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MONSOON WEDDING Seeing the moldy expression "feel-good" in relation to a motion picture generally gives me heartburn, but how else to describe this joyous work from Mira Nair, the director of Salaam Bombay! and Mississippi Masala? A picture as full of emotion as the traditional ceremony it celebrates, Monsoon Wedding uses the title event as the backdrop for a work that, among other things, delineates the struggle between "old" and "new" India, examines the compromises that individuals must perform for the sake of family sanctity, and, in the tradition of Father of the Bride, takes a gently comic look at the headaches brought on by pulling the whole thing together. Naseeruddin Shah is cast in the equivalent of the Spencer Tracy role, as the family patriarch who must contend with all sorts of old-fashioned strife in new-fangled Delhi as he coordinates the union of his thoroughly modern daughter (Vasundhara Das) to a handsome man (Parvin Dabas) flying in from Houston to take part in this arranged marriage. Characters come and go, tense situations alternately explode or dissipate, and secrets are uncovered -- yet through it all, most of these ingratiating folks invariably manage to do what's best for themselves and for the family unit. Vijay Raaz steals the film as a wedding planner whose obnoxiousness gets vaporized by true love, and there's an infectious soundtrack that may warrant an immediate trip to your local music store. 1/2

QUEEN OF THE DAMNED It's difficult to make a truly boring vampire picture, but the folks behind this draggy adaptation of Anne Rice's bestseller have done just that. Neil Jordan, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and the rest of those responsible for the arresting screen version of Rice's Interview With the Vampire are sorely missed this time around; instead, given the tedious exploits of the notorious bloodsucker Lestat (blandly played by Stuart Townsend) in this outing, the movie's sole claim to fame would seem to be as the final film project of the late singing star Aaliyah. She's cast as Akasha, the Mother of All Vampires, but it's impossible to gauge her thespian abilities based on this performance: She only arrives during the final half-hour, buried under reams of makeup and jewelry and boasting an electronically altered voice that sounds like a cross between Bela Lugosi and Twiki the robot from that 70s Buck Rogers series. There's probably a compelling film version to be made from this particular chapter in the vampire chronicles, but this moribund (and occasionally laughable) take ain't it. 1/2

RESIDENT EVIL Here we go again: yet another screen adaptation of a popular video game, and one that makes last summer's doltish Lara Croft: Tomb Raider seem almost Kubrickian by comparison. Writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson, doubtless hoping that financiers will confuse him with writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (of Boogie Nights fame), has made a career out of helming noisy sci-fi spectacles like Soldier and Mortal Kombat, and here he returns to the same dry well, concocting a shoddy product that tries to beef up its pinball-simple narrative by borrowing liberally from The Andromeda Strain, Aliens and George Romero's Dead trilogy. After an opening half-hour that ranks as the most excruciatingly dull 30 minutes I've sat through in at least two years (basically, expository scenes of a military task force trying to find out what went wrong at an underground genetic research facility), things get moving once our heroes get attacked by hordes of shuffling zombies, a pack of fleshless Dobermans, and a laughable, computer-generated mutant billed as "The Licker" (boy, there's a terrifying moniker). Except for one imaginative (albeit gruesome) sequence involving slice-and-dice laser beams, this isn't even fun on a trash level.

SHOWTIME While the dreadful trailer and the opportunity to catch overexposed Robert De Niro in his 238th film appearance of the new decade combined to make Showtime seem as appealing as a case of the clap, this is actually one entry in Hollywood's ceaseless string of "buddy-cop comedies" that has enough fun with its own premise to make it a passable timekiller. De Niro plays the team's straight man, a humorless detective who's forced to co-star in a reality-TV series with a preening cop (Eddie Murphy) who's always been more interested in pursuing an acting career. Much to the delight of the show's producer (Rene Russo), the friction between the partners helps turn the program into a ratings bonanza, but these mismatched cops eventually find common ground once they both set their sights on bringing down a suave arms dealer (Pedro Damian, doing a poor job of aping Alan Rickman's classic Die Hard villain). Aside from hearing William Shatner (playing himself) refer to De Niro's character as "the worst actor I've ever seen," there's nothing new under the sun in this one, but De Niro's frequent slow burns are consistently amusing, while Murphy's attempt to tackle the sort of role that made him a star in the first place is appreciated. 1/2