Chow, making like a monarch, is the main reason to catch Anna and the King, a bloated (2 hours and 20 minutes), old-fashioned epic sporting a veneer of political correctness about cultural and economic differences. Arriving in Bangkok for her new job as a teacher to the King's children, English widow Anna Leonowens (Foster) snootily proclaims, "The ways of England are the ways of the world." But she soon comes to appreciate local customs as well as the local ruler. The mutual attraction between the two, though more clearly articulated here than in earlier versions (1946's Anna and the King of Siam with Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison; a 1956 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I, with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner; and last spring's dopey cartoon musical), still goes no further than a slow dance and a caress on a cheek.
Chow, the Hong Kong-born star who washed out last year in his first American movie, The Replacement Killers, exudes sly sexiness and charisma here, despite his unflattering, short-pants costumes. Playing Mongkut, the 19th-century emperor of Siam, Chow does for costar Foster what even Richard Gere couldn't do in 1993's Sommersby: He makes her convincingly hot and bothered.
The problem with Anna is that director Andrew Tennant (Ever After) never decides what kind of movie—other than big—he is making. Anna flits between tropical travelogue (with Malaysia subbing for Thailand), romantic drama, Thai history lesson and, late in the film, action-adventure yarn. Foster, sounding like Julie Andrews, portrays her character with snap, but even she cannot do much with sappy lines such as, "I lost one man to the jungle, I'm not about to let that happen again." This Anna has its moments, most of them belonging to Chow, but it is not a good sign when you leave the theater humming "Hello, Young Lovers"—and wishing you'd been home watching that King and I video yet again. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: It's Chow time, but Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes are sorely missed
Hank Azaria, Susan Sarandon, Emily Watson, Bill Murray, Joan Cusack
Featured attraction
In 1937, a federally funded theater troupe led by a young Orson Welles was rehearsing for the premiere of composer Marc Blitzstein's Cradle Will Rock, a musical about workers and the dispossessed rising up against the rich and powerful. When publicity-seeking conservative congressmen got wind of its subject matter, they shuttered the Broadway production just before its opening. In the grand showbiz tradition, the show managed to go on anyway.
In this ambitious, passionate film, director-writer Tim Robbins (Dead Man Walking) compellingly re-creates this vintage episode of theatrical tumult. Mixing real figures from the time (including Welles, producer John Houseman, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, business scion Nelson Rockefeller and artist Diego Rivera) with fictional ones, Robbins weaves a surprisingly dramatic and affecting, if drawn-out, story. From his large ensemble cast, there are especially bright bits by Cherry Jones as a sympathetic bureaucrat, Vanessa Redgrave as a society dowager and Murray as a ventriloquist.
The lesson Robbins hopes to impart, of course, is that government has no business interfering with the arts—then or now. Given recent controversies over public funding of the arts (including the brouhaha over the elephant-dung Madonna at the Brooklyn Museum of Art), Cradle couldn't be timelier.(R)
Bottom Line: This history lesson rocks
Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie
For anyone who has read E.B. White's wonderfully warm 1945 children's novel, Stuart Little, about an intrepid mouse who is a full-fledged member of the Little family, this slapsticky film will be a disappointment. For kids raised on repeated video viewings of Home Alone and Mouse Hunt, it will seem just swell.
Part of the whimsical appeal of White's book is that there is no explanation for how Mrs. Little came to give birth to a mouse. She just did, and everyone accepts Stuart. Here, there are laborious expository scenes in which the Littles (Davis and Laurie) adopt Stuart (digitally animated, with Michael J. Fox providing the voice) at an orphanage. Once home, Stuart goes from adventure to adventure (getting stuck in a washing machine, being menaced by cats)—resulting in a movie long on chases and short on charm. (PG)
Bottom Line: Misses by more than a whisker
Tobey Maguire, Michael Caine, Charlize Theron, Paul Rudd, Delroy Lindo
For some older stars, no longer having to carry a movie seems a palpable relief. So it is, one suspects, for Caine, 66, who in this absorbing coming-of-age drama gives a perfectly nuanced performance as a kindly 'doctor who attends to children in a Maine orphanage in the 1930s and '40s—and, on the side, performs illegal abortions for women in need.
The chore of shouldering Cider House, directed by Lasse Hallström (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and ably adapted for the screen by John Irving from his 1985 novel, falls to Maguire, who proves up to the task. He plays an orphan who, after apprenticing to Caine, sets out to see the world and, eventually, must decide whether he too will perform abortions. How he finds himself, and an answer, makes for a rewarding movie. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: Don't let this one get lost in the Christmas rush
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
