Armed only with his mysterious mental connection to the feral minds of studio executives, the Movie Guru reveals just how good or bad this week's new releases will be:

25TH HOUR (R)
The latest from Spike Lee, starring Edward Norton as a convicted drug-dealer trying to make the most of his last day as a free man. Norton attempts to patch things up with his girlfriend and fire-fighter dad, goes out drinking with the boys, and seeks a good home for his dog. The film is perhaps most notable for being one of the first to explicitly acknowledge the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
Prediction: I'm all for honesty, and surely one cannot exist in New York City without being reminded of 9/11, but will such references not come across a bit heavy-handed? I also find it hard to believe Edward Norton as a heroin-pusher, but his acting skills could overcome my reluctance.

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (R)
If you were starting to think you'd have to wait eons for the next Charlie Kaufman-penned festival of surrealism, think again. The writer of Adaptation read the autobio of somewhat loopy former game show host Chuck Barris (The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show), who claims to have interspersed his TV gigs with hits for the CIA. Then Kaufman took the kook at his word. Sam Rockwell plays Barris; Drew Barrymore, George Clooney and Julia Roberts also star.
Prediction: With Clooney rather than Spike Jonze directing, this one might not be as crazily self-referential as Kaufman's previous outings. Which is probably a good thing.

DARKNESS FALLS (PG-13)
In an exciting twist for the horror genre, some pissed-off dead lady comes back to seek revenge against the town that killed her. She assumes the form of a doll—no, wait, a clown—no, wait, the Tooth Fairy. Yeah, that's it. Starring a bunch of teenagers. Or at least, people who look like teenagers.
Prediction: As so regularly happens, I'm waiting to be shocked at the success of this tripe, then to be equally unsurprised by the emergence of a sequel.

INTACTO (R)
A philosophical fable/ thriller from first-time Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Intacto creates a world where luck can be lost and stolen like cash. Max Von Sydow stars as one of four people who have survived great tragedy and must now deal with "survivor's guilt" as they try to protect their extraordinary luck from would-be thieves.
Prediction: It's certainly an original premise, and one most appropriate for our times. Add to that Fresnadillo's film-noir visuals, and you've got a moody, sometimes violent journey into the heart of questions we often don't like to ask.

Living With the Past

The knock on John Sayles as a filmmaker is that he's more interested in ideas than in people. And it's true that his movies sometimes feel like they started as term papers and then accumulated plots and characters as they went along. But at his best—in Lone Star, for example, he finds ways to flesh out his intellectual exercises with the complexities of real life.

Sunshine State (PG-13, 2002) is a fine example. I'm sure a movie about development controversies in coastal Florida isn't everybody's idea of entertainment, but Sayles' multi-layered study finds the basic human conflicts underlying the most banal civic politics. Set in a fictitious place called Plantation Island, which is divided into a mostly white town and a mostly black seaside community, it traces racial, sexual, and political fault lines with less didacticism than you'd expect. There aren't many real bad guys, or good guys, just people with specific sets of experiences that shape how they react to the world. The movie's overall tone is ambivalent—it understands the way the past both informs and constrains the present.

It benefits from a large and talented cast, including Edie Falco (of The Sopranos) and Timothy Hutton. Angela Bassett is especially good as a woman returning to the small town she fled as a pregnant teenager. She feels little nostalgia for the African-American community that her elders struggled to found and are now in danger of losing.

Those generational tensions are more fully—and hilariously—aired in the amiable comedy Barbershop (PG-13, 2002), set in a neighborhood joint in inner-city Chicago. Although it sometimes lapses into lazy slapstick, the movie has plenty of sharp things to say about African-American life, politics and identity. More than that, it's a plain old likable ensemble piece, with Ice Cube as the sincere but frustrated owner of a barbershop that employs a range of archetypes from the reformed hood (Michael Ealy) to the sharp-tongued sassy girl (the rapper Eve) to Eddie, the outrageously opinionated old-timer (Cedric the Entertainer). Some of Eddie's show-stopping diatribes ("Rosa Parks didn't do nothin' but sit her black ass down!") earned the wrath of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who were apparently short on things to be offended by that week. Like Eddie says, "If we can't talk openly in a barbershop, where can we talk openly?"

—Jesse Fox Mayshark

January 23, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 4
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