Continuing Shorts

ALEX AND EMMA

Self-named "brilliant novelist" Luke Wilson owes money to the "Cuban Mafia" (one thug played by hip-hop artist Chino XL), and needs to get unblocked and finish his next book fast (he has 30 days, as the script loosely alludes to Dostoevsky’s The Gambler). Sans laptop, he hires stenographer Kate Hudson. As he dictates a tale of cross-class passion, Wilson and Hudson play roles in the 1924 fantasy: He’s a poor tutor working for the lovely Sophie Marceau, who’s betrothed to wealthy David Paymer; Hudson is the au pair (adopting variously terrible accents depending on Wilson’s dictation that day). The premise is awkward at best, but laid over top of a couldn’t-be-duller romantic comedy (boy and girl are destined for earnest coupledom), the movie is stagnant from the first frame. The film cannot get out of its own way: Potentially odd moments fall flat, Hudson sounds more and more like her mother, and Wilson looks pained throughout. Last straw: They spend their day off in a drearily predictable montage, under a Norah Jones tune. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Ritz 16)

L’AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE

Headed for an executive career at his father’s behest, Xavier (Romain Duris) leaves France and his adorable girlfriend (Audrey Tatou) for a year in Barcelona via the university exchange program Erasmus. Taking a flat with six multinational roommates (hence the title, referring generally to "Europudding"), Xavier comes of age, as they say, under the watchful eye of Cédric Klapisch’s high-definition video camera. The action is whimsical, with layered images and split screens (a pile-on of forms he needs to fill out for the excursion cutely crowds characters out of the frame), speedy time-lapsing (denoting traffic, crowds, bureaucracy) and splashy colors (helped by the cluttered apartment and thrilling Gaudí edifices). Xavier’s process is erratic: He moons over his girlfriend, berates his hippie mom and, after learning to "appreciate" a woman from his lesbian Belgian roommate (Cécile De France), embarks on a lazy affair with a doctor friend’s beautiful but dim wife (Judith Godrèche). The film points out associations between commercial and cultural globalizations, but celebrates rather than laments the loss of fixed identities. Sweet, airy and occasionally a little too clever. --Cindy Fuchs (Ritz Five)

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

Talented young footballer Jess (Parminder Nagra) loves David Beckham. But her parents, first generation immigrants to the London suburbs, want her to focus on a proper marriage to a nice Indian boy, much like her sister (Archie Panjabi). Gurinder Chadha’s charming, energetic movie charts Jess’ efforts to hide the fact that she’s signed on with a girls’ auxiliary team, befriended teammate Keira Knightley (a Mia Hamm fan), and developed a crush on their sensitive Irish coach (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Unlike most teen romances, this film takes the girls’ perspectives and complicated feelings seriously, detailing their daily negotiations of culture differences (race, nation, gender, class, and generation). And while it includes some standard contrivances, it uses them to reveal the ways that assumptions shape experiences, particularly, girls’ experiences. Various conflicts come to a head in a colorful finale that crosscuts between a final football match and a traditional Indian wedding. Cultures continue to clash, but in ways that are increasingly responsive to one another. --C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

BRUCE ALMIGHTY

Jim Carrey needs a vacation from himself. In this latest movie with director Tom Shadyac (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Liar Liar), he’s Bruce, a self-centered Buffalo TV reporter with a perfect girlfriend (Jennifer Aniston), a knack for "human interest" stories and a slumping career. Ignoring the girl, he blames his professional misery on God’s oversight, feeling particularly tired of having to be the funny guy on the broadcast. The last time Carrey grappled with this problem, he made the treacly The Majestic. This time, he combines rubberman antics, schmaltzy revelations, and lots of self-love in a plot that’s one idea stretched past breaking: God (Morgan Freeman) grants Bruce godly powers, leading to a pile-on of cute tunes ("The Power," "If I Ruled the World," "God Gave Me Everything"), bad behavior and a silly moral lesson in the end. Steve Carell makes the most of his indignities as Bruce’s rival at work, but as his boss, Philip Baker Hall just looks adrift. Aniston looks like she’s in another movie entirely, which may be a cagey survival strategy. It’s hard to tell. --Cindy Fuchs (Ritz 16; UA Riverview.)

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS

Andrew Jarecki set out to make a documentary about children’s entertainers, one of whom was David Friedman, who as "Silly Billy" was a successful birthday clown in New York City. But Jarecki stumbled onto juicer stuff: Friedman’s father, Arnold, a schoolteacher in the affluent Great Neck community on Long Island, and his younger brother, Jesse, had been jailed for molesting dozens of young boys, students in Arnold’s home-taught computer classes. And, lucky break, the family as a whole and David in particular had an obsessive, not to say unhealthy, habit of documenting their darkest hours on videotape. That Capturing the Friedmans takes all of 10 minutes to get to the molestation charges, barely introducing us to the family before the freak show begins, tells you all you need to know. Jarecki doesn’t treat the Friedmans as humans -- more like germs on a microscope slide. Errol Morris-y footage, presumably left over from the film’s incarnation, shows David in his clown outfit performing against a white backdrop, and occasionally jaunty, off-key music plays under certain scenes. David’s hatred for his mother, Elaine, is palpable, but even in the footage he shot, there must have been something to make her look like less of a fanged harridan than she does here. Jarecki tentatively airs the idea that the charges against them may have been at least exacerbated by hysteria, if not created out of whole cloth. But instead of presenting both sides, Capturing the Friedmans merely seems to be hedging its bets. --S.A. (Bala; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE

Even if you enjoyed the first movie, the words "A film by McG" might take you aback, and with what turns out to be good reason. Sifting through the wreckage that is Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, a reasonably adept coroner might conclude that there’s a world of difference between giving a music-video hack with a flair for cheesecake and dirtbike races a pre-written script to direct and putting said hack in charge before the script’s even been written. It’s pretty clear, in fact, that Full Throttle’s script was never written, lurching as it does from one thunderous set piece to the next without so much as a "meanwhile…" to bridge the gaps. The crashingly obvious wall-to-wall music ("Surfer Girl" and "Misirlou" for a beach scene) is so loud it often obscures the dialogue, which might be counted a blessing. Given the desperate attempts to convince the public that the movie’s stars are friends in real life, you’d think the film might spend a little more time letting them interact: it never again reaches the dizzying heights of an early moment when the three -- Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu, as if you needed to be told -- spontaneously start dancing to MC Hammer’s "U Can’t Touch This." Basically, the whole movie plays like the fake montage at the beginning of scenes from past "episodes," only there’s no way to catch up on what you missed. --Sam Adams (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

FINDING NEMO

Our little Pixar is all grown up. Written and directed by Andrew Stanton, who’s had a hand in every Pixar feature since Toy Story, Nemo introduces Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks) and Coral (Elizabeth Perkins), a happy young couple of orange-and-white-striped clownfish, eagerly awaiting the hatching of dozens of eggs. Attempting to defend his brood from a vicious predator, Marlin is knocked unconscious, and when he awakes, the eggs, and Coral, are gone. All that remains is Nemo (Alexander Gould), whose egg somehow detached from the cluster. He’s tiny, with one underdeveloped fin that makes swimming an erratic adventure. But to Marlin, Nemo’s the one rebuke to the feeling that he failed his paternal duties, and consequently overprotected as all get-out. Lo and behold, further trauma ensues, as Nemo, showing off in front of his new classmates, swims out into open water and is scooped up by a scuba diver. The rest, of course, is adventure: Marlin swims the ocean, desperately searching for his lost spawn, while Nemo plots escape from a dentist’s aquarium. Nemo finds camaraderie in the tank -- with, among others, Gill (Willem Dafoe), a veteran of several escape attempts -- while Marlin hooks up with Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), an absent-minded fish who can’t remember anything other than her own name: The bond that develops between her and Marlin is a sweet, contentious one. Humans make an appearance in most of Pixar’s films, sometimes as disembodied appendages; they focus our attention on the unrecognizability of humans so we don’t notice how we’re covertly being coaxed to identify with toys, bugs, monsters and fish. Pixar’s creatures have humanity that most flesh-and-blood movies can’t touch. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE

Much like his last film, Dark Blue, Ron Shelton’s latest guy-bonding saga takes as its backdrop an approximation of recent news from the ’hood, setting its detective heroes -- ever-angling Joe (Harrison Ford) and his young partner, K.C. (Josh Hartnett) -- smack in the middle of music-industry drama. Assigned to investigate the murder of a rap group, they’re out of their element and then some. The case vaguely but pointedly resembles the Biggie and Tupac murders, in that the killer looks to be a Suge Knight figure, an intimidating label executive named Antoine Sartain (Isaiah Washington). The artists are killed in a club owned by Julius (Master P, in entertaining full-on self-love mode). Hollywood Homicide adopts Shelton’s usual tack of deconstructing generic formula. It’s a buddy movie where the arguments are petty and off-topic, an action comedy that moves slowly and it’s less interested in the plot than in secondary characters, detouring to spend time with colorful oddballs, including Lou Diamond Phillips’ turn as an undercover cop in drag (which abruptly cuts off) and Andre 2000’s appearance as a producer. The case becomes increasingly convoluted, with a side trip into K.C.’s personal past (his cop dad was killed on duty, and the kid has a little vengeance working on the prime suspect) and Joe and Antoine’s enmity devolving into an outright ridiculous climax of a chase scene. As it’s pointedly an unglamorous way to bring down the villain, it seems an apt way to end this anticop movie cop movie. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

HULK

Remember how when Barton Fink was assigned to write a wrestling movie, he wrote about a man wrestling with his soul? If he’d taken a crack at Marvel Comics’ not-so-jolly-green giant, this would’ve been the result. Ang Lee and constant collaborator James Schamus have concocted a psychobabble-drenched tale where the Hulk (or, sorry, Hulk) is merely an outward manifestation of Bruce Banner’s memories of childhood trauma; if the X-Men are really teenagers in disguise, dealing with their changing bodies and social ostracism, then the Hulk is, literally, a big baby. That Nick Nolte stars as Bruce’s long-post pappy seems appropriate, given that he starred in one of the most literal minded daddy-didn’t-love-me movies of all time, Affliction. (That with his flyaway hair and scraggly beard he seemed to have transformed himself into James Coburn’s character in that movie is merely a plus.) As Bruce, Aussie Eric Bana has the thankless task of finding dozens of different ways to seethe, while Jennifer Connelly, in the Fay Wray role, gets a bunch of weepy, overwrought scenes, but is essentially The Girl, Oscar or no Oscar. Lee tarts up the movie with a variety of CGI wipes, partial dissolves, split screens and so forth, obviously trying to draw inspiration from his nine-panel source, but he’s so far from tapping the pulpy lifeblood of comic books you can only howl in frustration. (That he’s convinced a genetically modified poodle makes a scary antagonist is about all you need to say.) The movie Hulk most obviously wants to be is King Kong, but Hulk’s CGI beast doesn’t have the grandeur of his far-cheaper predecessor, and the movie’s so mired in hypnotherapy recriminations it just feels like a prolonged niggle. Hulk trash. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

THE ITALIAN JOB

Stella (Charlize Theron, earnest as ever) is the only girl in The Italian Job. Being as it’s a remake of a 1969 Michael Caine heist picture, you’d think that her input would be minimal. But Stella brings surprising edge to her by-the-numbers part (originally male), not to mention crucial elements to the plot -- namely, safecracking skills, a thirst for vengeance and a Mini Cooper. Still, she’s up against it in this too-many-guys-vying-for-supporting-pizzazz picture. Her veteran safecracker father, John (Donald Sutherland), calls her on his cell from Venice. It turns out that dad’s skipped parole and is about to embark on one last job, after which he promises to go straight. John’s crew -- all predictable types -- includes his son-like favorite student, master planner Charlie (Mark Wahlberg); driver/womanizer Handsome Rob (Jason Statham); computer nerd Lyle (Seth Green); explosives expert Left Ear (Mos Def); and inside man Steve (Ed Norton). Though they get away with the gold, one of their number -- Steve, whose grumpiness is evident from frame one -- double-crosses the bunch, steals the gold and shoots John dead in the process. The others are, of course, soon fixated on vengeance. Steve’s snarky meanness comes to a strangely distant climax when the film eventually comes to its end -- a car "chase" in L.A. featuring a trio of tricked-out Mini Coopers careening along sidewalks and up and down subway stairs. (In the 1969 version, the Mini Coopers, then equally cute and stylish, raced through the streets of Torino.) Steve, meanwhile, watches from an appropriately menacing black helicopter, such that Norton’s performance is rendered in the most tedious sort of reaction shots: "Hmmm, what are you up to, Charlie?"--C.F. (Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

JETLAG

Working against her usual role, Juliette Binoche is here a fluttery beautician, inclined to wear much makeup and caught up in an abusive relationship with Sergi López (stunning as the psycho killer in With a Friend Like Harry…). By chance (or rather, by cell-phone-as-meet-cute device), she meets chef-turned-frozen food mogul Jean Reno at the airport; when he stands up for her in front of villainous López, their coupling is imminent but put off by a series of coincidences and evasions. Both yearning for connection but afraid of commitment, they keep meeting (still cute) as their planes are delayed. Directed by Danièle Thompson, from a formulaic romantic-comedy script she co-wrote with her son Christopher, the film offers few surprises: She finds he’s not so gruff as he pretends, and he appreciates that she’s actually very earnest. That, and when he spills salad dressing on her and she’s forced to take a shower, she emerges from the bathroom in terry robe and makeup-less, that is, as fabulous as Binoche usually looks. --Cindy Fuchs (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

THE MAN ON THE TRAIN

The Man on the Train opens, sensibly enough, with a man on a train: spike-haired, leather-jacketed Milan (Johnny Hallyday), trundling around this provincial village and looking absurdly out of place, the iconic image of him striding alongside the railroad tracks already replaced with the image of him stumping peevishly down a cobblestoned hill, a thin, frail old man following in his wake: Manesquier (Jean Rochefort), who offers him a room for the night, as the only hotel in town is closed. Even so early in the film, the stage is set for a fairly odious, touchy-feely affair, full of sharing, and learning, and men with gruff exteriors who melt into teary little puddles. Patrice Leconte knows that an audience can see the outlines of such a story looming, and The Man on the Train works overtime to convince us that it has nothing so reductive in mind. By the time the movie finally gets around to giving us what it’s all but promised it wouldn’t, we’re almost relieved. While Leconte has nothing so self-conscious in mind as a buddy movie that comments on buddy movies, the casting of lead actors as iconic as Hallyday and Rochefort is surely no accident. Leconte knows that part of the joy of The Man on the Train is watching these old hands square off against each other, and what’s more, he knows we know it, but rather than turn his two personalities into caricatures of themselves, Leconte lets us see beyond their façades. Even though Milan turns out to have come to town for criminal purposes, he’s not the outlaw he appears; the photograph drawn from his jacket pocket, which looks to have been taken in the American West, turns out to be from a fun fair where he worked as a stunt man. And for all his defeated self-loathing, the self-proclaimed "silent onlooker" Manesquier has enviable qualities of his own, though having Milan grab him by the lapels and shout, "Don’t you see how extraordinary you are?" may not be the best way to reveal them. --S.A. (Bryn Mawr)

THE MATRIX RELOADED

Watching The Matrix was like being injected with pure adrenaline, but the experience also served as its own vaccine -- you could only do it once. If you had seen it, and saw it again, Andrew and Larry Wachowski’s cringeworthy dialogue, their adolescent grasp of both philosophy and sexuality, came rather abruptly to the fore. There’s no chance that The Matrix Reloaded could instill the same awe as the original, but it’s not just sequel-itis that keeps Reloaded from connecting. The script acknowledges the imperative to top the original early on; as Neo (Keanu Reeves) faces off against a handful of Matrix-defending Agents led by Agent Smith (the fabulous Hugo Weaving), he remarks, "Hmmm. Upgrades." Reloaded introduces the human stronghold Zion, located near the Earth’s core. When the human forces organize for defense against the machines who are burrowing through the Earth’s crust to destroy them, the parliamentary disputes take on an unfortunate Star Wars cast, but the subterranean caverns also provide an opportunity for Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to doff his shirt and beat the war drums Spartacus-style. The bind in which Reloaded finds itself is due in no small part to the standards set by the first film. It’s no longer enough to have characters perform stunts that defy not only human physiology but the laws of physics -- it has to look real. We know that Weaving’s being doubled either digitally or by stuntmen -- not to mention all the times that the patented "bullet-time" camera moves reduce Reeves to a phony-looking digital stand-in. The Matrix’s whole mythology is caught up with the difference between reality and (computer-generated) fantasy, so when the line is blurred in places where it’s not supposed to be, the whole movie gets knocked off course. --S.A. (UA Riverview)

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Together again:

Bruce Willis and Aerosmith.

It's Armageddon.

SPELLBOUND

In Toronto last fall, you could actually hear the rarely experienced phenomenon of "buzz" at work; everywhere you went, people seemed to be talking about Spellbound, to which their audience would inevitably reply, "Spelling bees?" Maybe spelling champions were the kids even the nerds made fun of, but Jeff Blitz’s piercing, engaging documentary finds that the American dream is alive and well, at least as far as the National Spelling Bee is concerned. Following eight children on their way to nationals, Blitz finds a true microcosm of American society, from the well-heeled New Haven family whose daughter all but expects to win to the recent immigrants from India who’ve tutored first one child and then the other in French and Spanish (in addition to Latin at school, of course), all in the hopes of mastering the art of spelling words no one’s ever heard of. ("Cephalalgia" comes up in the first round.) There’s enough drama on these kids’ faces to make for an epic miniseries, but Blitz ably boils it down in 95 minutes, elegantly interweaving stories once the big contest begins. Even at the end, Spellbound doesn’t falter; Blitz’s climax takes the emphasis off victory, pointing the way toward the post-orthographical future. --S.A.(Ritz Five)

TOGETHER

Dismiss Chen Kaige’s story of a young violin prodigy struggling with the responsibilities of his talent as a Hollywoodized sugar pill at your peril; Together eventually boasts more toughness than any number of grit-scoured H-wood dramas. Following the boy and his success-hungry father from the provinces to Beijing, Together spans the extremes of Chinese culture (recalling Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju), but the tension between traditionalism and progress doesn’t play out along predictable lines. Together’s ultimate rejection of material success doesn’t come across as piety but as a hard-won insight, no doubt born of its maker’s own bouts with success. --Sam Adams (Ritz 16)

WHALE RIDER

Whale Rider begins with tragedy: A woman gives birth to two children, one stillborn. As her husband, Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), watches, she also dies, leaving him bereft and angry. His own father, Koro (Rawiri Paratene), focuses his rage on the surviving child, blaming her for the death of her brother. Porourangi storms off, leaving the baby to the care of his mother, Nanny Flowers (Vicky Haughton). Fortunately, she knows how to handle her husband in ways that even he doesn’t imagine. Whale Rider then jumps ahead 11 years, to when Pai (the astonishing Keisha Castle-Hughes) has grown into an inquisitive and independent-minded girl. Living with her grandparents in a Whangara community on the eastern coast of New Zealand, she’s named for a demi-god ancestor, Paikea, who arrived in New Zealand on the back of a whale. Legend has it that a firstborn son will be the next Whangara chieftain, but Pai will surprise her elders and herself, as she emerges as the next leader. Based on the novel by Maori author Witi Ihimaera and adapted by director Niki Caro, Whale Rider is part saga and part fairy tale, part adventure tale and part coming-of-age story. It’s also a rousing good time, with beautiful beachscapes and stunning whales-a-swimming imagery by cinematographer Leon Narbey and an elegant, simple-seeming narrative structure. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz East; Ritz 16)

WINGED MIGRATION

Moments in Jacques Perrin’s documentary, which follows migrating birds in flight around the globe, almost defy belief: The camera seems to soar among them like, well, a bird, dipping and diving, so close you swear you could reach out and grab a feather. Waddling geese are transformed into sleek creatures of the sky, while birds that already seemed graceful become almost supernatural. A few moments break the spell, though; twice, when the camera is about to capture the food chain in all its merciless, fascinating splendor, Perrin cuts away, which seems more dishonest than tasteful -- edit that stuff out for the Discovery Channel, but leave it in for the theater. And though you’d think a film about birds couldn’t possibly have any political content, what else to make of a sequence where Perrin cuts from American hunters downing birds in flight to a flock flying past the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty? No Frog-basher I, but something smells fishy, and it ain’t just that seagull. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

WRONG TURN

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Answers the question:

What if the Blair Witch had been

a bunch of rednecks?

(Cinemagic)