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Video / DVD: New Releases
A Cinderella story without much fire
The story is standard and the chemistry lacking, but romantics will still watch.
By PHILIP BOOTH, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 27, 2003
Maid in Manhattan (PG-13)
[Photo: Columbia Pictures]
Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes look marvelous, but lack sizzle as the stars of Maid in Manhattan.
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He's a wealthy Anglo politician, and she's a Hispanic maid from the Bronx. But together they're like, well, oil and water. Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient), as the uptown boy, and part-time dance diva Jennifer Lopez (Out of Sight), as downtown girl Marisa, offer zero chemistry.
The two talented leads, directed by Wayne Wang (The Center of the World) can't rise above the shortcuts and predictability of a film with a cookie-cutter story line, multiple plot contrivances and just a hint of multicultural relevance.
The difference in performance styles is jarring, with Lopez all about shy million-dollar smiles and tentative glances, and the actors playing her co-workers (including Marissa Matrone) going for the broadest of mannerisms. Fiennes, meanwhile, comes across as a little too emotionally detached for the role.
This Cinderella may have a social conscience, hoping for powerful people to pay attention to the needs of her old neighborhood. But she hardly hesitates a movie minute or two when it comes to stepping away into a new life, in the arms of her Prince Charming.
DVD extras: Theatrical trailers.
Rent it if you enjoy: Doomed love stories; romance movies.
Femme Fatale (R)
[Photo: Warner Bros.]
Super-model Rebecca Romijn-Stamos stars in Femme Fatale.
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Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is a femme fatale wannabe in yet another poor man's Hitchcock outing from director Brian De Palma. Romijn-Stamos (X-Men) is so bad, so wooden and campy, she's almost (but not quite) good as a predatory jewel thief who assumes a new identity after pulling off a bloody crime at the Cannes Film Festival, relocating to the United States and marrying. Or is she the same old wolf in supermodel's clothing (or lack thereof)?
De Palma, always eager to treat his female subjects as sex objects, opens the film with an inventively paced and edited heist sequence, built around a soft-core romantic encounter between two attractive women. Antonio Banderas plays a French photographer caught up in the seductress' psychodrama, and Peter Coyote is her husband, a U.S. senator. It's a nonsensical mess, but visually intoxicating.
DVD extras: Making-of-the-movie documentaries; Dressed to Kill montage; trailers.
Rent it if you enjoy: De Palma movies, erotic thrillers.
Ghost Ship (R)
[Photo: Warner Bros.]
Desmond Harrington, left, Gabriel Byrne, Karl Urban and Julianna Margulies aboard Ghost Ship.
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It's a haunted-house movie, er, slasher flick, on the open sea, with Gabriel Byrne and Julianna Margulies as the leaders of a salvage crew determined to find out what happened 40 years ago aboard an Italian luxury liner.
The past, of course, comes back to bite the contemporary characters, most of whom suffer terrible fates. Steve Beck (13 Ghosts) directs the gruesome tale, and the ill-fated cast includes Ron Eldard (an ER grad, like Margulies) and Desmond Harrington.
DVD extras: Making-of-the-movie documentaries; Mudvayne music video; theatrical trailer.
Rent it if you enjoy: Halloween, Friday the 13th and their sequels and kin, and/or other routine horror movies built on gory murders.
Jackass: The Movie (R)
[Photo: Paramount Pictures]
Johnny Knoxville stars in Jackass: The Movie.
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Juvenile pranks aren't what they used to be: They're neither clever nor funny, and not subversive in the least, based on the evidence of the big-screen adaptation of the MTV series Jackass. That didn't stop audiences from flocking to the movie, blamed (along with its small-screen counterpart) for the serious injuries of several viewers gullible enough to try these incredibly stupid stunts at home.
Johnny Knoxville and his pals, apparently dateless and desperate, get together for extended bouts of drinking and the kind of male bonding that leans in the direction of exhibitionism, sadomasochism and homoeroticism. Various members of the crew attach electrodes to various body parts, snort wasabi, dress up in panda suits, practice underwear bungee jumping and crash golf carts. There are also sequences involving the wrecking of a rental car and one man's decision to allow his nipple to meet the teeth of a baby alligator. Some fun.
DVD extras: Commentary by Knoxville and the filmmakers; commentary by cast members; deleted footage; outtakes; making-of-the-movie feature; music videos; trailers.
Rent it if you enjoy: TV's Jackass or Fear Factor; a poke in the eye and/or watching others endure the same.
CLASSICS on DVD
More than 30 years after its release, Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs remains a fascinating, troubling exercise in physical and psychological violence. On second viewing, this tale of an American intellectual's bloody stand against marauding locals in rural England isn't as graphic as recalled, particularly when compared with the explicit carnage seen in contemporary films. The film, perhaps the finest from the notoriously hard-drinking, hard-living director, features first-rate performances by Dustin Hoffman and Susan George as the young couple under attack. The new, two-DVD Criterion Collection edition is packed with enlightening extras, included vintage (Hoffman) and new (George, producer Daniel Melnick) interviews, a commentary by film scholar Stephen Prince, an 82-minute documentary on Peckinpah and a lavish booklet. The release just may prompt a critical re-evaluation of the movie.
* * *
[Buena Vista Home Entertainment]
While investigating Roger Rabbit&Mac226; Valiant’s (Bob Hoskins) list of suspects is topped by Roger’s wife, Jessica, a toon.
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Also out in dazzling new DVD editions, loaded with bonus features, are a double-disc Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), director Robert Zemeckis' animated noir charmer; Francois Truffaut's revered Day For Night (1973), a seriocomic paean to moviemaking; and Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman (1966). Available on DVD, too, is Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990), a collection of eight beautifully photographed stories, including one featuring director (and Kurosawa devotee) Martin Scorsese as Van Gogh.
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