American Pie (1999)

A fog with a chestnut-keep an eye on listen to, “American Pie” has but a single purpose — to be the king of Rabelaisian-out of pocket comedy — and will happily wear that crown until another membrane sets out to steal it, say, around this interval next year. Crude in more ways than one, this cheesy homage to a square of horniness Austin Powers could sole presume will be a dream silent picture for many a teenage boy; so thoroughly does it deed the comic possibilities of lecherous adolescence and the critical state to register. Crucially, howsoever, and unlike the leering “Animal House”-”Nerds” sex farces of yore, pic gives plentiful ever to the female p.o.v., which thinks fitting translate into prodigality of extra enrich oneself for this ultra-commercial Widespread delivering, which will be the must-see comedy for auds in their teens and early 20s wholly the mid-summer. But moderately older viewers who embraced last summer’s comparable, but infinitely more imaginative fog, “There’s Something About Mary,” are acceptable to feel more out of the loop with this story.

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Credited to a single screenwriter, first-timer Adam Herz, but feeling much more like the result of a bunch of guys sitting around topping each other with the most outrageous sex shenanigans they can think of, pic gives an idea of what’s to come with a teaser sequence in which high schooler Jim (Jason Biggs) is caught by his parents pleasuring himself in a tube sock while watching a porno tape.

The nothing-fancy, just-get-to-the-point approach continues throughout, and follows neatly off the simple premise: Four semi-out-of-it seniors, sick of their virginity and determined not to carry their burden with them to college, resolve to divest themselves of their innocence by the time they graduate in three weeks — and it has to be for real, not purchased.

In addition to Jim, who’s something of an oaf of no particular distinction, the buddies include Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), who looks to be in the best position to get over since he’s already reached third base with his blond g.f. Vicky (Tara Reid); skinny Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas), who has no apparent prospects, and Oz (Chris Klein), whose advantageous great looks and jock status are mitigated by an underlying propriety and shyness.

Galled by claims of sexual conquest by their dweeby pal Sherman (Chris Owen), the guys feverishly devote themselves to their task. Kevin quickly studies up on oral sex in order to break down whatever defenses Vicky has left against going all the way, the word is spread around school that shrimpy Finch is decidedly unshrimpy where it counts, and Jim places all his chips on his chances with an exotic Czech student, Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth); a slapstick bedroom encounter between these two, which is witnessed by the entire student body via computer, is a particularly wild comic highlight.

For his part, Oz unexpectedly falls for an appealing but prim-looking girl, Heather (Mena Suvari), who sings in glee club, and finds himself going to surprising lengths to win her over. It all comes down, of course, to prom night, and film’s climactic 20 minutes are devoted to the sometimes very funny but conventionally satisfying ways in which all the characters — men and women — end up getting what they want or need.

At every turn, you can sense Herz and tyro director Paul Weitz, who wrote last year’s “Antz” with brother Chris, who co-produced here, trying to figure out how they can one-up films that have come before and set new standards of vulgar hilarity. Last year’s semen in the hair has been replaced by semen in someone’s beer, the unwitting e-mail sex (the only scene featuring nudity) is an elaboration of the Hot Lips loudspeaker scene in “MASH,” and a delightfully unanticipated older woman-younger man encounter tips the hat to “The Graduate.”

Film succeeds in its elementary mission due to its relentless bluntness and fundamental realism about teenage human nature. The brazen, no-b.s. attitude about what’s on everyone’s minds will give it major scoreboard with its intended audience, and the multi-faceted ending pleases in the way it begins leaving the obsessions of high school behind and looks ahead to a more interesting future.

Largely no-name cast is game and gamey. Klein, discovered in “Election,” stands out once again here as the sensitive stud; hunkier and even better looking than Keanu Reeves, the guy’s got “movie star” written all over him, and his open, fun personality makes him, like Gary Cooper, the rare female heartthrob that guys love to watch, too.

Suvari brings an unconventional charm to the role of his observant g.f.; Alyson Hannigan is a scene-stealer as the chatty, apparent dim bulb with whom Jim hooks up for the prom; Natasha Lyonne gets good mileage out of her few scenes as the advice-dispensing, most experienced girl in school; and Elizabeth will set thousands of boys drooling as the statuesque Euro who could no doubt teach the whole graduating class a few tricks.

Set in Michigan but shot mostly around Long Beach, film is technically very low end except for the jam-packed soundtrack of 30-plus tunes. At the screening caught with a recruited audience, theater house lights were ruinously kept on at a very bright level during unspooling to accommodate videotaping of audience reactions until repeated complaints finally caused them to be turned down, then off.

The ice age is coming to an en…

The ice age is coming to an end and the giant valley that’s been home to Diego the saber toothed tiger (voice of Denis Leary), Manny the mammoth (Ray Romano) and Sid the apathy (John Leguizamo) is going to be flooded when the ice dam abutting it bursts. While the hapless Scrat chases his elusive nut in a series of escapades, the dozing of the animals are heading throughout the safe keeping of the far end of the valley, where a giant craft shaped tree bark will take them to dry loam. On the way and to Manny’s pleasant eye-opener, they meet the other residual mammoth, Ellie (Queen Latifah) and her two manic possum buddies, the possums Crash (Sean William Scott) and Eddie (Josh Peck). Manny hopes to propagate his species now that he has organize a female, but things don’t go smoothly, either for the would be mammoth couple, nor for Scrat, nor for any of them.

Impact Pt I full movie dvd

Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo review


About the best thing lone can bid seeking 1999’s “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo” is that it is by farther better than its sequel, 2005’s “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolow,” but that’s not saying much. While there are certainly a few funny moments in “Deuce,” mostly reaction shots, they come indubitably and infrequent between, the flick picture show relying instead on worn out sex gags, toilet humor, and unvaried physical shtick, some of which might make unbiased a Jerry Lewis fan wince.

Maybe it was just the oddity of the character names, but I couldn’t succour thinking as I watched On Schneider as the major normal, Deuce Bigalow, how much the movie reminded me of a slightly raunchier account of Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura. The comedy is just as exaggerated and silly in each action, with Schneider carrying things just that much above into the area of unsure partiality. “Deuce” made his initial appearance here, and the sequel carried the total into the ridiculously weak-minded, so by comparison, “Male Gigolo” doesn’t earmarks of half so bad.

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In any case, Schneider plays Deuce as a dorky dud who cleans fish ponds, fish tanks, and New England necessary bowls for a living. He’s such a sad sack he couldn’t get a antiquated if his time depended on it. So one daylight cleaning a pond, he runs into a European lady-killer hunk named Antoine Laconte (Oded Fehr), who right-minded happens to make his living as a gigolo. Women pay him “to stretch them pleasure.” It’s trusting to see why. Laconte is everything Deuce isn’t: Tall, dark, handsome, rugged, and immodest. When Laconte discovers that Deuce knows a lot about fish and he has to go abroad for the benefit of three weeks, he unaccountably asks Deuce to take care of his expensive tropical fish for him, leaving Deuce to look after not no greater than the fish but his swanky beachfront apartment, his antique weapons garnering, and his Porsche convertible. But Laconte warns Deuce when he leaves that if anything is poorly when he gets back, he’ll kill him.

That’s the setup, and you can pretty much guess what happens next. The apartment is filled with breakables, almost all of which Deuce breaks. Within minutes he has busted the fish tank, flooded the apartment, and at bottom burned the village down. The penniless Deuce is faced with $6,000 worth of damages that he’ll have to detail repaired within three weeks, or decline.

The solution to his problem appears in the practice of one of Laconte’s oddball friends, a White slaver named T.J. (Eddie Griffin), who prefers to call himself “more of a man’s madam.” T.J. recommends that Deuce go into the gigolo commerce, and the rest of the film is basically Deuce’s encounters with a series of bizarre clients: 500-hammer out women; 10-foot women; one-legged women; mentally unstable women; pretty ungenerous women accepted to uncontrollable outbursts of profanity; women with sleeping disorders (”I’ve always wanted to seek soup, but there’s the fear of drowning”). Besides, there is also a looney cop, Detective Chuck Fowler (William Forsythe), following Deuce, strong-minded to a notch him, Antoine, D.J., and every other male prostitute in the city behind bars. Oh, and Deuce’s establish is a men’s room attendant.

In effect, “Deuce Bigalow” tries to be another Farrelly brothers comedy, using gross or disabled characters and outrageous situations to develop its humor. It doesn’t quite reach the level of out the weakest Farrelly brothers film, but it does make some valiant attempts. Most of the jokes in “Deuce” are juvenile or sophomoric at best, take pleasure in kids giggling at dirty pictures. Need a good deal of racy gags, sexual talk, bathroom humor, and four-letter words.


What To Do In Case of Fire? review

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Not once does Rose give himself an out by suggesting that he might not be
sincere. Guess what theme music he chooses? Wagner’s “Prelude and Love-Death”
from “Tristan and Isolde.” If this is grandiosity, it’s the admirable kind,
for at its heart is a conviction that every human life, if explored with
understanding, is indeed worthy of “Tristan and Isolde.” Rose has the talent
to back up his faith with artistry.

The picture is a loose adaptation of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,”
about a man in the prime of life who finds himself slowly falling apart. Rose
brings the story into modern times. Danny Huston, the son of legendary
filmmaker John Huston, plays Ivan Beckman, a hotshot talent agent. Huston, who
has the size and shambling gait of his late father and a sly smile something
like that of Dennis Quaid, is a screen natural. His acting has subtlety and
scale, and he gives a performance that will leave audiences awestruck.

The movie starts with Ivan’s death, then backs up to trace the weeks
leading up to it — the wheeling and dealing and wooing and drugging that make
up the life of a Hollywood player. This is a world usually presented
satirically, so it’s refreshing to see it played straight. Rose takes us into
the limousines and into the parties and after-hours parties, where there’s
always lots of cocaine and call girls. Rose makes use of the flexibility of
digital video, finding kinetic and psychologically revealing angles through
which to present this life.

Rose had to shoot “Ivans” on a low budget because of the box-office failure
of his previous film, “Anna Karenina,” the Sophie Marceau picture that was
only the best version of Tolstoy’s novel yet filmed. Rose also made “Immortal
Beloved,” with Gary Oldman. Clearly, this man deserves a big budget, though
it’s good to see he doesn’t need one to make a terrific movie.

.

This film contains nudity and harsh language.

– Mick LaSalle



‘PEPE LE MOKO’

WILD APPLAUSE

Drama. Starring Jean Gabin. Directed by Julien Duvivier. (Not rated. 92
minutes. At the Castro.)

.

The release of “Pepe Le Moko” (1937) is a treat. Best known as the basis
for the classic American film “Algiers” (1938), it’s been unavailable in the
United States for 60 years, except in butchered prints and bad videotapes. It
turns out that “Pepe Le Moko” is even better than “Algiers.”

The French original has it all over on the Hollywood version in the way it
conveys atmosphere. It takes place in French Algeria, where the gangster Pepe
Le Moko (Jean Gabin) is holed up in the Casbah, a labyrinthine district of
alleys and markets, with a surprise around every corner. In the Casbah, Pepe
is both king and prisoner. He rules the underworld, and the cops can’t get
near him. But he knows that he can never leave.

The American remake provided Charles Boyer with his signature role: He
played Pepe as a romantic whose longing for Paris dooms him. But Gabin brings
something else entirely to Pepe, an impulsiveness, a buoyancy, a tough-guy
playfulness, and in the end he gives the more magnetic and persuasive
performance.

Gabin’s Pepe is a lovable, heart-on-his-sleeve sort of fellow, who inspires
loyalty through sheer likability. He’s young, well-dressed and has a bright
open face, not unlike that of Kenneth Branagh.

One night, at the tail end of a shootout with cops, he meets a young, rich
woman, Gaby (Mireille Balin), who is slumming with a party of friends. Gaby
represents everything that Pepe can no longer have — namely, Paris — and the
two start a romance.

The American version played up the romantic scenes, which benefited
enormously from the Gaby of Hedy Lamarr, whose beauty defied description. But
while those scenes retain their impact to this day, the French version,
following the identical story, just makes more sense. In “Pepe Le Moko,” the
romance doesn’t bring out the title character’s fatalism but his exuberance.
This Pepe has a real capacity for happiness.

In one particularly lovely sequence, Pepe is so pleased to be in love that
he sings on his rooftop, while the native women, in the street, giggle to
themselves affectionately.

– Mick LaSalle



‘WHAT TO DO IN CASE OF FIRE?’

POLITE APPLAUSE

Starring Til Schweiger, Martin Feifel, Sebastian Blomberg, Nadja Uhl, Matthias
Matschke, Doris Schretzmayer, Klaus Lowitsch and Devid Striesow. Directed by
Gregor Schnitzler. Written by Stefan Dahnert and Anne Wild. (R. 101 minutes.
In German with English subtitles. At Bay Area theaters.)

.

It’s 1980s Berlin, and a group of six anarchists is squatting in buildings
and leading “anti-imperialist” protests. Flash ahead to 2002, and many of
these former revolutionaries are now middle-class professionals. What happens
when an old bomb they planted finally detonates, threatening to expose their
former lives?

That’s the premise of “What to Do in Case of Fire?,” an enthralling,
entertaining feature that is less about terrorism than the changes people make
over the course of their lives. One of the former agitators is now the rich,
successful owner of an ad agency, another is a doting, single mother of two
young children, a third (whose nickname was “Terror”) is a lawyer preparing to
be a public prosecutor, and a fourth is a socialite about to be married. Two
of the old anarchists are just that: old, and still anarchists.

The reunion of these men and women is at times hilarious, at times
sorrowful. It’s funny when they argue about how to avoid jail time and try to
create a hard-to-pull-off scheme that tests their ingenuity. It’s
disconcerting when the two lifelong anarchists ridicule the lifestyles of
their former colleagues, and it’s troubling when the anarchist who lost his
legs says his former friends abandoned him after his accident. Despite their
differences, the six band together and try to destroy evidence the police
could use to bring them to justice.

Some moviegoers may see “What to Do in Case of Fire?” and be reminded of
Sara Jane Olson and the other former Symbionese Liberation Army members who’ve
been jailed on charges of killing a woman 27 years ago. Olson had escaped from
her terrorist past into the life of suburban motherhood, not unlike the movie
character of Nele, a single mother known in her Berlin days as “Red Nele.” The
difference: Olson’s life is real, and Nele’s is fictionalized. So are the
lives of the five other on-screen revolutionaries who used to take pleasure in
pelting police and causing trouble.

At the end of “What to Do in Case of Fire?,” there is closure that Olson
will never experience. The end is a reminder that this movie is entertainment,
not real life.

.

This film contains scenes of violence.

– Jonathan Curiel

Fear in the Night (1947)

“An excellent low-budget psychological
thriller.”

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

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An excellent low-budget psychological thriller directed and written
by Maxwell Shane that is based on the story “Nightmare” by Cornell Woolrich.
Cinematographer Greenhalgh’s shadowy black and white photography gives
it a film noir look. It was remade by the same director in 1956 as “Nightmare”
and starred Kevin McCarthy and Edward G. Robinson.

Bank teller Vince Grayson (DeForest Kelley) wakes up in the morning
in a cold sweat from a nightmare, where he saw himself in a mirrored room
with a woman and watched himself stab a man to death with an awl and lock
his dead body in a closet. Vince finds it odd that there’s a strange key
and button in his pocket, and blood on his wrist. This dream upsets him
so much he takes off from work to consult with Cliff Herlihy (Paul Kelly),
a homicide detective married to his sister Lil (Ann Doran). Cliff refuses
to believe Vince’s story. To cheer him up, they go on a picnic and invite
along Vince’s girlfriend and co-worker Betty (Kay Scott). Caught in a rainstorm,
the foursome take shelter in an abandoned mansion. They enter when Vince
strangely knows there’s a key under the flower bed. When the men go upstairs
they discover the mirrored room–just like the one in Vince’s dream. A
local policeman comes by to check out the intruders and informs them a
man was murdered in the house a week ago.

Back in his hotel room, Vince can’t understand how but is sure he’s
a murderer. After rescued from an attempted suicide by Cliff, the detective
uncovers clues that point to an evil hypnotist (Robert Emmett Keane) manipulating
Vince.

The taut pulp story, dreamy atmospheric settings and brooding mood
throughout, all serve the film well. The crisp acting was just right. DeForest
Kelley, in his debut performance, does a fine job as the innocent victim. 

Even with the release of Oliv…

Even with the release of Oliver Stone’s “W.,” there is no movie out now more relevant to the 2008 presidential election than “Frontrunners.” It doesn’t matter that the “presidency” in question is only for a high school student union. Politics is politics.

It does help to know that the featured high school is no ordinary establishment. “Frontrunners” chronicles the student union race at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country. As the placards at the beginning of the film note, more than 25,000 New York City eighth-graders take the placement exam to get into Stuyvesant’s 800-student freshman class.

Director Caroline Suh takes a refreshingly simple approach to “Frontrunners.” It’s shot in black-and-white, with no fancy montages or frenetic jump cutting. The story of the race takes center stage, as the four two-person teams - led by geek-savant George Zisiadis, popular girl Hannah Freiman, and jockish regular guy Michael Zaytsev and dark horse Matt Polazzo, who no one can remember is actually running - are cut to two in the nail-biting primaries. Then, there’s the final push for a winner.

The majority of the action takes place on school grounds, as fellow students, a high school political pundit (!), student union faculty adviser, writers at the school paper and others add their thoughts.

The film sets just the right tone: with inventive music choices and wonderfully piquant moments plucked from what must have been hundreds of hours of footage, “Frontrunners” is consistently entertaining. Just watching George deliver his four- - no, three- - point plan for success is worth the price of admission. As the candidates try to outdo each other with campaign paraphernalia and strategy (George carries a boom box to the top of the stairs, and pumps in motivational music like “Born to be Wild”), there are quite a few LOL moments, but the director never makes the kids seem like cartoons or stereotypes.

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It would be a shame to give any results away because the tension is so delicious. The race means a lot in the universe of Stuyvesant. Getting into an Ivy League school is the end game, but standing out among such type-A peers is important to every student. This is a school whose student paper holds interviews to endorse a candidate, and pumps a televised debate between the two final candidates into every classroom. As politico Dick Morris, Stuyvesant class of ‘64, notes in the film’s epigraph, “It’s the hardest race I ever fought.”

– Advisory: Nothing shocking, except the blinding political ambition of teenagers.

“It’s one of Brooks’s more el…

“It’s one of Brooks’s more eloquent
and witty films.”

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Kidnapping flick down Mexico way, that was slightly eclipsed in three
years by the similar themed one by Peckinpah entitled The Wild Bunch. It
also follows the same trajectory as Valentino’s silent The Sheik (1921).
Writer-director Richard Brooks (”Elmer Gantry”/”In Cold Blood”/”Bite the
Bullet”) bases the film on the novel A Mule for the Marquesa by Frank O’Rourke,
a catchall phrase meaning “from soup to nuts.” It’s set on the Mexican-Texas
border in 1917 after the Mexican revolution, at a time the Old West is
changing.

Texas millionaire J. W. Grant (Ralph Bellamy) offers to pay four
professional soldiers-of-fortune $10,000 apiece to rescue his beautiful
Mexican wife of fours years, Maria (Claudia Cardinale), rather than pay
a ransom of $100,000 and have her killed anyway. She was kidnapped by guerrilla-bandit
Capt. Jesus Raza (Jack Palance) and is being held in his Mexican desert
stronghold. The professionals are led by former fighter for Pancho Villa
and weapons expert Rico Fardan (Lee Marvin), horsemaster Hans Ehrengard
(Robert Ryan), and tracker/bowman Jake Sharp (Woody Strode). For the fourth
comrade, Fardan recruits his old pal from their fighting days in the revolution,
dynamiter, adventurer and lover boy Bill Dolworth (Burt Lancaster). The
almost impossible mission calls for them to get through Raza’s well-armed
army of over 150 and escape with Maria across the harsh desert. After rescuing
her from Raza, someone Fardan and Dolworth knew from their revolutionary
days, the boys learn that she wasn’t kidnapped but ran away from Grant
to be with her longtime lover Raza and refuses to go back. The mercenaries
are in a quandry about how to handle such a delicate situation, and decide
to listen to their hearts.

The film did a brisk box-office, and is one of the better modern-day
Westerns. Though it’s all implausible, the all-star cast sparkle and make
the action sequences forceful. It’s one of Brooks’s more eloquent and witty
films. Also, the photography by Conrad Hall is smashing (shot on location
in Death Valley, Lake Mead and the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada).
It was nominated by the Academy for Best Direction, Best Screenplay, and
Best Cinematography.

Onegin (1999)

Onegin is a man bemused by his own worthlessness. He has been carefully prepared by his aristocratic 19th century upbringing to be unnecessary–an outside man, hanging on, looking into the lives of others. Even when he's given the opportunity to play a role after he inherits his uncle's estate, his response is to rent the land to his serfs. In another man, this would be seen as liberalism. In Evgeny Onegin, it is more like indifference.

"

Onegin

" is a leisurely, elegant, detached retelling of Alexander Pushkin's epic verse novel, with

Ralph Fiennes

as the hero. It is the kind of role once automatically assigned to

Jeremy Irons

. Both men look as if they have stayed up too late and not eaten their greens, but Irons in the grip of passion is able to seem lost and heedless, while Fiennes suggests it is heavy lifting, with few rewards. "I am not one who is made for love and marriage," his Onegin says soulfully.

As the film opens, Onegin is returning to inherit his uncle's estate outside St. Petersburg after having lost his own fortune at the gambling tables. He is welcomed by receptions, teas and balls, and embraced by his neighbor Lensky (

Toby Stephens

). Lensky has a young bride named Olga (

Lena Headey

), and she has an older sister named Tatyana (

Liv Tyler

), who is a lone spirit and visits Onegin's estate to borrow books from his library.

Tyler has the assignment of suggesting passionate depths beneath a cool exterior and succeeds: She is grave and silent, with an ethereal quality that is belied by her bold use of eye contact. Onegin probably falls in love with her the first time he sees her, but is not, of course, made for love and shrugs off his real feelings in order to enter into a flirtation with Olga, who is safely married.

Tatyana's waters run deep. She declares herself in a passionate love letter to Onegin (the moment she saw his face, she knew her heart was his, etc.), but such passion only alarms him. "Any stranger might have stumbled into your life and aroused your romantic imagination," he tells her tactlessly. "I have no secret longing to be saved from myself." "You curse yourself!" she cries, rejected. The heartless Onegin continues his dalliance with Olga. This leads to a duel with Lensky. His heart is broken when he kills his friend; that will teach him to call a 19th century Russian nobleman's wife "easy." Onegin flees to exile (or Paris, which are synonymous). Six years pass. He returns to St. Petersburg and sees Tatyana again, at a ball. But now the tables are turned, in ironic revelations and belated discoveries, and Onegin pays the price for his heartlessness.

There is a cool, mannered elegance to the picture that I like, but it's dead at its center. There is no feeling that real feelings are at risk here. Tyler seems sincere enough, but Fiennes withholds too well. And the direction, by his sister

Martha Fiennes

, is deliberate and detached when it should perhaps plunge into the story. The visuals are wonderful, but the drama is muted.

There is a tendency to embalm classics, but never was a literature more tempestuous and heartfelt than in 19th century Russia. Characters joyously leap from the pages of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, wearing their hearts on their sleeves, torn between the French schoolmasters who taught them manners, and the land where they learned passion–inhaled it, absorbed it in the womb. I know Eugene Onegin is a masterpiece, but the story it tells is romantic melodrama and requires some of the same soap-opera zest as

David Lean

's "Dr. Zhivago." This film has the same problem as its hero: Its manners are so good, it doesn't know what it really feels.

Note: In addition to its theatrical run, "

Onegin

" has been playing on cable. Since the photography, locations and landscapes are the best reason to see the film, the big screen is the way to go.

The Other Man (2008)

The promising intrigue of a husband’s bullheaded obsession with his wife’s lover falls flat in “The Other Man,” directed with an indifferent hand by Richard Eyre. With his screenwriting partner Charles Wood (adapting Bernhard Schlink’s original story), Eyre prods what begins as a histrionic arts toward a droller cast temper in the final act, complete with a twisty and manipulative revelation, but the course is as rocky as it is at the last take out. Centerpiece is a mano a mano between Liam Neeson and Antonio Banderas, which will be the draw for auds after certain sales across most territories following pic’s Toronto preem.

If there were some intended mystery over whom that other man actually is, it’s revealed shortly after the opening credits, which linger over a boating excursion on Lake Como enjoyed by Lisa (Laura Linney) and Ralph (Banderas).

Lisa is then seen with her husband Peter (Neeson) at a New York fashion show featuring Lisa’s haute-couture shoe designs. A brief post-show encounter with Peter’s daughter Abigail (Romola Garai) suggests a frosty relationship between her and her father, while Peter looks suspiciously at designer Ralph (Banderas), who seems a bit too smoochy with Lisa.

The suspicious mood continues at dinner, when Lisa, unprompted, asks Peter if he’s ever thought of sleeping with someone else. Peter is nonplussed, but clearly, something is on Lisa’s mind. Leaving for work the next day, Lisa also appears to leave the film, which jumps forward to Abigail and Peter going through some of Lisa’s clothes and other items and finding a note scribbled with the words “Lake Como.”

“The Other Man” initially maintains an aura of uncertainty, suggesting a hidden side to Lisa. After Peter listens to a message on Lisa’s cell phone from a man (who sounds unmistakably like Banderas’ Ralph), he snoops through her laptop files, finding photos of Lisa with Ralph, enjoying Italian fun and bedtime mischief.

Now on a personal mission to find out who this guy actually is, Peter follows an email trail to Milan, where he finds Ralph in a cafe playing solo chess.

The tension and absurdity of a lover unwittingly revealing his affair to his lover’s husband register only mildly in a series of dialogues between Peter and Ralph (who pronounces his name in Brit fashion). What makes little sense, from a behavioral standpoint, is Ralph being so thickheaded that he can’t pick up on Peter’s hostile, laser-beam stares. The fact that Ralph isn’t exactly as suave as he appears doesn’t explain how he could miss that Peter has more than chess on his mind. Pic’s plot becomes increasingly untenable from there.

As a decent man trying to find out the truth about his wife, Neeson suggests someone less emotionally frayed than driven by jealousy and/or guilt, resulting in a performance that registers in an oddly cool key.

Banderas has by far the more interesting character, but the payoff once his Ralph learns the entire story about Lisa is unhelpfully dull. Linney’s trace on the movie is just that; her character is more talked about than seen.

Eyre’s handling is typically straight, classy and unremarkable, similar to his work on “Notes on a Scandal,” with a production squad of lenser Haris Zambarloukos, production designer Gemma Jackson and editor Tariq Anwar rendering ultra-pro work down the line. Stephen Warbeck’s standard score hits the obsessive-thriller notes but little more.

Set in the East-End of London…

Set in the East-Vanish of London, PURE is a story take the bond between a native, her children and the attack of drugs. Following the finish of his father, ten year over the hill Paul (Harry Eden) becomes the caretaker of his family – natural Mel (Molly Parker) and youngest kin Lee (Vinni Hunter). His alone friend is a flighty waitress Louise (Keira Knightley) who helps Paul in his desperate attempt to nurture his family from the mother’s dull addiction and her boyfriend, the local affairs (David Wenham). Last analysis, it is only when she hits rock bottom and is brought face to face with the damage she has wrought, that Mel finds the power to save herself and her family.

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