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May 8-14, 2003 movie shorts NewCITY OF GHOSTS Matt Dillon’s directorial debut is a strangely, yet predictably, moralistic romance, wherein the beautiful but tormented young white man finds proper purpose in exotic Cambodia. An insurance scammer who develops a guilty conscience after seeing his post-hurricane victims on TV, Dillon goes looking for his partner (James Caan) in Phnom Penh. Here he meets an assortment of types, all designed to hurry along his education: sweaty hotelier Gérard Depardieu, treacherous schemer Stellan Skarsgård, resilient cyclo Sereyvuth Kem and lovely art restorer Natascha McElhone, as well as several Russian mafiosos and a corrupt Cambodian general. Beautifully shot by Jim Denault (also cinematographer on the wonderfully textured Our Song), the movie conjures surreal mystery and danger, phenomenal backgrounds and interiors (the architecture alone is worth seeing) and some strikingly shadowed faces (especially Dillon’s and McElhone’s). But it gets stuck between its heart-of-darknessy intrigue and its touristy fascination with a kind of environmental "otherness." Aside from Kem, whose loyalty to Dillon is unfathomable, the locals have hardly a thing to say about all these foreigners come to "appreciate" and/or exploit them. --Cindy Fuchs (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16) DADDY DAY CARE Steve Zahn is fearless. No matter the role, he comes with fierce, seemingly earnest, mostly hilarious determination. In Steve Carr’s second Eddie Murphy movie (his first being 2001’s Dr. Dolittle 2), Zahn is a lonely Trekkie who agrees to help unemployed dads Murphy and Jeff Garlin run a daycare center. The comedy is premised on Murphy reacting to kids doing the darndest things (a joke that gets dismal quickly), while he finds his way toward excellent childcare. His enterprise is goaded by competition with the only other option in town, run by odiously named evil-school-marm Miss Harridan (Angelica Huston). All the kids are adorable beyond words, which makes them the film’s saving grace but also its fallback -- nothing much else gets attention (like, say, script, characterization, continuity). Murphy’s own 4-year-old, played by Khamani Griffin, has a bit of a trajectory (he learns to make friends while daddy massages his own ego), but as the working mom/wife, Regina King struggles mightily against a simply terrible role. Thank goodness Zahn is there to save the day, in particular when he speaks Klingon with one seemingly incomprehensible child. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)
A companion piece to Down From the Mountain, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ documentary catches up with the legends of ’60s soul. Though it devotes too much screen time to the obsequious Roger Friedman, moonlighting from his day gig at Fox News to serve as a kind of toadying tour guide, Strong tracks down Wilson Pickett, Sam Moore of Sam & Dave, The Supremes’ Mary Wilson, Ann Peebles, Jerry Butler, Rufus and Carla Thomas and The Chi-Lites, and finds them still sweating it out onstage, no matter who’s watching. Their legends are secure, of course, but their daily reality has not always been so rosy; riding through midtown Manhattan, Moore points out a hotel where he stayed when he was dealing (and using) hard drugs, and bitterness creeps through Wilson’s even-handed account of singing backup while Diana Ross got all the glory. (She’s taken to the lead role with a vengeance, though; listen as she warns her own backing singer to "get off my note.") Not all Strong’s performances are full-strength -- the nattily attired Chi-Lites skip over the high notes they once hit with aplomb; Pickett’s once-electrifying growl has hardened to near-caricature -- but when Sam Moore brings down the house with a version of "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby" so impassioned even he seems surprised, you feel the spirit as well. -- Sam Adams (UA Riverview) 
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ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE