by Matt Brunson

Andrew Cooper/New Linecredit: SCHLUMPY OLD MEN

capt:Garry Shandling and Warren Beatty

put their long marriages on the line in Town & Country.

NEW RELEASESDRIVEN More like Drivel. With rare exception, the mini-genre of race car flicks has always been a disreputable one, as proven by the likes of Elvis Presley's Speedway and Tom Cruise's Days of Thunder. But if there's anyone who could make a racing movie that at least qualifies as a guilty pleasure, it would be director Renny Harlin, since even his trashy films (including Deep Blue Sea and The Long Kiss Goodnight) are presented with a certain degree of style and chutzpah. But Harlin hits the wall with Driven, which is so banal and preposterous that not even his constantly roving camera can disguise the bankruptcy of the project. In fact, this is that rare time when Harlin's technique turns out to be an impediment, since the picture is so disorganized and chaotic that the myriad racing scenes result in nothing more than audience ennui (it doesn't help that much of the race footage is so obviously computer-generated). Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the original story (Neal Tabachnick and Jan Skrentny tackled screenwriting duties), handles the tried & true veteran role: He's cast as Joe Tanto, a former racing star who's coaxed out of retirement by crotchety car owner Carl Henry (Burt Reynolds) to provide guidance to Jimmy Bly (Kip Pardue), a rookie sensation who's in a dead-heat battle for the season championship with ice-cold defending champ Beau Brandenburg (Til Schweiger). Apparently growing modest with age, Stallone more or less hands the picture over to the other lead actors and their characters -- not a bad decision, since Pardue and especially Schweiger are fine in their roles. But the story itself is packed with too many needless characters, fetid dialogue and ludicrous developments. And what's with Burt Reynolds? His face, boasting a sickly color usually seen on someone right before they hurl, looks unnaturally stretched, indicating either too much makeup, too many face lifts, or a burning desire to audition for the next Mummy sequel. 1/2

ONE NIGHT AT MCCOOL'S Michael Douglas' first two credits as a producer were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for which he won the Best Picture Oscar) and The China Syndrome; now, approximately a quarter-century later, he's formed a new production company (Furthur Films), and its premiere film couldn't be further away from the prestige of those earlier titles. Sometimes funny, sometimes smarmy, and always lewd and crude, One Night at McCool's uses the old Rashomon blueprint of allowing its various characters to relate their own interpretation of the same events. At the center of every tale is Jewel (Liv Tyler), a luscious sexpot who, depending on who's telling the story, is either a calculating femme fatale who harbors a soft side, a ruthless dominatrix who's partial to whips and dog collars, or the embodiment of all that is pure and innocent in our soiled society. And holding those distinct viewpoints are, respectively, a bartender (Matt Dillon) who gets mixed up in murder because of his involvement with her, a ladder-climbing lawyer (Paul Reiser) who develops a taste for S&M, and a widowed detective (John Goodman) who's reminded of his dearly departed wife every time he looks at Jewel. Debuting director Harald Zwart and screenwriter Stan Seidel (who passed away last summer) have concocted a movie that on one level is nothing more than a leering frat boy feature (Jewel even washes a car in a skimpy outfit at one point) but that on another plane can be viewed as a satire on the manner in which men will alter their perceptions of any given woman in order to make her fit their own limited needs. Ultimately, the juvenile antics win out over the barbed material, but there are several laughs along the way, as well as a hilarious performance by Michael Douglas as a sleazy, bingo-playing hit man. 1/2

TOWN & COUNTRY A troubled production that was years in the making and ended up costing in the $80-$85 million bracket, Town & Country will likely suffer the same fate as a previous Warren Beatty film, Ishtar: Those who compare the cost of the film to what's actually on the screen will declare it a monumental turkey, while those of us who don't care about bloated budgets will view it as an amiable misfire with a few good moments but far too many dead spots. Certainly, the end result supports the claim that the picture went through several rewrites and reshoots (filming commenced in 1998, and the cast was called back much later to shoot a different ending after the first one tanked at preview screenings); yet while the completed package is distressingly choppy and frequently desperate -- characters separated by thousands of miles show up on each other's doorsteps with alarming regularity, while the climax contains the sort of far-fetched zaniness that works only in the sharpest of screwball comedies -- it also benefits from some finely tuned set pieces and a handful of good performances. In a role that provides some interesting subtext to his own life, Beatty (serving only as an actor-for-hire on this one) plays Porter Stoddard, a New York architect who's been happily married to an equally successful woman (Diane Keaton) for 25 years. But about the same time it's discovered that his best friend (Garry Shandling) is cheating on his wife (Goldie Hawn), Porter unexpectedly has a pair of affairs himself, both with his friend's wife and with a lovely cellist (Nastassja Kinski). The movie's theme is that old stand-by about how an individual doesn't realize how good he's got it until he messes up, but it's hard to make any emotional connections in the midst of such a rambling, ragged screenplay. And while most of the film is played in a genial, straightforward manner, the sequences involving a pampered rich girl (Andie MacDowell) and her macho father (Charlton Heston) are as bizarre as anything you'll find in David Lynch's Eraserhead.

CURRENT RELEASES

ALONG CAME A SPIDER Mystery/crime thrillers are arguably the hardest types of films to review: Do you analyze them primarily for their entertainment value, or do you critique them for how well their plots hold together in terms of all the narrative twists and last-minute character revelations we've come to expect from the genre? As a diehard film noir aficionado who fondly recalls the brilliant plotting of classic crime flicks, I tend to be strict when it comes to gaping plotholes, so those folks who don't mind that one plus one equals three may want to raise my rating for Along Came a Spider a notch or so. This follow-up to 1997's Kiss the Girls finds Morgan Freeman reprising his role as detective Alex Cross; this time, the lawman known for his ability to psychologically deconstruct any psychopath is forced to square off against one (Michael Wincott) who's responsible for the kidnapping of a senator's daughter (Mika Boorem). The clever criminal asserts that he wants to emulate the Charles Lindbergh-Bruno Hauptmann incident by instigating a new crime of the century; Cross teams up with a Secret Service agent (Monica Potter) in order to stop him. Anchored by a typically strong Freeman performance -- he's the most quietly comforting actor since Spencer Tracy -- and containing a whopping plot twist at the end, the picture moves at an efficient clip and will certainly keep patrons involved. But analyze the plot points for even one fraction of a second, and the whole film proves as flimsy as a tissue in a tornado -- an unavoidable letdown to anyone who expects their mysteries to contain even half a brain (there are more inconsistencies in this picture than there are tears at a wedding). The lovely Potter is miscast in a key role (unless the Secret Service recently opened a Victoria's Secret division), while director Lee Tamahori has yet to live up to the promise of his stunning New Zealand piece Once Were Warriors.

BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY Bridget Jones's Diary, based on the international bestselling novel by Helen Fielding, may be a romantic comedy, but it's hardly the twittering type that usually stars the likes of Meg Ryan or Diane Keaton (or, in the case of Hanging Up, both). It features the same tartness as the sleeper hit Four Weddings and a Funeral (not too surprising, since both films share a screenwriter and a pair of producers), but more importantly, it features a leading actress who steadfastly refuses to turn her character into a standard, nose-crinkling, Cheeto-munching movie lonelyheart. Renee Zellweger, gypped out of an Oscar nomination for last fall's Nurse Betty, gained 20 pounds and an English accent to land this part, and while the casting of a Yank as a Brit caused plenty of wailing on the other side of the Atlantic (hey, it's only fair: We cast the British Vivien Leigh as the quintessentially American Scarlett O'Hara), it's hard to imagine anybody complaining after catching Zellweger's excellent performance as an insecure single woman whose affections are torn between her rascally boss (a playful Hugh Grant) and an upright, uptight barrister (Colin Firth, saddled with the more predictable part). Certainly, Zellweger's Bridget goes through the romantic comedy paces every now and then, but while the script may occasionally indulge in conventional behavior, Zellweger never plays it as such; instead, she plucks her character's quirks and mannerisms straight out of real life, and in doing so makes her character all the more enchanting. Zellweger's Bridget Jones feels like a movie original -- reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly or Diane Keaton's Annie Hall -- and while it's unlikely the picture will enjoy the same level of success as its literary source, it's nice to know that single cineasts everywhere have a new, neurotic heroine to champion.

CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES It's been 13 years since the last Crocodile Dundee picture, and the only surprise is that it took them this long to finally get around to spitting out another entry. The 1986 original was a pleasant sleeper, and even 1988's Crocodile Dundee II had its moments, but this latest go-around is sheer desperation from first frame to last. Paul Hogan, whose features have grown so leathery, his body should be donated to a wallet company after he passes on, again plays the Aussie outdoorsman of the title, an amiable bloke with no pretenses and not much in the way of street smarts, either. When his significant other, Sue Charleton (returning co-star Linda Kozlowski), takes a job with her father's newspaper in LA, Mick Dundee finds himself once again leaving the safety of the Outback for the harsh confines of a concrete jungle; the central plotline kicks into gear when Mick and Sue discover that a fledgling movie studio known for producing shoddy sequels (presumably like this one) is actually a front for illegal operations. Crocodile Dundee In Los Angeles is such a lazy endeavor that director Simon Wincer (who helmed Lonesome Dove in a previous life) and screenwriters Matthew Berry and Eric Abrams repeat numerous bits from the first film (Mick gets mugged, Mick encounters transvestites, Mick gets confounded by electronic gadgets, etc.) while also turning to such grasping celebrities as George Hamilton and Mike Tyson to pump any semblance of vitality into an extremely tired picture. At one point, Hogan states, I think my crocodile hunting days are over. We can only hope, mate. 1/2

JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes hits theaters this summer, but in the meantime, will a remake of Spice World hold you over? OK, so officially, this is a completely different movie from that Spice Girls extravaganza, but seriously, in a couple more years, will anyone be able to differentiate between the two films? Like Spice World, this adaptation of the comic strip/cartoon series is monumentally moronic at its core (and certainly in its garish presentation), yet hovering around the edges are enough savvy asides and colorful sidekicks to make it, while nothing approximating a real movie, at least a couple of steps up from the numbing no-brainers that have been stinking up theaters recently. Rachael Leigh Cook, a young actress whose combination of limited emoting skills and eerily picture-perfect features makes it seem as if her entire face was airbrushed at birth, plays Riverdale rocker Josie, who heads to the big city with fellow Pussycats Melody (Tara Reid) and Val (Rosario Dawson), armed with the unified dream of scoring a record contract. They get their wish sooner than expected once they bump into two unscrupulous record company execs (Alan Cumming and Parker Posey) who seek to control America's youth via subliminal messages in the music. The picture's satire is hardly revelatory, though there's a running gag involving blatant product placement that ranks second only to the priceless punchline in State and Main as the most knowing comment on the subject that I've seen in quite some time. As the dastardly villains, Cumming and Posey fearlessly follow the less than flattering game plan that the script has mapped out for their characters, while Reid (American Pie) generates almost all the memorable chuckles (admittedly few and far between) as the bubble-headed Melody. She's so thick that (to paraphrase Charlie Sheen's famous swipe at Kristy Swanson) if ever a thought entered her pretty little head, it would perish from loneliness (her best line: If I could go back in time, I'd want to meet Snoopy!).

JUST VISITING Usually when a film is years in the making, that's because it turns out to be a large-scale production that runs three hours and boasts all manner of opulent costumes and sets (think Cleopatra). Yet although nobody's trumpeting Just Visiting as being years in the making, the signs are all there. A movie marquee spotted in the background during one scene advertises Go and The Out-of-Towners, two films released in April 1999. Another scene focuses on a wall calendar that reads, April 2000. And now we get to the actual release of the movie, in April 2001. Considering that the finished product runs a mere 88 minutes and displays all the production values of a small-town Fourth of July parade, I have to assume this one was years in the making simply because nobody involved was too anxious for this thing to ever be presented for human consumption. The glut of French blockbusters being remade as limp American comedies reached its zenith in the late 80s/early 90s, but the occasional straggler still turns up on our doorstep every now and then -- that's the case here, as the 1993 Gallic comedy Les Visiteurs (an enormous hit in its homeland) has been Americanized with the same stars (Jean Reno and Christian Clavier), the same scripters (Clavier and Jean-Marie Poire) and the same director (Jean-Marie Gaubert). I haven't seen the original, but I can only hope it's better than this dismal outing; perhaps the addition of John Hughes to this new version's screenplay was so he could dumb the material down to a level that we simple-minded Yanks could appreciate. The plot, incidentally, centers on a 12th century nobleman (Reno) and his imbecilic servant (Clavier) who both get magically transported to our era; they end up spending most of their time discovering the pleasures of bathroom humor (rinsing in toilets, munching on urinal freshener bars, etc.). 1/2

KINGDOM COME Heaven help us. Obviously hoping to tap into the same groundswell of emotion that turned 1997's Soul Food into a sleeper hit, this adaptation of the Off-Broadway play Dearly Departed similarly uses a tragic development involving an elderly member of an African-American family to bring the entire clan together for a marathon session of joking, bickering, crying and reconciling. Too bad the end results are nothing alike: Whereas Soul Food was a pure delight -- well written, smoothly directed and wonderfully acted -- Kingdom Come is a hellish spectacle, alternately shrill, boring and heavy-handed. When Bud Slocumbe drops dead at the kitchen table, his wife Raynelle (Whoopi Goldberg) gathers the other family members together for the sake of the funeral; they include her son Ray Bud (LL Cool J) and his level-headed wife Lucille (Vivica A. Fox, also in Soul Food), her other son Junior (Anthony Anderson) and his constantly harping spouse Charisse (Jada Pinkett Smith), and Bud's religious sister Marguerite (Loretta Devine) and her slacker son Royce (Darius McCrary). The remainder of the picture largely consists of scenes of Marguerite yelling at Royce, Charisse yelling at Junior, Ray Bud yelling at everybody, and Raynelle serenely taking it all in (why does Goldberg always seem so annoyingly smug in this type of role?). In the large ensemble cast, Pinkett Smith and Devine, who between them do enough (over)acting for 12 people, fare the worst; emerging at the top of the heap is LL Cool J, whose natural screen charisma makes up for some forced deliveries here and there. 1/2

MEMENTO The first truly memorable movie of 2001, Memento is a stunning cinematic experiment that one-ups even The Usual Suspects in terms of pulling the rug out from under anticipatory audience members. In a way, it's like Pulp Fiction magnified to the nth degree: Whereas that stylistically audacious film presented its various lengthy episodes in a decidedly non-linear order, Memento goes one better by presenting individual scenes out of chronological order. Actually, there is a tidy method to Memento's madness: For the most part, the story is told in reverse order, beginning with the end and working its way back in time to a logical starting point. On paper, that sounds like a daft idea -- if we know the end, won't we know all the facts that lead up to it, thus stripping the piece of any potential surprises? But that's where the film works its mojo: Memento is as crafty as any other well-constructed murder-mystery, because every time we think we know the score, the movie pulls in a new component from the past that forces us to reflect (and re-reflect, and re-re-reflect) on what we thought we already knew. Guy Pearce (L.A. Confidential) stars as Leonard Shelby, an insurance investigator whose troubles begin on the night that someone breaks into his house, murders his wife, and gives him such a bump on the head, it wreaks havoc on his ability to form and retain new memories. Thus, even as Leonard tries to track down the killer, he can't remember anything that happens to him for more than a few minutes, a taxing situation that forces him to depend on tattoos and Polaroid snapshots to keep the facts intact. Writer-director Christopher Nolan (adapting a short story by his brother Jonathan Nolan) has fashioned a razor-sharp picture that challenges us with its philosophical musings on the nature of memories even as it thrills us with its deliciously twisty plotline. 1/2

THE TAILOR OF PANAMA On the left, we have David Spade in Joe Dirt, while on the right, there's Tom Green in Freddy Got Fingered. (Having already fulfilled my quota of gross-out comedies for the year by sitting through Say It Isn't So, Saving Silverman and Head Over Heels, I'm in the enviable position of being allowed to stamp this pair Unscreened and move on.) But there in the middle, appearing as fuzzy as a mirage... can it actually be (gasp!) a movie for grown-ups? Yes, that would be The Tailor of Panama, a deeply absorbing drama that serves as a tonic for anyone not averse to a motion picture that doesn't include a single, solitary bodily function gag. Smart, sophisticated and cynical to its very core, director John Boorman's adaptation of John Le Carre's novel casts Pierce Brosnan as Andy Osnard, a British spy whose constant screw-ups over the course of his career have resulted in his banishment to Panama, a country where, according to one character, no good deed goes unpunished. Not that Osnard plans to commit any of those; on the contrary, he immediately bullies Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), a British tailor who's managed to hide his criminal past from everyone (except Osnard, of course), into operating as his local connection for digging up unsavory activities. A born storyteller, Harry feeds Osnard a pair of whoppers involving an underground revolution and the Panama Canal; this in turn leads to developments that quickly get out of hand and end up threatening a pair of former anti-Noriega activists who also happen to be Harry's best friends (Brendan Gleeson and Leonor Varela play these noble characters). Rush and Brosnan are a splendidly matched pair, with Brosnan's casting an especially intelligent move -- his Andy Osnard is like a corrupt James Bond, with loyalty only to himself. If the ending had been a lot sharper (as it stands, the film basically peters out), this would have been one of the year's best; nevertheless, it's still near the head of the current multiplex pack.

THE WIDOW OF SAINT-PIERRE A man commits a senseless act of murder and is then treated as a victim-saint by the other characters and, by extension, the filmmakers themselves. Another bleeding heart picture from hypocritical Hollywood? It could be, except for the fact that it comes from French director Patrice Leconte, whose past credits include such impressive undertakings as Monsieur Hire, Ridicule and Girl On the Bridge (just out on video). The Widow of Saint-Pierre proves to be the runt of this particular litter, a movie that pretends to answer several weighty questions without ever honestly contemplating all the facts. Set in 1849 in the French territory of Saint-Pierre (an island located off the coast of Newfoundland), the film stars Emir Kusturica (the Underground director, here making his acting debut) as a sailor who drunkenly stabs another man to death simply to determine whether the victim was big or fat. The island authorities sentence him to death, but execution will have to wait until a widow (French slang for guillotine) can be shipped over from France. In the meantime, the military commander (Daniel Auteuil) and his compassionate wife (Juliette Binoche), convinced that goodness resides in the prisoner, treat him like a family member and eventually steer most of the townspeople to their cause. Criminal reform is certainly a salient topic for a motion picture, but The Widow of Saint-Pierre is dishonest in the way it completely whitewashes the man's criminal act, not to mention how it never develops his character to the point where we can accurately gauge his moral fiber -- it's like Dead Man Walking without a sense of balance. Auteuil gives his character some interesting shadings, but the usually radiant Binoche isn't commanding enough to allow us to embrace her troublesome character, a woman so blinded by her own ethical code that she fails to comprehend the fatal ramifications of her actions.