SEX AND THE CITY:
THE MOVIE [R]
review by Robert Nesti

Carrie Bradshaw (a.k.a. Sarah Jessica Parker) always looks pretty in pink, or in any color that costume designer Patricia Field serves up for the actress in Sex And The City: The Movie. She looks especially stunning in a wedding dress, designed by Vivienne Westwood, for a Vogue spread that’s given her for her own wedding because she looks so perfect in it. That fairy tale wedding to Mr. Big (Chris Noth turns out to be a nightmare when (plot disclosure) he jilts her and sends this movie in a downward spiral it never appears to recover from. The movie turns out to be more soapy than sexy: perhaps Sexless In The City would be a more apt title.

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I’m one girl who doesn’t idolize Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and her gross gang of grandmas, but when I saw Hanelle Culpepper’s short “Sex And The City” parody, Six And The City, I smiled. And I laughed. And I forwarded it to a whole bunch of people I knew. It features a young Carrie (Adair Tishler), blogging her young life on the playground in the city. Naturally, giantess Samantha (Channing Nichols) has the jump on the whole kissing-of-boys thing, and of course, there’s the prissy prude Miranda (Melia Lockwood), and tomboy Charlotte (Sierra Wingert). It’s brief and smart and the girls are all cute as can be, and for once, strangely enough, it’s not creepy seeing kids playing grownups (see Bugsy Malone for a great example of that). And if Culpepper’s spoof is too much estrogen richness for you to take, check out her antidote, How To Wait In Line For Star Wars. –Elizabeth Meyer

Click the poster on the right to view ‘Six And The City.’

THE STRANGERS [R]
review by Padraic Maroney

As children, we asked our parents to check the closet for monsters or look under the bed for anything scary. But once we grow up, we begin to realize that most of the fears we previously had were nothing to worry about and that our homes are one of the safest places. Few movies have successfully been able to breakdown that security wall reducing grown adults to be afraid to go home at night. That was before The Strangers came to town.

In an era filled with J-horror remakes making us think our televisions and cell phones are going to kill us and the so-called “torture porn” that eaves bloodied mutilated carcasses piled up, it’s interesting to see a simplistic horror movie throwback like this dropped in the height of summer. The Strangers has a plot seen plenty of times before – in films like Wait Until Dark, Straw Dogs and recently Funny Games – a couple leaves a party to head out to the country for a weekend, but upon reaching the country home, they are met and terrorized by masked strangers.

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SHORT CIRCUIT: SPECIAL EDITION [PG]

While the timing of this re-release of the minor 1986 comedy hit about a sentient robot named Johnny 5 may be suspect — a month before Pixar’s annual windfall, Wall-E (about a robot who looks suspiciously like Johnny 5) — it doesn’t diminish its appeal and staying power. The pic starred a pre-punchline Steve Guttenberg as Dr. Newton Crosby, an AI pioneer whose work is used by the military to create five prototype soldier robots. When he learns that one of his creations has become self-aware after being struck by lightning, he teams with animal lover Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy) and Crosby’s Indian assistant Ben Jabituya (Fisher Stevens) to protect its human rights. Hijinks ensue (and zany hijinks will ensue if the Weinsteins cast Ben Stiller for their planned 2010 remake).

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THEN SHE FOUND ME [R]

Everything goes wrong for April (Helen Hunt, who also directs) in the opening minutes of this movie: her husband Ben (Matthew Broderick) announces that he’s leaving her, then throws her work schedule into chaos by not appearing the following day at the school where they both teach.

Fretting to her sickly mother about her marital woes (April wants kids and she’s already hitting 40), she gets less in the way of a sympathetic ear than a dollop of practical advice: “So adopt!” snaps her mother. But April wants more: she wants the sense of deep connection between herself and a child of her own flesh.

Just as April is wondering what more can go awry, her adoptive mother dies; and finally, fate delivers the coup de grace which gives the movie its title: Then She Found Me.

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YOUNG@HEART [PG]

The first scene in director Stephen Walker’s documentary Young@Heart is of 92-year-old Eileen Hall belting out a rendition of punk pioneers The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” before an enraptured audience.

Hall is regal, with a face deeply lined and snow-white hair; as she opens wide to let the words loose, her tongue is visible, and it, too, is wrinkled. It’s a delectable image, and the perfect capsule summary for a movie about a chorus made up of senior citizens who tackle all sorts of musical genres; not just the big band stuff of the 1940s, or classical compositions, as you might imagine, but the hottest new acts like Coldplay, along with some that have attained modern classic status like The Police and The Talking Heads.

Their idea of vintage music is James Brown’s “I Feel Good,” and you can tell that despite oxygen tanks and bouts of major surgery, arthritis, and the loss of friends, these singers are feeling good, too.

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Local independent film fans jonesing for the return of Cinema 320 can check out the Frances Perkins Branch of the Worcester Public Library’s “Fourth Friday Films,” a rich assortment of some of the best unseen films from around the world. The line-up through August 2008 is as follows:

Friday, June 27 at 7:00 pm:
THE VIOLIN
Directed by Francisco Vargas; Drama; Mexico; In Spanish with English subtitles
Violinist Don Plutarco, his son Genaro and his grandson Lucio live a double life: on one hand they are musicians and humble farmers; on the other, they support the campesina peasant guerilla movement’s armed efforts against the oppressive government.

Friday, July 25 at 7:00 pm:
AUGUST THE FIRST
Directed by Lanre Olabisi; Drama; USA; In English
It is the morning of Tunde’s graduation party, and things have already begun to unravel. Unbeknownst to most, Tunde has orchestrated the return of his long estranged father, resurrecting unresolved family anguish against the backdrop of Tunde’s celebration.

Friday, August 22 at 7:00 pm:
NOISE
Directed by Matthew Saville; Drama; Australia; In English
This is a story about the wrong person in the right place at the wrong time. Two heinous crimes have left a suburban town reeling, and the local community enfolds itself in a shroud of secrecy, borne from fear and an untrammeled mistrust of authority.

The Frances Perkins Branch Library is located at 470 West Boylston St., Worcester, and can be reached by phone at (508) 799-1687.

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL [PG-13]

It’s the most anticipated film of the summer, and if you’re an Indiana Jones fan, you have much to celebrate. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a fun-loving romp through the 1950s for Indy and friends (old and new), with a delightful amount of historical references added for spice – from world history, from the annals of Indiana Jones, and from the directorial compendium of Steven Spielberg. As an entertainment vehicle, it’s the smartest film yet to grace the screens in 2008. And as a continuation of a series that’s captured the hearts of two generations over the last twenty-five odd years, it rocks.

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SON OF RAMBOW [PG-13]

Not that anyone really needed to fuse Tom Sawyer and Fight Club, but writer-director Garth Jennings did, and the result is a whole lot of warm and playful fun.

A throwback in the same way Be Kind Rewind was, the step back in time (to the 1980s) that is Son Of Rambow is completely natural, unlike recent forced nostalgia like Starter For 10 and The History Boys. The story centers on two unlikely British junior high school friends – the wildly imaginative Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and the mischievous and smiling-on-the-outside Lee Carter (Will Poulter) – who collaborate to remake the ’80s action staple, First Blood, with a home video camera and a whole lot of youthful resourcefulness.

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STRANGE WILDERNESS [R]

Some things are just better enjoyed while high (the state in which they were created). Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side Of The Moon.” Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly.” The Teletubbies. We suppose that the latest Adam Sandler-free comedy from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison is one of those things, like a Cheech & Chong movie or “Half-Baked” or “How High.” We use the word “suppose” because we watched it straight, and for a couple of reasons.

First, the studios are not in the practice of sending DVD’s with a giant bag of weed, though we can imagine what it would be like to be a critic in Amsterdam (heck, the “Harold & Kumar” premiere party would probably last three days). Second, have you ever tried to make a deadline while baked? Not happening. And if for some miraculous reason you were able to stop trying to decode the secrets of the universe in the design on an Oreo, the output would likely be about as coherent as Bill’s and Ted’s history report.

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