FILMS SCREENED IN THEATERS IN 2003

FILM TITLE	FUNKYLB RATING	PERSONNEL	COMMENTS
*** = FILM HAS QUEER CONTENT	RATINGS RUN 1 TO 5 WITH 5 BEING BEST
Assassination Tango	4	written, directed by & starring Robert Duvall	Duvall brings interesting stories to the screen that are usually not terribly talky. The same is true here. He plays a hitman with a soft heart for both his stepdaughter and for dance. The dance sequences in the film (including ones with Duvall) are simply beautiful.
The Italian Job	3	directed by F Gary Gray (*Set It Off)* starring Mark Wahlberg, Donal Sutherland, Mos Def, Seth Green, Charlize Theron, & Ed Norton	Nothing offensive about this heist-caper film. A band of thieves, each member with a special skill, steal $35 million worth of gold. Marky Mark is the strategist who lures Donald Sutherland (a pre-imminent safe cracker) out of retirement for one last big score. Ed Norton betrays the group, steals the gold and kills Sutherland. This means revenge and war! Charlize enters the picture as Sutherland's daughter who also cracks safes, but does it for law enforcement and legit businesses. Will she cross over to avenge her father's death? Will she and Marky Mark hook-up romantically? You know how these pictures tend to proceed. The Cooper minis steal this movie from the humanoids, though. The film is not as fun as Ocean's Eleven, but not half bad.
*******Bend It Like Beckham	4		The feel good movie of the year, thus far. Girls playing soccer, girls being non-conformist with respect to gender roles. One long ass ad for Adidas (one of the film's sponsors) Still, the movie rocked!
*******Don't You Worry, It Will Probably Pass...	4	a documentary in Swedish with English subtitles	A documentarian follows 3 Swedish teens over the course of four years chronicling how they form and solidify their respective identities as lesbians. We see them come out to their families and their peers. All of the girls are from fairly small, insular and not at all forward-thinking towns in Sweden. This film also uses choice music from English speaking indie artists like Ani DiFranco.
****Gaudi Afternoon*	3	with Marcia Gay Harden, Lili Taylor and Juliette Lewis	Strange film. Superb cast! A mystery with some gender bending. Based on a popular dyke mystery book series. An American writer living in Barcelona is hired to locate a fellow American expatriate's "husband." It appears to be a cheeky homage to Almodóvar.
****Laurel Canyon*	5	directed by Lisa Cholodenko (High Art); with Frances McDormand, Kate Beckinsale, Christian Bale and Natasha McElhone	All the Brits here are using American accents (well...Natasha...I can't quite figure out what she's doing), and it's kinda funny. This is my favorite film of the year, thus far. McDormand is playing Jane, a hippie hold-over, pot smoking, polyamorous rock chick/record producer who is forced to make a kind of peace with her now grown son. It seems Jane was a very unconventional mom. Ya think? McDormand and Beckinsale seem to relish these polyvalent women they're playing here. The music in the film is fantastic, too.
Manito	4.5	all indie, non/first-time actors	A Greek tragedy set in an urban Puerto Rican neighborhood and family. The title character is a working class stiff who spent time in jail taking a fall for his drug dealing father. Manito's aim now is to make sure his very bright younger brother gets out of the 'hood and into college. Things, though, don't go as planned. Wonderful, heartbreaking film!
*Light of My Eyes*	3	in Italian with English subtitles	A lonely chauffer courts a melancholic single mother. Me'shell Ndege'ocello's music shows up in a key scene in this film. No one does the melancholy romantic thing quite like the Italians.
****Marion Bridge*	4.5	with Molly Parker (The Center of the World, Kissed)	A small Canadian film about 3 sisters dealing with the vestiges of their difficult childhoods and with unearthed family secrets. Molly Parker just makes me happy!
*******Under the Tuscan Sun	3.5	with Diane Lane and Sandra Oh	This is a light-hearted romantic (sorta) comedy about a jilted American wife, who impulsively buys a villa in Italy. Lane does here what she does in every film: brings a fragile humanity, intelligence, humor and complexity to what could have been a one-dimensional character. I shudder to think what someone like Andie MacDowell would have done with this part. Sandra Oh is onboard and as funny as ever as Lane's lesbian best friend.
*******April's Shower	3.5	written by, directed by and starring Trish Dolan	An indie lesbian romantic comedy. April & Alex were lovers. April decided she didn't want to be gay, broke Alex's heart and, as the film opens, is getting married to a man. Only problem is Alex is throwing the wedding shower at the house she and April used to live in together. Can Alex and April be just friends? Is April really totally over Alex and not really gay anymore? This film was a lot of fun. It's one of the better indie lesbian comedies with respect to the quality of the performances, the feasibility and pacing of the story arc and the overall polish of the film.
****Thirteen*	4.5	with Holly Hunter, Evan Rachel Wood, co-written by and also starring newcomer Nikki Reed	An unflinching look at the nightmare of every parent with heretofore 'good kids': the day your teenager becomes best friends with the best looking, most popular and most out of control kid at school. This movie doesn't moralize, nor does it choose sides. It merely depicts some of the heady challenges that teens face these days: easy access to drugs, ruthless cliques, promiscuous sex, boosting, cutting (as in their own skin with razors), alcohol abuse etc. Hunter, Wood and Reed (who co-wrote the script based on her own experiences) make it hard to look away.
Anything Else	2.5	with Christina Ricci and Jason Schwartzman	Woody Allen's latest celluloid monstrosity. This movie is misogynistic and irritating. Ricci is a selfish shrew and Schwartzman is her ever patient boyfriend with no 'nads. This is a complete waste of Ricci's gifts. I want the old Woody back, too. Where did he go? The only really good thing about this movie is that the Wood-man did NOT cast himself as the romantic lead. Watching him kiss yet another actress 20-30 years his junior is just nauseating!
Love Actually	3	with Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Billy Bob Thorton, Colin Firth, Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Alan Rickman, Kiera Knightly	All the usual suspects from British period films leave the corsets and tights at home, and join the rest of us in the 21st century! Hooray! This is an ensemble driven romantic comedy from the guy who brought us Bridget Jones, Four Weddings...Notting Hill etc... about the many faces of love. The film is cute, but given the size of the cast, there isn't much deep exposition going on. Too many couples, too little time. There are some funny, barbed comments aimed at the White House. Billy Bob is funny as a Dubya-like President with Hugh as a Tony Blair-esque PM. There is a lot of Black Brit window dressing, but none of the darker folk are at center of the film. Curious, especially since one Black guy is married to Kiera Knightley's character. We see a lot of her, but he has like 2 lines in the whole film! The soundtrack rocks, though! It's got Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones, the Beach Boys ("God Only Knows", my personal BB fav), Eva Cassidy et al. I could have lived without the 3, 000 interpolations of "All I Want for Christmas is You", man!
*Lost in Translation*	4.5	with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanssen; written & directed by Sophia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides)	This film was such a pleasant surprise. Bill Murray is a middle-aged American actor on the downward curve of his career making TV ads in Japan. Scarlett Johanssen is a recent college grad who follows her workaholic celebrity photographer husband overseas on a job. Both Johanssen and Murray seem to be dealing with the same existential questions, only at different points in the arc of their lives. This is just a quiet, meditative, absurdist and truly funny little film. I'm really starting to like Sophia's eye and her ear for minimalist dialogue, in particular.
*The Safety of Objects*	3	directed by Rose Troche (*Go Fish*), w/ Glenn Close, Patricia Clarkson, Josh Jackson	Chronicles a suburban neighborhood trying to heal from a communal tragedy. The performances are strong ones, but the story isn't very powerfully told. If you've seem Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, which tells a slightly similar tale but more heart wrenchingly so, then you know what I mean.
Raising Victor Vargas	3.5	cast of first or second time Latino teen actors	This film picks up where the director's short, 5 Feet High and Rising, left off. Victor, the self-described hot Latin lover of his particular barrio, is well into his teens and finding family life and his love life to be equally trying and puzzling.
OT: Our Town (A documentary)	3.5	documentary	Follows the seemingly doomed production of the play, *Our Town*, at an underachieving Compton, California high school. These Black and Latino kids are fantastic. They manage to make this dated, and some would say very vanilla play, tell their very specific, post-modern stories.
****XX/XY*	2.5	with Mark Ruffalo	Some drivel about heterosexual relationships being really hard. The only thing that made me rate it a 2.5 are the two female leads (college roommates who have a sexual relationship until some dude distracts one of them). This should have been a story about how lesbian relationships are really hard, man. Mark looks stoned in every one of his movies.
****The Swimming Pool*	2.5	directed by Francois Ozon (*8 1/2 Women*)	This would have been a pretty good film had director Ozon not tacked a lazy, nonsensical ending on it. This thriller is about a middle-aged female murder mystery writer, who ends up a player in a real-life murder and subsequent cover up. There's tons of feral homoeroticism between the older writer and her editor's 20-something daughter. It was a fun ride until the ending.