EVELYN

This film seems to have been made in the belief that someone somewhere exists who needs to be informed that the Irish are, by and large, a congenial and pious people who may love their drink but are little the worse for that. Based on events that took place in Dublin in the 1950s, Evelyn describes the efforts of Desmond Doyle (Pierce Brosnan), a poor tradesman whose wife leaves him one St. Stephen’s Day, to retrieve his three young children from the custody of the Church. His quest through the courts becomes a cause célèbre, and, not to give anything away, he wins in time for the following Christmas.

For a while the unrelieved conventionality of the film’s every aspect can be felt as blandly comforting, and there are many, many pub scenes, which Bruce Beresford (as complete a hack as any director who ever lived) milks for each ounce of quaintness. But the most confirmed sentimentalist must lose heart at the outpouring of treacle in the movie’s last third, when Desmond is inspired to argue theology on the witness stand (a folk tune welling up on the soundtrack), his little daughter faces down her persecutors with the help of her guardian angel, and so on till they unwrap the presents.

DAS EXPERIMENT

The eighth installment in this seemingly deathless series starts with a schematic prologue in a psychiatric hospital, where inmate Laurie (a grim-looking Jamie Lee Curtis, reprising her series role) briefly turns the tables on her brother, the noted serial killer Michael Myers, only to get herself killed. The main plot has to do with a cheapjack Web entrepreneur (Busta Rhymes) who recruits six college students to strap video cameras to their foreheads and rummage through Myers’s decaying childhood home. Their misadventures convey the unmistakable sense that Halloween: Resurrection is about nothing (supposed to be "looking for answers," the kids are really just flaunting their bodies to feed the morbid curiosity of bored Web surfers), and that sense is compounded by director Rick Rosenthal’s dizzying mixture of high-res, low-res, and multi-screen images. Fortunately — or not, depending on your point of view — serial butchery is not long in coming.

Rhymes’s cheerful presence lifts the film somewhat, as does Tyra Banks (though a restless camera sabotages her solo dance routine). But neither their participation nor an agreeable strain of goofiness in the script is enough to redeem the cynicism of this project.

HIGH CRIMES

Successful San Francisco trial lawyer Ashley Judd is stunned to learn that her adoring husband (Jim Caviezel, a soulful but rather large and violent puppy) was once part of a Marine detail that massacred nine civilians in a tiny El Salvador hamlet. Now Caviezel is charged with the mass murder, which he maintains was done by his commanding officer. To help defend her husband, Judd recruits rumpled Morgan Freeman, a lawyer who’s said to be good with military cases.

Slick and lachrymose, the film doesn’t wallow in clichés, it high-fives itself over them. Freeman has another of his plum parts (lovable recovering alcoholic who falls off the wagon while chasing witnesses through sleaze). Judd, a can-do babe in a power suit, morphs into a damsel in distress whenever the film wants to be a heavy-handed thriller instead of a humdrum whodunit. Her character miscarries during the course of the film, by way of demonstrating that High Crimes is also meant to be a "character study" about "emotions." And Carl Franklin directs as if he were mentally interpolating commercials every 10 minutes.

Imitative of P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia but an hour shorter and in Italian, Gabriele Muccino’s film juggles various people’s crises to the obstinate sawing of a string orchestra. The movie might have stuck with Carlo (Stefano Accorsi), an advertising professional who’s tempted to stray from his pregnant live-in girlfriend, Giulia (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Unfortunately, Muccino, in a distracted quest for universality, lets his Steadicam loose among peripheral folk. Carlo’s male friends experience various styles of wanderlust, all noisy; Giulia’s mother (’70s star Stefania Sandrelli) has had it with her psychiatrist husband; somebody’s father dies.

In short, L’ultimo bacio has a greater number of uninteresting characters than any film could support. It’s obvious that a conservative ending is the only one possible, since the film hasn’t laid the groundwork for any other kind, so it comes as no surprise when someone says — without irony and with the apparent endorsement of the film — "Normality is the true revolution." The psychiatrist concludes, "If people have been marrying for thousands of years, there must be a reason" — a remark of sufficient vapidity to discredit psychiatry forever. In Italian with English subtitles.

A directionless Jake Gyllenhaal and his fiancée called it quits months before her senseless murder, but neither of them broke the news to her parents (Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon). After the funeral, Gyllenhaal lets Hoffman take him in as a junior partner in a real-estate scheme. He also meets cute with a free-spirited postal worker (Ellen Pompeo) who must have had an unorthodox education (she knows what "escrow" means but is unfamiliar with the term "commercial real estate"), and the two fall in love.

This wispy counterculture soap opera is set in 1973, for no better reason than to assemble a party CD’s worth of songs not often heard in multiplexes. On writer/director Brad Silberling’s booby-trapped set, a person can’t back into a shut-off radio without activating the intro to Jethro Tull’s "Aqualung." For a while, the film’s mysteriousness about where it’s going works in its favor: you watch for a whole hour before Moonlight Mile collapses into bathos. But when it collapses, it collapses hard. As half-realized emotional issues get talked out at length, and as the characters come to terms with Silberling’s diluted life truths, the movie’s glibness and dishonesty become excruciating.

THE MYSTIC MASSEUR

V.S. Naipaul’s first novel, about a Trinidadian writer of modest gifts who has a career as a village healer thrust upon him and then attains island-wide political prominence, only to end up alienated from his people, is a cleverly constructed work of marvelous humor and linguistic richness. For this film adaptation, director Ismail Merchant contents himself with meager approximations of those qualities. Merchant probably hopes that, however leaden his handling of Naipaul’s narrative and however pusillanimous his treatment of Naipaul’s ironies, the re-creation of Trinidad in the ’40s and ’50s (the period of the story) is a task rarely enough performed and of sufficient inherent interest to make a film of the book worthwhile. But though the movie catches the flavor of the novel’s dialogue and splashes local color around with the requisite tasteful jollification, Merchant fails to make the characters vivid or understandable (despite a cast that includes Aasif Mandvi, Ayesha Dharker, Om Puri, and James Fox), and he obscures the political and social conflicts that give the story its point.

NEVER AGAIN

In 2002 America, no one denies 54-year-olds the right to have wild sex, talk about it, and even get movies made about it. For all I know, this is Republican National Convention material by now. But writer/director Eric Schaeffer ("one of New York’s true independent film voices," says the film’s Web site) wants barriers to smash, so he fills Never Again with self-righteous defiance. Licensed by Schaeffer’s belief that he’s striking back at American culture for stigmatizing the middle-aged, Jill Clayburgh’s lovelorn divorcée acts like an insane idiot (pardon me, I meant "holy fool"), annoying a helpless beauty-salon customer with her steamy confidences and donning a strap-on dildo and knight’s armor to win and hold her man (Jeffrey Tambor), a commitment-phobic pianist who has an unlikely steady gig playing new-age muzak in a Greenwich Village jazz club.

It’s too bad the phrase "romantic comedy" serves today mainly to dignify soggy dating-ritual sit-coms like this. Followers of the recent progress of the genre won’t be shocked to learn that the cinematic interest of Never Again is sub-zero, its Venus-Mars profiling insulting, and its comedy of errors excruciating.

SIGNS

Mel Gibson, nobler and cuddlier than ever, plays a former minister who switched to a regular collar after his wife’s accidental death caused him to lose his faith. Together with his two young children and his baseball-player brother (Joaquin Phoenix), Mel boards himself up in his Pennsylvania farmhouse to stave off an inexplicable large-scale attack by aliens.

In the context of today’s overblown Hollywood cinema, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan probably expects that a slow pace, precious compositions, sub-Lynch attempts at weird humor, and a solemn abstention from Schwarzeneggerian special effects will qualify this Big Whuh of a crop-circle movie for big-time points. Signs is thus filled with overcareful touches that register as either pretentious or slightly ridiculous (the endless creak of a screen door; Cherry Jones’s performance as a chatty county cop). In the end, all the winks and tics with which Shyamalan signals that he’s looked at a Fantagraphics book or seen a real movie (perhaps one by Larry Buchanan, director of Zontar, the Thing from Venus) only make this film’s calculated tearjerking more offensive.

WORLD TRAVELER

What could have been an acceptable documentary on the bad acting of Billy Crudup is spoiled by writer/director Bart Freundlich’s delusion that he is making a film that’s actually about something. Instead of just letting the camera roll as his star attitudinizes through pages of awful barstool monologues and dopy miscommunication sessions, Freundlich adopts a grandiloquent, tricked-up visual style that would be better suited to a very expensive SUV commercial than to what is, I think, intended as an update of the Five Easy Pieces macho-going-nowhere mythos.

Throughout the 103 minutes of this ludicrous road movie, a single tone dominates: the dispiriting sound of dull conversations that could never take place between any people anywhere. It’s hard to decide whether Crudup is more unbelievable when he’s sensitive, feisty, or numb. "Do you get away with this shit because you look like that?" asks a woman he’s coaxed out of a bar to stare at the stars. Hmm, that might explain it. I’m not sure what explains the fact that Freundlich was allowed to make this film. The only moment I enjoyed was when the crew turned the smoke machine too high during a scene in a restaurant, making the establishment appear to be under gas attack.

all this stuff originally published in The Boston Phoenix and © copyright 2002 Chris Fujiwara

Chris Fujiwara: Mostly on Film