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The first single off the Brown Sugar soundtrack is Erykah Badu’s “Love of My Life (Ode to Hip-hop),” and the first scenes of Rick Famuyiwa’s film offer an ode of their own. A series of hip-hop artists -- including Common, Kool G Rap, Pete Rock, Talib Kweli, Big Daddy Kane, ?uestlove, and Russell Simmons -- describe their passion for their art and culture. With hip-hop as its primary metaphor, history and setting, this romantic comedy gets over on its standard plot: Sanaa Lathan, newly hired NY editor for XXL must discover and declare her love for her childhood friend, Taye Diggs, now a producer at a commercial label, even as they both become entangled in other relationships. That is, he marries upper-crusty Nicole Ari Parker, and she thinks about marrying basketball star Boris Kodjoe. Supporting plots include Diggs’ signing of cab driver/ MC Mos Def, and Lathan’s friendship with Queen Latifah (who warns her that she’s “turning into a Terry McMillan character, which she was, in HBO’s Disappearing Acts). Lathan also provides ongoing narration of her efforts to reconcile her love for the ideals of hip-hop and its commercial imperatives, often crass: the example here is a duo called the Hip-Hop Dalmatians (Erik Weiner and Reggi Wyns), complete with spotted fur jackets, who cover McCartney and MJ’s “The Girl is Mine” as “The Ho is Mine.” Jokes aside, the film is earnest about its dedications -- to hip-hop and, happily, to strong women overcoming familiar plot set-ups. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

“We wanted someone for everyone,” says co-writer Greg Hinton of his ambitions for Circuit. That’s part of the appeal and part of the problem with this well-acted, well-made attempt to capture the complicated allure of the gay male subculture known as “the circuit,” a national round of huge dance parties, many of them fundraisers for AIDS research, that have been criticized for fostering drug use and indiscriminate sex. Writer/ director Dirk Shafer (Man of the Year) focuses on John, a gay ex-cop (Jonathan Wade Drahos) who moves to West Hollywood from the Midwest and finds himself swallowed up in the circuit maelstrom. Shafer’s good at capturing the absurd levels of narcissism that cause someone like John, who looks like a Chippendale in a cop uniform, to imagine that he has to get “bigger” to compete with the other circuit boys. And there are affecting performances by Andre Khabazzi as Hector, a hustler who’s locked in a love-hate relationship with his own reflection, and Kiersten Warren as John’s worried pal. But Shafer dilutes the film’s ultimate impact by trying to cover all the bases. A melodramatic subplot features William Katt as a sleazy, bleach-blonde party promoter married to Nancy Allen, who gets to give the film’s anti-exploitation lecture. And a film-within-a-film by John’s ditzy cousin Tad (Daniel Kucan) makes sure to include a few men who claim that circuit parties are just good clean fun -- apparently so that any viewer who shares their opinion doesn’t get offended by the rest of the movie.--David Warner (Ritz Bourse)

Rumor has it that Brian Koppelman and David Levien’s movie has been knocking around on a backshelf for a couple of years, arriving now in theaters to exploit Vin Diesel’s currently risen star. It goes to show that shelves exist for good reasons. Diesel is the only performer who comes out relatively unscathed, mostly because he plays an early, slightly rougher, slightly less cool version of the character he’s played in his three star-making films (Pitch Black, The Fast and the Furious, and that other one). Here, that character is gangster’s son Barry Pepper’s longtime friend and muscle-when-needed. Pepper inexplicably sends his other friend, a notorious screw-up (Seth Green as a mob kid?), to pick up $500,000; Green loses it, snaky smalltown Montana sheriff Tom Noonan grabs it and Pepper and pals need to retrieve it, lest his father (Dennis Hopper, in a non-role) be killed for it. John Malkovich plays Pepper’s Uncle Teddy, with an unplaceable accent and few snappy lines (to the loser sheriff: “I know you thought this was a manageable situation, but some situations are unmanageable”). Still, Diesel -- whose wardrobe consists of a chest-hugging wifebeater and a chest-hugging longjohns shirt -- has the pithiest line. When Pepper thanks him for his help, Diesel sighs, “It’s just more of the same for me, just more of the same.” Right he is. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Boy, I’d hate to be the Ritchies’ marriage counselor? Why would one of the foremost feminist icons of the last two decades marry a man who so obviously hates women? Madonna (who apparently now prefers to be called “Mrs. Ritchie”) starts in this hapless, witless and eventually offensive remake of Lina Wertmuller’s 1974 film, with husband Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels) showing the same predilection for humiliating his wife on screen as he did in the BMW short “Star.” Here, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone Ritchie plays a rich-bitch American (with, oddly, faint traces of an affected British accent) who is stranded on a deserted island with the ship’s hand (Adriano Giannini) whom she’s cruelly mistreated throughout the voyage. This, apparently, is grounds enough for him to sadistically mistreat her once they’re marooned, making her call him “master” in return for food, and eventually raping her to teach her a lesson -- which she, gladly, learns. That should be enough to indicate that this is the worst kind of “a woman’s a woman and a man’s a man” bullshit, except that Ritchie the beer-commercial hack can’t resist throwing in a lavish production number (purportedly inspired by hunger delusions) lip-synched to Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-a My House” (thank God she didn’t live to see it). It’ll be a matter of a week or two before this one joins The Next Big Thing and Body of Evidence in the dustbin of history. --S.A. (Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

Ex-Special Forces operative Jason Statham transports packages for wealthy, not exactly legal clients. He doesn’t want to know reasons or contents, just destinations and payments. He’s a brilliant fighter (director Cory Yuen is also an action choreographer), phenomenal driver (the film opens with a terrific chase scene), and painstaking planner, keeping his tricked-out BMW in perfect order and adhering to a strict set of rules to ensure he never gets caught off guard. When he discovers that one of his packages is a girl in a duffel bag (Shu Qi), his order comes undone, and he must save her, stop a plot to enslave a truckload of illegal Chinese émigrés, take down a smarmy villain called Wall Street (Matt Schulze) and perform any number of breathtaking martial arts, underwater and road-warrior-style stunts. Speedy, colorful and clever, this Luc Besson-produced film sets up Statham as yet another next-generational, hybrid action hero, fond of Bondish gizmos, haul-ass extreme like Diesel, supremely confident like The Rock, and phenomenally, precisely athletic like Jet Li. The fact that he’s survived his share of Guy Ritchie films doesn’t hurt either. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant;

Unpleasant even for a William Hurt movie, Disney’s adaptation of Natalie Babbitt’s young adult novel more or less rips the guts out of it. Alexis Bledel (Gilmore Girls) plays Winnie, the girl who stumbles on a family of rustic immortals who’ve happened on a mystic tree-stump spring which gives them eternal life. Her relationship with the Tucks is meant to teach children a thing or two about mortality -- Winnie’s final choice indicates that death can be as precious as life -- but the honeyed lighting and hack direction turn the story into a Sunday School special. Sissy Spacek, Victor Garber and Amy Irving are wasted in the process. --S.A. (UA Riverview)

Bad enough to ensure you never read the novel (by Janet Fitch) it’s based on, White Oleander seems like Warner Bros.’ bid for American Beauty gold, but it’s not even as good as that overheated chestnut. Based on ideas about womanhood that never quite translate themselves into, you know, drama, the story follows young Astrid (Alison Lohman) as she bounces from her murderous mother (a not-entirely-convincing Michelle Pfeiffer) to foster home to foster home, meeting born-again stripper Robin Wright Penn and fragile actress Renée Zellweger along the way. “They don’t destroy us; we destroy them” is the movie’s idea of profundity, though Astrid never shows any signs of following her mom down the boyfriend-poisoning route. Perhaps the idea is that womanhood can itself be toxic, whether to others or oneself. It’s hardly worth figuring out, since the movie’s sappy denouement removes what few teeth it’s shown along the way. Nice puppy-dog stuff between Lohman and Almost Famous’s Patrick Fugit, though. --S.A. (AMC Andorra; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

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October 10, 2002
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