31 March 2002

Jessica Stein (Jennifer Westfeldt) is clean and glossy and symmetrical and her hair can do various things (she paints, too) and, well—she’s picky. Mom is getting desperate (not to mention Grandma) for 28-year-old Jessica (Mom, could you shut up? I’m atoning!) but her most recent string of dates has been disastrous. One day at her copy-editing job at the Tribune, though, she and her co-workers read a personal ad which quotes an author I’ve not heard of [German poet Rilke, my dictionary says] and Jessica is intrigued. Too bad it’s in the women seeking women category. Helen Cooper (Heather Juergensen) is also dissatisfied with the men in her life as a manager at an art gallery and is looking to experiment. When Jessica with her sleek ’do and strippy heels actually shows up for the rendezvous, she immediately regrets it, but one use of marinate as a metaphorical verb outside the context of cooking and one unexpected kiss later, they are starting a passionate affair. Although Helen is beginning to warm to Jessica as a person, Jessica herself is unable to admit to what she is doing. Naturally, a confrontation is in the offing when Helen discovers that, shocker! she hasn’t been invited to the Stein brother’s wedding. <> Even though there’s no guns and no nudity, I can see why the local paper’s blood-and-guts reviewer would have been smitten. It’s no Go Fish (which required actual lesbians to propel its plot) or Desert Hearts (which was adventuresome 17 years ago with its tale of a straight woman beguiled by the charms of a brunette, and was much more erotic about it, too) but for a Manhattan-based story about people who are pretty well off but just haven’t found the right person to spend the rest of time with, it hits the spot.

106 minutes.

30 March 2002

An absurdist black comedy where everything ends in insanity. It’s pretty much all the cinema that Serbia has had to export for some time now. Boomerang (with a friendly-for-export sign in English from this Yugoslavian-Canadian coproduction) is a bar on a side street in the capital Belgrade with a proprietor who’s already close to the edge (he sleeps with an open reel tape playing war sounds). In the course of one day and an extended flashback a whole lot of characters will find their way to Boomerang and there will be much mayhem and people you thought were dead will return. <> I think I might have picked up a new vocabulary word or two, of course, only of the most vulgar sort, useful for negotiating with prostitutes or general insults and such. I was disappointed that the action eventually settled into the one location of the bar and would have liked to see more of the city. (The production is much more professionally staged than some of the French stuff I’ve seen lately, and the credit to among others the MUP Republike Srpske shouldn’t worry anybody.) Like I believe you can schedule a same-day wedding at the Kalemegdan.

91 minutes.

Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah) is getting ready for the 4 day wedding festivities for his only daughter Aditi (Vasundhara Das) and nothing is going right. It starts with the marigolds falling off the arch in the garden. The wedding planner P. K. Dube (Vijay Raaz) thinks that the words exactly and approximately mean the same thing and is busy on his wireless phone and pager. Guests arriving from America and Australia are late, and he’s surrounded by idiots. Waterproofing the tent for the expected rain later in the week will require more money, P. K. insists, money Lalit does not quite have. Lalit doesn’t know the half of it. The daughter has been having an affair with a local (Delhi) talk show host (Sameer Arya) who won’t leave his wife just yet. The groom from Houston, Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas), wants to get to know his bride before he takes her away to a strange place like America. And determinedly unmarried niece Ria (Shefali Shetty) has some suspicions and revelations in store. And, uh-oh, Lalit’s son Varun (Ishaan Nair) wants to be an entertainer. Couldn’t he play sports like a normal boy? <> Money crunch notwithstanding, this is a well-off family with a maid (whose youthful play with the bride’s jewelry attracts the devotional attention of P. K.) and many connections. There’s plenty of opportunity for good times, some lust between a few of the younger guests, friction between the future in-laws, and a touch of seriousness when Ria makes her stand. What a week! With a well-waterproofed tent and a little techno, everything can end well.

114 minutes.

29 March 2002

Workers in burger joint Duncan’s Pat and Joe McBeth (Maura Tierney and James LeGros) chafe under the dictates of owner Norm (James Rebhorn) better known for his chain of donut shops and inability to control or even understand his two sons. When the observation of co-worker Anthony Banco Banconi (Kevin Corrigan) leads to the exposure and banishment of the embezzling manager, Pat sees opportunity for herself and Joe, but Norm merely makes Joe an assistant manager (Which makes me what? she demands. The wife of the assistant manager?) and dreams of creating a drive-thru (which may or may not have been an innovation in the titular area in the period setting of the early seventies). Joe, meanwhile, has come across three prophetic hippies at the carnival otherwise shuttered for the winter (Amy Smart, Andy Dick, and Timothy Levitch) who have suggested to him the advantages of the intercom as a way of running the drive-thru. Under Pat’s guidance, Norm finds himself face-down in a Fry-o-lator, his sons sell the joint to the McBeths, and a homeless person is framed for the murder. As Detective McDuff (Christopher Walken) sniffs around, promoting vegetarianism and unconvinced of the homeless person’s guilt, the body count begins to rise. <> Fine, it’s the early seventies, and a photograph of Nixon is on the wall of the police station, but it is still suspicious that most of the main characters (except for McDuff and the national origin of his decrepit vehicle is misattributed) drive late sixties General Motors pony cars: Camaros and Firebirds. Doubly unlikely that they are local vehicles, as this film was shot in Nova Scotia. Tierney, an underappreciated aspect of Liar Liar, is effective as the driven woman who loses her mind in obsession over a grease splatter from the murder. Amy Smart is on-screen far too little, and her voice is half dubbed by a male (to emphasize the prophecies), but I wonder why Christina Applegate is on the cover of the April Vanity Fair and not her. I haven’t had a chance yet to dig out my edition of MacBeth but Out, damned… is not a part of the screenplay. Still, as stereotypical as it is, Norm’s complete inability to read his sons (a poster for Cabaret is enough for the audience to figure it out) is largely comical. So is Joe’s last-ditch effort to murder by burger in fighting wth McDuff.

112 minutes.

28 March 2002

Sarah Lloyd (Andie MacDowell) is the happy wife with two children and the big house in a semi-rural part of New Jersey who works in Manhattan for Newsweek. Her Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist of a husband, Harrison (David Strathairn), is concerned that he hasn’t connected with his son, but agrees to one last assignment. The civil war in Yugoslavia, October, 1991. When the report of his death in Croatia and the bag with some of his cameras comes back, Sarah does not believe it, and, indifferent to the fate of her children, flies to a city no one in the film can pronounce or even locate (Graz, Austria) and drives an Audi into Yugoslavia. Her car is promptly driven over by a tank, her hitchhiker is shot, and her rape is interrupted early only by the arrival of other journalists. Fully recognizing the stupidity of her quest, people she knows somewhat agree to take her toward Vukovar, under siege by Serb forces. <> Seven of us decided to grace the last screening Thursday night. I appreciated the opportunity to hear dialogue in Serbian without subtitles. Does it matter that it is not the real Vukovar, as I saw in the 1994 Vukovar Poste Restante? Or the 1992 Where Gods Are Dead [Der Gudene er Dode]? Still I stumbled out of the theater after all the bombardment and carnage. (Amidst all the graphic bombing and strafing and burning and shooting and piles of dead bodies, the slapping of a woman is faked as clumsily as anything on television 40 years ago.) Universal took its time releasing this, a copyright date of 2000 is a little surprise at the end.

121 minutes.

22 March 2002

Three fraternity brothers find themselves tossed out of the chapter’s house, victims of a trumped-up charge of embezzlement. They take the advice of the most stoned among them and, in the flash of a cut (and a later hurried remark about shopping at Goodwill), are dressed as women convincingly enough to pledge a sorority. Hijinks ensue. <> Oh, please, Melissa Sagemiller again as the object of affection? Heather Matarazzo still 5 years later playing the awkward one? But the audience had a foot-stomping good time. To think that those who left early missed the cannibalism joke!

93 minutes.

16 March 2002

A contrary wooly mammoth Manfred (Ray Romano) decides to walk north instead when the time comes around for migration, but he saves a sloth Sid (John Leguizamo) from two rhinos and then can’t shake him loose. The local herd of humans has been attacked by saber toothed tigers, and one of the women has chosen to take her chances in the river, but, exhausted, she must abandon her child on a riverbank. Sid insists that they reunite the little fur-topped bundle of naked wrinkles with its own herd. They are joined by Diego (Denis Leary), one of the saber toothed tigers that attacked the human settlement (as revenge for the killing and skinning of members of the pride), and his proposal that he is the only one that can track the humans and help Manfred and Sid reduce their travel time is plausible enough to overcome their suspicion of this predator. Naturally, they encounter obstacles on their journey, and come to learn the meaning of friendship. Meanwhile, a squirrel which is fairly saber toothed himself is having some little difficulty finding a place amongst all the ice and rocks to bury an acorn. <> Slapstick, jokes, and a quick pace (and that persistent squirrel) help cover up the lack of authenticity in a long list of scientific disciplines. The dodo sequence is a particular highlight.

80 minutes.

06 March 2002

Matt (Josh Hartnett) sure has his problems. He’s a designer of high bandwidth web pages with obscure navigational cues (I may be editorializing a bit there) living in San Francisco. Nicole (Vinessa Shaw, with a creepy Hilary Swank’s prettier sister look to her) has dumped him and in his subsequent anguish Matt has sex with pretty much every woman he meets and they’re all young and bouncy. But he’s starting to hallucinate and in desperation gets the idea to give up what he loves most—the constant sex—for Lent. The first evening at the coin laundry, he meets Erica (Shannyn Sossamon). As his relentlessly crass mates at the job (which never notices any recession) and his crude, incredulous roommate make Matt’s vow of celibacy a matter of public interest with a betting pool web site, his growing interest in Erica will require a delicate touch. <> The tripartite distribution pact that brought Bridget Jones’s Diary to American screens has come up with a rather flat (and unfunny) proposition this time. Although, in retrospect, it is intriguing that someone should think to make a hero of someone who doesn’t own a car. San Francisco is overplayed for this kind of movie, I think I recognize that hill under the Golden Gate Bridge from Boys and Girls. Sossamon, the princess who similarly inspired love at first sight in last year’s A Knight’s Tale, is cuddlier with shorter hair and ordinary clothes, but the constant parade of wenches in tops and skirts size 4 and smaller strains credulity. What a paucity of imagination to postulate scale modeling as the only activity Matt can think of to replace the time previously spent in cherchez la femme. Should it bother anyone else that the laundry where Matt and Erica meet is called the Mon Kee ?

95 minutes.

04 March 2002

All Lawrence Musgrove (Sean Combs) can offer to his son after 11 years on death row in a Louisiana prison is the drawings he’s made over the years. On the day of his execution he will draw two of the corrections officers charged with his care, Hank (Billy Bob Thornton) who generally supports father Buck (Peter Boyle) in running black children off their property with a shotgun and Sonny (Heath Ledger) who’s actually befriended those children. Hank is furiously disappointed in Sonny for vomiting on the death walk, but when Sonny shoots himself and dies, he is at a loss. When he notices a new waitress at the late night diner he frequents (Hank likes chocolate ice cream and his coffee black) and later stops to help when her son has been the victim of a hit and run late one night, he sees a different direction for his life. Leticia (Halle Berry) loses her son, her job, her car, her house and is ready to partake of a man’s presence after some whiskey. They don’t know they have Lawrence, her husband, in common. <> I had a vague idea that this was some sort of drama about bigotry and cross-racial attraction and was completely unprepared for the sex. Let’s just say I am not sorry I skipped Swordfish as it’s quite likely there was nothing seen in there that’s not on display here—and how.

81 minutes.

01 March 2002

Dame (Jean) Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) is identified in my The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as an Irish-born writer of novels. This film, with the participation of her surviving husband John Bayley (Jim Broadbent), depicts the deterioration of Iris (Judi Dench) due to Alzheimer’s and contrasts it with the beginning of her relationship with John. <> What I earlier called the routine toplessness of Kate Winslet (playing Iris in her post-collegiate days, which I assumed were before the war based on the automobiles) is expanded to nudity in the first minute and repeated throughout the movie. To the extent that a passion for writing might be difficult to depict, and to the extent that Iris was not parsimonious with her favor, this might all be very well. Certainly her story at the end of her life is unrelentingly depressing (save for the loyalty of her husband as he struggles to accommodate her diminished capacities—depicted in the Britain of the 90’s with her watching Teletubbies after finding Tony Blair incomprehensible).

91 minutes.