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April 18-24, 2002 movie shorts new
AMERICAN CHAI Written and directed by Cherry Hill’s Anurag Mehta (and starring brother Aalok), American Chai is appealingly commercial if not overly imaginative, notable mainly for its subject matter. The winner for Best Feature at last year’s Festival of Independents, it’s a genial (perhaps slightly too so) tale of an Indian-American college student attempting to hide his devotion to music from his traditionalist parents, who still think he’s pre-med. Of course, in the intervening year, movies like ABCD and even Monsoon Wedding have offered a more nuanced take on the churning and re-churning of Indian identity, but American Chai isn’t soulless, just a bit predictable. (Put it this way: The movie builds up to a big contest.) But Mehta at least knows how to deploy the formula successfully and with heart. --Sam Adams
A blood feud between two families animates this allegory by Walter Salles (Central Station). Cinematographer Walter Carvalho gives the dusty landscape of Brazil a texture so real you’re tempted to wipe the motes from your eyes, but Salles doesn’t have the authority to make his story a full-fledged fable, and Behind the Sun lacks the nuance for the story to work on a purely human level. Tonho (Rodrigo Santoro) is the eldest son of a family who has just been dealt the latest blow in the ages-old battle between them and their neighbors, and it falls to him to extract a life in return. (Given that his family has exactly four members, and their opposition dozens, you wonder how much longer this can go on.) The heart starts to sink when Tonho falls for a saucy girl from a travelling circus (Flavia Marco Antonio); what follows seems less fated than foregone -- it’s happened in so many movies before, why should we get all worked up this time? --S.A. CRUSH There’s not much particularly wrong with Crush, but that’s not much of a recommendation, either. Andie MacDowell is obviously miscast -- the rhythms of her dialogue and a few scattered lines of exposition betray an unsuccessful attempt to make her character an American expatriate instead of a native Brit -- but she turns in an unfussy, natural performance as a fortyish schoolteacher who starts an affair with a former student in his mid-twenties, while her friends, similarly fortyish, similarly star-crossed, look on with bemusement that turns to alarm. Notwithstanding a few cutesy market-driven touches -- the characters, when peeved, tend to say things like “You are Queen Bastard of the Bastard people!” -- John McKay’s movie is earnest enough that you want to forgive the fact that it has no apparent reason for existing. At least until the unearned and manipulative plot u-turn which sinks all residual goodwill. -- S.A.
See Sam Adams’ review here LUCKY BREAK A ragtag gang of down-and-out, blue-collar Brits confront their collective hardship head-on by banding together to present an unlikely, quirky performance. Not a bad little movie formula, the first five or six times you see it. Peter Cattaneo directed The Full Monty to $250 million in global box office, so it’s hardly surprising -- albeit disappointing -- that his next venture five years later would mine such similar territory. This time around, the cheeky rascals are not unemployed steelworkers, but inmates detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure in a somewhat-less-than-maximum-security prison, from which they plan to escape at the curtain call of their stage debut: a musical (written by the warden) depicting the life and times of Admiral Horatio Nelson. This is the kind of movie where not only do the newly incarcerated bank robber Jimmy (James Nesbitt) and the warden share a passion for Rodgers and Hammerstein, but the warden looks and sounds uncannily like Captain Von Trapp himself, Christopher Plummer. This is also the kind of movie where the pretty prison psychologist (Olivia Williams) can traipse unaccompanied through the cellblock, fraternize unconcernedly with the inmates, and maybe even fall in love with one. Talk about escapism. Stephen Fry’s witty lyrics for the musical are the best thing about the film, which by all rights should be called The Full Nelson. --Ryan Godfrey
Toula (Nia Vardalos) is Greek, 30 and unmarried. It’s the last part that is killing her hyper-Hellenic family, who thinks she should quit dabbling at college courses (“She’s got enough education for a woman” says her father) and just settle down and start a family. So when Toula falls in love with Ian, the man of her dreams (Sex in the City’s John Corbett), everything’s just wonderful -- except he isn’t Greek. What follows is essentially Meet the Greek Parents: The large, gregarious family is suspicious of Ian the Protestant and -- gasp -- vegetarian, who tries his best but obviously doesn’t fit in, and Toula becomes increasingly embarrassed by her ethnicity’s eccentricities. Will the couple gain the family’s approval and end up having the wedding? If so, will it be big, fat and Greek? Well, I don’t want to give anything away. Second City alum Vardalos wrote the screenplay, based on her semi-autobiographical one-woman show, so her knowing, frazzled performance and many of the details of her character’s over-attentive family life ring true. Michael Constantine and Lainie Kazan shine as Nia’s restaurant-owning parents; Dad Gus’s fixation on Windex as a panacea is particularly amusing. If director Joel Zwick’s staging is a smidge too hammy and sitcommy to work completely, keep in mind that this 25-year TV vet learned ethnic comedy working with the likes of Chachi, Balki and Mork.--R.G.
There’s a tracking shot near the beginning of Murder by Numbers that is literally skin-crawling: The camera glides slowly across the alien landscape of the hugely magnified epidermis of a strangled woman’s body, replete with foreign fibers and microscopic detritus that the police will depend on to lead them to the woman’s killer. Or killers, in this case; Michael Pitt and Ryan Gosling play bored, disaffected suburban rich kids who set out to prove their Nietszchean superiority by getting away with murder. The little Raskolnikovs have read all the forensic investigation handbooks (and probably seen more than a few episodes of CSI), and thus know just what phony evidence to plant on the victim to incriminate the wrong guy. Sandra Bullock is the hard-bitten police investigator with a closet full of skeletons who, with help from perennial lapdog Ben Chaplin, may well be the intellectual match of the existential executioners. The first two acts of director Barbet Schroeder’s thriller comprise a largely enthralling cat-and-mouse mind game, thanks mostly to fine, subtle performances by Gosling and Pitt as the BMOC and the introvert philosopher, respectively, and sturdy work by Bullock as the vulnerable maneater. The setup is all for naught, though, when the psychological claptrap of act three takes over and the stupid and utterly conventional (okay, by the numbers) woman-in-peril finale kicks in. -- R.G. THE SCORPION KING Pro wrestling phenom Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has got your Middle East conflict right here. He’s the titular brick shithouse in this prequel to a sequel to a remake of The Mummy; you can’t say Universal isn’t squeezing every last drop out of its franchises. If this one does well, expect a few Roman numeral knockoffs, a roller coaster or three, a cartoon, a Harem Girls on Ice show, and maybe even a sitcom: Love, Assyrian Style. As the last Akkadian assassin Mathayus, The Rock finds himself in the hard place of having to kill warlord Memnon’s gorgeous sorceress, who has the clairvoyant ability to take names before kicking ass. But you know right off the bat Memnon is the real baddie; he’s the one with the British accent. Executive produced by wrestling svengali Vince McMahon, the film consists of a series of excuses to fight, followed by violent (but bloodless, like wrestling) mayhem. If there’s a lesson to be learned from all the nonstop PG-13 carnage, it isn’t a history lesson: catapults and gunpowder, 30 centuries B.C.? Not so much. But that’s not The Rock’s fault. He’s at least as charismatic and likeable here as Arnold was in essentially the same movie, Conan the Barbarian. If anybody ever makes a prequel to a sequel to a remake of, say, Predator or Kindergarten Cop, here’s your star. Power to the People’s Champion. --R.G.
See Sam Adams’ review here. (Ritz East)
“Friends” seems like a generous term for the squabbling, materialistic and mean-spirited residents of Russian immigrant Yana’s Tel Aviv neighborhood. But it’s early 1991, and in a time of war perhaps it’s necessary to extend the meaning of “friends” to include anyone not personally dropping Scuds on your city. It’s your loss, Saddam, because Yana (Evelyn Kaplun) is a babe. Yana is also married, a few months pregnant and abandoned in a strange city by her scumbag husband, who was kind enough to leave her with a massive bank debt that keeps her from leaving Israel. There are a lot of bleak directions this premise could go in, but co-writer/director Arik Kaplun -- Evelyn’s husband -- manages to tiptoe a star-crossed romantic comedy through this minefield of pathos. Yana’s chief benefactor and de facto confidant is her wedding-videographer roommate, Eli (Nir Levy), a compulsive filmer of the public and private lives of his many women friends, especially Yana. Eli’s camera lens -- the symbiotic locus of observer and observed -- brings both a crisp detachment and an intimacy to the pas de deux of Yana and Eli’s growing mutual regard. Appropriately and amusingly, their relationship becomes physical only when they are wearing depersonalizing gas masks, while the air raid sirens blare. That the story ends well for everyone is testament to the restorative powers of love, even in the time of mustard gas. --R.G. | ||||||||||||||||||
THE LAST WALTZ