Michele Massa's blog

The Film:

After lingering in DVD obscurity for years, Anchor Bay finally brings John Hough's 1974 car chase drive-in classic Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry in grand style!

Peter Fonda (of Race With The Devil and Easy Rider) plays a race car driver named Larry who has seen better days. His career isn't what it used to be and maybe it's time he started looking at other options to pay the bills from here on out. Larry and his buddy/mechanic Deke (Adam Rourke of The Stuntman) decide that the best way to get rich quick and move on to greener pastures is to rob a grocery store and out run the police through California to financial freedom in Mexico! Unfortunately, Larry decides to sleep with a woman named Mary (Susan George of Straw Dogs and Enter The Ninja) the night before the robbery is to go off, and she decides for the two boys that she's going to be coming along on their adventure.

When the time comes for the old snatch and grab, the three of them pull of the plan reasonably easy, robbing the store (managed by Roddy McDowell of Planet Of The Apes!) by holding his family at gun point until he hands over the goods. They hit the road in their Dodge Charger, putting the pedal to the floor and gunning it south. What they don't take into account is that the cops who gives them chase, lead by Everett Franklin (Vic Morrow of Humanoids From The Deep), while use every trick in the book to stop them cold. Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry are going to have to drive fast and furiously through the back roads of Southern California to make it out, and they're also going to have to learn to survive life with one another along the way.

Plot wise and character wise, this film leaves a lot to be desired. The story isn't too far off from Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (at least the initial premise) and neither Larry nor Mary are really all that memorable as people. The romantic subplot panders to the audience and doesn't add much value to the film, and the humorous moments spread throughout the film are neither funny nor interesting.

So why bother?

The car chases, baby. The car chases. Made in the days before CGI ruined big screen stunt driving, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is chock full of fantastic chase scenes and car stunts that are sure to appease anyone into muscle cars and what they can do. Not only that, but the film also features a lot of great footage of the terrain where the entire thing goes down and plenty of action throughout. Yeah, Peter Fonda kind of sleep walks through it all and Susan George isn't any better than 'just okay' in her role but the sheer volume of high speed chases and jumps and stunts more than make up for it. The pacing is tight, the cinematography is handled very well, and there's a gratuitous 'Vic Morrow as the heavy' factor that can't be disputed.

It wouldn't be tough to argue that the film is hung on a very skeletal plot, but there's enough car chase action, explosions, and fantastic stunt work to make it easy to overlook the fact that we've seen this all before. None of this is original, none of this is high art, but all of this is entertaining. Turn off your brain and enjoy this one. It sure beats the pants of more modern fare like The Fast And The Furious or Italian Connection remakes.

A hidden, occasionally caustic, comedy in which a self-pitying, ABBA-worshipping, Aussie maiden looks seeing that love in all the falter places. Colorfully offbeat.

Technically I'm retired, but that needn't prohibition me from assigning grades
and making smooth-spoken remarks, need it…?
My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog):
B-

Might have been a solid 'B' had it been entirely subtitled rather than
largely dubbed, but it still seems like a project better suited to the
page than the screen — especially since the most compelling footage is
lifted from Les Blank's

Burden of Dreams

. I spent most of the
movie wishing I were watching that instead. (Seen on video for

Time
Out New York

review.)

Ghost Dog: The On the move of the
Samurai (Jim Jarmusch):
B

Like

The Limey

, a simultaneously playful
and somber exercise in genre deconstruction, in which heady atmosphere
and highfalutin' conceits are intended to disguise the material's basic
lack of remarkableness. I wound up preferring Jarmusch's effort slightly
to Soderbergh's, partly because I found Forest Whitaker far more
compelling than Terence Stamp (the latter is tied with Hilary Swank for
1999's Most Overrated Performance), partly because

Ghost Dog

, for
all of its pretensions, has a wonderfully sly sense of humor — you've
gotta like a movie in which The Way of the Samurai includes detailed
instructions on how a warrior can improve his complexion.

The Borough (La Ciudad) (David
Riker):
C

A minority opinion, if the sustained applause that erupted at my screening
is at all representative…but I stand by it, even as I acknowledge that
it seems a bit churlish to dismiss a movie made with such honorable
intentions. If you're automatically receptive to any tale of
socio-economic hardship, you may well be moved to tears; I found the whole
thing oppressively noble, its adagio-heavy score and
life-is-tough-for-the-downtrodden theme so pushy and didactic that I
half-expected Sally Struthers to step into the frame's foreground and ask
us to look into our hearts. (There were, in fact, people collecting
donations outside the Quad on opening night.) A critic blurbed on the
poster compares it to Italian neorealism; I hereby dare whoever it was to
watch it back-to-back with

Umberto D.

or

The Bicycle Thief

,
and then try to make the comparison again with a straight face.

The Cider House Rules (Lasse
Hallström):
B-

Haven't read the novel, but whatever might be special about it didn't
survive the translation: the plot is surprisingly pedestrian (for Irving,
anyway), and the fine cast (Tobey Maguire fast becoming a fave, though his
range still seems limited) is intermittently swamped in generic
sensitivity. Some nice moments here and there, but dead spots are more
numerous still, and structurally it's so damn neat'n'tidy that I
accurately predicted the movie's final scene, right down to the final line
of dialogue, about half an hour before it ended.

Bringing Out the Dead (Martin
Scorsese):
C+

(The following was written to a few friends way back in June, after
I'd seen a recruited-audience screening — hence the comparative
informality of my tone and the occasional cryptic personal asides. I plan
to see the finished film sometime in the next week or two, and if my
opinion substantially changes — which I think unlikely — I'll add
further comments in a separate entry.

)

Okay, BRINGING OUT THE DEAD. First of all, the print I saw was pretty
much complete, although there were a few effects shots that were clearly
not finished yet, and no end credits, and it obviously hadn't been timed.
Music all seems to be in place already. Opening titles are pretty cool,
as usual — fairly simple by Scorsese's standards, but still cool.

Plot summary, such as is possible, goes like so (skip to the next
paragraph if you don't want that much information): Nic Cage is an
ambulance driver who's haunted by the ghosts of the patients he couldn't
save, in particular the ghost of one teenaged girl named Rose, whose face
he sees on every passerby on the street. Early on he and partner John
Goodman pick up a middle-aged man who's had a heart attack; the man's
daughter turns out to be Patricia Arquette, with whom Cage forges a
tentative friendship as she continually returns to the hospital to check
on her dad, who's barely hanging on. Arquette is involved with some drug
dealers, and that plot strand leads to a gruesome climax that I'm not
prepared to spoil for anybody except to say that that's where most of the
unfinished effect shots take place. And then there are various subplots,
the most prominent of which involves a crazy homeless guy who keeps ending
up in the hospital tied to a gurney screaming for someone to give him a
cup of water (drinking water could allegedly kill him, according to one of
the doctors). Hard to say more, because narrative isn't this movie's
strong suit — one strike for me already, as those of you who know me well
know.

What worked for me was everything that had nothing to do with the main
storyline, i.e. all of the details about working for EMS. Typically
flamboyant direction by Marty and editing by Schoonmaker is aces. Best
thing in the movie is Ving Rhames, playing another EMS guy, who has an
over-the-top hilarious scene that I predict will do very well in the Best
Scene category in my annual survey. (Tom Sizemore, as a kinda evil-wacko
driver not unlike his character from STRANGE DAYS, I didn't care for so
much.) The movie is fundamentally pretty serious and somber — it was
written by Schrader, after all — but the supporting elements and
background detail are often borderline absurdist; try to imagine TAXI
DRIVER crossed with AFTER HOURS. I much preferred the absurdist stuff,
and (as usual) I was somewhat irritated by the constantly shifting tone
(cf. Imamura).

What didn't work for me was (a) the Cage-Arquette relationship, which
takes up an obscene percentage of the film's running time and is a
major-league snooze (cf. virtually every movie ever made starring two
actors who are involved in real life; makes me nervous about EYES WIDE
SHUT), and (b) the whole Schraderesque man-haunted-by-inner-demons thing,
which is unbelievably trite for one thing (wow, an ambulance driver
obsessed with the folks who died on his watch, whodathunkit?) and clashes
with the wonderfully absurdist tone of the rest of the movie for another.
There's a fair amount of voiceover that I'd guess was lifted directly from
the book, and while I usually don't mind the voiceover in Scorsese
pictures (it even worked for me in CASINO, which I loathed), here it seems
studied — closer to the labored, academic Willem Dafoe narration in
AFFLICTION than the sardonic Ray Liotta narration in GOODFELLAS. Cage is
at best okay, but still seems to be in sad-eyed CITY OF ANGELS mode a lot
of the time. Arquette sucks, as ever. Goodman is good old reliable
Goodman, but he's not given much to do. Rhames rules, playing a character
closer to Don King than Marcellus Wallace; he's having way too much
fun.

As Peace pointed out in his Usenet post, I didn't especially care for
CASINO or KUNDUN either (though I gave the latter a fairly respectable
B-), and both of those have many ardent fans. I'll be surprised if this
one does, though, except among those for whom Scorsese can do no wrong. I
should note for the record that everybody within earshot of me *hated* it.
I overheard numerous discussions while we were sitting around filling out
the survey cards, and the hostility in the room was palpable; people
resented having wasted two hours of their lives watching it. I think my
C+ was one of the more positive reactions. But keep in mind that I saw an
advance screening of FARGO and predicted that it'd be a huge critical and
commercial flop, so I obviously can't be trusted. In fact, my response to
DEAD is similar to my response to FARGO, now that I think about it: both
felt like two different movies inelegantly stitched together, and in both
cases I only liked only one of the two. So you FARGO/Scorsese fans are
definitely advised not to get too despondent. I'll be curious to see what
the other critics think come October.

(Turns out that the critical response was reasonably favorable, at
least here in New York; nobody got overly excited, but I saw a lot of
three-star reviews and grades in the B/B- range. People are willing to
cut Marty a lotta slack, I think)

The Story of Us (Rob Reiner):
C-

I know, you're wondering why I even bothered to see this. To be honest, I
was in the right mood for "relationship propaganda," as Leslie put it
(she was smart enough to stay away); unfortunately, it's so inept that by
the end I was rooting for Bruce and Michelle to get divorced, and for
their kids to be adopted by cannibalistic space aliens. And Eric Clapton
is lucky he used to be a genius; if he hadn't written "Sunshine of Your
Love" and "Layla," I'd want him consigned to a special room in Hell, one
in which the inane faux-Spanish ditty that recurs throughout this movie
plays on literally infinite repeat.

The clock struck thirteen. Tom (Way) snuck a slipper in the doorway of his uncle and aunt's apartment, scampered down the superb wooden staircase of the elderly blood and opened the backdoor which, he'd been told, led nowhere special. Gilded paintings materialise around the hallway, as he steps into the brilliant daylight of a vast Victorian surroundings garden. Helpless clandestine next morning, Tom challenges his aunt and uncle: 'What if someone were duplicitous to you about something they thought you shouldn't know about?' So the twerp thinks they're trying to snow him. It's a thin line between magical and ridiculous, and though this rose-tinted adaptation of Philippa Pearce's timeless fantasy has its heart in the propriety place, it plainly hasn't much of a head fitting for this equipment. It's no lawlessness that the protagonist is shed weight dull, but the film shows no more aptitude than the kid in the direction of making sagacity of the midnight timetrap.

Gleaners are people who live rotten fruit radical behind after a harvest, the discarded bread and dumped goods of others. Protected by a law passed by French King Henry IV in 1554, a handful gleaners are met by filmmaker Agnes Varda who travels across France documenting their means of survival. She finds them in every possible state of affairs, from the fields to the backstreets to the markets of towns. Varda reflects on her own life and carry out as she 'gleans' the cold material for this documentary. 

The result is a children's movie that adults can take kids to and come away
with more than the twin satisfactions of doing a good deed and knowing that
good deed is over with. To be sure, "Holes" is not like "The Wizard of Oz," a
children's film that adults might want to see on their own. But as kids' films
go, it's a thoughtful, superior piece of work, an entertaining picture that
youngsters can enjoy on first viewing and perhaps fully grow into as they get
a bit older.

It was directed by Andrew Davis, who has made too many good movies for it
to be a coincidence, mainly in the action or suspense category ("Under Siege,"
"The Fugitive"). "Holes" benefits from Davis' penchant for naturalism. He
allows for outlandish characterizations but keeps the movie real, not
permitting it to degenerate into silliness despite the inclusion of typical
kid-movie jokes about smelly feet and flatulence.

Based on the novel by Louis Sachar, and adapted by the author, "Holes"
takes place over the course of about 100 years, but its main story involves an
innocent boy, Stanley (Shia LaBeouf), who is sent to a peculiar reform school
in the desert. The school's manager, played by Jon Voight as a stiff-backed,
bowlegged

crank, explains the school's philosophy: "Take a bad boy, have him dig
holes all day in the hot sun — that turns him into a good boy!"

Hence the title. Every day, the boys go out and each digs a huge hole. The
feeling in the reform school is a little like "I am a fugitive from a chain
gang," only without the chains. One suspects, early on, that the harsh warden
(Sigourney Weaver) wants those holes dug for reasons besides misguided
altruism. Finding out what her motive might be is the journey of the movie.

The narrative cuts from the modern story to a story of the Old West, and
does so with particular deftness, juggling the time sequence even within the
flashbacks, and yet always maintaining complete clarity. While the modern
characters (at least the adults) are played in an exaggerated style, the Old
West tale is told straight, with Patricia Arquette as Kate, a schoolteacher
who gradually falls in love with a black man in the years not long after the
Civil War. When things end in disaster, Kate turns her rage at authority into
a second career as Kissin' Kate Barlow, a bandit famous for leaving a big lip
print on the heads of her victims.

Davis and Sachar gradually bring together the modern and the Old West story
lines in a way that's both inevitable and smooth. Along the way, they blend
concerns that are modern in nature (racism, prison reform) into settings that
are more classical than contemporary in atmosphere. Even the reform school
scenes don't feel strictly contemporary but rather as if they existed in some
kind of limbo outside time.

Ultimately, "Holes" conveys a mystical aura, a sense of history repeating
itself, of rights being wronged across time, of recurring themes in the
movements of people's lives, and of the importance of friendship, family,
loyalty and justice. It's in this aspect that "Holes" is truly satisfying.
Flatulence jokes aside, it's one of the few children's movies that kids and
parents can discuss and find little treasures beneath its surface.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

Directed by James Toback. (R. 105 minutes. At the Roxie Cinema.)

Writer-director James Toback ("Two Girls and a Guy") has entered that
enviable career stage where his movies are automatically interesting because
he made them. Like those of the best auteurs, his films are invitations to
wallow in a sensibility that's hard to resist.

But Toback isn't coasting. His latest, "Harvard Man" has everything you
could ever want from a Toback movie: lurid sex, shocking excess and an out-of-
nowhere thoughtfulness that's not put on; it's real. As early as "Fingers"
(1978), Toback was showing how the highest and lowest impulses could be raging
within a single individual. That same fascination is at work in "Harvard Man."

Adrian Grenier plays a young Harvard student with a complicated life. He's
a college basketball player whose cheerleader girlfriend (Sarah Michelle
Gellar) is the daughter of a Mafia boss. He is also a philosophy major having
an affair with his professor, played by Joey Lauren Adams.

Toback isn't afraid of talkie scenes. He is comfortable using a single
setup and letting the characters whip through pages of dialogue. Grenier and
Adams have a long bedroom scene in which she tries to warn the drug-friendly
youngster away from using LSD. "It's cyanide," she says.

But Toback never indulges himself at the audience's expense. He earns the
right to take his time, when needed, by crafting an overall story of genuine
tension — the Mafia girlfriend ropes our young hero into a plot to throw the
game. He also knows how to play with time with seeming ease, to juggle past
and present in the editing to illuminate both.

Grenier is a find, and "Harvard Man" should mark Gellar's entrance into
full-fledged adulthood, as far as her castability is concerned. Yet the
performer most worth noting is Adams, who would be an unlikely choice to play
a philosophy professor, except that she seems to understand every word she
says. Adams sparkles with quick-mindedness and verbal agility. This is a
worthy and underused talent.

Advisory: This film contains drug use and sexual situations.

– Mick LaSalle

'LOLA'

Romance. Starring Anouk Aimee. Directed and written by Jacques Demy. (Not
rated. 90 minutes. In French with English subtitles. At the Lumiere today
through April 18; at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael today through April
15.)

Soft and evanescent, lyrical but bittersweet, Jacques Demy's first film is
like a dream that one enters — and then recalls for years afterward with
absolute pleasure.

Filmed in 1961, "Lola" is an ode to yearning and enchantment — a valentine
to France, to beautiful women, to the foolish but delicious notions of romance
that we receive from Hollywood. Anouk Aimee ("A Man and a Woman") is heavenly
as Lola, a dance-hall girl in the port city of Nantes (Demy's hometown). Part
phantom and part voluptuary, Lola is the kind of woman who wants "always to be
alluring," who wiggles when she walks, who's fond of a drink, who likes to
primp and smoke and speak in a breathy voice.

As a young girl, Lola dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer but "got lost,"
she explains. Early in the story she runs into Roland (Marc Michel), an old
flame who becomes smitten all over again. Lola rebuffs him; she still pines
for Michel, the broad-shouldered Adonis who loved her and left her with a 7-
year-old son.

Demy shot "Lola" in black and white, dedicated it to filmmaker Max Ophuls
("The Earrings of Madame de . . .") and constructs an Ophuls-like daisy chain
of interconnecting chance encounters. Like Ophuls, he lets his camera glide
and swirl around his characters — as if he were embracing them and their
heady illusions. Demy died in 1990 and his widow, director Agnes Varda,
supervised the restoration of his exquisite, muted jewel of a film.

– Edward Guthmann

'FESTIVAL IN CANNES'

Drama. Starring Anouk Aimee, Greta Scacchi, Maximilian Schell and Ron
Silver. Directed by Henry Jaglom. (PG-13. 99 minutes. At the Embarcadero
Center Cinema.)

Henry Jaglom keeps making Henry Jaglom films, and they're always compelling,

sometimes in a car-wreck sort of way and sometimes in a truthful way that's
only his. "Festival in Cannes" is one of his better efforts — a wry and
sometime bitter movie about love, set against the wheeling and dealing
atmosphere of the world's most famous film festival.

Jaglom, like the French director Eric Rohmer, is in love with love. Unlike
Rohmer, Jaglom is a cynic. More artist than thinker, Jaglom says more than he
thinks he's saying in "Festival in Cannes," and that's all to the good. The
festival backdrop may be intended to lend enchantment to a tale of three
generations of lovers finding each other over a span of days. But under the
steady gaze of Jaglom's camera, Cannes looks like a worn beach town defaced by
movie billboards. Nothing of value will come of this festival — or of these
relationships. That's the cynical and refreshing message being communicated
here.

Anouk Aimee plays a French actress juggling two offers: a starring role in
an independent film from a first-time director (Greta Scacchi) and a small
role in a blockbuster being fronted by Ron Silver as a big-time Hollywood
sleaze. Through this false dichotomy — there's no reason the actress can't
accept both offers — the movie gives Aimee a chance to shine and illustrates
the difficulties actors face. Everyone flatters them; everyone wants to use
them.

Maximilian Schell is well cast as Aimee's ex-husband, a great director who
hasn't made a film in years. "It's so hard to make a film," he says.
"Sometimes I think it's enough to dream them."

The younger generation is represented by Jenny Gabrielle, as a novice who
comes to Cannes an unknown and overnight finds herself the talk of the
festival. It's a dream come true, but Jaglom is too honest to present the
upheaval in her life as anything other than emotionally disconcerting, the
kind of thing that would make any young person want to latch on to a new lover
just to hold on to something.

– Mick LaSalle

'HUMAN NATURE'

Comedy. Starring Patricia Arquette, Tim Robbins, Rhys Ifans and Miranda
Otto. Directed by Michael Gondry. (R. 96 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

"Human Nature" is a sly comedy that lives up to the promise of its title.
It explores the contest between civilization and brute impulse and does so
with a combination of screw-loose zaniness and intellectual rigor. The result
is a satisfying and original picture.

Patricia Arquette plays Lila, a young woman who, at puberty, started
growing fur all over her body. As an adult, in order to pass in society, she
spends a lot of time shaving herself — everywhere. Meanwhile, her boyfriend
Nathan, played by Tim Robbins at his uptight best, researches ways of teaching
civilization to mammals. He gets the ultimate chance to test his behavior
theories when he comes upon a man (Rhys Ifans) who was raised by apes. He
brings him to his laboratory and sets about teaching him to be an ascot-
wearing, wine-drinking lover of opera.

Written by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote "Being John Malkovich," "Human
Nature" is characterized by smart, quirky dialogue throughout, though the
funniest moments are sight gags involving the newly civilized ape man, who may
have the veneer of refinement but is clearly hanging by a thread. In one scene
he is taken to a restaurant and, in the midst of placing his order, leaps from
the table and starts rubbing against the waitress. The fact that he is wearing
an electric collar and knows he will be punished for this makes it all the
funnier.

The point of "Human Nature" is that, left to our own devices, all of us
would be as impulsive and animal-like. That would hardly be worth saying, but
the movie has a more subtle point — that civilization itself, far from being
an instrument of civility, is the most efficient tool through which people are
able to implement and get away with their most monumental acts of selfishness
and sensual gratification.

Advisory: This film contains nudity, sexual situations and strong language.

– Mick LaSalle

'FRAILTY'

Suspense. Starring Matthew McConaughey and Bill Paxton. Directed by Paxton.
(R. 100 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

In his directing debut, actor Bill Paxton has made a truly awful picture
instead of a merely vapid one. "Frailty," about a single father who thinks God
wants him to kill evildoers, is dumb but also unrelentingly dark and ugly,
thereby depriving the viewer of any camp value.

Daddy the Demon Slayer is played with maniacal fervor by Paxton, who could
have used a good director to rein him in. He apparently directed his fellow
actors, including Matthew McConaughey and granite-faced Powers Boothe, to look
as morose as possible while he filled in gaps with dark filters and ominous
music.

The script by Brent Hanley veers from silly and hackneyed to gruesome and
hackneyed. When McConaughey guesses that Boothe became an FBI agent after
Boothe's mother was murdered, the agent replies, "Have you thought about a
career in law enforcement? You really have a feel for it." He's serious.

McConaughey, as Paxton's grown-up son, has approached the FBI because he
believes his brother grew up to be a serial killer like Pops. In flashback, he
recalls how the dad enlisted the boys to lure people into his van, "Silence of
the Lambs" style.

"Frailty" focuses on the kids' trauma to an unseemly degree. The boys
witness numerous killings, and one is nearly starved to death by the dad. The
movie enumerates the horrors these kids experience without a glimmer of hope
that they might emerge OK. Matt O'Leary, the abused kid in "Domestic
Disturbance," had it easy in that picture compared with what he endures here.

Director Paxton bludgeons where he could finesse. When the father pulls the
shade down before the umpteenth ax slaying, you think you'll be spared the
carnage. No dice. The whack happens off-camera but the blood spurts into the
frame.

Visual cliches run rampant. Fog shrouds the public garden where the bodies
are buried. Shadows from the partition in a cop car play on McConaughey's face.

You can say one thing for novice director Paxton, though: The scene of a
miniature angel descending through a carburetor is a true original.

Advisory: This film contains violence and raw language.

– Carla Meyer

'BORSTAL BOY'

Drama. Starring Shawn Hatosy, Danny Dyer and Michael York. Directed by
Peter Sheridan. (Not rated. 91 minutes. At the Opera Plaza.)

"Borstal Boy," about the early life of Irish playwright Brendan Behan, is a
sincere piece of work with good performances and some illuminating moments.
But it's dragged down by a slow pace, an intrinsic lack of dramatic tension
and a somewhat naive treatment of the subject. The result is a film that will
probably please people already fascinated by Behan but leave everyone else
yawning with admiration.

The picture, based on Behan's memoirs, begins with young Brendan (Shawn
Hatosy) as a 16-year-old IRA zealot who is captured by British officials
before he can follow through on a plan to blow up something in Liverpool. He
is sent to a British borstal — a kind of reform school — which turns out to
be the best thing that ever happened to him. Run by a sweet-natured warden
(Michael York), the place is more like a boy's camp than a prison.

Some scenes have a casual truth about them that feels right. At night,
chilling newsreels of the Battle of Britain are shown on a movie screen, but
the boys barely react — they just clown around and talk, waiting for the
feature to start. The growing friendship between Brendan and a young gay
sailor (Danny Dyer), treated with sensitivity and detail, becomes the center
of the film.

Yet something in the film's handling of Behan's emerging homosexuality
feels a little too politically correct — too accepted, too cozy and too easy.
For a macho Irish kid in 1940, there had to be some inner conflict. Or if the
conflict wasn't there, where was it? Somewhere, for sure. Behan went on to
drink himself to death in his early 40s. Yet there's no hint here of anything
clouding this young man's psyche. It might be admirable that writer and co-
director Peter Sheridan avoids cheap theatrics, but no one should be
congratulated in avoiding all theatrics. That's just denying the dictates of
the medium.

Advisory: This film contains strong language, violence and some sexuality.

– Mick LaSalle

'THE OTHER SIDE OF HEAVEN'

Drama. Starring Christopher Gorham and Anne Hathaway. Directed and written
by Mitch Davis. (PG. 113 minutes. At the Galaxy.)

In the 1950s, John Groberg left his hometown of Idaho Falls and went
halfway across the world to the Kingdom of Tonga, a South Pacific archipelago
where he was sent as a missionary by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints.

Groberg was 19 when he left his home and spent the first months on Tonga
struggling with language barriers, hurricanes, mosquitoes and the islanders'
suspicions. His 1993 memoir, "In the Eye of the Storm," has been adapted as
"The Other Side of Heaven," a film that recaptures his early adventures and
uses them as an example of the benefits of missionary work.

"The Other Side of Heaven," made without church sponsorship, is handsome
and sincere but slightly awkward in its combination of entertainment and
evangelical boosterism. Directed and written by Mitch Davis, it focuses
primarily on Groberg's cultural adjustments on the island of Niuatoputapu but
slips occasionally into sermonettes extolling the virtues of Christian service.

Christopher Gorham, who looks a bit like the young Tom Hanks, is appealing
as Groberg. Arriving at the island where he will live for three years, Groberg
cuts an odd profile in his suit and narrow tie, surrounded by skeptical island
men in grass skirts and women who titter that he looks "whiter than soap."

Groberg learned Tongan by reading the Scriptures, but for some reason the
islanders, played mostly by New Zealand actors, speak English once he has
learned Tongan. The South Pacific photography by Brian Breheny is very strong -
- the film was shot in the Cook Islands — and Anne Hathaway ("The Princess
Diaries") is lovely as the girlfriend Groberg leaves behind.

– Edward Guthmann

'SON OF THE BRIDE'

Drama. Starring Ricardo Darin, Hector Alterio and Norma Aleandro. Directed
by Juan Jose Campanella. Written by Campanella and Fernando Castets. (Rated R.
124 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. At the Lumiere.)

In Buenos Aires, a workaholic restaurant owner neglects his daughter and
mother and hasn't time for his girlfriend. "Your life's like a marathon," a
potential buyer observes. "You remind me of a juggler spinning plates."

Rafael, the lead character in "Son of the Bride," is one more manifestation
of a cinematic cliche: the pent-up, cell-phone-addicted businessman who has to
hit the wall before he can smell the roses. Juan Jose Campanella directs with
such care and affection, however, and Ricardo Darin plays the lead character
and his transitions so gracefully that it all goes down quite easily.

Nominated for an Oscar as best foreign-language drama — it lost to "No
Man's Land" — "Son of the Bride" finds Rafael suffering from tax pressures,
reduced profit margin and a financial climate that allows chains to buy at
wholesale but penalizes mom-and-pop businessess. All that madness has made him
a monster, but after a mild heart attack and extended hospital stay he's a
changed man — and wants off the fast track.

"Son of the Bride" manages to be affectionate without drawing too deeply
from a well of sugar and schmaltz. After Rafael's breakthrough, his dad
(Hector Alterio) announces that he wants to remarry his mother in a church
wedding. There's dubious virtue in turning the Alzheimer's-stricken mom (Norma
Aleandro) into a spunky, slightly raunchy woman-child, but Campanella, whose
own parents remarried late in life, finds the right tone and creates a very
sweet moment with the elders' wedding.

Advisory: This film contains raw language and sexual situations.

– Edward Guthmann