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Fired Up / * (PG-13)
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"Fired Up" (PG-13, 89 minutes). Two callow and witless high school football players attend cheerleading camp in dreams of seducing the squad. The characters relentlessly attack each other with inane chatter and the forced jollity of minimum-wage workers passing out free cheese samples at the supermarket. Rating: One star.
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Just Another Love Story / ***1/2 (No MPAA Rating)
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"Just Another Love Story" (Unrated, 104 minutes). A vigorous film noir about a cop who is mistaken for the fiance of an accident victim who has amnesia. It's not that simple. All sorts of twists and surprises are laid on, and the closing scenes are astonishing. From Denmark by Ole Bornedal. Rating: Three and a half stars.
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Must Read After My Death / ***1/2 (No MPAA rating)
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"Must Read After My Death" (Unrated, 76 minutes). A cry from the grave. A grandson goes through a family archive of home movies and recordings, to deconstruct the self-destruction of a family with an alcoholic perfectionist as a father and an uncertain martyr as the mother. Fascinating, tragic. Three and a half stars
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The International / *** (R)
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"The International" (R, 118 minutes). A big international bank has an assassination program to protect its shady investments in arms deals, and Clive Owen of Interpol teams with Manhattan DA Naomi Watts to stop them. Lots of financial skullduggery and a sensational shoot-out in the Guggenheim Museum. Directed b y Tom Twyker ("Run, Lola, Run"). Rating: Three stars.
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Confessions of a Shopaholic / **1/2 (PG)
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"Confessions of a Shopaholic" (PG, 112 minutes). A wining performance by Isla Taylor as a compulsively shopping ditz who wins fame and love and pays her bills and is still a ditz. Taylor reminded me of Lucille Ball, and I liked the movie about as much as I disliked "Sex and the City." Rating: Three stars
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Friday the 13th / ** (R)
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"Friday the 13th" (R, 91 minutes). About the best "Friday the 13th" movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required. It is an unremitting exercise in nihilistic despair. Rating: Two stars.
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Great Movie: Waking Life (2001)
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by Roger Ebert
It is hard to say how much of Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" (2001) is a dream. I think all of it is. His hero keeps dreaming that he has awakened. He climbs out of bed, splashes water on his face, walks outside and finds himself dreaming again. But the film isn't one of those surrealist fantasies with pinwheels coming out of the hero's eyes or people being sucked down into the vortex. It's mostly conversational, and the conversation is all intriguing; the dreamer must be intelligent.
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Movie Answer Man: By the time we get to
Phoenix, he'll be laughing
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Q. Has Joaquin Phoenix lost it, or what?
Greg Nelson, Chicago
A. I watched him on "Letterman" and was appalled. There are theories that he was deep in the character of his new hip-hop persona, behaving strangely for his buddy Casey Affleck's new documentary, channeling Andy Kaufman or whatever. I doubt if that particular hip-hop personality is going to inspire many fan clubs.
More seriously: He was on the show to "promote" his new film, "Two Lovers." All he did was assure that his bizarre behavior will be referred to in most of the reviews of the film, which opens here Feb. 27.
He had no right to do that. Independent, original films have a hard enough battle without their stars putting on psycho shows. He had no right to do it to James Gray, who directed it and co-wrote it with Ric Menello. No right to do it to his fellow actors Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw, Isabella Rossellini and the others. No right to distract from the film itself, which was selected for the official competition at Cannes and is running at 83 percent on the Tomatometer. I don't care if he did it deliberately or mistakenly. He should have stayed at home.
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Commentary: Not the Oscars: the French stay cool
when they award their greatest film
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Lisa, a friend of mine, was for many years Variety's correspondent in Paris. In the countdown before the Oscars, I found these observations fascinating.
By Lisa Nesselson
I had a dream the other night here in Paris about being the director of two movies, both of which were contenders in the Best Motion Picture category at the Oscars.
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