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Film Clips
CHICKEN RUN. Peter Lord and Nick Park, the British animation team behind the Wallace and Gromit adventures, turn their attention to the lowly chicken in this tale of one hen's fight to lead her flock out of slavery and on to uncertain freedom. It's a wonderful feat of clay for adult audiences, for whom the wordplay and subtext about commercial greed and social justice (set in 1950s York) are as much fun to watch as the engineering and antics of the anthropomorphized animals themselves. Be advised, however, that at least one chicken was harmed about 20 minutes into the making of this movie, a fact that did not win over the under-8 crowd at a recent test screening. Like their plucky onscreen heroine Ginger, these fair-minded viewers did not soon recover from the cruel fate visited on the eggless Edwina. The wails of protest suggest a new generation of vegans may have been born. Not even the voice of Mel Gibson, as fugitive Yank yardbird Rocky, could persuade them that justice would ultimately be served, as it is, sans white meat. --Wadsworth
COTTON MARY. Against all expectation, the most experimental movie on the Loft marquee is this Merchant-Ivory production. In any other movie, illicit sex, despicable characters, swearing and shoddy production values might be taken in stride. But can this be the same Ismail Merchant, executive producer? (His lily-white creative partner appears in the credits in franchise name only.) The 64-year-old filmmaker lights out from the expensive and tepid waters of the trademark English epic to return to his cultural and cinematic roots in India. Set on the Malabar Coast in 1954, this complicated narrative about racism and class begins with a Catholic Anglo-Indian nurse, Cotton Mary, who befriends a frightened Englishwoman who can't breastfeed her newborn daughter. Cotton Mary offers the same elaborate sets and panoramic views audiences have come to expect, but there's nothing genteel or restrained about this snapshot of Indian society in its first decade of independence from Britain. This rather dark tale of desire and vengeance (adapted from the eponymous play by Alexandra Viets) is doled out slowly and effectively over the course of 124 minutes. While not exactly enjoyable, it's a wholly unexpected and challenging experience. Starring English stage actress Madhur Jaffrey, her daughter Sakina Jaffrey (as niece Rosie), Greta Scacchi as the wealthy former colonial, Lily, and co-starring an errant boom microphone that must've had a really good agent. --Wadsworth
GONE IN SIXTY SECONDS. The title is apparently a description of how long this movie will last in the theaters. Schlockmeister Jerry Bruckheimer has somehow failed to live up to even his low standards with this depressingly boring film about balding criminals and the women who love them (i.e. their mothers). Nicolas Cage goes through the motions as Memphis Raines, king of the car thieves, who must rescue his brother (Giovanni Ribisi, who desperately needs better material than he's been getting) from an evil exporter of contraband autos. Angelina Jolie and Robert Duval fail to liven things up as Raines's partners. For high-speed adventure with an existential edge, you're better off renting the classic Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, or maybe just going out and stealing a car yourself. --DiGiovanna
JESUS' SON. An indie film starring Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton, with a supporting cast including Denis Leary, Jack Black, Will Patton, Dennis Hopper and Holly Hunter? Like you even have to ask me twice to slap down my $7.50. Though I'm not a big fan of the hand-held camera, this disjointed tale about a 1970s drifter narrating the seminal events of his young, drug-addled life is worth pretty much every jarring moment. Based on the 1993 novel by Denis Johnson, this desperate and often humorous junkie love story can hardly be said to glamorize drug use. And yet, it is a cinematic testament to the surreal experiences of the chemically challenged, rendered faithfully in all their absurdity and degradation. From the Iowa farm to rehab in "Phoenix" (no, those conspicuous Santa Catalina Mountains are not a hallucination), Crudup remains the epitome of the fragile, fractured soul finding its way through a bewildering world. Not entirely profound, but an eminently enjoyable cast of characters. --Wadsworth
LUMINARIAS. If there's one thing I learned from growing up in Los Angeles, it's that the closest biological thing to a neutron bomb is an empowered East L.A. Chicana. I don't know why or how, but few people (and none of them Anglo) possess and turn into cultural identity that level of passion and presence. Luminarias attempts to harness that formidable energy into a very mainstream plot about five Chicana-Latina women and their relationships with men and with each other. While it's wonderful to see this vibrant minority culture acknowledged in the marketplace (the empty but official Seal of Existence in American society), these five stories of love and family attempt to claim and tame every cultural cliché, stereotype and archetype under the sun. Andrea is a divorce lawyer with an unfaithful husband. Her main client is a bright but undereducated young mother, fleeing her abusive boyfriend. Lili is a naïve spritualist, part Mexican and part Native American, who falls in love with a Korean 7-11 owner. Sophia is light-haired, perky nosed yuppie therapist who emphasizes her Anglo accent when speaking Spanish. Irene is a bigoted fashion designer who's given up sex for Lent and Anglos for life, and thinks her gay brother is just "confused." Their arguments and insights are saturated with color, humor, and sentiment, but one is left with the feeling a more powerful story is chaffing under the straightjacket of this Hollywood formula. --Wadsworth
ME, MYSELF AND IRENE. I fear that the end of the line has come for gross-out comedies, as Me, Myself and Irene exhausts every combination of bodily fluids in an effort to eke out one more disgusted laugh. The Farrelly brothers, who brought us the sine qua non of gross-out films, There's Something About Mary, reach the bottom in trying to top themselves in this intentionally revolting tale of a Rhode Island State Trooper (Jim Carrey) who must escort a beautiful young woman (Renee Zelwegger) past a gauntlet of evil police officers and corrupt golf course owners. If you feel that you must see what kind of comedy can be eked out of breast milk, sputum and the rectal insertion of chicken heads, then this is the film for you. If, like most of those who dwell above ground, you've had about enough of that, then I'd suggest staying home and renting some Three Stooges comedies--they're just as stupid, but you won't be forced to watch anyone defecate. --DiGiovanna
THE PATRIOT Roland Emmerich, the genius who gave us 1998's unwatchable Godzilla, here uses all his smarts to turn the Revolutionary War into a revenge fantasy. Mel Gibson plays the highly believable non-racist Southern plantation owner whose Black farm hands are all "freed men." Somehow Emmerich makes it seem like the British are being evil when they come to liberate slaves from their benevolent masters, and that such actions warrant the brutal extermination of all the English troops in the colonies. Imagine something with the intellectual depth of a Schwarzenegger action film, only with everyone wearing ponytails or powdered wigs, and with the machine guns replaced by muskets, and you'll get a sense of how bizarre The Patriot is. As an added bonus it's nice to note that it's based on a true story, only in real life the man portrayed by Mel Gibson was renowned for raping his slaves and hunting Native Americans for sport. --DiGiovanna
THE PERFECT STORM. It's like all the digital forces colliding in this dizzying disaster movie sucked more or less all of the chemistry out of the human element, but in a way that's a relief. Synapses can only fire so many times in the span of 129 minutes, and the white-knuckled, jaw-clenching anxiety of this unbeatable battle with hurricane Grace in the North Atlantic makes life seem far more precious than that tired, salty love story between Mark Wahlberg and Diane Lane, anyway. George Clooney pilots this adaptation of the true tale of six Gloucester fisherman who set out in the fall of 1991 and find themselves caught in the storm of the century. For those with recurring nightmares about the sea, The Perfect Storm has a little of Jaws and The Poseidon Adventure brought by Industrial Light and Magic into the 21st century. Not much to recommend the screenwriting, but plenty of tension and technical mastery. Also starring Mary Elizabeth Mastratonio and John C. Reilly (Magnolia's gun-losing boy in blue). --Wadsworth
RETURN TO ME. I loved the short-lived sitcom The Bonnie Hunt Show, which years ago was written by and starred the flaxen-haired Second City comedienne as an intrepid TV interviewer. It was charming, witty, good-natured and believable, and I was apparently the only person in the country besides producer David Letterman who watched it. Return to Me, co-written and directed by Hunt and set in her old stomping grounds of Chi-town, brings that gift of good character to the screen with a star-studded cast: David Duchovny, Minnie Driver, David Alan Grier, James Belushi, Hunt herself and Carroll O'Connor (who, far from his Archie Bunker persona, plays a grandfather who sounds like an Irish Winnie-the-Pooh). Unlike your typical romantic comedy about obsession and low self-esteem, this love story is saturated with sweet relationships. It's as if the writers were assigned a list of all things universally heartwarming--big dogs, little kids, Italian restaurants, wisecracking old men, great apes that speak sign-language, a life-saving heart-transplant, etc. etc.--and told to spin a story out of them. In lesser hands, it would be a ghastly mess, but the writing sparkles and the chemistry hums like a Sinatra tune in spring. You'd need a heart full of vipers and mustard gas to resist its feel-good vibe. --Wadsworth
SCARY MOVIE Gross-out humor meets Airplane!-style parody in this body-fluid drenched spoof of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream. If you didn't see those films, stay away from this one. If you're likely to be offended by jokes so gross and obscene that I can't even describe them here, stay away. If you think Masterpiece Theater has gotten a little too low-brow of late, stay away. If you have none of the above problems, and want to see something that's incredibly trashy, often stupid, but also pretty f***ing funny, check this one out. It's got Wayanses! --DiGiovanna
SHAFT. A well-paced, well-plotted, well-scripted and generally entertaining action film that does a deep injustice to the Shaft legacy by converting the 70's blaxploitation hero from a smooth lover to cruel killer. Samuel Jackson is the title character, a vicious New York City police officer who cares far more about hurting and killing the people he unjustly arrests than he does about humanity, kindness or a hot piece of tail. Watching this Shaft take out his aggression on dozens of Puerto Rican petty criminals, I just wanted to hug the hate out of him --DiGiovanna
SUNSHINE. KXCI used to play this novelty folk song called something like, "I Am My Own Grandpa," the lyrics of which were a rhyming recitation of the singer's convoluted family tree. Having that pedestrian song running through your head while viewing this ambitious, amber-hued epic is sort of like laughing through somebody's funeral, but hey. One hundred years in the life of the Sonnenschein family clocks in at three hours, leaving exactly two hours and fifty minutes for the crime to become its own punishment. Adding injury to insult is the utterly two-dimensional Ralph Fiennes in a triple leading role, as fictional narrator Ivan, his father Adam, and grandfather Ignatz. While this will make some women swoon and some men indifferent, it makes me think that even had I suffered a traumatic and permanent head injury, I couldn't smile upon the endemically repressed, fish-eyed Fiennes as romantic hero. Nonetheless, playwright Israel Horvitz's multi-generational tale has the allegorical feel of Tolstoy or Kundera, covering the same socio-political territory of love and war with literary insight and director Istvan Szábo's lingering cinematography. The fate of "A Taste of Sunshine," a secret elixir passed down from father to son, is the metaphorical prism through which we view the extraordinary lives and events--namely, 50 years of fascist, socialist and communist revolutions in Eastern Europe--shaped and suffered by one Austro-Hungarian Jewish family. Sunshine is like three one-hour movies that add up to a masterful allegory about the human condition, as disease. Though a bit of an endurance test, it's a moving and powerful saga. --Wadsworth
UP AT THE VILLA. No surprise to find Kristin Scott Thomas' furtive smile and limpid blue-green eyes as the centerpiece of this 1930s-era "all's fair in love and war" story. Thomas plays Mary, a widowed Englishwoman who must decide between the safety of marriage and the recklessness of love (represented here by Sean Penn, in the role of American cad Rowley Flint). Based on the tale by W. Somerset Maugham, this rule-breaking novel makes for a somewhat tepid screen adaptation, the condensed intrigues and plot twists of which are more maddening than romantic to the modern mindset. Still, few things are lovelier on film than Italian churches, country villas and gardens, or more nostalgic than steam trains, evening gowns and the fragile virtue of the second sex (yawn). Maugham's subversive humor--if you look for it--stands firm as the Nazis draw near, making this historic fiction as picturesque and mildly amusing as the aristocratic society it mocks. In the end, however, it's neither murder, moonlight nor love-making that lingers in memory, but the droll lines of the American dowager Princess San Ferdinando (Anne Bancroft), and row upon row of unforgettable tomatoes. (A far better effort, on video, is Maugham's The Razor's Edge, starring Bill Murray "in his first serious role.") --Wadsworth
X-MEN. Purists will undoubtedly find finer points to quibble with, but this comic-book-to-live-action film was the first of its kind to meet all my eye-candy expectations while seeming to remain true to the good, uncomplicated concept of good versus evil. It also serves as a primer for the X-Men uninitiated, introducing this modern monster fable through a series of vignettes that converge mid-film to reveal the impending war for and against mankind, as waged by rival scientists and their respective armies of genetic mutants. Creator Stan Lee (who makes a cameo appearance as a hot-dog vendor) roots his X-men adventures in the time-honored tradition of free will, creating a dichotomy between superhero and supervillain that adheres faithfully to the concept that the world is what we make of it, for better or worse. Directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects), it stars Patrick Stewart as benevolent genius Professor X; Ian McKellan as nemesis Magnito; and, among others, Anna Paquin, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Stamos and Ray Park (respectively as emphatic Rogue, steel-clawed Wolverine, weather-controlling Storm, laser-eyed Cyclops, telekenetic Dr. Jean Grey, the shape-shifting Mystique and prehensile-tongued Toad). Its franchise might well emerge--in morality tale and special effects spectacle--as the Star Wars trilogy of the double-ought decade. --Wadsworth
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