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Also playing
By Times staff
© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 23, 2001
Summer's last hurrah
[hoto: Warner Bros.]
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Summer and baseball season are almost finished, so Warner Bros. is trotting out Summer Catch in the nick of time. Freddie Prinze Jr. stars as Ryan Dunne, a hotshot pitcher taking one last shot at the majors in the Cape Cod Baseball League where so many All-Stars got their start. Jessica Biel (TV's 7th Heaven) provides a distraction playing a Vassar graduate on vacation. The lineup includes several Bull Durham remnants including a Susan Sarandon-style sexual mentor for young players, Ryan's wacky battery mate (Matthew Lillard) and various baseball Annies. Summer Catch is directed by Mike Tollin, whose sports savvy showed in the cable TV programs Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream and Arli$$.
Bursting the bubble
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jimmy Livingston, a.k.a. Bubble Boy, in a romantic comedy that has already upset some people because Jimmy suffers from a rare genetic immune deficiency. You may recall the true story of David Vetter, who lived his life inside a plastic shield to keep him safe from infections until his death at age 12 in 1984. His mother, Carol Ann Demaret, deemed Bubble Boy "an insult to David's memory" and the Immune Deficiency Foundation has called for a boycott of the Touchstone Pictures (i.e., Disney) film. In the movie, Jimmy falls in love with a classmate (Marley Shelton) and constructs a mobile plastic bubble in order to follow her cross-country. Previews show Jimmy being bounced by a bus and a train and hoisted above a rock concert crowd. That may or may not be as insensitive as John Travolta's weepy 1976 TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble or similar characters played for fun on Seinfeld and Northern Exposure. See Friday's page 2B for a review.
Attack of Martian zombies
[Photo: Screen Gems]
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John Carpenter is one of the few filmmakers able to include his name in the official title of a movie, and the only one who finds it necessary. Maybe that's because recent works such as John Carpenter's Vampires and John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. needed something to set them apart from the rest of their respective genres. Now comes John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars starring Natasha Henstridge (Species) as a space cop transferring a prisoner (Ice Cube) when Martian zombies attack. Expect plenty of explosions, decapitations and martial arts mayhem. The movie was screened too late for Weekend review.
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