Category: Film/TV

Bowling for Columbine is populist rabblerouser Michael Moore’s third documentary feature and possibly his best. It is less focused and less sure of itself than Roger & Me, which tracked the damage done to one town by one company, and The Big One, a particularly self-aggrandizing “concert film” about a Moore book tour that doubled as an invective against corporate greed. Here Moore asks questions he may not quite have the answers to, and somehow this lack of confidence makes the film even more affecting.

As much essay as investigation, Bowling for Columbine is a meditation on societal pathology, a glimpse at what author Richard Plotkin labeled “Gunfighter Nation.” Why do Americans have so many guns? And why do we use them so often?

Moore points out that America has far more gun deaths in an average year than any other industrialized nation, and the statistics are so eye-popping that they bear repeating: Germany –381, France — 255, Canada — 165, the United Kingdom — 68, Australia — 65, Japan — 39. The United States? 11,127.

In search of an explanation, what begins as a focus on one day — April 20, 1999, the day of the massacre at Columbine High School –spirals into a cross-country meditation on gun culture. Moore talks to James Nichols, the acquitted brother of Oklahoma bomber Terry Nichols, hangs out with the Michigan Militia (who calmly explain that anyone who isn’t armed isn’t being “responsible”), visits a bank (also a “licensed firearms dealer”) that is giving away a gun to all new customers, and tracks down NRA president Charlton Heston for one of his trademark confrontations. He returns to his native Flint after a horrific school shooting in which one 6-year-old kills another.

The film’s methodology mixes these on-site interviews and confrontations (Moore takes two Columbine survivors with 17-cent Kmart bullets still lodged in their bodies to corporate headquarters to “return the merchandise”) with found footage (a Chris Rock routine about the need for “bullet control,” an instructional video on school security, an early NRA television ad) and music montages (a series of American foreign-policy debacles — leading to the attack on the World Trade Center by “CIA-trained” Osama bin Laden –scored, rather egregiously, to Louis Armstong’s “What a Wonderful World”).

But what are the answers? Moore takes on possible sources one at a time. Violent cultural images in the form of rock music (especially Columbine scapegoat Marilyn Manson, an interviewee who seems to be one of the sanest people in the film), video games, and movies? Joe Lieberman may think so, but Moore, perhaps predictably, has doubts: Kids in other countries listen to the same music, play the same video games, and see the same films, but don’t lash out violently in the same ways.

Is it a history of state violence? No fan of the current cowboy-in-chief, Moore takes pains, often rather spurious, to link state militarism to the domestic murder rate (as when he continually points out that the Columbine shootings coincided with the heaviest bombing during the war in Kosovo), but he also acknowledges that other countries –particularly Germany and England –have just as much blood on their hands without the same problems with internal violence.

Is it a product of poverty and related social ills? The availability of firearms? Moore acknowledges that neighboring Canada has about as many guns per capita floating around and an even higher unemployment rate. But he also points out that — with universal health care and better public housing — Canada seems to be a country that takes care of its poor rather than attacking them. One Canadian citizen Moore interviews is confused when asked about the country’s “indigent.” Moore also, with great precision and barely contained outrage, shows how the popular welfare-to-work laws fostered a climate that contributed to the child-on-child shooting in Flint.

But, to the extent that Moore arrives at an answer, it is the availability of firearms in America in conjunction with a culture of fear that makes us more liable to use them. There’s a “Schoolhouse Rock”-style history of the United States that shows a mingling of fear and violence that leads from the pilgrims to white flight. There’s a consideration of the role of television news’ “if it bleeds it leads” ethos (Moore contends that, as the crime rate has fallen 20 percent, coverage of violent crime has risen 600 percent) and the role of panic-inducing politicians in breeding a culture that perceives more threat than is actually out there, with warnings thus becoming self-fulfilling prophecy.

With the Washington, D.C., sniper shootings receding from the headlines and “Countdown Iraq” (as one cable news network has already branded the coming war) commencing, Bowling for Columbine would seem presciently timed. But, as Moore has said, this is a film that could have been made a decade ago using different examples.

“Are we homicidal in nature?” one father of a Columbine victim asks. Moore doesn’t quite have all the answers, but his painfully funny yet sorrowful film is at least brave enough to ask the questions.

— Chris Herrington

As I sat down for a matinee preview-screening of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, there was great excitement in the air among both children and parents.

The house lights’ dimming brought applause from the children, as did a trailer for a particularly crappy-looking movie about a talking, boxing, pickpocketing marsupial. Then the movie came along, with John Williams’ teasingly familiar score and spooky/cool drift from the clouds of a night sky to young Harry Potter’s room in his terrible “muggle” family’s house.

As the movie progressed, though, the titters and whinnies gradually stopped. Through the rest of the film’s 161 minutes, the audience hushed. Though there were plenty of babies in the audience, none cried, and where there are usually three or 12 annoyingly loud, uncontrollable children in any family-film experience I’ve ever had, all were quiet. It was stupefying. But explainable. A little of the magic is gone since the first Harry Potter film, maybe, but the mystery’s begun.

Harry hears voices. Not a good thing for anyone, even wizards, as pointed out by pal Hermione. The voices urge him to “kill, kill,” and not long after his colleagues turn up petrified (not dead, just … petrified, temporarily). Harry happens to be in the wrong place at several wrong times and bears the suspicion of his classmates for the deeds, each accompanied by a cryptic message scrolled in blood threatening worse results next time. Complicating Harry’s search for the truth is a nagging rumor that whoever is doing this is a “descendant of Slytherin” — Salazar Slytherin, that is, who helped found Hogwarts’ School of Witchcraft and Wizardry some 1,000 years ago. Both the late Slytherin and Harry have the ability to talk to snakes, a rare talent. Could Harry be a descendant of Slytherin? Does the weird, blank diary of long-vanished former student Tom Riddle hold the answers?

Most impressive about this sophomore entry into the Potter film franchise is the improved acting talents of its young stars — Daniel Radcliffe as Harry, the stronger Emma Watson as Hermione, and funnier Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley. Radcliffe, more than just a Potter look-alike, is discovering nuances in both inflection and expression. All of the returning stars have wider dramatic range and better comic timing. Kenneth Branagh was added to the cast as Gilderoy Lockhart, professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts. A stylistic cross between Laurence Olivier and William Shatner, Branagh is at his hammy best as the smilingly vacant celebrity wizard. The recently deceased Richard Harris is clearly ailing as the grand wizard Albus Dumbledore, but that somehow adds gravity to Harry’s journey. I hope that Harris’ friend Peter O’Toole picks up the wand for the next Potter. Obvious candidates Christopher Lee and Ian McKellan are busy wizards in another blockbuster franchise currently, and O’Toole has the right mix of heart and wisdom for a master like Dumbledore.

My sister Lucia explains that the Potter books mature as Harry ages, becoming more adult in their concerns with each passing installment. Everything about The Chamber of Secrets reflects this, from the impending puberty of its young stars to the darker, more sophisticated visual style to the weight of its content. Mortality is a theme here, introduced as a more grown-up concept than was explored in The Sorcerer’s Stone. Slightly sugared by the narrative candy-coating of J.K. Rowling’s sensitive text, this works well. Young children may not quite be prepared for the genuine frights of giant talking spiders or their quiet, violent attacks, the flirty new ghost Moaning Myrtle — who has the best line: “If you die down there, you’re welcome to share my toilet” — or the haunting solemnity of Tom Riddle. But most responded wonderfully to the more mature material — quiet awe throughout. And I defy any nonsensical Harry Potter-is-an-agent-of-Satan book-banning parents to find fault with the responsible themes of racial inequity (nasty Draco Malfoy and his Aryan family are proponents of Hogwarts as a pure-bloods-only school) and honest childhood wisdom like Hermione’s “Fear of the name of something only increases the fear of the thing itself.” There is nothing to fear with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. — Bo List

François Ozon’s 8 Women may be too postmodern for its own good. It’s a film buff’s stunt picture — an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery done as a Vincent Minnelli/Jacques Demy-style musical filmed with the stylized zeal of Douglas Sirk’s ’50s Technicolor melodramas, all directly inspired by George Cukor’s star-studded The Women. Got all that?

Of course, ever since the French New Wave inaugurated film as film criticism, there have been many, many great movies more influenced by other movies than by life. But 8 Women is too leaden and mannered to do justice to any of its influences. The musical sequences are static. The melodrama lacks real emotion. And the whodunit aspect is pretty mundane.

The film is a trifle –a stagey excuse for a multigenerational cast of notable French actresses to ham it up in eye-popping, color-coded costumes. And on that not-inconsiderable basis, 8 Women holds interest.

The film is set in a snowbound cottage in the French countryside, where the man of the house, Marcel, is discovered with a knife in his back. Eight women, all related to Marcel in some way, inhabit the house and its environs, and all become suspects. There’s Marcel’s wife Gaby (Catherine Deneuve), Gaby’s wheelchair-bound mother Mamy (Danielle Darrieux), and her unpleasant, spinster sister Augustine (Isabelle Huppert, who also stars in the far more serious The Piano Teacher, playing this week at Muvico’s Peabody Place theater), the latter two living at the cottage rent-free. And there are Marcel and Gaby’s two daughters, tomboyish teenager Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier), a mystery-novel-reading, new-wave pixie, and girlish, home-from-college Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen). There are also the home’s two servants — sexpot chambermaid Louise (Emmanuelle Béart) and French-African housekeeper Madame Chanel (Firmine Richard). Finally, emerging from the shadows is Marcel’s scandalous, ex-showgirl sister Pierrette (Fanny Ardant).

The iconic nature of this cast, Deneuve aside, is likely to be lost on American audiences not particularly knowledgeable about French cinema. But for those for whom these actresses’ stature is relevant, there are some memorably campy moments: Deneuve and Ardant rolling on the floor having a catfight; Deneuve saying of Huppert, “I’m beautiful and rich. She’s ugly and poor”; Deneuve awkwardly dancing along with her young castmates during one musical number. This last, of course, unintentionally entertaining. — CH

As pop-star romans à clef go, the Eminem vehicle 8 Mile sure beats anything Elvis ever did. It’s even better than Purple Rain (which, as a Prince-fanatic grade-schooler, I must have seen in the theater at least half a dozen times). In fact, the only film of its kind that’s more satisfying and interesting is probably the Jimmy Cliff reggae/gangster tale The Harder They Come, which most of the millions of Eminem fans who have pushed 8 Mile up the box-office charts have probably never even heard of.

Set in Marshall Mathers’ native Detroit, this tale of a talented white rapper (Jimmy Smith, aka Bunny Rabbit) from a trailer park on the outskirts of the city trying to make it in a black man’s world will be familiar to anyone well-acquainted with Mathers’ biography. The details have been changed a little but not much. The three women who supply so much of the content on Eminem’s records are all here: Doted-on daughter Halie Jade becomes doted-on little sister Lily. The irresponsible, alcoholic mother Eminem lashes out against on record becomes an object of mixed affection (and unlikely glamour) played by Kim Basinger. The anguished relationship with (ex-)wife Kim on record is broken up into far gentler relationships with estranged girlfriend Janeane (Taryn Manning, much of her work seemingly left on the cutting-room floor) and comely new dalliance Alex (Brittany Murphy, with her trademark mix of adorable and dangerous).

The script here (from Scott Silver, the brain-wizard behind 1999’s disastrous The Mod Squad) is strictly perfunctory. If you’ve seen Purple Rain (or The Karate Kid or the first couple of Rocky movies, for that matter), you can pretty much imagine the narrative arc: Shy kid from the wrong side of the tracks hones his craft but can’t cut it when the pressure’s on. He suffers humiliation and defeat at the hands of more confident and privileged rivals. He deals with personal issues –a messy broken home, romantic problems, arguments with friends and employers, his own relatively inchoate emotional problems –that all go sour at the same time for a nadir about two-thirds of the way into the film. Then he gets it all together, breaking out of his shell for a rousing and climactic victory during a concluding confrontation.

But if 8 Mile‘s script is nothing special, the direction from Curtis Hanson and lead performance from Eminem are special indeed. Hanson, an old pro who got his start working with Samuel Fuller on the brilliant if little-seen racism meditation White Dog and who has become an A-list director in recent years after helming L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys, takes this bundle of familiar tropes and shapes it into a movie. And Eminem’s overwhelming starpower, no-brainer backstory, and searing screen presence (no major pop star –discounting pre-rock icons such as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin — has ever given a big-screen performance this convincing) are all the material Hanson really needs.

But 8 Mile isn’t just about the life of Marshall Mathers. For starters, it’s different from most other pop-music romans à clef in that most of the music heard in the film isn’t actually that of the star. 8 Mile is set in 1995, and most of the film’s soundtrack is the music that Rabbit and his friends are listening to. As much about hip hop as about Eminem, 8 Mile captures a specific cultural moment — artists like Mobb Deep (their classic track “Shook Ones Pt. II” blaring from Rabbit’s headphones during the opening credits), Wu-Tang Clan, and Notorious B.I.G. reflecting a gritty era when East Coast hip hop experienced a rebirth and before East/West violence and gilded-age greed turned things sour. And the story itself is as much about any struggling MC — dreaming of making it big while rapping with Biggie while driving a beater and living at home with mom.

It’s also a film about Detroit, the most bracing cinematic essay on that decaying industrial city since Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar. All dour grays and rusted browns, Hanson’s Detroit is a bombed-out collection of abandoned buildings, blighted neighborhoods, run-down trailer parks, and ramshackle pressing plants. It’s not a pretty place, but Hanson makes it a memorable one and conveys how such rough-edged music would emerge from such an environment.

8 Mile is also, of course, a film about race: Its title refers to a road that separates city from suburb, black from white. One tip-off to the film’s ambition occurs when Rabbit’s mom is seen painting her toenails while watching Imitation of Life — Douglas Sirk’s ’50s “passing” melodrama –on television. But, like both Blue Collar and Purple Rain, 8 Mile is a film about race that denies the subject’s importance. If Purple Rain posits an imaginary multicultural utopia in the middle of lily-white Minnesota, 8 Mile joins Blue Collar in embracing class, not race, as a source of solidarity.

And finally, right, it’s a film about Eminem, perhaps the most momentous talent American pop music has produced in the last 20 years. It isn’t a concert film —8 Mile parcels out Eminem’s rhyme skills in small doses. He and pal Future (Mekhi Phifer) riff on “Sweet Home Alabama” when Rabbit’s mom’s boyfriend is blaring it from the trailer. There are two impromptu battle scenes — one in a parking lot, the other during lunch break at the pressing plant –in which Eminem flashes his skills. But it’s all setup for the finale.

8 Mile is bracketed by an MC “battle” competition at a hip-hop club called The Shelter, and these scenes — more exciting with conflict than anything in Rocky, The Karate Kid, or Gladiator — may convey the thrill of hip hop at its purest better than anything else captured on film. There is a raw intimacy to these battles — MCs going head-to-head in a gray, graffiti-scarred club. Rabbit –an easy target due to his race — freezes up during the opening battle. But Eminem lets loose for the conclusion. The final battle ingeniously conveys one of the key facets of Eminem’s greatness as an artist — rather than obscuring his whiteness, he embraces it, and he may be the most self-deprecating rapper ever. Forced to take the mic first in his climactic battle with champion MC Papa Doc, Rabbit steals Papa Doc’s material by anticipating everything he’ll say about Rabbit and saying it for him. You’re right, Rabbit raps, I am white. Your crew did beat me up. You did steal my girlfriend. I do live in a trailer park. My friends are Uncle Toms and retards. And I’m still standing here in your face.

What hip-hop naysayers and highbrow snobs don’t understand is that, like all of the truly great rappers (and Eminem is indeed the only white person to belong on a very short list), only even more so, Eminem loves language — unexpected ideas, odd juxtapositions, complicated cadences, rhyme for rhyme’s sake. This concluding battle sequence — one of the most thrilling things you’ll see on the big screen all year — gets all this across. It alone will make 8 Mile an enduring cult classic for hip-hop fans. And it’ll win over any skeptic who gives it a chance. — Chris Herrington

A short, helpful biography: Frida Kahlo (pronounced KAH-low), one of the most prominent female visual artists of the 20th century, was born in Mexico in 1907. In 1925, Kahlo suffered an excruciating injury in a trolley accident — a metal handrail pierced her from her back through her pelvis. She spent a year recovering, mostly in a full body cast, and in the meantime learned to draw and paint — usually self-portraits from a mirror her parents installed above her bed so that she could make the most of her limited perspective. When she had healed, Frida sought the professional critique of Diego Rivera, renowned Communist and muralist. He loved her work and soon introduced her to the lively Mexican art scene and the livelier politics of his revolutionaries. Married not long after, they endured nearly 25 years and two marriages to each other, including fierce battles, countless affairs, and 32 operations for Frida, who had never fully recovered from her defining accident. She died in 1954 at age 47, having enjoyed only one exhibit of her work in her native Mexico. Primarily a self-portraitist known for her one long eyebrow and enigmatic, smileless expression, her paintings combine traditional folk imagery with icons of herself, often in various states of suffering and loss.

A short review: Frida is a tasteful and exciting illumination of the life and work of the prominent but oft-overlooked Kahlo, not only as an artist but also as the revolutionary she became under mentor/husband Rivera. Unlike other artsy biopics, Frida pushes farther than just aesthetics and explores with judicious detail the particulars of the ideas behind the art — the politics, the Communism, the pain, the dirt.

I compare Frida to two of the better artist filmographies from the last 10 years: What’s Love Got To Do With It and Pollock, about Tina Turner and Jackson Pollock, respectively. Watching the former, I longed for a deeper exploration of Turner’s conversion to Buddhism, which seemed so integral to her transformation from battered wife to solo titan. Similarly, I was captivated by Pollock‘s dual focus on the art and mental illness of its subject but left the film not understanding why his work was so significant. Frida manages to best both films in these respects by developing the range of Frida’s influence: that which inspired her and that which makes her inspiring. The result is a revealing panorama that integrates all of Kahlo’s passions — art, politics, family, Rivera — without scrimping on (almost) any of them or fearing the stigma of Kahlo’s leftist leanings or accomplished bisexuality. However, by covering all of the bases, Frida never stays with one subject for very long — least of all, Kahlo herself. Unified but episodic, the film avoids the depths of Kahlo’s sufferings as little more than exposition and overdevelops her relationship with Rivera (it’s really a movie about their marriage), depriving its star (Salma Hayek) of the kind of powerhouse Oscar-momentry that Angela Basset and Ed Harris were able to milk decisively from their respective icons.

Hayek spent 10 years fighting to get Frida made, beating out divas Jennifer Lopez and Madonna to this particular prize. She’s quite good here: dark and feisty, though not quite as dour as the Kahlo I remember from art-history class. Hayek, however, is overshadowed by Alfred Molina’s Rivera. A Dionysian firebrand, he finds just the right balance between his robust and confrontational politics and artistry and the great passion and respect with which he regarded his wife. In particular, Rivera’s expression of pride and deference at Kahlo’s exhibit — which she attended, against doctor’s orders, carried in on her bed — is quietly profound.

Director Julie Taymor, known principally for her reinventions of The Lion King as a Broadway musical and Shakespeare’s gory Titus as an art film, succeeds here by restraining her usually florid metaphor and scope and staying close to Kahlo’s spirit and style. Particularly fascinating are her brief, stylish fantasias that combine the duality of Kahlo’s personal angst with her creations — shown as mind-bending collisions between her tormented, imaginative life and that which lived on the canvas. By the end, the two worlds are indistinguishable — and indelible. — Bo List

Auto Focus begins in 1965 with the dawn of the “classic” TV sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. Meet family man Bob Crane: the picture of likability and easy charm and — as Colonel Robert Hogan — the star of the show. At an early press junket, a reporter asks Crane a few questions about the new show, concluding with something like “So if you liked World War II, you’ll love Hogan’s Heroes?” The reporter gets up to leave abruptly, and when Crane asks what’s wrong, the reporter, offended, answers, “I’m a Jew.” After this, the film never returns to the issue. See, Auto Focus is a film that wormishly exposes the secret sexual underbelly of an otherwise bland and innocuous television personality, but I think the real scandal is how any well-paid executive at a major television network (CBS) could think that a sitcom about wacky misadventures in a Nazi POW camp is a good idea. Why doesn’t somebody make a movie about that? It seems like the worst TV idea ever — with all due respect to My Mother the Car, Cop Rock, and The Geena Davis Show — and yet Hogan’s Heroes ran fairly successfully until 1971. Alas.

Auto Focus, however, isn’t about Hogan’s Heroes or Bob Crane’s career (good thing). It is a movie about a man’s descent and the friendship that precipitates the downward spiral of our — ahem — hero. Crane’s Mephistopheles is new buddy John Carpenter (played by Willem Dafoe and not to be confused with the horror director of the same name). A tech wizard, John knows all the latest in stereos and cameras. Crane, a photography buff, as it were, takes quickly to Carpenter, who seems to make a business of knowing just enough celebrities to keep ahead with his job at Sony and where all the hot strip clubs are. Before long, Crane is playing drums for strip shows by night, rehearsing and filming Hogan’s by day, and neglecting his family in between.

Meanwhile, Carpenter has introduced Crane to the joys of home movies, sexual conquests, and combinations of the two. A swinger is born, and the consequences catch up fast. Wife Anne (stately Rita Wilson) finds his collection of photos of him with other women and asks, “How many women are there?” The question is mostly irrelevant, really, and Crane probably couldn’t begin to guess anyway. Hogan’s Heroes is soon canceled, and Crane must make do with his limited talents and a growing reputation as an indiscreet Hollywood pervert (agent Lenny, played with excellent moral reserve by Ron Leibman, admonishes him on the set for showing his dirty photo album to — gasp! — Donna Reed!). His last big break, ironically the Disney family comedy Superdad, flops and by the time he’s touring the dinner-theater circuit and appearing on a has-been-celebrity cooking show, he is already emotionally bankrupt. All the while, his constant companion is John Carpenter, whose unflagging dedication is matched only by his unwavering libido.

There is an intended emotional hollowness to Auto Focus that somehow plays more disturbingly than other sexual-nightmare parables like Fatal Attraction or anything with Richard Gere. Crane’s unending conquests are so detached and passionless that one almost longs for the eroticism of a simple kiss. The film’s only true passion is in the relationship between Crane and Carpenter, alternating between macho camaraderie and homoerotic longing — by Carpenter. While reviewing footage of one evening’s festivities, Crane, panicked, catches a glimpse of Carpenter’s hand on his backside. “It’s an orgy!” Carpenter defends. Dafoe — intense as always — is sad and pitiable as the best friend who, unaware, wants just a little more.

Greg Kinnear, a deceptively complicated leading man with a superficial edge, is ideally cast as the compromised Crane: valueless, empty. His winning smile and vast charm are perfectly suited to the growing desperation of a man needing badly to be liked and wanted. Director Paul Schrader (American Gigolo, Affliction) traces his corruption with gritty elegance, gradually trading bright cheerful colors for dirtier tones and jerkier angles with each passing scene. Auto Focus, aptly titled to suggest Crane’s automated exploits and ambiguous moral focus, succeeds with understated brilliance in revealing the darker side of mediocre celebrity and unglamorous sex.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, the Adam Sandler vehicle the director has referred to (with some mixture of cheekiness

and honesty) as an “art-house Adam Sandler film,” is essentially a love story about a man who discovers a gimmick to obtain cheap

frequent-flyer miles and then finds a reason to use them.

The film was seemingly designed with its lead actor in mind: Anderson riffs on Sandler’s icon status, offering an

alternative reading of the emotionally erratic, autistic man-child character Sandler has cultivated in a series of successful lowbrow comedies.

But Anderson’s use of his star is even cleverer. While Sandler is certainly a willing and active participant in the character

transformation (revelation?), Anderson also seems to be using the actor’s own discomfort at being in a “serious” movie to the film’s advantage.

Sandler plays Barry Egan, the owner of a Los Angeles-based company that distributes novelty items. Emotionally unstable,

lonely, and hounded by seven subtly harpy-like sisters, Barry seems to require intense

concentration just to make it through a workday.

He calls phone-sex lines just to have someone to talk to, and he’s so borderline obsessive, he discovers a loophole in a Healthy

Choice promotion that will allow him to obtain a million frequent-flyer miles by buying only $3,000 worth of pudding (this part is based

on a true story), despite the fact that he doesn’t plan on doing any traveling. (“Airline miles is like a

currency these days,” he explains to business partner Lance.)

Those expecting a typical Sandler comedy are cued in from the beginning that this isn’t another

Happy Gilmore or Waterboy. Rather than the sitcom-like flatness and conventionality of all other Adam Sandler vehicles, we get a meticulously designed world

composed of protective corners of shadow and great swaths of natural light, extremely careful framing, and an equally purposeful

deployment of color. Punch-Drunk Love is also remarkable for its disarming interplay of silence and noise. (This film won’t win an Oscar for

sound editing — some military or sci-fi/fantasy epic will — but it deserves one.) And there are no opening credits whatsoever.

There is something of the silent comedian in Sandler’s terse, iconic (he wears a bright-blue suit throughout the film)

performance, but the film finds its tension precisely in Barry’s inarticulateness. Barry’s most common piece of dialogue is a limp “I don’t know,” and

he has a penchant for beginning negative statements with an acquiescing “yeah”: When one sister tries to set him up on a blind date,

Barry’s response is “Yeah I don’t do that.” (“You don’t do anything,” she huffs.) When the phone-sex operator calls back the next day

to demand more money, Barry responds, “Yeah I can’t afford that.” But Barry’s wet-blanket exterior hides a rage that frequently

explodes — often at himself, sometimes at others.

Barry’s situation is most fully revealed during an extraordinary party sequence in which Sandler conveys profound

discomfort amid Barry’s flux of sisters and their husbands and children. This sequence does for the aggressive verbal play of siblings what

John Cassavetes’ Husbands did for the nuclear family: exposes it as a source of overwhelming anxiety. Endlessly recounting a cruel

childhood game in which they would torture Barry by calling him “gay boy,” Barry’s sisters disguise menace behind playfulness, and Barry

snaps, smashing a series of glass doors. Barry later confesses to one brother-in-law, a doctor, “I don’t like myself sometimes. Can you help me?

I don’t know what’s wrong because I don’t know how other people are. I sometimes cry a lot for no reason,” then breaks down in tears.

In any other Sandler film, the sequence would be played for comedy (the brother-in-law is actually a dentist), but here the audience is

likely to be unsure of how to respond.

Into this life comes Emily Watson’s Lena. Watson is a very unconventional romantic lead with her old-fashioned,

Kewpie-doll look and further ties the film to an older era (as does a gratuitous but lovely iris-in to Lena’s and Barry’s clasped hands). Lena

pursues Barry and falls for him. Why this seemingly together woman embraces a mess like Barry is a mystery. Why does she pretend everything

is normal when an anxious Barry smashes up a men’s room and gets them kicked out of a restaurant during their first date? Why does

she laugh so generously at Barry’s nervous anecdote about a lame radio deejay he finds humor in? It could easily be said that Lena’s utter

lack of motivation is the film’s fatal flaw. (Is she some cousin to Watson’s unforgettable Bess in the problematic

Breaking the Waves, who gives of herself without question or hesitation?) But maybe Lena is

Punch-Drunk Love‘s rain of frogs. Odd things happen in P.T.

Anderson movies.

And though this is largely a two-person film, something must be said about the work of Anderson regulars Luis GuzmÝn

and Philip Seymour Hoffman: Are there two better supporting actors in film today? Hoffman is a brilliant scenery-chewer who is

great yet again as a Provo, Utah, sleazebag who owns the phone-sex operation that tries to extort Barry. And GuzmÝn’s Lance?

Does anyone do more with less than GuzmÝn? Anderson makes great, subtle use of this compulsively

watchable actor in a small role. Notice the way a scene in which Lena initially asks Barry out is played entirely through GuzmÝn’s chaste but suspicious glances.

Over the course of four films, Anderson has established himself as one of American cinema’s most dazzling and daring

young talents. Hard Eight was a debut that served notice. And

Boogie Nights, seen as a Pulp

Fiction derivative by some at the time, has

only deepened over the years. (Its greatest connection to

Pulp Fiction now is clearly the way both films are palpably giddy about the

possibilities of filmmaking.) But Anderson’s last film,

Magnolia, felt like an ending of sorts. With its Altmanesque cavalcade of characters

and intersecting plotlines, its courageous sincerity, and its Rubicon-crossing rain of frogs, it was operatic filmmaking at its most

impossibly grandiose. Where to go from there? Rather than raising the bar even higher, Anderson smartly withdraws from the precipice. Rather

than opera, Punch-Drunk Love is more of a chamber piece — brief, muted, revolving around a few characters.

Given the odd mix of expectations viewers are likely to bring to the film,

Punch-Drunk Love may take a while to sink in. I

was unsure about it upon first viewing, loved it

the second time. It’s a brave little film (under 90 minutes) with an extraordinary

performance from Sandler that is likely to be a career aberration, and it leaves so many images floating around in one’s mind:

Sandler tap-dancing in a grocery-store aisle; the surreal vision of Barry disappearing down an airport tunnel en route to his first flight;

the silhouetted embrace and kiss in front of a pastel burst of life outside a hotel window; Lena

embracing Barry as he mutters helplessly, “I don’t freak out very often, no matter what my sister says. I don’t freak out!”; and a contented final shot of Barry and Lena in harmony.

— Chris Herrington

We’re going to play a brief game that explains my disappointment in this week’s horror offering and reveals the limitations of my smug wit. Fill in the blank: GHOST SHI__. If you answered with a “P,” you have correctly named the new nautical schlockfest from junior-level production company Dark Castle (The House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts). If you answered with a “T,” you have correctly guessed the content of my review, were I allowed only two words.

Ghost Ship can boast a truly stylish opening: A romantic 1960s movie score and title font for the opening credits flash us back to ’62, aboard the Italian luxury liner Antonia Graza. We are in the ballroom, and happy, elegant couples dance dreamily to the torchy musical stylings of a gorgeous Italian songstress. A little girl looks on in boredom and loneliness. The captain approaches her and beckons her to dance. She does, and for a moment, we are deceived into thinking that all of this is very nice for the girl. Suddenly, all of the ballroom’s occupants, except the young girl, are dead, in the most gruesome and expedient mass-killing I have seen in recent film. The girl is, again, alone. That’s the first seven minutes or so, and considering that it opens a hokey movie like this, it’s terrific! Alas, the film plods on for a good 81 more minutes with (almost) nothing as good to show for it.

After the cool scene, we are introduced to a fairly typical band of likable misfits working on a salvage tugboat the kind of crew we are accustomed to seeing assembled for ensemble action or horror films like Predator, Armageddon, or The Abyss or movies closer to Ghost Ship‘s level of cheesy inadequacy, like 1980s aquatic equivalents Leviathan and Deep Star Six or the poor Deep Blue Sea. This movie is really Julianna Margulies’ big movie break, and she is the obligatory tough-as-nails female (Ö la Sigourney Weaver or Maria Conchita Alonso), while good actor Gabriel Byrne is the cap’n, doing some fine, grizzled work reminiscent of Robert Shaw and his shark story in Jaws. The team is approached by a naive young pilot named Ferriman (cue ominous music here), who has photos of a spooky, drifting vessel that, floating in international waters, could legally be a bonanza for the crew. Or it could be a … ghost ship! Is the team up for the task of hauling it in and splitting the goods? You bet!

What ensues is lots of looking through dank, rusted hallways. Lots of it. And after a while, you start to want to see someone killed to end the agony of yet more hallways. As promised in the film’s title, ghosts appear, in the forms of the little girl from the opening scene and then some not-so-nice spirits. The only interesting thing about these ghosts is figuring out which are naughty and which are nice. Why would a passenger load of 600, horribly murdered, come back to do harm to innocent scavengers? It takes a long time to figure this out, and the results lead one to question the motivations of at least one of the ghosts (really, only four ghosts have anything to do here a paltry number of apparitions, considering the budget). But who cares?

Ghost Ship has a lot of the flaws of other ham-fisted horror vehicles a mix of good and not-so-good actors and unanswered questions: They’re on a floating graveyard, at night. Where is that light coming from? Wouldn’t they be cold swimming in Alaskan waters? Shouldn’t the deaths of their best friends register in the following scene? And granted the sweetness of the first scene, nothing as visually interesting occurs afterward, except for a techno-scored reprise with lots of jerky Matrix-y camerawork and more deaths, a welcome reprieve from gloomy hallways and the lackluster deaths of our 2002 tugboat team. Stylish but stupid. I would steer clear of this bloated, beached nonsense and toward the genuine chills of The Ring. Bo List

A remake of a massively popular Japanese film of the same name, current box-office champ The Ring opens with a set piece similar to that of the Scream series. It’s a dark and stormy night in a big, mostly empty house. Two comely teenage girls sit in one girl’s bedroom and gossip. By the end of the night, one will be dead and one will be headed to the psychiatric ward. The actual setup is also in the vein of recent American teen-horror films: One girl tells an urban legend about a videotape — anyone who watches it gets a call saying they’ll die in seven days, which they do. The other girl gulps:”I saw it. Seven days ago.”

But this opening also cues the audience that this isn’t another one of those horror movies. The scene isn’t played for laughs –ironic or queasy — or for gore. It’s played for maximum creep effect. And it’s effective.

The dead girl’s aunt, Rachel (Naomi Watts), is an investigative reporter, and the girl’s mother asks her to try to determine why her daughter died (“Sixteen-year-old girls’ hearts don’t just stop. I’ve talked to three different doctors, and no one can tell me exactly why my daughter died”). Rachel soon hears talk of the videotape and discovers that the other kids who watched it with her niece also died, all at 10 p.m. the same night. Rachel tracks the tape down fairly easily (it is waiting to be found) and, without hesitation, watches it. Then she gets the call.

Creepy details pile up: Rachel’s grade school son Aidan has been drawing pictures of a dead girl at school, which Rachel takes to be a coping mechanism after the death of her beloved niece — except that he started making the drawings before her death. Photographic images of people who have seen the tape — including Rachel and her estranged boyfriend (and Aidan’s father) Noah (played by Martin Henderson), a video technician, to whom she shows the tape — are blurred.

The tape itself, which Noah derides as “very student-film,” is a catalog of perhaps subconsciously connected black-and-white images, sort of a cross between Un Chien Andalou and a Nine Inch Nails video but sufficiently skin-crawling. Technology wizard Noah somehow determines that it couldn’t have been made by any camera he’s aware of. (Something about an ID number encoded on videotapes.)

Having watched the tape and gotten the call, Rachel has seven days to unravel the mystery before her own demise, which gives the film its structure, and the details of the tape’s origin begin to emerge. What at first seems to be the result of some electronic transmission coming from the tape itself turns into something a little different, and Rachel’s sleuthing leads to an isolated island, an insane asylum, an old, dark house, a sordid family history, and other evocative ghost-story material. Along the way, the film fetishizes a few creepy images: a long ladder leading to a barn loft, an old well buried underneath a cabin, a lighthouse over a rocky beach.

The Ring is no great film. As recent horror films go, it’s neither as accomplished as The Sixth Sense nor as sui generis as The Blair Witch Project. It does have some of the skin-crawling atmospherics of the finest arty ’60s horror films — Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls, Repulsion. And it stays a step ahead of its many plot holes and implausibilities. It also comes with the now de rigueur twist ending, except this time, the device isn’t gratuitous. It’s necessary: a not-quite-happy ending that withholds reassurance and throws the fear back at the audience.

And if nothing else, The Ring is notable as the first film for Watts since her historic performance in Mulholland Drive. Watts (who’ll be filming 21 Grams in Memphis later this year) acquits herself wonderfully in what is a far less compelling role (will there ever be another role like Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn?), proving that her electric performance for David Lynch was no fluke and that she can carry more mainstream material on her own. — Chris Herrington

Igby Slocumb, title character of Igby Goes Down, is a rascal, as my grandmother would say. Equal parts charmer, thief, sycophant, whiz kid, and brat, Igby (Kieran Culkin) gets what he wants and he’s not afraid to starve on the street to prove that he’s cleverer than everyone around him. No proper school on the East Coast will have him (he’s been through most of them), and mother Mimi (Susan Sarandon) is at the end of her rope in her attempts to sophisticate and legitimize him, juggling Igby-wrangling with her feisty battle with breast cancer. Brother Oliver (Ryan Phillippe), an opportunistic Columbia frosh, is the model of vacant parental approval: successful, articulate, bland. Oliver could be Thurston Howell III’s long-lost grandson, with Igby as an unwelcome hindrance to his social calendar and Young Republican ladder-climbing.

There is something spooky about the Culkin family. I envision the following scenario: Walt Disney, in his twilight years, works feverishly on a mysterious fertility drug that will produce the perfect child actor. Disney leaves the drug safely hidden in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World but dies before he can create his race of tap-dancing, tinny-voiced, smiling miniature superkids. Enter Kit and Patricia Culkin, years later, happy newlyweds on their honeymoon, who stumble on the secret formula in between Epcot and Neverneverland. She drinks the formula and you know the rest.

The Culkins are a little hard to keep track of, but Kieran is the one who was in Father of the Bride, The Cider House Rules, and this past summer’s The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. Like Altar Boys, this is a skewed coming-of-age drama — not in the vein of Stand by Me or Empire of the Sun, by any means, but quite like Rushmore. We know that Igby is smarter than anyone else in the movie from the get-go. It’s not about smarts. The point of the journey lies in catching the heart up with the head. Igby grows up a little, hates his mother, encounters sex (and lots of it, with the sexy Amanda Peet and the smartly acrid Claire Danes) and drugs and adultery and corruption before his eventual return home. The first scene, a flash-forward, shows Igby and Oliver at Mimi’s bedside, putting a plastic bag over her head. Are they trying to kill her? The scene, quirky and amusingly troubled, cuts away to the beginnings of Igby’s adventures. One of the last scenes brings us back to this moment — now not so quirky, not so funny. Igby spends so much time avoiding and cursing his mother that we expect some intellectually giddy triumph from his chance to end her altogether. The film’s success lies in connecting these two dots, and Kieran plays the full circle with grown-up mischief and real-kid hurt.

This is a movie for literate audiences who enjoy smallish films with subtly quirky characters and no easy answers. The dramatic element of Igby is always coated with humor and dark wit. The comedy is laced with pain. The film’s violence, sexuality, and glimpses of mortality are usually accompanied by big laughs. The performances are finely tuned to this humor, with a cast of underrated comics that includes Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum (in a delightfully low-key turn as Igby’s patronizing godfather), and Bill Pullman as the schizophrenic Slocumb patriarch. In fact, the film’s tone is arguably set by Pullman. Each time we see him, in the present or in flashback, we are drawn further and further into the darkness of the film’s bitter wit, concluding with a bizarre and haunting bathroom scene between a teeth-brushing young Igby (played by younger brother Rory Culkin — see? there’s dozens of ’em) and his bloodied, showering father. Having only seen Pullman in the lowbrow Spaceballs, Independence Day, and Mr. Wrong, it’s nice to see some interesting, real acting from him. The film shares in his schizophrenia, and when the film comes full circle with Igby’s closure with numb brother Oliver, meanie Mom, and crazy Dad, we feel just as finished, just as strong as Igby. Not for the faint of heart or those who wonder about where their kids are. They’ll just worry more. — Bo List

Then I first read Tuck Everlasting, oh, about 20 years ago, I think I missed the point. A thoughtful children’s novel that meditates on the big issues of life and death, Tuck asks, Is life worth living forever? As a child unfamiliar with illness or dying, I was so afraid of the abstract concept of mortality that I couldn’t imagine not wanting to live forever. Watching the film version of Tuck as an adult in the 21st century (I don’t think the 1980s was the best decade for a young person to learn life lessons), I was able to look back and see that many of my perceptions about life and its beautiful “finity” had their genesis in my response to this book.

Winnie Foster (Gilmore Girl Alexis Bledel) is a proper turn-of-the-20th-century young lady with stern parents and a very conventional, corseted life. One day, while taking a forbidden walk in the nearby woods, she stumbles upon the mysterious Tuck family charming and strange, wise and static all at once. They have a secret they are willing to protect at any cost, but it’s love at first sight for Winnie and 17-year-old Jesse Tuck (Jonathan Jackson, brother of Dawson’s Creek-er Joshua), so they include Winnie in their lives and their secret: Jesse’s not 17. More like 104. The family and their horse drank from an enchanted spring some 87 years ago, ensuring eternal life for all of them. They keep to themselves to avoid suspicion from small-minded townsfolk who may wonder why they don’t age like the rest of them. Who wouldn’t kill for the secret? Enter Ben Kingsley as the mysterious Man in the Yellow Suit, who’s on to the Tucks and is searching for their secret spring. Things get tough for Winnie and the Tucks as their fountain of youth becomes endangered, and Winnie is faced with a choice: Life and love eternal with Jesse? Or nature’s course replete with illness, loss, and death?

Mostly faithful to the 1975 Natalie Babbitt novel, Tuck Everlasting is the welcome return of the good, old-fashioned Walt Disney family drama. Remember Old Yeller and Pollyanna and all of those wonderful “historical” films from your youth? And your parents’ youth? Tuck Everlasting fits snugly into the canon. Beautifully filmed, with a haunting and mystical Celtic score by William Ross, the film looks good, sounds good, and is handsomely acted by its Oscar-pedigreed cast members (and its not-so pedigreed cast members). William Hurt and Sissy Spacek are warm and honest as the everlasting Tucks. Hurt, in particular, makes the most of some obligatory nuggets of folksy wisdom like “Don’t be afraid of death. Be afraid of the unlived life.” Ben Kingsley excellently vilifies himself without the requisite period-melodrama ham that would have so tempted a Tim Curry or Geoffrey Rush. As Winnie’s parents, Amy Irving (Spacek’s surviving Carrie co-star) and Victor Garber (the sensitive ship-designer in Titanic and Daddy Warbucks in TV’s Annie) paint with shades of dour and strict in, surprisingly, three dimensions.

Leading lady Alexis Bledel makes a fine transition to the big screen. Subtle and passionate, she carries the film and its Big Ideas with believable youth and wonderment never showing too much scripted maturity or self-awareness. She discovers as we discover. And this is a challenge in a story that asks its audience (mostly pre-teen girls, I predict) to ask important, painful questions from a deceptively difficult children’s fantasy. Fortunately, Bledel is paired with the charismatic Jackson, whose portrait of eternal youth is aided by a striking beauty so pure and wholesome it would put shame to milk. At 104, I’m sure he still gets carded.

Purists will allege that the movie oversimplifies by emphasizing cheesy romance over the awe and splendor of Winnie’s coming-of-age amidst extraordinary, fantastical circumstances and that’s true. I say, Pooh pooh, purists. This is a gorgeous, well-acted film that young people should see.

When death is in every headline, how excellent that a film deals so sensitively and respectfully with an issue so difficult for children of any age to discuss, much less see. Bo List

A big hit at both the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, director Steven Shainberg’s Secretary is an erotic fairy tale, though not the kind you’re likely to find on Cinemax late at night. It’s a richly designed, luxuriously stylized tale of two people unhappy, self-mutilating Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal of Donnie Darko) and her complement, obsessive-compulsive lawyer E. Edward Grey (James Spader) who find contentment in a dominant/submissive relationship. In other words, it’s a love story, with nary a shred of ironic detachment.

Secretary is basically a two-person film. Other bit characters show up in Lee’s orbit: Stephen McHattie as her alcoholic, abusive father; Lesley Ann Warren as her overprotective mother; and Jeremy Davies (lending the film some second-hand kink through his work in the incest comedy Spanking the Monkey) as sad-sack suitor Peter. But Secretary is basically an elegant, tentative pas de deux between Gyllenhaal and Spader as they negotiate their way around the ineffable mysteries of desire, warily pursuing happiness in a sexual and emotional construct that flirts with taboo. If someone as transgressive as David Lynch had directed a romance as emotionally delicate as, say, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, Secretary might be the result.

Spader has traveled in this territory before, of course, most notably in David Cronenberg’s brilliant Crash, though the sexual subculture here is a lot more common and believable than that film’s world of car-crash fetishists. Spader’s performance is reserved his Edward a man (initially) ashamed of his desires even as he indulges in them. But however much the audience may want to recoil at Edward’s dominant place in this office power play, Spader imbues his character with a steadfast moral center by underplaying moments of startling generosity. Noticing the needles and iodine with which Lee secretly abuses herself after a particularly stressful call from Dad, Edward brings her into his office to confront her. “What’s going on with the sewing kit and the band-aids?” he asks. Then, when she demurs, he verbalizes her situation in a way that perhaps Lee has never really comprehended before, explaining that by cutting herself she brings the pain inside to the surface and finds comfort in watching the pain heal. “You will never, ever cut yourself again. That’s over,” Edward says. And Gyllenhaal’s mini-symphony of facial expression recognition, gratitude, emancipation is but one of many grace notes.

If you haven’t figured it out already, this is not Sweet Home Alabama. Many viewers may find the subject matter distasteful especially since the aforementioned relationship breakthrough leads to harder stuff, like a good, stiff spanking in response to a few (perhaps intentional) typos and some may want to judge the sexual lives of these characters. But Maggie Gyllenhaal won’t let that happen. Like Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, except in a far lighter manner (this is a very funny film), Gyllenhaal carries the film through its most precarious moments. The look of satisfaction Gyllenhaal gives Lee when she has a carrot in her mouth and a saddle on her back or when she’s crawling down the hall on all fours, a memo between her teeth, has nothing to do with sexual manipulation or titillation. It’s real and true and demands believability. Her confidence emboldened by her relationship with Edward, Gyllenhaal’s Lee comes off as something like a sexpot Janeane Garofalo brainy, charming, bringing deadpan flair to her vanilla lovemaking scene with Peter (“Did I hurt you?” Peter asks, worryingly. “No,” Lee sighs with languid disappointment) and screwball grace to a lovably silly laundromat courtship scene. This would be a star-making performance similar to Diane Keaton’s in Annie Hall if the movie itself weren’t too outré to find a vast audience (and these days, Annie Hall itself might be too outré to find a mainstream audience).

With two such great performances amid such daring material, there’s a lot of pressure on Shainberg to not let his actors and script down, and he doesn’t. He gives the initial meeting of Lee and Edward a striking fairy-tale quality, the raincoat-clad Lee entering Edward’s office like Little Red (or Blue, in this case) Riding Hood into the Wolf’s lair. And his thoughtful, judicious use of nudity (its late appearance used only as a symbol of a comfort Lee’s never had before) is a master stroke that establishes the film as anything but the prurient investigation of sexual taboo that some reactionaries are liable to brand it. n

Chris Herrington

He’s baaaaaaaack! Wait. This is a prequel. He’s heeeeeere! Hannibal Lecter, that is: the Julia Child of serial killers made famous in the Thomas Harris novels and particularly by the Oscar-winning performance of Anthony Hopkins in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. Hopkins’ Lecter is now a household synonym for creepiness, and his associations with fava beans and Chianti are now rather permanently affixed to those delicacies. Viewers will come to the theater with two major questions on their minds: Is Red Dragon better than last year’s Grand Guignol horror-fest Hannibal? Yes, it is. How about The Silence of the Lambs? Not quite. Silence (one of few scary movies to nab the Best Picture Oscar) was a masterpiece of slowly unraveling tension and discreetly horrific brutality. Hannibal, better than most people give it credit for, was still an unworthy sequel, overexposing its star, who, in Silence, achieved icon status with only a handful of scenes most of them behind thick Plexiglas. Red Dragon, thankfully, comes closer to the spirit of Silence, the first film. Er, second film. You see, first there was 1986’s Manhunter, based on the same story as Red Dragon, but with Brian Cox as the good doctor. Why the remake? Hopkins, of course.

We begin in the 1980s, at a Baltimore symphony concert. A flautist is mangling a delicate section of music, and we see Lecter wincing. We cut, then, to a magnificent dinner thrown by Lecter for the symphony board. In between compliments to the cook, they exchange snooty gossip about a missing musician. Good riddance, they suggest between bites (!), since he was so terrible. After the meal, Lecter is paid a visit by Will Graham (Edward Norton), an FBI agent with an uncommon ability to think like the very killers he hunts. The latest round of slayings is proving impossible to solve, and he has enlisted Lecter’s help in putting the clues together. Graham’s latest discovery: The killer is eating the victims! Who could it be? Within moments of Graham’s revelation, he has a knife in him quickly on his way to being the next course. But fast thinking frees him from Lecter’s clutches, and both men are critically wounded.

Years later, Graham is fixing boats in Florida. No more FBI for him. He has a wife (Mary-Louise Parker) and child and not a care in the world until former boss Jack Crawford stops by to tempt him back into one last case. There’s a killer out there who has targeted two families, brutally slaughtering them then placing fragments of mirrors in their eyes. What could this mean? Only Graham can crack this one, but he’s going to need some help: Lecter.

The formula here is mercifully closer to the Silence success: young, nervous FBI agent must stop one serial killer and relies on another to put the mystifying clues together. In Red Dragon, we get to take another long walk down the dungeon corridor to Lecter’s cell, get to chuckle at the flamboyantly uppity warden Dr. Chilton (the returning Anthony Heald), and go through the same cat-and-mouse games that Lecter will eventually orchestrate with one Clarice Starling in Silence. Like Starling, Graham looks at the clues but doesn’t see them. We do, however. Unlike Silence, we know much about the killer up front. He is sad loner Francis Dolarhyde sole resident of an abandoned nursing home and played by Ralph Fiennes. Between killings, he finds himself inadvertently courting a blind co-worker (Emily Watson), whose romantic advances play some havoc with his need to kill. This buys Graham some extra time in putting the pieces together, but the clock starts ticking faster when Graham’s own family becomes involved. You know the drill.

Fans of the franchise will like this third installment. While Silence relied chiefly on psychological suspense and Hannibal on beautifully composed gore, Red Dragon opts for a little more action. Suspenseful, yes, but revealing the particulars of Dolarhyde’s identity (including a Norman Bates-y grandmother obsession) lets a little air out of the tires. Fine performances from an almost campy Hopkins, Norton, and the terrifyingly over-the-top Fiennes, however, make this otherwise paint-by-numbers mystery worthy of the remake.

Okay, Memphis. I’m going to make a deal with you. I’m going to save you about $7.50 and roughly two hours of your time by steering you away from The Banger Sisters if you promise to put that money and time toward a ticket or to a rental of a better Chick Flick (see suggested titles below). Promise! A theme of my recent reviews has been the despairing dearth of good roles for women, having seen several grade-A, often Academy Award-winning actresses accepting grade-C roles in high-profile films. The Banger Sisters is a different monster altogether: The roles are great but the movie is so damn lousy that it’s impossible to care.

The Premise: Goldie Hawn (in extremely fine comic and touching form) and Susan Sarandon play Suzette and Vinnie, well-known rock-band uber-groupies in the ’60s nicknamed “The Banger Sisters” by Frank Zappa for their, ahem, sexual congress with varying Rock Gods and their roadies. It’s now 20 years since they’ve seen each other, and while Suzette is still living large in L.A. as a rock-club bartender, Vinnie (now the more dignified “Lavinia”) is the proper wife of a Phoenix lawyer/politico, with two spoiled daughters and a posh lifestyle. When Suzette is fired from her job (seems having Jim Morrison pass out while on top of you doesn’t have the clout it used to), she drives to Phoenix to find her old friend. Along the way, she picks up Harry (Geoffrey Rush), a nervous screenwriter on his way to Phoenix for a different kind of reunion: to shoot his father. The two are a proverbial odd couple: Suzette, the promiscuous party girl; Harry, a germophobic nerve-worm. The expected sparks fly between them.

When Suzette finally arrives in Phoenix, she encounters the unforeseeable and shocking reality that Vinnie is now a square. She’s an uptight, doting, enabling mother, and she wears beige all the time. Yet another odd couple! It’s as if the Vinnie that Suzette knew has amnesia and has been absorbed into a Martha Stewart catalog on Laura Bush’s coffee table. Meanwhile, both of Lavinia’s daughters are having problems: Hannah (Erika Christensen from Traffic) is drinking and doing drugs, and the younger Ginger (Sarandon’s real-life daughter Eva Amurri) fails her driving test and makes weird throat noises. Chaos! The rest of the movie is about the effect Suzette’s presence has on the family and how all Vinnie needs is to lighten up, and she will find herself again.

The Diagnosis: This movie is garbage. Well-intentioned garbage. By well-intentioned, I mean that it is a film with two interesting and promising characters for mature, attractive women in their 50s (Hawn is 56, Sarandon is 58, and both look terrific) that allows them to be unapologetically fun and sexy. But casting two great, funny ladies together isn’t enough. There’s just no script here, and things that are meant to be funny fall flat. Harry’s attempt to shoot his father, for instance. Ha ha. And it’s two bad movies in one: The Harry subplot is its own film and doesn’t complement the story of the two gals. Regardless, aside from having bratty daughters and a stiff husband, we never see why Lavinia’s new life as a society matron is SO bad. She seems fine. Not fun but fine, until she snaps. Suzette needs the help, in the form of AA, Sexaholics Anonymous, and whatever support groups exist for Women Who Have Slept With The Lizard King (surely there’s at least one). Her message of redemption through smoking pot and having promiscuous sex goes unchecked in the film, and that’s a problem. The rest of the movie is a slow montage of Lavinia lightening up and getting “real,” concluding with a poorly written high school graduation speech about being “true.” It’s all very insulting.

The Prescription: For a first-rate Susan Sarandon buddy film, rent Thelma & Louise or, to see her let her hair down, The Rocky Horror Picture Show or White Palace. For truly funny Goldie Hawn, try Protocol or The First Wives Club. You’ll get more “bang” for your buck. — Bo List

YOU CAN HAVE ROOTS AND wings, Mel. This is the thesis statement of the funnel cake of a film Sweet Home Alabama.

Mel is Melanie Carmichael (Reese Witherspoon), who has escaped her small-town Alabama upbringing and stumbled into a storybook fantasy life as an up-and-coming Manhattan fashion designer. Her new line of (unattractive) clothing is the breakout success of the season, and to top it all off, her boyfriend Andrew (Patrick Dempsey), an aspiring politician and the mayor s son, has rented out Tiffany s so he can propose to her and let her pick her own ring (swoon!). There s a hitch: Melanie is still married, technically, to childhood sweetheart Jake (Joshua Lucas), who never signed the divorce papers. After seven years without so much as a visit home, Melanie must go back to Pigeon Creek to finally end her marriage, obligatorily pass by her mom and dad s, and scoot back up to the Big City to marry Mr. Perfect and forget her roots forever.

But small-town hilarity ensues. Jake still won t sign the papers. And while, at first, it seems that he just wants to be obstinate about it, we soon come to realize that it s because, lo these seven years, he has been trying to figure out how to get his life together and become something worthy of Melanie and her big dreams. Melanie, incidentally, is culturally shell-shocked. Not only does Pigeon Creek have no ATM machines, there are women in their late 20s who have gasp! babies. This finally unravels Melanie, and in a spirited game of pool with Jake that gets ugly, she drunkenly tells it like it is to Jake and all of her old backward friends. Seems to her that they just don t know there s a whole world out there outside the confines of country music, Moon Pies, and homemade jams. She offends everybody, outs a closeted gay friend (wonderful Ethan Embry), then pukes in Jake s truck. Home, sweet home.

Meanwhile, Andrew arrives, unexpectedly, to see what the holdup is and stumbles into everything he s not supposed to see: Civil War reenactments, Melanie s folksy parents, and, worst of all, Jake, whom Melanie has never mentioned. The wedding s off! And then, suddenly it s on! Andrew quickly realizes he s been a jerk and that the best way to atone is a Big Fat Creek Wedding right there in Alabama. Will Jake be that guy at the wedding who says I do when the preacher asks if anybody has any objections? Will Melanie develop an appreciation for her upbringing and small-town values? Who will she choose? These are the pressing questions of Sweet Home Alabama.

You have seen this movie before with countless other titles and casts. Usually, it s very clear who the bride-to-be will choose in the end, and I ll give you a hint from this movie s poster slogan: Sometimes what you re looking for is right where you left it. The choice is at least very appealing: rich, political Andrew or Jake, who has that smile and those blue eyes (swoon!). I quote Charlie Brown: What a dilemma! Both actors are great. It s nice to see Patrick (Can t Buy Me Love) Dempsey back in a romantic role, and Josh Lucas is a handsome Matthew McConaughey for the 21st century.

The rest of the movie is disarming and fun, if slight. Pigeon Creek is a fantasy small town colorful and warm and full of obviously loving people. I anticipated some offensive redneck humor and stereotypes, but I found it to be relatively tame compared to how shallow and angry it made New Yorkers look especially the mayor played by Candice Bergen. Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place, as Melanie s parents, do a nice job being intelligent rubes with big hearts, and Jean Smart (from TV s Designing Women) has an all-too-small role as Jake s wise mother. Reese Witherspoon is a great comic beauty who does a good balancing act between the comedy of her return to Pigeon Creek and the drama of her big choice. And the film s theme, having roots and wings at the same time, is true and nicely played all the way to the music behind the ending credits. Now, guess which song is played. BL

HOW IS A METAPHOR LIKE A GOOD steak? Neither is enjoyable when overdone. If only someone had told that to Mostly Martha s director/screenwriter, Sandra Nettelbeck. If only.

The film follows the life of an incredibly anal, ill-tempered head chef, Martha (Martina Gedeck), who works in a small upscale restaurant in a quaint German town. After a tragic car accident, Martha is forced to raise her niece, 8-year-old Lina (Maxime Foerste), who is just as bullheaded as her aunt, complete with demonstrative scowl. Throughout the film, Martha announces Lina s likeness to the girl s father an Italian whose name Martha didn t know until her sister s death but apparently has no qualms about hunting down so Lina will stop all her damn whining. And although the youngster s arrival appears to be the solution to Martha s inability to eat the gourmet meals she cooks alone, Lina forces a stake through her aunt s heart by continually refusing to eat. Things get even more shaken up when Martha returns to the restaurant after her short leave of absence only to find Mario (Sergio Castellitto), an eccentric but wonderfully charming Italian chef, blasting Sinatra and running the show. Not only is he in charge, his fellow employees actually like him, which poses great danger to Martha s job security, since she is clearly a raging bitch to everyone within a 100-foot radius of the kitchen.

So here we have Martha, whose sexual frustration is practically audible when she starts making googly eyes at Mario halfway through the movie, and Lina, who desperately pines to be with her estranged Italian father, and Mario, the fun-loving Italian who happens to be the only person at whom Lina will crack a toothy grin.

The ending to this simple, romantic comedy is predictable. Where the film really falls to pieces is its heavy-handed approach to the well-trodden food-as-life idea: Martha as a lobster eating itself in a tank, Martha as a tough gnocchi that must be cooked by an experienced chef, Martha raising Lina as if trying to make a dish without a recipe, and so on. It s the same old ploy that s been around as long as, well, movies about food.

I think what really made me mad, though, was that this movie couldn t even deliver on the simplest task of a food movie: It didn t make me hungry. But maybe it just wasn t to my taste.

ALISON STOHR

Chronicling the music scene in Manchester, England, from the late ’70s through the early ’90s via the rise of Factory Records (home to Joy Division, New Order, and the Happy Mondays, among others) and its founder Tony Wilson, director Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People tosses the rule book with the same kind of gleeful anarchism that the punk scene it chronicles did.

The digital-video film frequently breaks the third wall by having characters speak directly to the audience, mixes documentary and fiction footage, uses a narrator who is outrageously unreliable, peppers scenes in which actors play real people with those same real people playing other roles, drops in lovably chintzy special effects, and gives birth to brief ad hoc music videos whenever a new band is introduced. It might be the only pop-music-based film I’ve ever seen in which I was more interested in form than content.

For the record, I’m a music fan for whom Joy Division has always equaled “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and not much else, for whom New Order is a band to be admired from afar, and for whom the Happy Mondays were dismissed from day one. Chances are most American viewers will be even less emotionally committed to this music, and while the film undoubtedly holds deeper interest for English audiences and Americans who dote on this particular scene, 24 Hour Party People is engaging enough to draw in pop fans not particularly interested in the glories of “Madchester.”

Winterbottom’s presentation of the Manchester scene’s creation myth is one of the most thrilling stretches of film this year. The site is a 1976 Sex Pistols concert, their first appearance in Manchester. Winterbottom mixes actual Super-8 footage of the show with filmed sequences of his actors in the audience, creating the effect of both streams of footage sharing the same film space. As Johnny Rotten lurches and leers across the stage, the film’s protagonist/narrator, local television reporter Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan), sits with his wife Lindsay (Shirley Henderson) in the bleak, mostly empty room and tells the audience that they are witnessing history. There are only 42 people at the show (“What difference does that make?” he later asks a colleague at the TV station. “How many people were at the Last Supper?”), but they will be “inspired” to “perform wondrous deeds.” Wilson points out members of the Buzzcocks, who were supposed to open the show but who had equipment issues, a group of young men in the back of the hall who would soon become Joy Division (and later New Order), and a rough-looking cat (Martin Hannett) who would go on to produce some of the scene’s best music.

Soon, Wilson is broadcasting punk music on his own regional television show and opening a rock club called the Factory, in part so that he and his friends can advertise a “factory opening,” thus reversing a local trend.

This first half of the film, which chronicles the creation of Factory Records and the early days of Joy Division, has great, gritty energy. Sean Harris is startling as Ian Curtis, the ill-fated lead singer of Joy Division. Performing onstage in an intense, coiled trance, Harris’ body explodes in angular spasms, giving the impression that he may have been his own rhythm section, his physical cues making him as much a bandleader as James Brown. Some of these scenes are engrossing even for those that aren’t huge Joy Division fans: a Factory Records stable live jam to “Louie, Louie” or the band crowding into a car with their manager and Wilson to drive around Manchester at night and listen to a tape of their just-recorded “She’s Lost Control.”

This section of the film ends rather abruptly with Curtis’ suicide, which isn’t dealt with in much detail at all. And soon, the film rockets into what Wilson tells the audience is its second act, which focuses on the “Manchester scene” of the early ’90s, where Wilson’s new club the Hacienda is, as he dubiously claims, where “everything came together: the music, the dancing, the drugs, the city it’s the birth of rave culture, the moment when even the white man starts dancing.”

The Hacienda scene is fueled by the trendy and short-lived sound of tepid white alt-funk like that of Wilson’s latest discovery, the hooliganish Happy Mondays, but even more so by Ecstasy, the clientele’s preference for which, at the exclusion of the club’s cash bar, leads to the Hacienda’s financial ruin.

“I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. I’m a minor character in my own story, which is about the music and the people who made it,” Wilson announces. But this is false modesty. Coogan’s Wilson, along with Winterbottom’s visual and conceptual playfulness, drives the film along. Wilson is a contradictory figure, both visionary and “twat.” He’s a Charles Foster Kane-style impresario of the vanguard, making sure Factory Records uses no contracts by dramatically drawing up a contract to this effect, in his own blood. At the same time, he’s too bourgeois to give up his job on local TV.

He’s pretentious yelling at a reporter who questions the Nazi-associated name “Joy Division,” “Haven’t you ever heard of semiotics?” and peppering his monologues at his new job as host of the British version of Wheel Of Fortune with historical and literary allusions (which the show’s producers then edit out before broadcast). He’s deluded comparing all of his artists, most ridiculously the Mondays’ Shaun Ryder, to Yeats. He’s prone to outrageous claims and blanket assertions “Jazz musicians enjoy themselves far more than the people listening to them.” And he’s a witty ringleader for the film’s chaotic madness: He flirts with Miss Britain by discussing his flirtation then explains to the audience that he was “postmodern before it was fashionable.”

Wilson’s demeanor that of a good-natured bullshitter who sincerely believes his own line and whose grand schemes are driven more by “an excess of civic pride” than by profit embodies the film’s punk spirit. The film’s pre-credit sequence shows TV-reporter Wilson on assignment to introduce viewers to the trendy new sport of hang gliding, Wilson pausing to alert the viewer to the “symbolism” of this introductory non sequitur, where he crashes into a hillside. “Think Icarus,” Wilson says, “and if you don’t know what that means, read more.”

But 24 Hour Party People abjures the traditional trajectory of stormy downfall and the finding of a new peace in favor of an ending more loose and friendly. When Factory Records comes to an end, Wilson explains to the corporation that has come to buy out the company that it has no contracts and no back catalog, that “I protected myself from the dilemma of selling out by having nothing to sell.” Then he goes up on the roof to have a drink with his friends, where he is visited by God, who tells him that he should have recorded the Smiths when he had the chance.

If the sneakily accomplished, devastatingly realized Israeli “comedy” Late Marriage is the third in an accidental trilogy of “ethnic” wedding films to grace local screens this year, it is most remarkable for its differences from the other two. If the word-of-mouth sensation My Big Fat Greek Wedding was a feel-good synthesis of the pressures of cultural tradition and a younger generation’s inherent need to break free from those pressures, then Late Marriage is a “feel bad” film about the failure to find the same kind of compatibility between those competing tensions. And where the Indian should-have-been-a-word-of-mouth-sensation Monsoon Wedding arrived at a grudgingly accepting view of arranged marriage, Late Marriage offers a fairly damning portrait of the practice.

Set amid a Tel Aviv community of emigrants from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia that writer/director Dover Kosashvili is himself from, Late Marriage centers on Zaza (Lior Loui Ashkenazi), a 31-year-old graduate student who, much to his parents’ chagrin, has not married, despite the fact that his parents have set up possibly hundreds of meetings with potential brides.

The film is tightly structured as a series of set pieces, with three primary parts and a coda. And individual scenes are frequently long takes filmed in static medium shots, giving the film a detached, analytical feel.

The film’s first section is a bit of a red herring, though one whose purpose becomes clear later on. Zaza is taken by his parents and another pair of older relatives to meet yet another prospective bride, a beautiful and strikingly self-possessed 17-year-old named Ilana (Aya Stenovits Laor). The girl is bored and droll and sharp-witted, and she and Zaza spar gently and make out absentmindedly while sent to her room to “get to know one another,” though it’s clear that neither Ilana nor Zaza is all that interested in the prospect of a marriage that his father and her uncle are discussing in the living room as if negotiating the purchase of a household appliance (“I’ll take her,” the father announces).

Most viewers are likely to assume that the film will be about the arranged courtship of Zaza and Ilana, but Ilana is never seen again. The scene merely gives a glimpse of the process that Zaza’s parents have been dragging him through for years and hints at their increasing weariness and concern that their son is so old yet has not done the honorable thing and taken an appropriate wife.

In the film’s next section, we find out why Zaza has been holding out: He’s in love with Judith (Ronit Elkabetz), a 34-year-old divorcée with a grade-school-aged daughter. Zaza has been with this woman for years but refuses to reveal the relationship to his parents, who he thinks would never accept his marrying a divorced older woman. Much of this middle third of the film is taken up by one uninterrupted bedroom scene between Judith and Zaza. Centered around a candid, earthy bout of lovemaking and bracketed by moments of pre- and postcoital conversation, this is a scene in which nothing yet everything happens. Played with thrilling naturalism by Ashkenazi and Elkabetz, the scene gives a sense of the deep familiarity and affection that exist between Zaza and Judith, of a relationship grounded in shared history and mutual interest. It contrasts sharply with both the disinterested dalliance between Zaza and Ilana and with the drab relationship that exists between Zaza’s parents, themselves products of an arranged marriage.

In the film’s third section, Zaza’s parents discover the illicit relationship, camping out — along with several other family members of their own generation — in the parking lot of Judith’s apartment building in hopes of exposing the couple. The set piece of this section is a horrifying, harrowing intervention scene in which Zaza’s (extended) family invades Judith’s apartment and terrorizes the couple, the brutal frankness and physical intimidation by Zaza’s parents coming as a shock even after their feelings have been made apparent.

Zaza refuses to stand up to his mother, never noticing a sense of respect she develops for Judith that may be a crack in her obstinacy. Judith, taking note of Zaza’s reaction, ends the relationship, despite Zaza’s willingness to continue the affair under the previous clandestine conditions. From there, the film flashes forward with a brief, bleak coda that seems to be an equal condemnation of Zaza’s family’s insistence on a “proper” arranged marriage and Zaza’s own refusal to confront and defy their wishes — with the sense of comfort and ease in the centerpiece scene between Zaza and Judith lingering, a throbbing pain of regret that haunts the powerfully awkward finale.

In Hebrew and Georgian with English subtitles.

On the surface, Barbershop is everything you might expect: hackneyed, slight, obvious. But it also is imbued with a generosity of spirit that lifts it above its cinematic station.

From the opening montage of black-and-white photographs (with the words “black-owned” printed on one storefront window that scrolls by without any special attention) to the closing-credits blare of the Staples Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” the film aches with nostalgia. The discourse at work here, which was also explored — more directly but also more as an aside — in John Sayles’ recent Sunshine State, is that the civil rights movement had an unintended effect: The racial integration and assimilation that victory brought also wreaked havoc with black self-sufficiency. With the bad old days and good old days beginning to blur, Barbershop looks back at a sense of community it perceives to be in peril.

Barbershop takes place over the course of a single day, and the film moves along two parallel tracks. One plot line concerns perpetual planner Calvin’s (hip-hop icon Ice Cube) sale of the South Side Chicago barbershop he inherited from his father to a local loan shark (Keith David in full-on Mack mode). But after envisioning the neighborhood institution his father spent 40 years developing turned into a barbershop-themed strip club, Calvin has second thoughts and tries to return the loan shark’s money only to find a demand of 100 percent interest.

The other plot line follows the inept attempts by a Laurel-and-Hardyish pair of local “thugs,” JD (Anthony Anderson, the round mound of rebound who once made perhaps the most unlikely athlete ever in the Saturday-morning hoops sitcom Hang Time) and Billy (Lahmard Tate), to open an ATM machine they stole the night before from an Indian-owned convenience store across the street from the barbershop.

These two narratives come together at the end in about as believable and rewarding a way as you could expect (not very) but are mostly distractions, and calculated ones at that, serving complementary functions: the former to give the film an air of redeeming seriousness, the latter to provide some broad slapstick. But the real core of the film, and the reason why anyone would want to see it, is what takes place between these two devices — the barbershop scenes.

If the filmmakers weren’t so constrained by the narrative necessity of commercial movie-making, they could have just filmed a two-hour movie of barbershop bonhomie (a subject dying for a good documentary) and been better off for it.

Calvin’s barbershop, as one character explains, is a cornerstone of the neighborhood, “our own country club.” It’s a place to hang out, discuss the issues of the day, hurl playful insults, and speak words otherwise left unsaid because, as the same character later explains, “ain’t nobody exempt in a barbershop.”

Director Tim Story and writer Mark Brown have assembled a colorful cast of characters and performers to people this very stage-y central location. Ice Cube, though great in previous roles (especially as the hollow-eyed Doughboy in the otherwise too after-school-specialish Boyz In the Hood and Chief Elgin in the Gulf War-themed Three Kings), plays the straight man, offering solid support to a group of flashier performers. Fellow hip-hop star Eve plays the shop’s only female cutter, Terri, a tough girl who is an object of infatuation for colleague Dinka (Leonard Howze), a gentle West African immigrant proud of a job he rightfully considers skilled craftsmanship. Dinka receives courtship advice from Ricky (the charismatic Michael Ealy), a two-time felon trying to go straight who trades barbs with the well-educated-and-making-sure-everyone-knows-it Jimmy James (Sean Patrick Thomas, with a less kind spin on the role he played in Save the Last Dance). Meanwhile, Jimmy James spends the day chastising the shop’s newest cutter, hip-hop-loving white boy Isaac Rosenberg (Troy Garity), whom he perceives as a poseur. Looking over the crew is longtime barber Eddie (The Original Kings Of Comedy‘s Cedric the Entertainer, with his graying hair implying at least 20 years on the actor’s actual age), who spends the day expounding on every subject that comes up, which is easy when you don’t have any customers but do have one longtime regular (“Checkers Fred”) who sits in the corner cheering you on all day.

Eddie is the focal point of these scenes, a likable old loudmouth who is prone to begin stories with “In my day ” and who worked his chair through all of the crucial city events of his generation –the riots in ’68, desegregation and busing in ’74, Walter Payton’s 275-yard game against the Vikings in ’77. Eddie begins one screed with the young-folks-baiting “Black people need to stop lying” then slaughters a series of sacred cows — Rodney King, O.J., Rosa Parks — before sending his co-workers into convulsions of outraged laughter with the ultimate dis: “Look, fuck Jesse Jackson. Jesse Randy, Tito, Action, all those Jacksons.”

Cedric the Entertainer’s Eddie is a blast when he lays back and eggs on his younger cohorts (“Knock his college ass out!” he yells when Ricky and Jimmy James nearly come to blows) or spouts malapropisms (“Welfare and affirmative action: Is that not respirations?” he asks during one serious discussion), but the film loses steam when Story and Brown force him to become the preachy voice of wisdom.

Barbershop is at its best when it doesn’t try so hard, when it allows the audience to slip into the daily rhythms of work and conversation at the shop: a debate over the crucial distinction between a “woman with a big ass” and a “big-ass woman”; a hand-scrawled cardboard sign that reads “No rap music before 10 a.m.,” the arrival of that hour marked by one cutter dropping an EPMD cassette into the stereo and blasting the classic single “You Gots To Chill”; a simple shaving lesson from Eddie that gets his younger colleagues to settle down and pay attention for a few minutes.

Barbershop‘s barbershop is a great place to hang out. If we have to put up with the film’s predictable plot trappings in order to do so, it’s well worth it.