The Heartbreak Kid 1/2

Queen for a day - Blanchett is terrific as Elizabeth.

Recently I chanced upon my old apartment neighbor, and he updated me on his life. Soon after I got married, he himself wed a lady he'd been seeing. Following the "I dos," she transformed instantly into "the bitch from hell." They're split up now. He's staying with buddies. But he still wears the ring to remind himself: Never again.

Well, in regard to the new Heartbreak Kid, to paraphrase Jim Carroll, this one is for you, my brother. At least half of it. The half that does speak to the dilemma that the person (let's cut the PC rubbish - the woman) you thought you knew becomes utterly different after the ceremony, and not for the better. Rest is the expected Farrelly Bros. relationship-farce bag of fan base-pleasing tricks, an explosion inside a dirty-joke novelty emporium, prosthetic boobs, pubic wigs, ethnic stereotypes, icky medical conditions and dotards flying in all directions.

You'll laugh, maybe cringe a little - but not remotely like how folks cringe at the 1972 Elaine May-directed version this remakes. That was the one where a freshly wed nebbish Charles Grodin fled his Noo Yawk bride during their Miami honeymoon for svelte WASP golden goddess Cybill Shepherd, in one of the most painful expressions of Jewish-American self-loathing since Woody Allen's bar mitzvah. It got under your skin like melanoma because characters and emotions were recognizably human. Here that's less of a consideration.

Ben Stiller, in his standard likeable-everyschlub bit, takes over as Eddie Cantrow, now a non-ethnic-specified San Francisco sports-shop owner with a scoreless love life. When an old flame marries, he finds solace in new romance with Lila (Milan Akerman). Six weeks into their blissful dating relationship, he proposes marriage. En route to a Mexican resort after the ceremony, though, Eddie's love goggles seemingly drop off, and the hasty groom starts finding things about Lila that bug him. Her crap taste in music. Her old cocaine addiction and debts. Her freaky sex turn-ons. Weird thing is, in Elaine May's telling those would have been ideal shiksa qualities. Actress Akerman indeed more resembles Cybill Shepherd than does the dark-haired, demure Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), a vacationing and unattached Mississippi miss, whom Eddie pursues once Lila's mood swings and bad sunburn get him mostly banished from their honeymoon suite.

He keeps Lila a secret while wooing the new dream girl and her gooberish family (ah, so that's what happened to Polly "Kiss mah grits, Mel!" Holliday) and contemplating breaking his marriage with his incipient bitch-from-hell wife. Additional misunderstandings and complications arise from some rat-bastard twins, Eddie's merrily widowed dad (Ben's real-life father Jerry Stiller), and a Frito-Bandito-level portrayal of a Mexican concierge, so clueless he doesn't know it's impolite to place his dick in the hand of an unsuspecting gringa.

A comedy canvas crammed with scene-stealers, hit pop-tune samples and tasteless asides is quite par for the famed Farrelly formula, under which (as in There's Something About Mary) there's a solid theme, a man not compromising in the search for the love of his life. That constant always puts the Farrellys ahead of the usual horndog teen-sex flicks about nailing the prettiest cheerleader. Still, the schtick grows a bit weary here. You'll laugh - maybe cringe a little - and if you sit through the end credits, there are bonus jokes tied to earlier running gags; you'll be in the parking lot before you comprehend them - and by then, 40 per- cent of The Heartbreak Kid has already seeped out of memory.

Still, it will bring transient pleasure to my old neighbor and other guys of my acquaintance who've told me woeful tales like his. He's got them beat with that detail about his wedding ring, though.

- Charles Cassady Jr.

Belle Toujours 1/2, Lady Chatterly

Nobody does sex in the movies better than those perpetually horny French. From new-wave classics like Louis Malle's The Lovers and Roger Vadim's ...And God Created Women, to the Rabbelasian '70s romps of Bertrand Blier (Going Places) and Catherine Breillat's envelope-pushing feminist Rorschach tests (Anatomy of Hell), French filmmakers have always appreciated adult sensuality in its most primal form. Even foreign directors working in France have been unable to resist that country's carnal allure (Marco Ferreri with The Last Woman, Luis Bu-uel's masterpiece of erotica Belle de Jour). It's enough to make a movie critic blush.

Not even 98-year-old Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira is immune to France's licentious siren call. Oliveira's latest, Belle Toujours, is a kind of pithy epilogue to Bu-uel's 1967 screen landmark. Running a fleet, streamlined 70 minutes, Toujours reunites Michel Piccoli's petit sadist Monsieur Husson from the Bu-uel film with glacially beautiful part-time hooker (and full-time masochist) Severine. Curiously, Severine is now played by Bulle Ogier instead of Belle's Catherine Deneuve. Since Deneuve has worked extensively with Oliveira in the past (The Convent, A Talking Picture), I'm assuming she chose not to reprise her most iconographic role for personal reasons. No matter; Ogier is a more than adequate substitute for the ineffable Deneuve. Husson first spots Severine at a symphony recital and begins aggressively stalking her. After repeatedly rebuffing his advances, Severine finally acquiesces to join Husson for dinner. While no actual sex occurs, their conversation - and the silences in between - is laced with innuendo and allusions to sexual peccadilloes. (Husson was Severine's late husband's best friend who gave her directions to the brothel she worked at.) Oliveira closes Belle Toujours on a whimsically surreal note (a stray chicken roams the hallway just outside Husson's hotel door) that pays additional homage to surrealist master Bu-uel. Like everything else in this tiny gem of a movie, it's close to perfection.

The more overtly sexual Lady Chatterly is not only the most successful screen translation yet of D.H. Lawrence's groundbreaking novel, but also one of the finest literary adaptations in recent memory. Although shot in France by a French director (Pascale Ferran who brings a distinctly feminine sensibility to Lawrence's echt masculine ethos) with an all-French cast (Marina Hands plays Constance Chatterly; Jean-Louis Coulloc'h is gamekeeper Oliver Parkin), Ferran's Chatterly doesn't bother relocating the book's thoroughly British characters or locales outside their original English setting. By preserving the integrity of her source material, Ferran points out just how universal its themes (the transgressive power of sex, class consciousness, et al) remain to 21st century audiences. Distinguished by remarkable sexual candor (in front of the camera) and considerable formal rigor (behind the camera), Ferran's stately, yet unabashedly sensual Lady Chatterly is literally a feast for the senses. Fans of Lawrence, French cinema and/or high-toned erotica will swoon in ecstasy.

- Milan Paurich

Belle Toujours
At 5:30 p.m. Saturday, October 13 and 7 p.m. Sunday, October 14
Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque

Mob Rules - Wahlberg and Phoenix make We Own the Night a good popcorn flick.

Lady Chatterly
At 9 p.m. Friday, October 12 and 7 p.m. Saturday, October 13
Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

All dressed up with nowhere to go, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is that rare historical epic that's best enjoyed if you check your brain at the door. A sequel to 1998's Oscar-nominated - and vastly superior - Elizabeth, The Golden Age suffers from massive creative confusion on a development level. You get the sense that neither director Shekhar Kapur nor scenarists William Nicholson and Michael Hirst could decide which Elizabeth story they wanted to tell. What we get is a hodgepodge of competing storylines, any of which could have sufficed as a stand-alone feature. But the kitchen-sink approach Kapur and company favor results in a cacophony of sound (Craig Armstrong and Ar Rahman's score is ludicrously bombastic), fury, and sumptuous art and costume design signifying precious little. You certainly won't learn anything new about Elizabeth that you didn't already know from having seen the previous movie.

We get the whole Elizabeth/Mary Stuart rivalry thing (the splendid Samantha Morton turns up for a few brief scenes as the doomed Queen of Scots), the Spanish Inquisition, Britain's war with Spain and Elizabeth's flirtatious relationship with alpha male Walter Raleigh (a suitably dashing Clive Owen). Kapur even finds time for some battle-at-sea action setpieces that are bigger, louder and more CGI-heavy than anything in Peter Weir's Master and Commander. Elizabeth: The Golden Age also features more bustling montage sequences - all propelled by that incessantly busy orchestral score - than any movie this side of Potemkin. It's never boring exactly, just trifling and a wee bit dim.

Yes, Cate Blanchett is predictably great, although she's basically recycling her performance from the 1998 Elizabeth. There's nothing surprising or "new" about this new portrayal; it is what it is. The Elizabeth 1 miniseries that ran on HBO last year starring Helen Mirren as the Virgin Queen told the complete Elizabeth story in a more coherent, less fractured style. If you only have time for one Elizabeth movie, skip this and check out the cable version instead.

- MP

Opens Friday areawide

Gypsy Caravan

More than just a concert movie, Jasmine Dellal's Gypsy Caravan provides a behind-the-scenes look at a six-week North American tour that featured five bands from four countries. There's plenty of great footage of the performances here, ranging from the traditional Indian folk troupe Maharaja to the terrific Romanian brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia, an energetic group that could give New Orleans acts like the Dirty Dozen a run for their money. As much as the clips show us the eclectic nature of these gypsy (or Roma) acts, it's the look into their personal lives that really distinguishes this work from other concert films. We get to witness both a wedding and a funeral as Dellal goes back to the homelands of many of the concert's stars.

Along the way, we learn that Macedonian diva Esma Redzepova married a non-gypsy and adopted and educated some 47 children with her late husband. Juana la del Pipa of the Spanish flamenco ensemble Antonio El Pipa had to overcome her husband and son's drug problems in order to become a successful dancer. Nicolae, an elderly Romanian who plays violin with the group Taraf, continues to tour and perform despite his age so that he can feed his family. Johnny Depp's heart is in the right place when he vouches for the gypsy people and denounces the stereotypes that continue to persist. But his appearance seems out of place in a movie that makes that point well enough on its own. Having a Hollywood celebrity give his two cents on the matter is really neither here nor there. But that's a minor quibble with a movie that's beautifully filmed and shows such compassion for the gypsy culture, it'll make you seek out the wonderful soundtrack whether the music's your thing or not. - Jeff Niesel

Opens Friday at the Cedar-Lee Theatre

We Own the Night

We Own the Night has the misfortune to be opening less than a month after another crime drama about the Russian mob (David Cronenberg's rapturously received Eastern Promises). Compounding writer/director James Gray's (The Yards, Little Odessa) bad luck is his movie's surface resemblance to Martin Scorsese's The Departed. Like last year's Oscar-winning Best Picture, Night stars Mark Wahlberg as a policeman (Brooklyn instead of Beantown this time) who gets mixed up with the mob (Russian gangsters in New York instead of Irish wise guys in Boston). And both films feature rookie cops who go deep undercover to nail some vicious hoodlums (Joaquin Phoenix subs for Leonardo DiCaprio). Critics will bitch that it's not as ambitious or stylistically accomplished as the Cronenberg movie, and audiences will dismiss it as a Scorsese rip-off. Sometimes you just can't win.

Which is unfortunate, really, since We Own the Night is actually a pretty good popcorn flick. The kind of unpretentious Saturday night movie nobody bothers making anymore, Night shakes off a wobbly beginning to become exponentially more involving and suspenseful as it goes along. Even though you can figure out where it's headed within the first 15 minutes, Gray's craftsmanlike approach to done-to-death genre material and a solid cast (including the redoubtable Robert Duvall as Wahlberg and Phoenix's police chief pop) make this one of the fall season's sturdier mainstream entertainments. About that wobbly beginning: For some reason, Gray chooses to open with a title card informing us that it's 1988 despite the fact that everything we see and hear - the hedonistic nightclubs, the clothes/hairstyles, even the song choices - signifies the tail end of the disco era a decade earlier. Very, very distracting. But that's a rare misstep in an otherwise compelling yarn told with estimable grit and acted with the finest method-actor conviction. It might not be as outré as Eastern Promises or as thematically ambitious as The Departed, but that shouldn't stop anyone from having a good time. - MP

Opens Friday areawide