistic clan whose most terrifying member (Leatherface) is a hulking psychopath who wears his victims’ faces as masks. The bottom line? The original picture is a genuine classic of the genre, a punishing, unrelenting nightmare that never allows viewers even a moment of sanity or security. This doltish new version, on the other hand, is nothing more than business as usual, a feeble retelling that guts the integrity of the original and wears its own cynicism like a ragged mask. 1/2
TUPAC: RESURRECTION With dance classes on his high school resume and Shakespeare cited as an influence, rap star Tupac Shakur clearly never quite fit the stereotypical image of the gangbanging thug, and the strength of this documentary is that it never flinches in showing us why he made the choices he felt he had to make — even though they ended up costing him his life. Director Lauren Lazin was fortunate to have ample material with which to work (home movies, private journals), and although Tupac’s mother, former Black Panther Afeni Shakur, serves as an executive producer, this is no sanitized whitewash: While the notorious war between the East and West Coast rappers isn’t explored in much depth, other prickly points in his career are admirably placed front and center.
This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2, 2003.
