|
Indie flix
By Times staff
© St. Petersburg Times,
published November 8, 2001
Boy meets boy in this romantic comedy
[Photo: Lions Gate Films]
Brett (Adam Goldberg, left) sets up his best friend, Eli (Dan Bucatinsky), on a blind date that turns into a roller coaster of emotions.
|
All Over the Guy (R) (92 min.) -- Eli (Dan Bucatinsky) is a shy West Hollywood police reporter. Tom (Richard Ruccolo) is a gregarious special education teacher who carouses too much. They don't seem made for each other, but karmically tuned lovers seldom do in frothy romantic comedies. Their relationship unfolds with flashbacks and quirky sidekicks in a film scheduled for home video release next month.
New York Times film critic Dave Kehr wrote: "There isn't much to separate All Over the Guy from the great mass of indie dating comedies except for its determination to subject gay and straight relationships to the same sort of pop psychological analysis. Some kind of equality has been achieved when it is impossible to distinguish heterosexual cliches from homosexual ones. . . .
"Don Roos, the writer and director of The Opposite of Sex, was an executive producer of All Over the Guy, but all it contains of his quirky personality are cameo appearances by Opposite stars Christina Ricci and Lisa Kudrow."
Opens Friday at Tampa Theatre.
On the road with Felix
The Adventures of Felix (Not rated, probably R) (95 min.) -- Sami Bouajila plays the title character, a gay Arab dockworker who loses his job and decides to find his estranged father. Co-directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau arrange their film as a series of vignettes, with Felix meeting a variety of eccentrics and adopting them as his ad hoc family.
New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell wrote: "Road movies, a genre that seems to be dying out, are slices of life in which the audience sees the maturation of the protagonist. But Felix is the same happy-go-lucky egotist by the end as he was at the beginning. . . .
"(The film) makes its points gently; the picture presents its socially conscious messages as if they were written in the sand, on the beaches where Felix would probably prefer to frolic. . . . The directors evoke the hungry raffishness of Bertrand Blier's Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and Going Places, the best road movies ever made, in which the journey released something in both the travelers and the people they came across."
Shown with English subtitles. Now playing at Channelside Cinemas in Tampa.
Love and murder in Medellin
Our Lady of the Assassins (R) (98 min.) -- Director Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune, Kiss of Death) turns his attention to drug cartels in Medellin, Colombia, where Fernando, a middle-age writer (German Jaramillo), returns to document the violence in his hometown.
[Photo: Paramount Classic]
Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros, left) and Fernando (German Jaramillo) stand over Medellin in Our Lady of the Assassins.
|
Fernando meets Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), a 16-year-old assassin, and they fall in love. When Alexis is murdered, Fernando tracks his killer.
New York Times film critic Stephen Holden credited Schroeder's film for "a murky, dark-hued ambiance all its own. From within this sunbaked circle of hell, the oppressive heat almost steams off the screen, and when the camera points to the hills on the city's fringe, the clouds obscuring the peaks appear to be boiling. The color and mood of the film, shot in high-definition video, make the movie feel paradoxically hallucinatory and realistic in a documentary sense."
Shown with English subtitles. Opens Friday at Channelside Cinemas in Tampa.
Cliched and overdone
Under Hellgate Bridge (R) (90 min.) -- A former drug addict named Ryan (Michael Rodrick) returns to his Queens, N.Y., neighborhood where one brother has overdosed and another is dealing heroin for Vincent, a macho kingpin (Jonathan LaPaglia).
Vincent also married Ryan's former lover, making his violent dislike of Ryan more than strictly business.
New York Times film critic Stephen Holden wrote: "(The) shrill screenplay is an ungainly mechanical contraption in which every swatch of dialogue rings with the clank of cliched oratory. With a ponderous self-consciousness, the story builds to a saloon shootout that parodies a standard western showdown. The performances are correspondingly overblown and the soundtrack inundated with grandiose choral music and mediocre hard rock."
Opens Friday at Channelside Cinemas in Tampa.
Back to Weekend
© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111
|
