Short Subjectives April 11 2001

Capsule reviews of films by CL critics

Opening Wednesday
?JOE DIRT (PG-13) Image 1/2 David Spade, amusing in small doses, wears out his welcome many times over as the mullet-headed title character who’s out of touch, out of style and out to find the parents who deserted him at the Grand Canyon 25 years ago. Los Angeles shock jock Dennis Miller makes Joe a 15-minute celebrity by giving him a forum to tell his story. The majority of laughs involve Joe being hurt and humiliated. Spade might have been able to keep Joe interesting for an eight-minute sketch, but a feature? No way, Dude. — STEVE WARREN

JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS (PG-13) Image Image 1/2 The titular trio reaches the big screen via a ’60s comic book and a ’70s animated TV series. Only Tara Reid, as the standard dumb blonde, has a personality as she, Rachael Leigh Cook and Rosario Dawson play punk without attitude. The easy listening hard-rockers become overnight sensations, then realize their records contain subliminal advertising, a “conspiracy to brainwash the youth of America with pop music.” As a satire on consumerism it’s hardly a teenage Fight Club — and you wouldn’t call the product placement subliminal — but this mild diversion has its moments. — SW

KINGDOM COME (PG) Image Image Image Soul Food was just an appetizer for this African-American family comedy that brings a dysfunctional brood together to bury their patriarch. Whoopi Goldberg plays it almost straight as the widow while Loretta Devine takes comic honors as her ever-praying sister-in-law. Goldberg’s sons, LL Cool J and Anthony Anderson, are in troubled marriages (to Vivica A. Fox and Jada Pinkett Smith) but no problems are too big to be resolved neatly for a feel-good ending. The actors and most of the script make up for technical shortcomings in the funniest funeral since Chuckles bit the dust. — SW

Opening Friday
?AMORES PERROS Image Image Image 1/2 (R) A trio of stories set in a dystopian Mexico City revolve around a life-altering car crash in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s gripping first feature more indebted to the indie free-styling of Tarantino than the art film legacy of Bunuel. --FELICIA FEASTER

BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY Image Image 1/2 (R) Renee Zellweger manages a convincing British accent and remains defiantly appealing as the loveable loser “singleton” Miss Jones despite this bland, conventional, American-targeted re-working of Helen Fielding’s witty, rude best-selling diaries to the screen. — FF

Duly Noted
?AMERICAN NIGHTMARE: Image Image 1/2 Horror fans will delight in this cultural history of contemporary horror, as seen through the eyes of some of its principle practitioners, including Wes Craven, George Romero and Tobe Hooper. Nifty clips enliven the film, and fairly erudite commentary might just give you a few new arguments to justify to your significant others why you like this stuff. April 13-19 at GSU’s cinéfest. -- EDDY VON MUELLER

CARBIDE AND SORREL. This 1963 German comedy involves a factory worker trying to move seven barrels of carbide safely across the Soviet occupation zone. Director Frank Beyer combines fast-paced humor with keen social observation.April 11 at 7 p.m. Goethe Institut Atlanta.

THE CHARCOAL PEOPLE. A gripping documentary reveals both the harsh working and living conditions of charcoal workers in Brazil and the consequences of that fuel on the Amazon rain forest. An Atlanta premiere. April 6-12 at cinéfest.

DO THE RIGHT THING Spike Lee explores the rising racial tensions in a Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on a hot summer day. Presented by IMAGE’s Atlanta Film & Video Festival. April 19 at 8 p.m. Rich Auditorium, Woodruff Arts Center.

ETE AND ALI After completing their military service, Ete and Ali embark on an uncertain future. Ali doesn’t want to return to his small village and Ete discovers his wife has a wandering eye. When Ali decides to help his friend get his wife back, the troubles begin. April 18 at 7 p.m. Goethe Institut Atlanta.

THE GIFT Cate Blanchette stars as a clairvoyant who leads police to a dead body in the murder mystery by Sam Rami and Billy Bob Thornton, which also stars Hilary Swank and Greg Kinnear. April 13-19 at GSU’s cinéfest.

MEN OF HONOR. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Carl Brashear, destined to become the Navy’s first African-American diver despite resistance from his tough instructor (Robert DeNiro at his saltiest) in a nobly-intended, Oscar-bait biopic that saw no nibbles from the Academy. April 6-12 at cinéfest.

“THE MULLET” Previously aired on local cable access station MediaOne, episodes of “The Mullet” will be screened on the first Monday of the month at the Fountainhead Lounge. The TV show features short films like “The Uh-Huh Man,” “The Real Life of Jimmy Mullet” and “The Fisherman and the Mullet.” April 2-June 4 at 8 p.m. Fountainhead Lounge, East Atlanta.

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (R) The cult classic of cult classics, the 1975 horror spoof follows an all-American couple (Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick) to the castle of Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), a drag-queen/mad scientist from another galaxy. It’s all fun and games until Meatloaf gets killed. Dress as your favorite character and participate in this musical on acid. Fridays at midnight, Lefont Plaza Theatre, 1049 Ponce De Leon Ave.

Continuing
?ALL ACCESS (NR) Image Image Image Like an hour of the best of MTVH-1 on a giant screen, All Access bypasses boy bands, gangsta rappers and teen sex goddesses to offer a diverse menu of rock, rap, country, world beat, gospel, funk and Latin sounds or at least some of the more mainstream manifestations of each. The ads misleadingly suggest 15 acts when collaborations boil it down to nine, but the result is neither a ripoff nor a disappointment. Shot in venues from soundstage to stadium, it’s the perfect millennium sampler for now and for a time capsule. — SW

ALONG CAME A SPIDER (R) Image Image Image Morgan Freeman returns in fine form as world-weary forensic psychologist Alex Cross of Kiss the Girls, likewise recommended as entertainment, not art. When a senator’s 12-year-old daughter is kidnapped Alex teams with Secret Service agent Jezzie Flannigan (Monica Potter), who was assigned to protect the girl, to find kidnapper Michael Wincott — and the girl — before it’s too late. After an action-packed opening the film slows down until the final hour, which is packed with twists, some more surprising than others. What matters is the plot holds together while you’re watching it, even if it falls apart in retrospect. — SW

BEFORE NIGHT FALLS (NR) Image Image Image ’80s artist Julian Schnabel steps up to the filmmaking plate again after his promising 1996 Basquiat to deliver another noteworthy portrait of an idiosyncratic artist rebelling against convention. This time it’s Cuban dissident writer and homosexual Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem), who was aggressively persecuted by Castro’s forces after the revolution for both his work and his sexuality. This bio-picture, featuring bizarre cameos from Johnny Depp and Sean Penn, is lyrically constructed, with a surreal rhythm that manages to span decades in Arenas’ often brutal, lonely life without losing a sense of the artist’s perspective. — FF

BLOW Image Image Image (R) Ted Demme’s film version of the real-life rise of pot-to-cocaine drug importer George Jung (Johnny Depp) is all surface flash and Scorsese-cribbed effects. A diverting entertainment featuring some so-bad-it’s-good fashion moments, the film is wafer-thin in the originality department, with Demme favoring visual effects over middling details like character development and motivation. --FF

THE BROTHERS (R) Image Image 1/2 Director Gary Hardwick’s screenplay is too schematic but that shouldn’t hurt this comedy’s popularity as a date movie. It’s got laughs, tears, sex, moral dilemmas and enough romance for a month of Valentine’s Days. The leads are late-twentysomethings at different stages of maturity regarding relationships. D.L. Hughley is married, Shemar Moore engaged, Morris Chestnut on the verge (with fine Gabrielle Union) and Bill Bellamy is totally commitment-shy. — SW

CHOCOLAT (PG-13) Image Image 1/2 Free-spirited Juliette Binoche opens a chocolate shop in a repressed village, setting up a didactic conflict of indulgence versus denial. The French locales, food and faces are lovingly photographed (the disarming ensemble includes Judi Dench, Johnny Depp and Alfred Molina), but it cannot equal the comparably themed but richer Babette’s Feast. Chocolat melts in your hands, not in your heart. — CH

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (PG-13) Image Image Image Image An enchanting tale set in early 19th-century China, Ang Lee’s (Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm) atmospheric Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon rekindles the Hong Kong flame of gravity-defying martial arts action and tender sentiment. Lee invests the usual astounding acrobatics with his characters’ pangs of regret, love and loss as two martial arts masters, (Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh) teach a spoiled young aristocrat (Zhang Ziyi) about the moral responsibilities of the Giang Hu martial arts way in this subversive, beautifully realized coming-of-age story. — FF

DOWN TO EARTH Image Image Though he’s given strong supporting performances, Chris is not yet the Rock on which to build a movie. In this remake of Heaven Can Wait he plays a would-be comic who’s called up to heaven prematurely and sent back in the body of a rich white man. There are a few good lines and moments, but it feels overall like a mediocre sketch comedy. A Chris Rock concert movie would have been far more entertaining. I thought the Warren Beatty version was overrated, so as much as I like Rock, I can’t work up much enthusiasm for an inferior remake. — SW

ENEMY AT THE GATES (R) Image Image 1/2 The 1942-43 Battle for Stalingrad boils down to a duel between two men, Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law) and Major Konig (Ed Harris), the top snipers for the Russians and Germans respectively, in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s epic that looks great but isn’t always as suspenseful or dramatically effective as it might be. The big battle sequence at the beginning invites comparison to Saving Private Ryan and suffers from that comparison. Mad magazine readers will appreciate a hint of “Spy vs. Spy” in this story of “Sniper vs. Sniper,” while historians may consider it an example of reductio ad absurdam. — SW

EXIT WOUNDS (R) Image Image 1/2 Steven Seagal, back down to fighting weight, regains action star viability as a maverick Detroit cop who becomes a one-man Internal Affairs Dept. DMX, whose charismatic presence could be exploited by a stronger director, plays a new jack druglord/dotcomillionaire. Car chases, fights and shootouts are mostly quick cuts suggesting fast motion and mucho destruction, but there have been far worse action sequences in far worse movies. Comic relief comes from Tom Arnold and Anthony Anderson, whose final routine suggests the birth of a new comedy team. They deserve an encore, while once is enough for the rest of the movie. — SW

15 MINUTES Image Image Larger-than-life characters, largely unmotivated acts of atrocity and a total disregard for dramatic continuity propel this disorganized and densely packed police thriller/would-be media satire about a green arson investigator and a celebrity homicide cop (Robert De Niro) on the trail of a pair of brutal and unusually image-conscious Eastern European thugs. Like a bigger, stiffer Two Days in the Valley(also by writer/director John Herzfeld), but without the neat cat-fight between Teri Hatcher and Charlize Theron. Why bother? — EVM

GET OVER IT (PG-13) Image Image Tommy O’Haver follows Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss with a teen comedy that presents a John Hughes-wannabe script in the style of a Beach Party movie. Ben Foster, an unlikely leading man, is no way a match for Kirsten Dunst, his best friend’s younger sister who becomes his Ms. Right while helping him get over Melissa Sagemiller. Casting Sisqo and Zoe Saldana as African American friends of the white leads feels calculated, more a matter of demographics than democracy, especially when Sisqo’s big number is tacked on at the end to stretch the film to minimal feature length. — SW

HANNIBAL (R) Image Image Image The sequel to The Silence of the Lambs substitutes a well-cast Julianne Moore for Jodie Foster, but more problematically offers director Ridley Scott’s baroque gloss for Jonathan Demme’s solid sobriety. The results can border on camp, especially when the eerie Anthony Hopkins bites into culinary puns, but the well-crafted cat-and-mouse scenes keep the suspense at a delicious simmer. — CH

HEARTBREAKERS (PG-13) Image Image 1/2 Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt play mother-daughter con artists in this overlong, overly broad comedy. Weaver gets a rich sucker to wed her, then catches Hewitt seducing him and scores a quick, lucrative divorce. Hewitt wants to be independent but mama says she’s not ready yet. When Weaver targets billionaire cigarette mogul Gene Hackman, Hewitt secretly goes after bar owner Jason Lee and, true to mother’s warnings, mixes pleasure with business. — SW

JUST VISITING (PG-13) Image Image A soupcon of Gallic charm (mostly in Jean Reno’s romantic performance as a 12th-century French count who time-travels to 21st-century Chicago) drowns in a vat of American bombast (courtesy of John Hughes, who assisted the original writers with the adaptation) in an English-language remake of Les Visiteurs, one of the most popular films of the ’90s in France. This low comedy has a high cheese factor, with eight-plus centuries of culture shock expressed mostly in bathroom humor. — SW

MEMENTO Image Image Image 1/2 (R) An investigator (Guy Pearce) suffering from short term memory loss tries to track down his wife’s killer in Christopher Nolan’s ingenious thriller. As in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal the scenes unfold in reverse order, so both the audience and the forgetful hero are constantly thrust into the unknown. Complicated. exhilarating and dark, Memento’s ending leaves your head spinning — counterclockwise. --CH

THE MEXICAN (R) Image Image Image In this disposable but entertaining star vehicle Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts have a relationship so dysfunctional you wonder why they bother, but that’s Hollywood’s idea of romance. They’re apart for most of the picture, the heart of which is Roberts’ association with James Gandolfini, a hitman with a twist who kidnaps her to ensure Pitt brings an antique pistol back from Mexico. Overall the movie’s a mixed bag, with more positives (a literate, often witty script; slightly surreal visuals) than negatives (cliched scenes and plot twists, Nancy Sinatra’s overplayed “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” on the soundtrack). — SW

POLLOCK (R) Image Image Image This cinematically conventional biopic of abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock is a vivid portrait of a veritable sphinx. Directed by and starring Ed Harris, Pollock follows the professional rise and obligatory unraveling of the gifted painter, focusing on his marriage to fellow artist Lee Krasner. As evocative as Harris’s portrayal of the sinewy and scowling artist is, he fails (or chooses not) to offer any insights into Pollock’s swollen ego, alcoholic rage and generic mad genius behavior, leaving Pollock unavoidably unsatisfying as a result. — FF

SOMEONE LIKE YOU (PG-13) Image Image 1/2 The best thing about this total chick flick is that men, rather than being likened to pigs, are compared to bulls instead. Ashley Judd stars as Jane, who adapts the New Cow Theory, that bulls refuse to mate with the same cow twice, to show that human males behave the same as bovines. That’s after she’s dumped by Greg Kinnear and before she and Hugh Jackman realize they’re made for each other. This formulaic movie might have been made in the pre-feminist era as well as today. It’s not groundbreaking but it’s a pleasant enough time-waster. — SW

THE TAILOR OF PANAMA Image Image Image Pierce Brosnan wickedly sullies his 007 image as a sleazy, womanizing intelligence agent who enlists a fraudulent tailor (Geoffrey Rush) to spy on Panama’s ruling elites. The adaptation of John LeCarre’s novel weaves a complicated pattern of broad satire, serious political commentary and knotty character study, but director John Boorman loses his grip on the different threads, offering a weak, unconvincing ending that undercuts the film’s otherwise provocative originality. — CH

THE WIDOW OF SAINT-PIERRE Image Image 1/2 Prolific French filmmaker Patrice Leconte (Monsieur Hire, Ridicule) makes a rare mis-step with this attack on capital punishment in the 1850s. Emir Kusturica as a condemned killer and Juliette Binoche as his unexpected advocate are too reserved to generate much audience empathy, although the director still has an eye for memorable images, such as a cafe on wagon wheels rolling through a town. — CH

WHAT WOMEN WANT (PG-13) Image Image Image Don’t expect much more than a light social comedy and you won’t be disappointed by the throwaway charms of this Hollywood lark about a chauvinistic ladies man (Mel Gibson) who is electrocuted in the bathtub and wakes up able to hear women’s innermost thoughts. Director Nancy Meyers knows how to pander to a mainstream audience, and her predictable but often funny film has enough insight into the communication barriers between men and women to sustain interest in a rather thin plot. — FF