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ENOUGH A sleazy exploitation flick disguised as a serious message movie about a nutcase who beats his wife, this ultimately has as much to do with spousal abuse as The Wizard of Oz does with agriculture in Kansas. Jennifer Lopez plays a savvy waitress who ends up meeting and marrying the "perfect man" (Billy Campbell). But in about the time it takes to clip one half of one fingernail, Hubby turns into a complete monster, an ogre who has affairs with seemingly every woman on the continent, beats his wife to a bloody pulp and even gets rough with their helpless daughter (Tessa Allen, cast not so much for her acting ability as for the fact that she draws a collective "aww" from the audience every time the camera zooms in on her tear-streaked little face). The fact that he excuses his beastly behavior by declaring that he's simply doing what a man's gotta do is offensive enough, but don't think this wanna-be feminist empowerment fantasy goes easy on the women, either: Thousands of wives in this country feel trapped in abusive marriages because they don't have the funds to escape or fight back, but hey, that's no problem in this movie, not when Lopez manages to track down her estranged father (Fred Ward), a boisterous lout who's so rich he can personally bankroll his long-lost daughter's entire revenge plot. It would take too much space and effort to list the countless plot holes littering the movie, but rest assured there are enough of them to draw comparisons to the Grand Canyon.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Time for an English quiz: Oscar Wilde's immortal play may deserve its lofty reputation, but because it's so stridently stagebound in origin, writer-director Oliver Parker (An Ideal Husband) has elected to open up the piece by doing everything except a) chop a radical amount of Wilde's wonderful dialogue; b) have Lady Bracknell (Judi Dench) and Miss Prism (Anna Massey) involved in a chase straight out of a cheesy Carry On comedy; c) add a scene in which Gwendolen (Frances O'Connor) gets the name "Ernest" tattooed on her buttocks; d) include a sequence in which the Green Goblin crashes British high society. If you answered d), you'd be correct, but considering Parker's other modifications, would the existence of such a sequence really seem that radical? Yet because the play's the thing, it's impossible to completely screw up this tale of mistaken identity -- as a result, the movie offers some pleasures through Wilde's way with words and the skills of the actors mouthing them. As Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing, the two men who both adopt the moniker of Ernest in an attempt to woo their ladies (Reese Witherspoon and O'Connor), Rupert Everett and Colin Firth make ideal leads, while Dench offers her usual poison-pen delivery as the no-nonsense Lady Bracknell. Parker's direction and script are needlessly fussy, but thanks to his source material, he's like an artist working with a net, unable to do complete harm to himself or to others. 1/2
INSOMNIA With its bleak atmosphere, internally driven performances and unsettling ending, the 1997 Norwegian character study Insomnia seemed like just the type of movie whose pedigree would be tainted by a needless American remake. Instead, the new Insomnia is a surprisingly faithful remake of its chilly predecessor, and when it does elect to head off in its o employs changes that fit it well -- that still work within the context of the storyline -- rather than ones that were imposed for the sake of commercial sensibilities. And while nothing in this production quite matches the ferocious intensity provided by Stellen Skarsgard's excellent performance in the first picture, it compensates by featuring two often ill-used Hollywood stars -- Al Pacino and Robin Williams -- doing some of their best work in years. Pacino drops the ham to play Will Dormer, an exhausted LA detective who journeys to Alaska to help investigate the murder of a high school student. Plagued by bad luck that doggedly clings to him like clothes static in a dryer and wracked by guilt over an unfortunate turn of events, Dormer begins to allow his fatigue to dictate his actions, even to the point where he enters into an unorthodox partnership of sorts with the case's primary suspect (Williams). Insomnia is directed by Christopher Nolan (the man responsible for last year's best picture, Memento), and he and scripter Hillary Seitz manage to turn it into a slow yet satisfying morality play.