NEW RELEASES
CHARLOTTE FILM SOCIETY Movies begin this Friday at the Manor and continue the following Friday at Movies at Birkdale. Call 704-414-2355 for details.
* BUFFALO SOLDIERS The TV movie The Reagans wasn’t the only Hollywood project from the past year to largely vanish because of fears it would anger our Republican friends in charge. Improbably, Miramax Films, once the most cutting-edge of all studios, cowardly gave the boot to Buffalo Soldiers, releasing it to only a handful of cities before sending it packing to Videoland. The movie’s crime? It dares to show the military in a less-than-flattering light, as an institution in which some of its officers are incompetent or psychotic and many of its foot soldiers corrupt and drug-addled. Imagine if Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H had been stifled back in 1970 because its studio was afraid the movie would offend Nixon with its thinly veiled digs at the Vietnam War, and you can see the absurdity of the current climate. At any rate, Buffalo Soldiers is no M*A*S*H, but it’s still a sharply scripted serio-comedy in which an opportunistic GI (Joaquin Phoenix), running illegal operations under the nose of his inept commander (Ed Harris) right before the end of the Cold War, runs afoul of a hardnosed officer (Scott Glenn) and escalates the antagonism by dating his daughter (Anna Paquin). 
* Also: The Chinese import TOGETHER (1/2), from director Chen Kaige (Farewell, My Concubine), is a modestly pleasing tale about a peasant trying to guarantee that his son, a violin virtuoso, has the opportunity to succeed in life. The ending, meant to be inspirational, is instead problematic. France’s DEMONLOVER () stars Connie Nielsen (Gladiator) in a slick corporate thriller about a double-dealing businesswoman’s discovery of a website that specializes in illegal activities. This convoluted picture starts out strong by keeping the viewer off-balance, but it ultimately leads nowhere, and the ending can be figured out before the movie’s even half over. And THE SON () comes from Belgium’s sibling team of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who are favorites at Cannes (their earlier film Rosetta took the top prize) but not with me. This one is a similarly lethargic drama about a carpenter (Cannes Best Actor winner Olivier Gourmet) who takes under his wing the teenager who killed his own son years earlier. God knows I’m usually a sucker for leisurely paced character studies, but with most of the running time devoted merely to endless scenes of Gourmet silently driving his car, silently climbing stairs, silently doing sit-ups, etc., I was ready for a naval battle or an Orc attack just to shake things up — and to insure I hadn’t lost my hearing.
CURRENT RELEASES
THE ALAMO Forget The Alamo… again. John Wayne’s 1960 take on the historic battle of 1836 was fairly useless as history and barely involving as entertainment, but it at least had the benefit of a sterling cast and a marvelous Dimitri Tiomkin score. This version can’t even match those modest achievements — it’s the equivalent of one long drone from a stiff Social Studies teacher who can scarcely be bothered to add any sort of relevancy to the topic. Even with his charisma kept in check, Billy Bob Thornton still fares best as Davy Crockett. The other leads — Dennis Quaid as Sam Houston, Patrick Wilson as William Travis and especially Jason Patric as Jim Bowie — resemble waxworks at a history museum; if the characters they’re portraying had been this boring, they simply could have lulled the Mexican army to sleep. 1/2
DOGVILLE The latest drama from writer-director Lars von Trier, following the powerful Breaking the Waves and the insufferable Dancer In the Dark, is equally guaranteed to disturb and divide audiences. Nicole Kidman (in a strong performance that goes with the flow) plays a Depression-era fugitive who shows up in a small Rocky Mountain town, whereupon the locals grudgingly come to accept her as part of their community. But as time progresses and suspicions are aroused, the residents eventually turn on her, treating her as nothing more than a slave and laying the groundwork for the film’s cathartic climax. Armed with the minimalist trappings of a filmed stage play, this is a movie of our times, a cautionary tale railing against the uninformed conformity that too often soils the legacy of this great country. 1/2
ENVY Simply put, Envy is a steaming pile of celluloid crap. The excrement reference is appropriate, since the plot centers on a loudmouth (Jack Black) who invents the Vapoorizer, a spray that makes dog doo disappear into thin air; his creation makes him rich, which in turn makes his best friend (Ben Stiller) insanely jealous. Barry Levinson, an accomplished director whose bombs are now starting to outnumber his hits, can do absolutely nothing with newcomer Steve Adams’ perfectly dreadful script. It really says something when a movie manages to snag the services of both Stiller and Black and then squanders their talents by forcing them to play unlikable, uninteresting characters who come across as irritating rather than amusing. The sooner they Vapoorize this movie from their resumes, the better off we’ll all be.
HELLBOY The beginning of Hellboy looks like the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that’s a good thing. But the rest of the movie brings to mind last year’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and that’s not a comparison anyone would clamor to receive. That’s a shame, because this comic book adaptation about a demonic superhero appeared to have the right director in Guillermo del Toro and the right actor in Ron Perlman. But despite their combined efforts, this grungy movie isn’t original enough, exciting enough, or humorous enough to sustain interest, let alone spawn the expected sequel or two.
KILL BILL VOL. 2 The inability to notice that the emperor had no clothes — not even a bandanna — helped turn Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 into a critical darling and a favorite of fan-boys everywhere. But although originally conceived as one movie until the length dictated the creation of two separate flicks, the Kill Bill volumes couldn’t possibly be further apart — in style, tone or content. Volume 1 diehards will inevitably feel let down by the emphasis on talk rather than action, but Volume 2 is nevertheless the superior movie. It’s better written, better acted (especially by Uma Thurman and David Carradine), and more emotionally involving, although it’s still obvious that Tarantino should have taken the scissors to his project and carved out a single kick-ass movie instead of two bloated ones. 1/2
LAWS OF ATTRACTION The 1950 comedy Adam’s Rib cast Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as husband-and-wife lawyers who end up on opposite sides of a major case; this clearly hopes to be its modern-day equivalent, but it’s so inconsequential that it wouldn’t even cut it as Adam’s Hangnail. That’s a shame, because the star pairing of Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore promises much more than this movie actually delivers. Brosnan is as casually charismatic as always, while Moore, taking a break from award-friendly projects, gleefully throws herself into her change-of-pace role. They’re an engaging team, which makes it all the more frustrating that they’re let down by a trite screenplay.
MAN ON FIRE This is a remake of a forgotten 1987 flick starring Scott Glenn; that version barely ran 90 minutes, and it’s a sign of director Tony Scott’s arrogance that this ugly revamping clocks in at 140 minutes. The movie starts off OK, with Denzel Washington effectively cast as a former government assassin whose constant boozing is interrupted once he agrees to serve as the bodyguard for an American girl (Dakota Fanning) living with her parents in Mexico City. Scott’s meaningless stylistics immediately grate on the nerves, but the strong work by Washington and Fanning — and the bond they create together — cuts through all the hipster b.s. and draws us into the picture. But once the child gets kidnapped and is then believed to be dead, this turns into a tedious revenge yarn. 1/2
MEAN GIRLS Like Heathers and Clueless, here’s that rare teen comedy that refuses to be pigeonholed as a teen comedy. Even more remarkably, it’s also that rare Saturday Night Live-sanctioned film that’s actually funny. Scripter Tina Fey elected to adapt Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, along the way turning a nonfiction book into a fictional story spiced up with her own pithy, piercing observations. Lindsay Lohan stars as a naive teen who, upon making her public school debut after a lifetime of home-schooling, finds herself being courted by the “bitch-goddess” crowd. Director Mark Waters and Lohan previously worked together on the Freaky Friday remake; I’m not prepared to elevate them to the level of Kurosawa-Mifune or Scorsese-De Niro, but they’ve clearly got a good thing going.
THE PUNISHER One of the most popular of the latter-day (read: 1970s onward) Marvel Comics heroes, this one-man killing machine first saw his exploits translated to film in a 1989 Dolph Lundgren vehicle that went straight to video. Now here comes the more polished and more expensive version (with Dreamcatcher‘s Thomas Jane in the lead), and perhaps the best that can be said about it is that it’s more watchable than the equally sadistic Man On Fire. It’s tolerable junk if viewed in the right frame of mind, if one is willing to overlook the poor dialogue, John Travolta’s colorless villain, and the ludicrously overplayed death scenes.
13 GOING ON 30 Starting off in 1987, this engaging comedy centers around 13-year-old Jenna Rink, an awkward girl whose only desire is to be “thirty, flirty and thriving.” She magically gets her wish granted, waking up in 2004 at the age of 30 and not remembering anything that has transpired over the course of the last 17 years. As she begins to piece together the missing years, she realizes that she doesn’t like the person she’s become. Jennifer Garner, the versatile star of Alias, is irresistible here — she possesses the flair and instincts of a screwball comedienne — and if her performance ultimately isn’t quite as moving as Tom Hanks’ in the thematically similar Big, that might be because the script by Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa doesn’t delve as deeply into the dark side of being a child trapped in a grownup’s body.
THE WHOLE TEN YARDS Never mind the yards: There are at least 100 whole reasons why The Whole Ten Yards is easily the worst movie to (dis)grace movie screens so far in 2004. A sequel to a so-so film that barely anyone remembers (The Whole Nine Yards), this again finds gruff hit man Bruce Willis and nerdy dentist Matthew Perry mixing it up with gangsters. This attempt at comedy is so unspeakably awful that I actually felt precious brain cells melting away as my eyes took in this horror. The experience left me shell-shocked to the point that I was wandering the parking lot afterward in a daze, dependant on the kindness of a fellow scribe to remind me who I was, what I was doing there, and where I was parked. I’m no expert on the subject, but shouldn’t Workers’ Comp be covering my recuperation?
WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF This curious piece of whimsy casts Jamie Sives as Wilbur, a Glasgow resident who’s generally giving those around him the cold shoulder when he’s not busy devising new ways to commit suicide. His eternally patient brother Harbour (Adrian Rawlins) devotes himself to Wilbur but also finds time to romance single mom Alice (Shirley Henderson), yet once they’re wed, Harbour is forced to confront his own medical misfortune while Wilbur and Alice explore their mutual attraction behind his back. The gallows humor is the film’s strongest suit, followed by its gallery of sympathetic characters simply seeking companionship in a cold world. Less successful is its eventual segue way into melodrama, with an inherently tearjerking development bucking awkwardly against Lone Scherfig’s chilly direction.
OPENS FRIDAY:
BREAKIN’ ALL THE RULES: Jamie Foxx, Gabrielle Union.
MICKEY: Harry Connick Jr., Sherri Richmond.
TROY: Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom.
This article appears in May 12-18, 2004.
