27 March 2004

Osama

Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban has diminished the choices of one girl’s family to none. With her father dead, her mother and grandmother are unable to leave the house out of fear of the roving patrols, and they will all three starve. The last desperate move is to disguise the girl (Marina Golbahari) as a boy so that she can work in a local shop, where a man who fought alongside her father sells hot milk. This might almost work out, even with her high-pitched voice and suspiciously smooth face, but all the local boys are rounded up for training in religion and personal hygiene, and her inability to climb down from a tree arouses suspicion. The blood running down her legs doesn’t help. In these bleakest of circumstances, there is no happy ending. An antidote to glitz.

About 90 minutes.

interMission

Set in an unspecified urban part of Ireland, with multiple plot threads interlinking, and featuring the usual: thuggery, adultery, drinking, sex, cursing, crime, and really appalling labor-management relations. With Colin Farrell as a crook who can’t stop punching women in the nose, Colm Meaney as the detective looking to bring him down, a number of pretty actresses who turn out, suspiciously, to have been born in Scotland, and assorted men of varying ages and mostly downgraded economic circumstances. Rolls along smoothly enough, although intercutting two car chases pushes it.

About 106 minutes.

26 March 2004

Good Bye Lenin!

A son takes his responsibility to his mother seriously, and when the doctor tells him after she awakens from an 8-month long coma that any excitement could trigger a second heart attack, he sets out to hide from her that their small East Berlin apartment has been overtaken by events in the meantime. The son Alex (Daniel Bruhl) has a girlfriend (the nurse Lara from the Soviet Union he met in the hospital and fell in love with watching her smoke), his sister Ariane (Maria Simon) has a live-in boyfriend and another child on the way, and, oh yes, East Germany doesn’t exist anymore. As time goes on and the deception becomes harder, Alex resorts to creating fake news reports in the old style. Somewhat comedic, especially as Alex goes dumpster diving to retrieve jars with the labels of brands abandoned once groceries from the West appeared on store shelves, but also saddled with family secrets (the father defected a decade earlier).

About 120 minutes.

25 March 2004

Twisted

Well, if it isn’t another Ashley Judd movie where the hair of her character gives up and just gets worse as the movie drags on (it starts out in a man’s bad haircut). When the choices for using a free ticket are among Adam Sandler, Ashley Judd, and a hockey movie (Miracle), I’ll take Judd. But everyone in this limp police procedural (Judd herself, Samuel L. Jackson, Andy Garcia, David Strathairn, Camryn Manheim) looks and sounds 10 years past their peak. Judd plays Jessica, the quick-to-temper officer who has just made it to detective when a serial killer hits San Francisco and, oops, the victims are all recent sexual liaisons of hers. Do you suppose her drinking problem has anything to do with it? It never occurs to anyone to ask the old lady in the apartment across the courtyard what happens when Jessica lifts bottle to lips.

About 96 minutes.

23 March 2004

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Where to begin? Joel (Jim Carrey) wakes up one morning, discovers a big dent in his car door which he doesn’t remember, and once at the Long Island commuter railroad station decides against riding into town and heads out to Montauk. On the beach and at a diner there on the eastern-most point on the island, a blue-haired woman attracts his wary, corner-of-the-eye attention, and Clementine (Kate Winslet) turns positively predatory once they’re on the train back westbound. The two are all set to move in together, she’s just getting her toothbrush out of her apartment, when someone knocks on his car’s window and asks if he needs help. It’s not giving away too much to say that Clementine and Joel already know each other, but she’s partaken of the services offered by Lacuna, a memory erasure firm operating out of small offices on the second floor of a less than first rate commercial property. Technically, the operation is brain damage, the doctor (Tom Wilkinson) explains to Joel when he learns of this and visits the offices. The plot grows from there as almost everyone has their own agenda. The memory erasure technician (Mark Ruffalo) desires the office receptionist (Kirsten Dunst) but she has her own secret, and the assistant (Elijah Wood) is breaching the confidentiality of doctor-patient relationships to try to get laid. With no major misstep spoiling the effect (like Charlie Sheen showing up at the end of Being John Malkovich or the cliche-ridden turn Adaptation took) an engaging look at love.

About 107 minutes.

07 March 2004

Starsky & Hutch

Set in the seventies but not wallowing in the decade, appropriating the iconic vehicle and the apparel from the television series that inspired it but presumably little else in trading on the well-established personas of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, and the glorification of consequence-free drug use and the tasteless disturbance at a bat mitzvah aside, a tepid comedy that wastes the talent of Amy Smart (pairing her with Carmen Electra as two cheerleaders with leads in the investigation of a washed-up body on the Bay City shoreline).

About 100 minutes.