Short Subjectives April 25 2001

Opening Friday
CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES (PG) 1/2 Paul Hogan makes a shameless, witless attempt to revive a worn-out franchise with a thin, underdeveloped premise stringing together tired jokes and stretched beyond the breaking point by an unsuspenseful climax that goes on for nearly a third of the movie. With decent material Hogan (who has aged better than his wife, Linda Kozlowski, who plays his still-unmarried partner) might have been able to pull off another culture-clash comedy, but this one’s as pathetic as Lethal Agent 3, the bad movie it makes fun of. — STEVE WARREN

THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN 1/2 (NR) This transfixing trio of stories, which only flounder in the third act, treat the difficult condition of being a woman in a fundamentalist religious culture in this Iranian film made by a husband-and-wife writing and directing team. The film, whose episodes have an allegorical texture, are weighty and meaningful, and made even more satisfying by the glimpse director Marzieh Meshkini offers, of the physical and emotional landscape of this beautiful, and troubled country. --FELICIA FEASTER

THE DISH (PG-13) In this delightful comedy about Australia’s role in the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, life goes on as usual in the town of Parkes while their huge radio telescope prepares to relay the moonwalk to the rest of the world. The Mayor plays politics, young musicians play Jimi Hendrix and young lovers play the games they play. And sheep graze in the pasture surrounding The Dish. A steady stream of quiet chuckles at the Capraesque wisdom of common folk leaves you thinking that if there weren’t a place like Parkes there should be, and maybe one on the moon as well. — SW

FREDDY GOT FINGERED (R) Tom Green plays slacker Gordon Brody, a 28-year-old wanna-be animator who still lives with his parents. Brody battles his frustrated father (Rip Torn), whose only wish is for his son to move out and get a job, falls in love with a wheelchair-bound rocket scientist and plays with wildlife.

Duly Noted
?AMERICAN NIGHTMARE: 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

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.

BEAU TRAVAIL (NR) A filmic reverie, dense with unforgettable imagery and spooky, erotic subtext, Claire Denis’s tale of the ruinous, corrosive jealousy that drives a French Foreign Legionnaire stationed in Africa to sacrifice his beloved career over a guileless young recruit is drawn from Melville’s Billy Budd and the fertile, artful imagination of a director more concerned with mood than a cut-and-dried storyline. April 21 at 8 p.m. at Rich Auditorium, Woodruff Arts Center. --FF

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.

HOT SUMMER East Germany’s own Grease. When two groups of high school students decide to hitchhike to the Baltic Sea during summer vacation, the girls arrive first. To get even, the boys lead them to a beach full of mosquitos. April 25 at 7 p.m. Goethe-Institut Atlanta.

IT ALL STARTS TODAY (NR) Celebrated French director Bertrand Tavernier evokes both Ken Loach and Michael Apted in this union of social wake-up call and heartfelt lament. The realistic drama focuses on the committed director of a kindergarten located in an economically depressed town who champions a better life for his young students whose futures are jeopardized by abuse, alcoholism, neglect and hopelessness. April 20 at 8 p.m. at Rich Auditorium, Woodruff Arts Center. --FF

“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 PEACHTREE FILM SOCIETY OSCAR SHORTS PRESENTATION. (NR) For two programs on April 21-22, the Peachtree Film Society offers its eighth annual collection of fresh, Academy Award-winning and nominated live action, animated and documentary shorts, including former Atlantan Tracy Seretean’s winning Documentary Short “Big Mama” and the compelling 1999 Documentary Feature winner One Day in September. April 21 at 7 p.m. at Cinevision and April 22 at 6 p.m. at Parkway Pointe. --CURT HOLMAN

QUILLS Academy Award-winner Geoffrey Rush stars as Marquis de Sade, the notorious French writer whose erotic stories made his name the definition of dominant bondage. April 20-26 at GSU’s cinéfest.

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.

SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE John Malkovich plays F.W. Murnau, the director of Nosferatu, the German vampire film. Willem Dafoe plays the lead actor Max Shrek, a real vampire. Together they star in this morbid look at the making of a horror classic. April 20-26 at GSU’s cinéfest.

THE WARRIORS When they are accused of killing a gang leader, Coney Island street gang the Warriors must make it back to their home turf on the other side of the Big Apple, dodging hits as every other gang in New York is out to get them. Midnight movie April 20-21 at GSU’s cinéfest.

Continuing
?ALL ACCESS (NR) 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) 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

AMORES PERROS 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. --FF

BLOW (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

BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY 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

THE BROTHERS (R) 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

CAST AWAY (PG-13) Director Robert Zemeckis and his Forrest Gump star Tom Hanks have created another crowd-pleaser in what begins as a modern-day Robinson Crusoe story but comes out looking like a “Survivor” spin-off. Dumped in the Pacific, Chuck Noland (Hanks) spends four-plus years on an otherwise uninhabited island, developing survival skills gradually and realistically. The plot eventually gets Hollywood-ized, but it’s amazing how long Zemeckis resists commercial impulses, aside from the whole movie being such a commercial for Chuck’s employer, FedEx, that failing an Oscar, it has a chance to win a Clio. — SW

CHOCOLAT (PG-13) 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) 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

ENEMY AT THE GATES (R) 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) 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 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? — EDDY VON MUELLER

GET OVER IT (PG-13) 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) 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) 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

JOE DIRT (PG-13) 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. — SW

JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS (PG-13) 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

JOURNEY INTO AMAZING CAVES (R) Nancy Aulenbach of Norcross, a cave rescue specialist, is paired with British microbiologist Dr. Hazel Barton in this stunning IMAX documentary that takes them to Arizona, Greenland and the Yucatan in search of extremophiles, “microbes which thrive in the harshest of conditions,” some of which will be the source of new medicines. A few remarks in Liam Neeson’s narration might be explained or challenged, but most are innocuous enough. This Journey is filled with visual excitement for sedentary types, visceral excitement for the Xtreme crowd and a bit of information it won’t hurt any of us to know. Playing March 24-Sept. 3 at the IMAX theater at Fernbank Museum. — SW

JUST VISITING (PG-13) 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

KINGDOM COME (PG) 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

LEFT BEHIND (PG-13) If I go to hell for this lukewarm review, the road will be paved with the fundamentalist filmmakers’ good intentions. Based on a novel that projects the prophecies of Revelation onto modern times on the assumption they’ve begun to come true, it wastes too much time making a mystery of what every viewer knows: the millions who suddenly disappeared went to Heaven in the Rapture. In a less predictable plot line, two men try to take over the world by ending war and hunger. With the prophecies carved in stone and the wheels set in motion, resistance should be futile. — SW

MEMENTO 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) 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

O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (PG-13) 1/2 George Clooney plays an escaped convict dragging his buddies across the Depression-era Deep South in search of hidden treasure and also trying to stop his wife’s remarriage in this uneven but brilliantly bizarre screwball send-up of ’30s folk history and Homer’s ancient epic, The Odyssey. The film features a number of Coen Brothers alums, including John Goodman (standing in for the Cyclops) and John Turturro (who almost gets turned into a frog). The title comes from Sullivan’s Travels, which you should also see, dammit. — EVM

POLLOCK (R) 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

THE TAILOR OF PANAMA 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