Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon
Sports widows, here's a movie that directly addresses your plight with humor, compassion and understanding. See if you can relate: Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. But Boy also loves the Boston Red Sox. Whom does he love more?
Ben Wrightman (Fallon), a math teacher in Beantown, falls for Lindsey Meeks (Barrymore), a business consultant, but remains fanatical about attending BoSox baseball games. She keeps hoping he will figure out there's more to life than sports. "All those things you feel for that team, I feel them too," she says, "but for you."
An Americanized adaptation of Englishman Nick Hornby's autobiography about his ardor for soccer, Fever Pitch is directed with uncharacteristic restraint by brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly (There's Something About Mary). The film is uneven—there are draggy sections and cutesey-poo bits—but much of it is sweetly funny and there are moments of genuine honesty and wisdom about adult relationships. Barrymore coasts on her sympathetic charm in a role similar to ones she has played before. The puppyish Fallon proves irritating early on but grows on you, which may be the point.(PG-13)
ACTION
Matthew McConaughey, Penélope Cruz, Steve Zahn, William H. Macy
As in Botticelli's painting of Venus, McConaughey is first glimpsed rising near-naked from the sea, the sun glinting off the taut bronze muscles of his abdomen and the spray streaming from his hair. All that's missing is the giant clamshell. His showy entry is indicative of the wackiness, much of it unintentional, of this patchwork attempt at creating a brawny saga filled with romance, derring-do and intrigue.
In Sahara, McConaughey makes like Indiana Jones-lite as adventurer Dirk Pitt, a Navy SEAL turned marine salvage expert. He and faithful buddy Al Giordino (Zahn) are in Nigeria to recover sunken treasures. Pitt emerges from the sea, though, just in the nick of time to rescue a United Nations doctor in distress (Cruz). She is about to be murdered by sinister assassins hoping to prevent her from investigating a possible plague. The movie piles on several additional subplots, all serving as excuses to keep throwing Pitt and the good doctor together and jack up the danger quotient. Sahara even borrows a page from National Treasure, having Pitt obsessively searching for an ironclad Civil War-era boat that he theorizes wound up in Africa.
It's all pretty nonsensical, which would be fine and dandy if the proceedings were carried off with great panache. But, in the same way that McConaughey is a second-tier movie star—he looks like the real thing but lacks the magic—the plot and repartee seem recycled from better pictures and the performances are merely serviceable. Sahara is not dreadful—it simply doesn't make an impression any more solid than the sand that it's built on. (PG-13)
ANTHOLOGY
Robert Downey Jr., Alan Arkin, Gong Li, Chang Chen
Director Michelangelo Antonioni, now 92 and too frail to shoulder a full production, is at the heart of these three short films connected by the theme of love and sex. Hong Kong's Wong Kar Wai and America's Steven Soderbergh joined the project because of their affinity for the Italian master (L'Avventura)—although only Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love) actually shows a similar sensibility, one that makes a viewer as aware of the lovers' surroundings as the lovemaking itself: Walls, halls, entire landscapes are one vast bedroom. Antonioni's film, The Dangerous Thread of Things, is too tenuous to be described as anything more than a poetic fragment about a ménage in Tuscany. Soderbergh's Equilibrium is a dismissable comedy about an ad man (Downey) explicating an erotic dream while, behind his back, his psychiatrist (Arkin) plays Peeping Tom with binoculars. But Kar Wai's opener, The Hand, in which a fading courtesan (Li) never loses the dutiful love of her tailor (Chen), is a small classic of sexual ardor. It's like being seduced into a swoon. (R)
MARTIAL ARTS
Stephen Chow, Yuen Wah, Leung Siu Lung
CRITIC'S CHOICE
If Tom Cruise had Renée Zellweger from "Hello" in Jerry Maguire, then Kung Fu Hustle had me as soon as pinstripe-suited gangsters broke into a dance number. The Cantonese-language film about a would-be hood (Chow) who joins forces with some unlikely martial arts masters is full of similarly inventive, unexpected moments. Hong Kong-based director-writer-star Chow pays tribute to the formulaic 1970s kung fu pictures of his youth while taking the genre to places Bruce Lee never could have imagined. Hustle's violence is bone-crunching but stylized (choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, who did The Matrix) and well-tempered with laughs. (R)
Beauty Shop
Barbershop on estrogen. Queen Latifah is the genial center of a distaff spin-off. She opens a hair salon in Atlanta and must deal with fractious staff, needy customers and money woes. (PG-13)
Millions
Consider this an early Christmas gift. Director Danny Boyle, known for the accomplished downers Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, has crafted an irresistible heartwarmer about two young British brothers who, near the holiday season, recover a suitcase stuffed with cash after it seemingly falls from the sky. (PG)
Mondovino
Director Jonathan Nossiter examines globalization's effects on the wine industry. His documentary will fascinate fans of the grape. (PG-13)
Ocean's Twelve ($27.95)
Movie:
Going back for another round led to a sapless sequel for George Clooney, Brad Pitt and the nine other stars of 2001's effervescent Ocean's Eleven. The infectious high spirits and style that made the first caper so entertaining seem calculated and desperate here, though newcomer Catherine Zeta-Jones adds sparkle. (PG-13) Extras: A single paltry trailer.
Hotel Rwanda ($26.98)
Movie:
If the subject matter seemed too tough to sit through in a theater, try the DVD release of this inspiring true-life drama about Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who saved 1,200 refugees during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Don Cheadle is superb as Rusesabagina, showing a decent man doing the right thing when it counted. Extras: Director- writer Terry George and Rusesabagina himself provide insightful audio commentary, as does Cheadle on several of his scenes. Also, there's a featurette on Rusesabagina's recent emotional return to Rwanda and a fundraising appeal by Cheadle on behalf of Amnesty International. (PG-13)
Sideways ($29.98)
Movie:
Two old college buddies, fast approaching middle age, take a road trip through California's wine country, finding romance and a morsel of self-knowledge in a warmly human, bittersweet comedy by director-cowriter Alexander Payne (About Schmidt). Extras: Stars Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church amuse themselves (and us) with a jokey, self-deprecating commentary, revealing choice tidbits: The wine they were quaffing was often real; both suffered from food poisoning after filming a dinner scene. There are also a handful of funny deleted scenes. (R)
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Tom Gliatto.
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!
