November 13, 2002

film

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Meryl Cohen, David Fear, Dina Gachman, Susan Gerhard, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Patrick Macias, and Chuck Stephens. See Rep Clock, page 98, and Movie Clock, page 99, for theater information.

Film Arts Festival

The 18th Annual Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema runs Nov 13-17. Venues are the Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, S.F.; Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley, Berk; and the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F. For tickets, call (415) 552-FILM or go to www.filmarts.org. For commentary, see "Chockadoc," page 43. All times p.m. unless otherwise indicated.

Wed/13

Brava A Dream in Hanoi with "Indiana Aria" 7.

Thurs/14

Brava Unlocking The Heart of Adoption 6. Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story with "Mixed Feelings" 8. "New Storytellers" (shorts program) 9:30.

Fri/15

Brava Downside Up 6. "America Re/Visioned" (shorts program) 7:30. "ManHandled" (shorts program) 9:30. Love Will Travel 11.

Sat/16

Brava "Kid's Animation Mini-Festival" (shorts program) 11a. "From Your Seat to the Street" (free panel discussion) 1. "In The Flickerflash" (shorts program) 3. Trailer Park Blues with "Tzipa And Volf" 5. Yank Tanks with "Thirteen" and "Taxi Driver" 7. Security 9. Scumrock 11:00.

Wheeler Livermore with "Edmund's Island" 6. Radical Harmonies 8.

Sun/17
Castro A Place Named Destiny 11a. Dylan's Run 1. Heart of the Sea with "Subways: 5 Variations on a Theme by Rilke" 3. "First Person Female (shorts program)" 5:30. The Weather Underground with "Sing Along San Francisco" 7:30.

Latino Film Festival

The sixth annual Latino Film Festival runs through Sun/17. Local venue this week is the Fine Arts Cinema, 2451 Shattuck, Berk. For a complete schedule, including information on screenings in San Jose, go to www.latinofilmfestival.org; for tickets go to www.ticketweb.com or call 1-866-468-3399. For commentary, see the Oct. 30 issue of the Bay Guardian. All times p.m.

Fri/15

Honey for Oshún 6. Brave New Land 8:30.

Sat/16

Dare to Dream 1. Jewish Latin America: Argentina Memories and Terror 3:15. The Back of the World 4:45. Streeters 6:15. If I Saw You, I Wouldn't Remember 8:45.

Sun/17

Back and Forth 2. Sweet Repose 4:15. Aliens to Themselves 6:15. Pellet 8.

Opening

All About Lily Chou Chou What a fantastic year it's been in Japanese cinema, what with inspired and inspiring new films and filmmakers seemingly being discovered every other week. Shunji Iwai, however, is not one of them – he's been making treacly, incomprehensible TV shows, rock videos, and (film festival-unwelcome) feature films for more than a decade now. Breaking no new ground, his new but predictably turgid teensploitation monolith concerns an assortment of fans drawn to a Web site devoted to the film's titular, mythologized rock chanteuse. A blame-the-victim study of high school simps, bullies, and rapists, this directionless mess is meant to appeal to ... whom? (2:26) Galaxy. (Stephens)

*A Dream in Hanoi See "Chockadoc," page 43. (1:31) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

*Far from Heaven See "Magnificent Obsession," page 41. (1:47) California, Clay, Shattuck.

Half Past Dead Seagal! Ja Rule! Alcatraz! Guns! Explosions! Martial arts! Hellz yeah. (1:39)

*Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Happily free from the burden of exposition (see last year's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which spent way too much time grappling with that tiresome-but-necessary task) Chamber of Secrets, again directed by Chris Columbus, is a fast-paced adventure from start to finish. Young wizards Harry, Ron, and Hermione (Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, all spot-on) make like Hogwarts' own Bloodhound Gang, using smarts and spells to unravel a mystery so dangerous it's even got the school's unflappable teaching staff (including Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, and the late Richard Harris) on edge. New faces in Chamber of Secrets include Jason Isaacs as the sinister Lucius Malfoy and the particularly hilarious Kenneth Branagh as the smug, self-obsessed Professor Lockhart. A few scary scenes (including one involving giant, hungry spiders) may make younger kids a little nervous, but the film's magical elements, in the forms of a flying car, a hair-raising Quidditch match, chatty ghosts, screaming letters, clumsy owls, and much more – not to mention an underlying message about friendship and loyalty – are what lingers after the lights come up. (2:41) Century Plaza, Century 20, Empire, Grand Lake, Jack London, Orinda. (Eddy)

*Last Dance See Critic's Choice. (1:24) Roxie.

Reunion Also known simply as "Dogme #17," Reunion is a kind of Big Chill for the 21st Century. The film follows a group of high school friends who come together for a 20-year reunion and discover none of their lives have turned out as planned. Divine retribution rules the day as the onetime ugly duckling (Jennifer Rubin), now a successful beauty, gets some heavy petting at an old make-out spot with the former Mr. Popular (Billy Wirth). While Reunion's nostalgic tone crosses the line from sentimental "We're all grown up now" to self-indulgent "Isn't being a grown up hard?" one too many times, director Leif Tilden (who once sported a tortoise shell and headband as Donatello, the Corey Feldman-voiced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle) takes charge of the handheld cam and his small-town location with an easy, no-frills style, creating the kind of back-to-basics film the Dogme creed demands. (1:30) Galaxy. (Sabrina Crawford)

*Standing in the Shadows of Motown See Movie Clock. (1:48) Embarcadero, Shattuck.

Ongoing

*Alias Betty A novelist (Sandrine Kiberlain) living in Paris finds her life grinding to a halt after tragically losing a son. Her mother (Nicole Garcia), a self-centered and clinically insane woman with a rocky history of parenting (she once tried to kill her daughter in a fit of psychosis), decides to kidnap a little boy and give him to her offspring to dull the pain. What's worse is that the child's mother, an abusive waitress (Mathilde Seigner) whose biggest aspiration is to whore for local gangsters, doesn't seem to care much when the media cameras are gone. While one could technically bill Betty as a thriller, veteran French director Claude Miller (The Accompanist) owes more to low-key nail-biters like Laurent Cautet's Time Out than to the Hitchcock-homage school of suspense. Fueled by ironies (real ones, not the self-referential in-jokes that often pass for it) and the discreet shards of the bourgeoisie's shattered psyches, this adaptation of mystery writer Ruth Rendell's novel The Tree of Hands builds a toxic head of steam off quiet desperation without ever breaking its smooth-as-glass surface. (1:41) Rafael. (Fear)

Auto Focus 'I always wanted to make an impression," a jaunty Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) confides early in Auto Focus, Paul Schrader's biopic about the Hogan's Heroes star. Twenty-four years after his death, it has become clear that Crane's showbiz career made far less of an impression on the public than his still-unsolved brutal murder, which has in turn been eclipsed by his well-documented, rather spectacular appetite for sex and amateur pornography. Though Crane goes through two troubled marriages in the film, his relationship with AV expert John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) is portrayed as the most meaningful. The pals share equally proportioned libidos in overdrive – their motto is "A day without sex is a day wasted!" – as well as a passion for the latest video technology. Both Kinnear and Dafoe have some nice moments, but the film's structure is too tidy to feel like it's telling a true story. Crane's life is boiled down to a cut-and-dried tale of a good man corrupted by Hollywood, fame, and the machinations of his leechlike best friend, and the film ultimately offers no insight into Crane's eventually life-wrecking obsession with having sex and documenting his conquests. (1:47) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

*Bloody Sunday It started out as a "peaceful march against internment;" it ended up with thirteen dead and turned a town in Northern Ireland into ground zero for "the Troubles." That early morning massacre in Derry on January 30, 1972, has been memorialized in books and song, but it's filmmaker Paul Greengrass's gut-wrenching recreation of the day of infamy that truly captures the sheer horror of the tragedy. Focusing on the events leading up to the shooting of Irish demonstrators and its aftermath, Bloody Sunday incorporates the viewpoints of MP-activist Ivan Cooper (James Nesbitt), nervous soldiers, one of the victims, and several British army commanding officers to present a multi-sided, fragmented perspective. The film's gritty you-are-there verite camera work begs comparisons to The Battle of Algiers, but it's the sequential fade-outs that reduce everything to elements of a nightmarish waking dream, bypassing sensationalism and sentimentality for a dread-filled march towards the inevitability of history. (1:40) Four Star. (Fear)

*Bowling for Columbine In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore attempts to find out why, exactly, America is so very homicidal. What's so powerful about the film, a truly intelligent departure from the somber stranglehold of the Sept. 11 era on the topic of What's Wrong with America, is what's so powerful about all of Moore's films: his use of location, the comic mise-en-scène that one couldn't dream up in a studio setting, the "reality" of our reality that is truly too strange for words. I mean, after all this time, Who lets this guy in? The camera rolls as Moore makes pit stops that turn into filmmaking coups; by the time the interviews are over, those catch-phrase historic events that had been reduced to very singular meanings – "Columbine," "Oklahoma City," "9/11" – are reinvented as the truly terrible, complex situations they were. Ours is a population easily herded, a fact Moore enjoys as he revisits some of the old ghosts of media frenzy: those "Africanized killer bees" that never arrived, the razored apples poised to kill children on Halloween. Should a country this hyped up on fear be armed? That question is easy. The bigger one – Why are we so afraid? – is largely unanswerable. What's new for Moore is taking on a question so sticky in a time so angry in a country so thought-controlled. (1:59) Act I and II, Embarcadero, Piedmont. (Gerhard)

Brown Sugar From the streets of Harlem, to the studios of Los Angeles, the history of hip hop comes alive in writer-director Rick Famuyiwa's romantic comedy. On the surface, it's a When Harry Met Sally-style date flick for the MTV generation. A brash playboy and music industry big wig (Taye Diggs) reconnects with his childhood best friend- turned-cultural journalist with a conscience (Sanaa Lathan). The pair rekindle their passion for the urban beats of their neighborhood streets while (predictably) developing a new one for each other. But underneath the thin layer of Hollywood schmaltz lurks a story about the heart and soul of hip-hop: with a cast of hip hop heavyweights including Mos Def, Russell Simmons, and Queen Latifah (whose hilarious exchanges about the relative merits of vibrators and men with Lathan steal the film), the film reflects the intense and deeply personal way that our connection with musical sounds and culture shape our lives. (1:48) Jack London. (Crawford)

*Comedian Two years after Jerry Seinfeld's sitcom went off the air, the acclaimed comedian made an unusual decision to retire every last joke in his well-worn arsenal and build a new stand-up act from scratch. Christian Charles and Gary Streiner, the producers of Seinfeld's American Express commercials, asked permission to document the process when they learned that the performer was actually terrified of taking the stage without the safety net of his old material. With two hand-held digital cameras, they followed Seinfeld around the New York City comedy club circuit, capturing the action, both onstage and off. The resulting film, initially titled Anatomy of a Joke, is a surprising and very funny behind-the-scenes look at the unique world of stand-up comedy. Featuring appearances by Colin Quinn, Chris Rock, Jay Leno, and Bill Cosby, Comedian reveals a community bonded by the daunting task of making people laugh night after night and committed to making it look easy. (1:22) Lumiere. (Cohen)

*8 Women Though other films by François Ozon (Water Drops on Burning Rocks, in particular) prove he's adept at creating unflattering male portraits, his latest gift to audiences comes wrapped in feminine packaging. When 8 Women's faux-Technicolor paper is ripped off, female duplicity is revealed, and Ozon presents the spectacle with compassionate cynicism. The musical whodunit unites many – but not all – of France's most famous actresses: Catherine Deneuve rules, or attempts to rule, with trademark hauteur over a cast that includes Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart, Virginie Ledoyen, and grand dame Danielle Darrieux. During a title sequence that also pays homage to the rain shower of phony jewels in the opening credits of Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life, the name of each actress is matched with a flower, some symbolic of innocence, some overtly obscene. The plot that follows is a murder mystery, but Ozon's true investigation – as usual – is a misanthrope's inquest into human nature. (2:00) Albany, Lumiere. (Huston)

*8 Mile Eminem's stab at big-screen stardom may hew closer to Purple Rain than any of his jokey, off-color videos, but it's hard not to get caught up in Curtis Hanson's 8 Mile, the tale of Rabbit, a scrappy guy from the wrong side of the tracks whose extraordinary rhyme skills are, clearly, his only ticket out of trailer-park hell. The obstacles – a crummy job, a crappy car, stage fright, hostile rivals, a dismal home life, the all-consuming Detroit dreariness – pile up, but even though you know Eminem is eventually going to rock the shit out of the mic, his performance as a quietly determined but often defeated dreamer is enough to make you worry a little bit. And the payoff delivered in the film's final rap battle is so immense that 8 Mile's faults (a few too many one-sided characters, particularly the female ones) are easily swept away by the triumph of the moment. (1:51) California, Century Plaza, Century 20, Empire, Grand Lake, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

Femme Fatale This flamboyantly awful France-U.S. coproduction is yet another Brian DePalma "Hitchcockian" contraption recycling the same old split-screen effects, slow-mo, elaborate tracking, et al, to absolutely no purpose; on that level it's even worse and more gratuitous than the director's prior low, Raising Cain. Rebecca Romijin-Stamos plays Laure, a deadlier-than-the-male assassin-thief-seductress-multilinguist who gets away with the jewels during a bloody bungled robbery. Some years she's reinvented herself as a U.S. ambassador's wife, and an unwanted snap by a photographer (Antonio Banderas) puts angry old allies back on her trail. Make that tail. Romijin-Stamos doesn't have a character to play here; she is used, as the performers are called on porn sets, as a "model." There's a scene in which she grinds against a pool table in an alleged Paris biker bar that would almost be beneath Shannon Tweed. (His own presence completely beside the point, Banderas bears a "get me outta here" look throughout.) Femme Fatale is the most embarrassing major release I've seen all year. It's so bad, it's not even good-bad – he pervasive stupidity first gets you gaping, then it leaves you yawning. (2:06) Metreon. (Harvey)

Food of Love The aptly titled Food of Love oscillates between a Queer as Folk-ian potboiler and a wrenching Freudian melodrama. It has all the staples of both: a young protagonist named Paul (Kevin Bishop), a classical musician who is easy prey for older drifters; a crafty publicity agent (Allan Corduner) who tries to bait striplings with his connections in the music world; an overprotective mother (Juliet Stevenson); and a high-profile concert pianist (Paul Rhys) who seduces all of the aforementioned. For most of the film, we follow Paul's coming out narrative, from his deflowering in Barcelona to his inauguration in the ranks of Julliard. Given his youth and his ennui, Paul's sexual romps are as tense as the phone conversations he has (or avoids) with his increasingly rattled mother; as it turns out, the music in Food of Love – particularly Chopin's romantic piano glissades – is actually sexier than the sex. (2:04) Opera Plaza. (Rachel Swan)

Frida Director Julie Taymor (Titus) suffers from Tim Burton-itis: in her films the sumptuous art direction tends to overshadow everything else onscreen. Frida comes to life when Kahlo's colorful, sorrowful paintings are the focus, but the rest of the film – mostly concerned with the rocky relationship between Kahlo (Salma Hayek, who also produced) and husband Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) – is bogged down in melodrama and distracting cameos (Antonio Banderas, Saffron Burrows, Edward Norton) by Hayek's show biz pals. In her most high-profile role to date, Hayek – dutifully sporting the unibrow – looks gorgeous in Kahlo's elaborate costumes and hairdos. The pleasures of eye candy aside, however, it's too bad a biopic about such a passionate artist comes off feeling like too much decoration, not much soul. (1:58) Albany, Bridge, Century 20, Orinda. (Eddy)

Ghost Ship Julianna Margulies and Gabriel Byrne star as salvage team leaders whose crew stumbles upon the find of a lifetime: a mysterious luxury ship, laden with an obscene amount of gold, thought lost for 40 years. And naturally, the ship's also populated by a posse of unhappy, undead souls. About the only reason to sit though this extremely derivative, would-be shocker from director Steve Beck (Thirteen Ghosts) is the opening scene, which illuminates with gleeful goriness the terrible fate of the ship's original passengers. Otherwise, anyone who's ever seen a haunted house-boat-hotel-whatever movie may recognize a few too many elements – a beautiful, seductive woman suddenly transforms into a rotting corpse; a meal is discovered, mid-chew, to be crawling with maggots; a creepy little girl appears with a message from beyond the grave – to be truly spooked. (1:25) Century 20, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Heaven (1:46) Opera Plaza, Rafael.

I Spy It doesn't take a genius to figure out the song-and-dance I Spy offers a suspecting public: boffo-budget blockbuster adaptation of a vintage TV show, ebony-and-ivory buddy-film bickering, a nonsense plot about a stealth fighter plane falling in the hands of "a who's-who of international bad guys!," product placement, movie star (Eddie Murphy, Owen Wilson) shtick, things-go-ka-boom! set pieces, etc. What's surprising, however, is how irredeemably awful the end result actually is, bereft of even the guilty pleasures such comfort-food cinema usually offers. TV actress turned boob-tube recycler Betty Thomas (The Brady Bunch Movie) brings a patented Wonder Bread blandness to the proceedings, and the usual saving grace of Wilson's dumbed-down deadpan is canceled out by Murphy, fast-pattering away like the '90s never happened. Lowest-common-denominator moviemaking for the masses is one thing; putrid, piss-poor crap like this, however, will strain any little eyes spying for traces of entertainment buried beneath the pabulum.

(1:36) California, Century Plaza, Century 20, Jack London, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Fear)

Jackass: The Movie You can call this coproducer Spike Jonze's antiprestige project – a Bronx cheer to the Spiegel heir and anointed cinematic star's skateboarder roots. But apart from a cameo as one of a makeup-spackled crew of Lark-crashing, shoplifting oldsters, Jonze shouldn't get all the credit: after all, Johnny Knoxville, Chris Pontius, Bam Margera, and crew are the ones accruing the stitches and scar tissue. In any case, if you loved the series, you'll bust a gut at Jackass: The Movie – till you're in as much pain as the MTV pranksters. Basically a lengthy version of the series, complete with short-attention span episodes such as "Off-Road Tattooing," "Yellow Snowcone," and "Bungie Wedgie," a tossed-off, grainy-as-crap, straight-from-video look, and handheld bumbling (including vomiting camerapersons), Jackass: The Movie is the unholy, funny-as-hell spawn of Faces of Death, backyard wrestling, Evel Knieval, and Candid Camera. (1:25) Century Plaza, Century 20, Jack London, Kabuki, Metreon, Shattuck, 1000 Van Ness. (Kimberly Chun)

*The Last Kiss Writer-director Gabriele Muccino's The Last Kiss, a tender look at the realities of growing up and settling down, is also a modernized take on the traditional Italian sex comedy. Less about raw lust (though there's no shortage here) than about the restlessness that permeates contemporary relationships, the film ultimately paints love as a state of perpetual confusion and repeatedly asks whether it is ever possible to recognize happiness once you've found it. Muccino accomplishes this through the interwoven stories of a group of college buddies on the verge of hitting 30: Carlo (Stefano Accorsi, also of the Italian import The Son's Room) is secretly petrified of marrying his pregnant girlfriend, Paolo (Claudio Santamaria) can't seem to get over his domineering ex, and Alberto (Mario Cocci) is beginning to question the value of an endless string of one-night stands. Well-structured and well-acted, The Last Kiss deftly canvasses the gamut of human emotions, from the joys of childbirth to the dizzying fear that somehow, somewhere, a better life is passing us by. (1:44) Four Star. (Cohen)

*Mostly Martha Hamburg-born writer-director Sandra Nettelbeck's sumptuous new film, Mostly Martha, extends the Euro-foodie film genre to Germany with its story of a woman looking for love amid scads of gorgeously shot meat, fish, and pasta. Martha (Martina Gedeck) is a top chef at a fancy Italian restaurant in Hamburg. Martha's fiery, uncompromising spirit comes across in her meticulous control of the kitchen and in her refusal to ever let a customer get away with criticizing her food. Even in her therapy sessions she can't bring herself to express her feelings about love and life but obsessively recites recipes to her shrink. The sudden death of Martha's sister in a car accident is the tragic catalyst that opens her emotional floodgates, the rock-bottom moment that makes her fall apart. When Martha's boss (Sibylle Canonica) brings on a free-spirited Italian sous chef (Sergio Castellitto) to help out in the kitchen, Martha's frustration and anxiety mount. Martha offers an array of sensual and cinematic pleasures, and it ultimately has even more to say to us about grief and longing and about how we must reach out to those around us in both good times and bad. (1:47) Balboa, Shattuck. (Jenni Olson)

My Big Fat Greek Wedding A shrinking wallflower raised amid over-the-top extroverts, Toula Portokalos (Nia Vardalos) awakens from her 30-year funk after one look at lanky hunk Ian (John Corbett). She gives herself a makeover and a new career and duly snares Mr. Right. Trouble is, his family is as WASPy as they come, while hers – well, suffice it to say that parents Gus (Michael Constantine) and Maria (Lainie Kazan) are so ethnocentric that their suburban house is outfitted to look like the Parthenon. Wacky culture-clashing ensues. Adapting Vardalos's autobiographical stage monologue for the screen, director Joel Zwick (a TV veteran all the way back to Laverne and Shirley) doesn't do much to elevate the material above elongated-sitcom status – though if the howling response from a largely Greek American audience at a preview screening is any indication, this agreeable, predictable comedy has at least one demographic in its pocket. (2:01) Galaxy, Metreon, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Naqoyqatsi Following Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, this third entry in filmmaker Godfrey Reggio's wordless trilogy of laments over man's inhumanity to man (and the planet) is at once the most experimental and the least chilly of the lot. It represents a considerable departure from the visual tactics of the prior two. Where they rested on grandly photographed, sometimes time-lapsed but essentially straightforward views of natural and human landscapes, Naqoyqatsi is almost entirely composed of trick shots: superimposed, solarized, composited, digitally manipulated, split-screen, slo-/fast-motion, anamorphically lensed, digitally altered, tinted, and found-footage images. Yet despite all the flamboyance of technique, Reggio's latest (set to another pounding-dirge Philip Glass score) is actually far more interested in the individual – or our loss of individuality – than his earlier features, which often seemed like pretentious liberal-guilt exercises trying to pass off spectacular travelogue views as a form of evolved spiritualism. Here the thematic focus is on "war as a way of life" (the titular Hopi term's definition), so despite occasional crude or murky thinking, Reggio must deal head-on with politics, nationalism, militarism, and so forth. Thus there's more emotional immediacy to his pictorialism. While you can still accuse Reggio of making very fancy, very expensive art-house eye candy, Naqoyqatsi is an extremely striking package that really does have something inside. (1:41) Lumiere, Rafael. (Harvey)

Punch-Drunk Love It seems like it wouldn't be a stretch for Adam Sandler to play Punch-Drunk Love's Barry Egan, an average schlub given to fits of comical fury – unless, of course, you take into account that Punch-Drunk Love isn't the latest output of the Sandler laff factory; it's actually the new film from P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). Love is a weird piece of work, displaying vaguely Coen brothers-like tendencies and a stop-go momentum that somehow fits its structure – essentially, it's just a series of very, very carefully plotted self-contained scenes in a world with deliberately stylized art- and sound-direction. Sandler plays Barry as nervous and earnest, and mines new emotional territory in scenes with the sweetly persistent Lena (Emily Watson), a perfectly normal person who somehow falls for the unstable, Healthy Choice pudding-obsessed Barry. By and large, Sandler pulls it off, though it's unclear whether Anderson zeroed in on him because he wanted to provide the comedian with a breakout role, or because convincing audiences to see Sandler as more than a goofy megaplex star is a formidable challenge, or just because. (1:37) California, Century 20, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Presidio. (Eddy)

*Real Women Have Curves If 18-year-old Ana (America Ferrera) had gone to work in her sister's East L.A. garment factory 25 years ago, she and the other workers would be eyeballing the dresses and complaining they'd never be able to afford them. Ana would have given up plans for college and joined the movement, fighting for social and economic justice. But in Real Women Have Curves, set in the present day, the women are concerned about not fitting into the gowns, and Ana's contribution is to let them know their full-figured frames are fine just they way they are. You know from the beginning Ana's going to college despite familial pressure, but it's what happens along the way that matters. Director Patricia Cardoso offers East L.A. as a kaleidoscope of color, sound, and energy, and Ferrara's infectious Ana is impossible to resist. If feel-good flicks bother you, pass this up. But if you're looking for something to smile at – that's going around these days – here's something a little different to make you do just that. (1:25) Century 20, Embarcadero, Shattuck. (J.H. Tompkins)

Red Dragon Anyone who's seen Michael Mann's 1986 Manhunter knows that Red Dragon was made purely to cash in on beloved boogeyman Hannibal Lecter's popularity. Too bad for director Brett Ratner (Rush Hour) and a top-notch cast (besides Anthony Hopkins, the roster includes Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel, and Emily Watson; even the smaller roles are filled by respected types like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Mary-Louise Parker) that comparisons to the Mann film are inevitable. If not for that previous, superior take on the same material (a retired FBI agent, played here by Norton, turns to Lecter to help catch a serial killer called the "Tooth Fairy"), it'd be easy enough to toss Dragon off as an adeptly suspenseful thriller -- not as good as Silence of the Lambs, sure, but not a misstep like Hannibal. But where Mann's film was stylish and tense, Dragon is standardized horror for the masses, with talking paintings, exploding houses, and way too much of that sly ol' cannibal, who is by now so hammy his next logical step is a buddy comedy. (2:05) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

The Ring This version of Hideo Nakata's 1998 cult hit could have been the mighty exception that proved Hollywood remakes don't always sabotage the originals. There was hope, primarily because the film is Naomi Watts's first appearance after Mulholland Drive. Dismissing The Ring simply because it's a Hollywood product is snotty – many of the current Japanese genre masters whose movies are being optioned for remakes by Miramax and other U.S. companies are in fact strongly influenced by Hollywood genre cinema. The problem is, Nakata, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and others understand classic Hollywood B-movie strengths better than current Hollywood B-movie directors. So while Kurosawa brings the philosophical and emotional dread of Don Siegel and Jacques Tourneur to his own Ring-inspired Kairo, Gore Verbinski brings ad-language facility and vacuousness to The Ring. Nakata's deep well of dark water turns shallow here – there's no tension or character-identification beneath the slick, sometimes effectively creepy imagery. (1:45) Century Plaza, Century 20, Empire, Jack London, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Huston)

*Rivers and Tides (1:30) Balboa, Rafael.

Roger Dodger First-class lout Roger Swanson (Campbell Scott) uses his gift of dizzying gab to become the top copywriter in his advertising firm – and to woo every female who strays into his sight line. But the cruelest joke of all is that this self-proclaimed ladies' man really doesn't know dick about the fairer sex; his one truly intimate relationship is with his own self-loathing. So when his precocious teenage nephew, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), shows up looking for tips on the art of seduction, you can practically hear the backbone-snap of innocence lost coming like a far-off thunderclap. Words are also first-time director-writer Dylan Kidd's main ace in the hole, as he's constructed a film consisting of one riff of whirling verbiage after another with a self-conscious case of antsy Cassavetes-camera jitters. Mainly, it's the performers' line readings of Kidd's hyperbolic prose that makes Roger Dodger worth a look, giving the budding filmmaker's love of nihilistic patter a life even in a third act of diminishing returns. (1:45) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Fear)

The Santa Clause 2 (1:45) Century Plaza, Century 20, Grand Lake, Jack London, Kabuki, Metreon, Oaks, 1000 Van Ness, Orinda.

Secretary (1:44) Balboa, Opera Plaza.

Spirited Away A little girl and her parents stumble across an "abandoned amusement park!" (No, it's not Euro-Disney.) After her folks eat some magical food and literally turn into pigs, the girl goes through the looking glass into a world of talking animals, hungry ghosts, cute boys who are really dragons, and one pissed-off, gigantic toddler. Like the best fables, grand anime sensei Hayao Miyazaki's (Princess Mononoke) fantasy epic is both charmingly childish and a feverish nightmare. Why Miyazaki's work is getting the red-carpet treatment from the House of Mickey is almost as mystifying as the film's scattershot "plot"; whether Disney is hoping to court a homegrown generation raised in the light of the Sailor Moon or is just altruistically giving a mainstream release to a complete, if barely comprehensible, work of imagination is one for the ages. Regardless of mouse-eared intentions, Spirited Away is one undeniable visual experience that may require viewers to simply give up following the story, sit back, and just enjoy the acidic trip. (2:04) Kabuki, Shattuck. (Fear)

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2:22) Metreon IMAX.

*Sweet Home Alabama Up-and-coming fashion designer Melanie Carmichael (Reese Witherspoon) has just accepted a proposal from her high-society beau (Patrick Dempsey, eerily JFK Jr.-like), who happens to be the son of the image-conscious New York City mayor (Candice Bergen). Trouble is, Melanie has a secret, hell-raisin' past – and a good ol' boy husband (Matthew McConaughey clone Josh Lucas) – in backwater Pigeon Creek, Ala. When the former "Felony Melanie" heads south for the first time in seven years determined to finalize her divorce, her stilettos 'n' cell phone persona makes for culture clash with the yokels (including her plain-folks parents, played by Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place). Social faux pas ensue, Civil War jokes abound, the nature of true love is pondered, and – come on, if you've seen the trailer, you know how this cinematic equivalent of lemon chess pie ends. It's a chick flick, sure, but the Witherspoon factor ensures Sweet Home Alabama is a top-notch entry into the genre. (1:49) Century 20, Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*The Trials of Henry Kissinger History goes easy on winners – at least longer than it does with the losers. However, there may be an expiration date approaching for all the ass-kissing accorded Kissinger, who was regarded as the genius element in several Republican presidencies. This BBC-produced documentary suggests that Kissinger's public persona may well have been sculpted only to distract attention from his lust for power on the international stage at whatever cost, via often secret meetings and negotiations. The film's indictment includes evidence of chicanery in the '68 presidential election; a guiding hand in needlessly prolonging the Vietnam War; urging covert bombing and then the 1970 invasion of Cambodia; orchestrating the overthrow of Chile's democratically elected, anti-U.S.-capitalist Allende and installing Pinochet's dictatorship; and still later turning a blind eye to Indonesia's brutalities in East Timor. Called "brilliant, manipulative, and secretive" even by some ostensible allies, Kissinger has been running scared since elderly Pinochet's arrest-dodging media inquiries, refusing to comment on specific allegations in journalist Christopher Hitchens's exposé book (on which Trials is based). Still, the existing paper trail is already damning enough. Is Kissinger a war criminal? No matter how you've felt about him in the past, your view of this 1973 Nobel Peace Prize winner is sure to be shaken by these terse 80 minutes' scrutiny. (1:20) Balboa, Rafael. (Harvey)

The Truth about Charlie It'd be hard to find more enjoyable espionage lite than Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant's 1963 mousetrap Charade, a featherweight piece of fluff that was fueled off the fumes of its stars' charms. Trying to craft a remake that's even half as fun as the original seems almost as ludicrous as expecting mere mortals Thandie Newton (Beloved) and Mark Wahlberg (in a beret!) to fill their predecessors' Givenchys and gabardine suits, but somehow director Jonathan Demme mistakenly thought he and his cast could recapture that duo's giddy champagne-bubble chemistry. Even without the burden of comparison, Demme's uneven take on the house-of-cards plot involving a recent widow (Newton), a hidden fortune, a mysterious stranger (Wahlberg), and assorted sundry villains just can't find a speed past sputtering; it works best when it jettisons story altogether and simply pays homage to jittery nouvelle vague fancies and the Paris-when-it-sizzled era of cinema-ago-go. Past those tributary moments, it's little more than a disappointing travelogue cursed with a classic sense of retread déjà vu. (1:44) Kabuki, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Fear)

Tully Handsome, corn-fed hunk Tully Coates (Anson Mount) has come to a crossroads: should he keep playing the role of the town heartthrob and tarnish his reputation with the local stripper, or should he settle down with freckled nice girl Ella (Julianne Nicholson) and risk a broken heart? Meanwhile, back at the ranch (literally), a mysterious debt threatens both the foreclosure of his father's farm and to open the door to a closet full of familial skeletons. It's tempting to think that director-screenwriter Hilary Birmingham derived her film from watching overlaid transmissions of Petticoat Junction and Peyton Place as a kid, which would explain the small-town landscape of swimming holes and Tastee Freezes, where soap operatics lurk around every hay-strewn corner. Mount certainly has the looks and homegrown charm to essay such a guileless backwoods gigolo role, but everything else about this indie melodrama can't seem to rise above a feeling of freeze-dried familiarity. (1:42) Galaxy, Oaks. (Fear)

The Tuxedo (1:39) Century 20.

*24 Hour Party People Manchester-based label Factory gave the world Joy Division, the Happy Mondays, and the seeds of rave culture via its sister club Hacienda and was renowned as much for its owners' bad business sense and drug-fueled burnout as for its stark, minimalist sound. 24 Hour Party People seems destined to cement the collective's rightful place in the pantheon, but any notion of genuflection or pedestal polishing quickly gets pissed on. Laden with one of the cinema's most unreliable narrators in the form of Factory impresario Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan) and brimming with pop art detritus filmmaking (punky Super 8 comfortably cuddles with druggy D.V.), the film is less concerned with facts than with Factory's mythos as a beautiful supernova failure. Director Michael Winterbottom (Wonderland) incorporates Lester-like giddiness, deconstructive asides, and even actual participants from the era (keep an eye out for Mark E. Smith and Howard DeVoto) to correct the film when it "gets it wrong," still, any glitches are overrun by the film's gleeful willingness to jettison narrative and biopic concerns in order to hook viewers on a feeling. (1:57) Four Star. (Fear)

The Weight of Water Finally reaching theaters after two years on the shelf, this unusual stretch for action director Kathryn Bigelow (K-19, Strange Days) might better have been left there. Based on a novel by Anita Shreve, it has interesting aspects that no doubt carried more idiosyncratic nuance on the printed page; here, they come off as alternately clichéd, pretentious, and underdeveloped. Catherine McCormack plays a photographer fascinated by a murky, 130-year-old crime. She travels to the incident's original site with her chain-smoking writer spouse (Sean Penn), his brother (Josh Lucas), and the latter's new bombshell girlfriend (Elizabeth Hurley). Suspicions of an affair between husband and hussy grow as we see played out, in parallel flashbacks, the saga of Maren (Sarah Polley), a Norwegian émigré to a bleak coastal town who rots in a loveless marriage while watching the brother she loves a little too much happily matched with another new arrival. This Hawthorne-like tale of repressive puritanism (with a Lizzie Borden climax) is intriguing enough that it – and in particular Polley, who's terrific despite variable material – should have been the whole film. Instead, we get way too much contrasting modern-day footage in which McCormack's watchful intelligence is unfortunately swamped by ghastly hamming from both Penn and Hurley. The end results are frustrating; there's a good movie lurking in here somewhere, but they lost it somewhere along the way. (1:54) Galaxy. (Harvey)

White Oleander Even if you haven't read Janet Fitch's Oprah-approved novel, the film version of White Oleander is worth taking note of: it's a "women's picture" that centers not on romantic entanglements but on relationships between mothers and daughters, and it eschews the expected healing-power-of-family message. After her controlling, self-absorbed mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) is jailed for murdering an inattentive boyfriend, troubled teen Astrid (Alison Lohman) encounters a string of wildly different foster moms (including Robin Wright Penn and Renée Zellweger) as she gropes her way toward self-reliance. Director Peter Kosminsky, whose previous directing experience includes several made-for-British-television dramas, gives Oleander a realistic, unglamorous quality – though he could've kept a tighter leash on the voice-overs. White Oleander's thick application of Lifetime channel-style drama – the script is by Mary Agnes Donoghue, who also adapted Beaches – is offset by its solid cast, in particular the understated Lohman and the icy Pfeiffer. (1:48) Balboa. (Eddy)

Rep picks

*'Bo-Dacious B-Movies,' 'Kung Fu Kult Klassics,' and 'Saturday Midnights for Maniacs' This week: Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, plus Candy Snatchers (Wed/13); Chang Cheh's 1978 The Crippled Avengers and the 1972 The Queen Boxer (Thurs/14); and – here's your chance, if you missed it last time – The Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie (Sat/16). Four Star.

*My Grandmother In the 1929 silent film My Grandmother, office loafers devour political education primers, slide backwards down the ballustrade, and toss paper airplanes at cigar-smoking managers. Meanwhile, a Harold Lloyd-inspired bureaucrat (Aleksandre Takaishvili) gets pummeled by his wife (Bella Chernova) as puppets gawk and cartoon men caper across the floor. Director Kote Mikaberidze's pinwheeling camera creates a house-of-mirrors effect, providing alchemic illusions of shadows coming to life. The film's live musical accompaniment by the Beth Custer Ensemble mixes guitar thrumming with absurdist Klezmer, creating an effect like Broiges Tanz meets Delta Blues. The score adds to the mood of the film by using violin interjections and slide-whistle glissandos from a clarinet and a muted trumpet. (1:05) Castro. (Swan)

*The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part Two See 8 Days a Week, page 56. Jezebels Joint.