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Film Clips
ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER. Spain's most famous filmmaker, writer/director Pedro Almodovar, returns to the screen with his least surreal and most humane attempt to capture the complex absurdities of the female universe. Actress Cecilia Roth is a bereaved mother who returns to Barcelona to discover the identity of her son's father, only to initiate an unforeseen and uniquely interrelated series of events. Rich character development, masterful dialog (even with English subtitles) and an intelligently skewed visual and narrative perspective make this one of the year's most interestingly un-American films--a trait recognized in last week's Academy Awards, where it took honors for Best Foreign Language Flick. While today's Oscar is often damnable praise, save your scorn for the cult of American Beauty: What glitters in Almodovar is indeed gold. -- Wadsworth
BOYS DON'T CRY. Eerie, beautifully shot, strongly acted and successfully emotional, Boys tells the true story of Teena Brandon, a Nebraskan girl who lived as a boy named Brandon Teena. In the desolate wastelands of the plains, her unorthodox lifestyle brought her into conflict with some extremely backwards characters, including a neanderthal sheriff and two hoodlums who befriended and then brutally betrayed her. A difficult film from an emotional perspective, Boys will probably steal an Oscar or two for the dead-on performances of Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena and Chloe Sevigny as her girlfriend Lana Tisdale. -- DiGiovanna
THE CUP. This joint Bhutanese/Australian premiere is a cinematic gem. A comedy set in a Tibetan monastery-in-exile in India, 1998, its focal point is young student Orygen (played with charismatic swagger by Jamyang Lodro), a lightning rod for the monks' clandestine obsession with professional soccer. Writer/director Kyentese Norbu (acknowledged in Buddhist circles as the reincarnation of 19th-century Tibetan saint Jamyang Khentse Wangpo) offers a colorful insider's perspective on the sacred and profane aspects of monastic life, including a humorously Zen view of national politics and World Cup soccer. Within the anecdotal attempts of Orygen and co-conspirators to catch the World Cup finals on television, The Cup captures with disarming and simple detail the bittersweet existence of refugees safe from physical harm but nonetheless struggling in a cultural and historic limbo. Based on true events and filmed on location in a Buddhist monastery, it's a sweet, philosophical tale that's as funny as it is profound. -- Wadsworth
DROWNING MONA. A mediocre comedy that draws from some strong performances and suffers from some weak scripting. Casey Affleck is superb as the Opie-esque owner of a landscaping business. His shifty-eyed and guilt-ridden "aw-shucks" innocence pretty much propels the film through its dryer parts. Also good are Bette Midler as the titular Mona, a woman so awful that when she dies the small town where she lived throws a party; and Danny DeVito as the sheriff who wants to solve the crime anyway. There are a few good laughs, and the film's tasteless humor is more tasteful than the gross-out stuff that's so popular these days, but it's not a must-see. -- DiGiovanna
ERIN BROCKOVICH. Steven Soderbergh directs this based-on-a-true-story about a personal injury lawyer and fallen beauty queen, the unlikely legal team to stumble across the most lucrative toxic tort case in U.S. history. Julia Roberts and Albert Finney star as Brockovich and attorney Ed Masry, who represent the small, desert town of Hinkley, California, against monolithic utility Pacific Gas and Electric. Exactly 10 years after her Pretty Woman debut, Roberts returns to the screen with the same makeup and wardrobe, augmented by three small children, a Hell's Angel boyfriend with a heart of gold, and a finely honed sense of outrage for all powers-that-be. "She brought a small town to its feet, and a huge corporation to its knees," the poster reads. This romantic fight for truth and justice may be a box-office hit nationally, but it's sure to flop down the Cali coast in Avila Beach, where a post-Hinkley Brockovich and Masry blew in like ambulance chasers in 1996 after the disastrous Unocal oil spill, conflating fears and charming hundreds of clients with Brockovich's trademark cleavage. Their trumped-up charges were trounced in court, leaving Masry to a hasty retreat with 50-percent of his clients' property damage settlements. Oops. Motto for the sequel: "Hero today, pawn tomorrow"? -- Wadsworth
FINAL DESTINATION. The premise of this thriller is that high-school French student Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) wakes up one day clairvoyant and cursed with a reverse death wish that starts killing off his friends one by one. After sparing his classmates from a Paris-bound plane that explodes minutes after take off, his efforts to thwart fate land him in a high-octane web of paranoid psychosis, spurred on by grim-faced FBI agents. Which just goes to show you, kids: take Spanish. -- Wadsworth
HERE ON EARTH. The birch trees of Minnesota stand in for the Berkshires in this first-love drama starring American Pie's Chris Klein, alliterative teen beaut Leelee Sobieski (Never Been Kissed, Eyes Wide Shut), and Josh Hartnett (star of Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, which opened with critical acclaim at Cannes and Sundance). After a fateful drag race leaves a local diner in ruins, rival bad boys Klein and Hartnett are sentenced to a summer of community service and competitive courting in small-town America. We haven't seen how it ends, so follow your instincts: if you bet by names, the producers are "Friendly" and "Downer." -- Wadsworth
MISSION TO MARS. When a reconnaissance mission goes mysteriously awry in the year 2020, Gary Sinise and Tim Robbins lead the rescue mission to find out what happened at base camp Cydonia. During the two-year journey, audiences are treated to plenty of scenes in zero-gravity and on the wind-swept plains of Mars -- which, it turns out, look a lot like the Arizona/Utah border region (minus the crazy, worm-like Martian cyclones). Though directed by action movie big-shot Brian DePalma, with initially creepy suspense and an all-adult cast (Sinise sheds his persona as earthly übervillian to become clean-shaven hero Jim McConnell), this is essentially a Disney movie aimed at a younger audience. The deeper into space it goes, the campier it becomes, culminating with a kaleidoscopic, holographic history of Mars that will have creationists in an uproar (not really). But it does reveal Hollywood's thinly veiled campaign to brainwash us with super-enhanced sci-fi movies depicting the secret origin of life. (Okay, not really that, either.) Also starring Don Cheadle and Connie Nielsen, as astronauts Luc and Teri. -- Wadsworth
NINTH GATE. Director Roman Polanski answers the musical question "How many roads must a man walk down" in this occult thriller starring Johnny Depp and some old books. Depp plays a master text analyzer and spends much of the movie closely comparing the three surviving copies of a 17th-century Satanic tome. Only Polanski could make library work seem exciting, dangerous and sexy. The vampiric Frank Langella plays Depp's employer, a man who wears a fabulous suit and would summon Satan. Lena Olin plays a rival book collector who will do anyone in order to get her hands on the infernal volume. If you can get past some of the goofier aspects, Ninth Gate's tight plotting and odd characters promise a fun ride--to hell! -- DiGiovanna
REINDEER GAMES. Ben Affleck, Gary Sinise and Charlize Theron team up for a wild night of ex-con Indian gaming in this cheap-laugh, explosion-filled round of double-jeopardy. Is it a good movie? Hell no! Will you like it? If your standards for wise-cracking action flicks are looser than a Motor City beauty searching for true love in a back-page ad for penitentiary pen-pals, the odds are in your favor. Highlights include a prison food-fight, a cameo of Theron's perky breasts, the use of Ben Affleck as a dart board, and the bloody deaths of at least four Santas. Ho, ho, ho and ho. -- Wadsworth
TITUS. Shakespeare's worst play, Titus Andronicus, is here given the over-the-top, Ken Russell-style treatment it deserves. A wildly zany and sick romp through a motorcycle punk rock version of ancient Rome, with lots of mutilations and orgies and murders and cannibalism. Extremely trashy, pretty and oh-so-fun to watch, in exactly the way a Jacobean revenge drama ought to be. Whoever designed the sets and costumes should be given a leather-studded Academy Award. -- DiGiovanna
WHATEVER IT TAKES. The suggestive tagline of this teen romantic comedy is, "How low will they go to get the girls of their dreams?" True to its high-school subjects, the answer is "all the wrong places." With just four weeks until "graduation," social outsider Ryan (Shane West) and dumb jock Chris (James Franco) enter into a double-Cyrano scheme of romantic deception to woo the objects, and we do mean objects, of their desire (played by Jodi Lyn O'Keefe and Marla Sokoloff). Disaster ensues, and life lessons are learned. Well, some. Others, ostensibly, await the "higher" education of college life. -- Wadsworth
THE WHOLE NINE YARDS. Bruce Willis makes mega-hits. Matthew Perry makes minor flops. They team up in this mid-range comedy about a hit man who moves to the suburbs. But really, what's funnier than a hit man? I mean, hit men kill people! -- DiGiovanna
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