..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Why-oh-why would you make a movie as god-awful-clueless-clumsy as Princess Diaries 2? Plus a half-dozen other movies, including Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, Code 46, Garden State, and a contrary take on The Village.

You're dead, son.
Get yourself buried.

Vaudeville is dead, but nobody bothered to tell Garry Marshall.

Turning 70 in a couple of months, the veteran hack seems the most unlikely director of movies about young women, such as Runaway Bride (1999), The Princess Diaries (2001) and this year's Raising Helen, which was the most recent misfire to lower Kate Hudson to the level of last year's flavor. A franchised piece of cardboard exploitation like The Princess Diaries brings to mind the great line Burt Lancaster blurts in The Sweet Smell of Success: "You're dead, son. Get yourself buried."

Sadly, the corpse has been left out in the middle of the cineplex for all to view. Five years after the forgettable events of The Princess Diaries, perky Princess Mia (Ann Hathaway), heiress of the Rinaldi family, is caught up in an intrigue for the throne of Genovia, an anachronistic duchy about the size of a middling modern day spa. Hathaway can make some surprisingly grotesque faces, which Marshall showcases by encouraging her to pull supposedly girlish, but nasty grimaces every so often.

As the granny about to step down from the throne, Julie Andrews' face is drawn, her eyes look freshly bee-stung, and the excuse for a late-in-the-game musical number makes the bladder cry out for immediate attention. It takes place at a slumber party for something like forty spoiled little princesses from all across the Eurotrash bloodlines, and a slumber party with frantic little children in their Dr. Dentons should be the most dynamic thing ever. Here, it's only a mess. In the real world, of course, such a confab would be more like having Tara Reid and the Hilton sisters having their way at a wine cooler distillery.

As the uncle of another pretender to the throne, Jonathan Rhys-Davies, semi-remembered from Raiders of the Lost Ark, makes a nauseatingly hammy heavy, even before a close-up of his swollen bare feet got the loudest reaction from a roomful of small girls. The pretender is one Sir Nicholas, played by Chris Pine, an actor who looks like David Hasselhoff without the acting chops. Will they fall in love or share eyebrow-waxing tips?

The sets are shabby, as genteel as an in-flight goods catalog. Teen Robb Report, anyone? Faux marbling rules. The costumes are awful. In an early scene, Hathaway is dressed in a shawl with all the fashion sense God gave a turnip, swirls of puce and purple and yuck. The vistas showcase the splendid scenery of a scruffy San Fernando Valley backlot. A romantic interlude by a lake at night is shot in almost precisely the same blue shadows as the Garden of Gethsemane scene that opens The Passion of the Christ. (Garry wept.)

There is so much superfluous junk going on in ill-framed shots you wonder about Marshall's attention span. Lighting and focus are inconsistent, making it seem like he's a first-take man, making sure everyone gets home in time for dinner with the family. Camera style, Garry? "Oh, just put it down anywhere." It's the mental equivalent of a 7-Eleven burrito, where ingredients that once passed for food is now something that wallows in your belly, mocking your cheapness.

A lot of semi-familiar faces linger in the background, with two or three lines thrown their way by movie's end. The extras casting is filled with faces from Marshall's movies and sitcom past, such as veteran Tom Poston or tiny, wizened Paul Williams. It's almost as if three dozen doddering pals of Marshall needed annual screen time so they could hold onto their SAG health insurance.

Marshall litters what's ostensibly a girl-empowerment spin on fairytale fantasies with many, many in-jokes, including his "lucky charm" Hector Elizondo as the Queen's longtime security man and admirer from nearby. There's also a reference to Lenny and Squiggy, bit players in his sitcom Laverne & Shirley, several to Marshall's unfunny 1993 play "Wrong Turn at Lung Fish," and a stupid turn by comic Larry Miller, who pops up in the director's work, comprised mostly of a moose impersonation in an Italian accent.

Mia's line, "You just can't go around kissing people!" got a thrilled rise out of the wee ones at my screening, which was followed immediately by Hathaway tumbling into a fountain with Sir, coming out soaked, with black thong lines and visible nippleage. (That's why the movie got a "Gee!" rating.)

The weirdest aside comes when Princess Mia's dancing is described as requiring a "war crimes tribunal." When they finish building Movie Jail, let's see how quickly they lock up Garry Marshall.

Blind man's buffoonery

Takeshi Kitano, maker of Fireworks (Hani-be) and Sonatine, is an acquired taste. He's probably one of the most important directors working today, but his tonal shifts, alternating the bumpkin comedy that he trained in on stage and Japanese television, with bursts of outrageous yet spatially secular acts of violence, leave some audiences befuddled or bemused at best. Which is sad, considering that in a movie like his latest has some of the most furiously inventive moments in any movie this year. Zatoichi, retitled The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi for U.S. release, is a riff on the long-running Japanese movie series, with twenty-six installments over the years. There are playful bits taking on several Japanese period and martial arts genre traditions, but what is most satisfying is Kitano's as-always approach to expressive violence that becomes as much a feat of graphic arts as troubling sensation. Each time the seemingly unbeatable blind Zatoichi is compelled to slide his deadly sword from his bright red blind cane, sound effects of sudden force anticipate zigs of blood and zags of geometry, the blood depicted through the use of computer generated imagery, as much bright red geysers of Japanese calligraphy as of viscous life source. It's a strangely lyric and thrilling effect, and one of the most memorable features of a marvelous movie. (Although I love the needs-to-be-seen-to-be-disbelieved climactic musical number.)

How soon is now?

Prolific genre polyglot Michael Winterbottom revisits some of the thematic notions of his masterful refugee drama In This World in the terse, dreamily paced Code 46. In an unspecified time, in a world woven from locations in Shanghai, Dubai and Jaipur, genetic intermingling is controlled by the state, as are the zones where the privileged live lives like in Bill Gates' Seattle rather than derelict shantytowns. Tim Robbins plays an investigator who takes an "empathy virus" to find wrongdoers at a Shanghai concern called the Sphinx, where "papelles"-identity papers-are manufactured. He finds the culprit right away-round faced, pixie-haired, moon-eyed Samantha Morton and tumbles into love. Towering Robbins and tiny Morton make a strangely affecting couple, their lives aswirl in a world created from bits of now and the fears of tomorrow. There's some gentle play with language, too, an argot littered with several tongues.

Down the Garden path

Garden State, Zach Braff's debut as a writer-director is a charming, ambitious quirkfest that holds great promise and in the meantime a few diverting bits of goofy behavior and indulgent yet solid design instincts. It's what used to be called a good first movie, before the critical world expected every piece of entertainment to be capable of changing the world.

The Scrubs star plays Andrew "Large" Largeman, a TV actor whose psychiatrist father (Ian Holm, small and grave, with a great Jersey accent) has kept him medicated since an accident disabled his mother years earlier. He returns home for Mom's funeral, meeting up with confused old pals like grave robbing gravedigger Peter Sarsgard, whose performance is one of the most tonally perfect things I've seen in too long, a few new oddballs and one Natalie Portman. Portman plays a manic piece of work straight out of an unmade Hal Ashby (Harold & Maude) movie, and from the moment her character's forcing headphones onto Large to see if a Shins single might change his life, she's charm itself. Cute, slight, self-conscious without being self-series, and rife with pop songs, it's sweet work.

Twisted

The secret is out: The big twist is that not many people like M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. (Still, at the start of the weekend, it had grossed over $91 million.)

Originally titled "The Woods" - a title Disney's marketers apparently got the writer-producer-director-surpriser to forsake, standing for what we fear, rather than makes us feel safe-the film disappointed many more people than it thrilled, its second weekend drop-off a whopping 67%. (Warning: If you haven't seen the movie, there are a few hints at plot turns in the next couple of paragraphs.)

There's a beautiful documentary called Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time about the Scottish environmental artist who creates graceful works from natural detritus-twigs, frost-which are meant to be soon effaced by nature. My surprised reaction to The Village was similar. I expected little from a filmmaker whose Signs and Unbreakable seemed deeply shallow work, unworthy of the better conceit behind The Sixth Sense. But Shyamalan's fable, a post-9/11 parable by his own admission, is a resonant work beyond his usual kit of puzzle-box narrative turns. The dangers that can be caused by fear and isolationism are woven throughout his tale of a group of frightened former city dwellers who've secreted themselves in a distant village much like a fin de siecle Celebration, Florida of an earlier century. There are moments that grate and confuse, and it seemed this was another crackpot concatenation of Shyamalan storyboards and twists that would mask its incoherence through a formal solemnity that borders on the comic. The movie is implausible in its particulars, the tone funereal rather than magisterial, which feels like Shyamalan's intent with his glum ardor. But the metaphors accrue and obtain, thoughtful and provocative, with the ringing notion that cultures may create and sustain their own bogeymen to keep citizens within boundaries, stewing with fear.

The interesting range of actors-among them, stoic Joaquin Phoenix, tormented William Hurt, twitchy Adrien Brody, luminous Judy Greer, each get their peculiar moments to play in the face of the threat from the woods outside, from "Those We Do Not Speak Of." The newest face is the central character played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who has a gossamer contemporaneity, and gets to tear up a teacup full, a regular strawberry blonde waterworks. It would be wrong to give the strands of story away, although your friends might, but there is value beyond the restless oddity of The Village, especially when actors get to intone lovely lines about love such as "The only time I know fear is when I think of you and harm; and "The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe." The twigs and stems and stones of this haunted forest make a fortress of metaphor. And thinking about them afterward, you might feel very afraid.

Yet, where I found a cautionary parable against isolationism, other writers found The Village to be endorsing what Metro Weekly's Annalee Newitz called "pure, uncut Bushiana." "By the end of the film," Newitz writes, "the protagonist has learned that the profound terror keeping the villagers inside their borders is based on lies. Nevertheless, she decides to stay within the walls and (one assumes) perpetuate the fearsome deception and meaningless, elaborate rituals the villagers have developed to ward off their imaginary monsters. Shyamalan seems to be suggesting that the goodness of old-fashioned, small-town life requires us to sacrifice rationality, peace of mind, and truth itself.
The Village is pure, uncut Bushiana. We need to protect our borders, and if there's no real reason to do that, we'll just make one up... Living in fear of these phantasms is what makes America strong." Like Robert Zemeckis, Shyamalan may be heading toward making movies with ambiguous metaphors for any opinion one already holds: When's Manoj going to make his Forrest Gump?

The real Daddy Day Care

Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky spent over two years of their lives and $4.5 million of Metallica's money following the veteran heavy metal band through recording an album and preparing to tour, capturing much bickering, many meltdowns and a couple of regroupings along the way. (The drama includes the near-year lead guitarist James Hetfield spent in rehab.) In the two hours and twenty minutes of the graceful, gratifying Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, the filmmakers manage to transform the comical doings of sheltered millionaires, something of a miracle, patiently observed, lovingly patient, and beautifully structured.

Holly wouldn't

Quirky, verbal romantic comedy Little Black Book has a lot on its mind about trust in relationships, mostly trust in one's own instincts. While Brittany Murphy's its perky core as an employee on a Montel-like show (hosted by a spluttering Kathy Bates) going down the tubes, the movie's dark, beating heart is fierce producer Barb, embodied with a small woman's zest as only the one and only Holly Hunter could.

There are all kinds of twists here, but it's still strange to see her in what most people would think of a Hollywood movie. She offers up her sidelong grin. "It's not a Hollywood movie if I'm in it!"

While she's choosy, Hunter doesn't seem to be like Brando saying that acting is a valueless thing to do with one's life. "No," she says quickly. "Nor do I really think he thought that. It can be a little embarrassing. It's all got a kind of wash of humiliation running through it. It's a patina of humiliation! It's because of the exposure when everybody else is thinking what time lunch is going to be and god I really need a smoke and you're up there being concerned with y'know, revealing something universal about humanity. It's tough."

There's a lot of bracing meanness in Little Black Book, some distance from morally uptight, unhappy Jane Craig in Broadcast News, the last time she played a character in a TV studio. "I hope that people also think of me as the 'Cheerleader Murdering Mom,'" she says, eyes bright. "I was hoping she put an end to Jane Craig! There are parallels. And huge differences. The biggest difference that I liked and wanted to shape with Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, the producer, who also heavily rewrote [the script], I really wanted to instill in the character that she's a drifter, she's a dabbler, she's not a careerist. She's not a professional woman, even. She's interested in a grand scientific experiment, which is us. She worked in the Peace Corps, she drove a bus, Wall Street, and then she lands in reality TV. I thought her a slightly bohemian type who definitely had an off-screen life, as opposed to Jane Craig, who was all on-screen. I wanted hints of an off-screen existence with this girl; she's put together. She looks good. She's got something going on that has nothing to do with being a producer."

Couch potential

Pearl Gluck's charming snack of a personal documentary, Divan, is about one woman's attempt to reconcile with her devout father after having left the tight-knit world of Brooklyn Hasidim years early. It's hardly the narcissistic movie one might expect Gluck traces her own journey to reclaim a family keepsake, a nineteenth-century couch from Hungary, which is said to be blessed because a famous rabbi once slept on it. The glimpses of a fallen Eastern Europe are sage and sorrowful. I like this movie a lot, and there's a bonus: it's a shapely seventy-seven minutes long.

Show me the way away from Max Yasgur's farm

After three decades of legal limbo, music doc director Bob Smeaton has pulled hours and hours of footage out of the Canadian National Archives in Ottawa from Festival Express, a 1970 CN railway tour across Canada that headlined Janis Joplin (who had less than three months to live), Buddy Guy and the Grateful Dead and lots of bud and booze. It's no Woodstock, and Smeaton wisely sticks mostly to performance. (Some interviews neatly split-screen interviews of surviving musicians, then and now.) There's a weird anti-audience vibe in some segments, which is assuredly a way to be the anti-Woodstock. Joplin's a stunner; her performances include "Me and Bobby McGee," "Cry Baby" and "Tell Mama."

Touched

In Touch of Pink, Cary Grant is the ghostly apparition offering advice to young Indian-Canadian Alim (Jimi Mistry), happily living in London and leading a gay life, unbeknownst to his strict Muslim mom. Enter: Mom. Enter: predictable plot complications for a half dozen movies like The Wedding Banquet. Writer-director Ian Iqbal Rashid lets Mistry overact in a wide-eyed way, but Kyle Maclachlan's inexact yet amusing impersonation of Grant offers momentary respite.

Trained

Probably one of the more delicious movies of utter incoherence I can recall, Sun Zhou's Zhou Yu's Train is equal parts Wong Kar-wai moodismo and Krzysztof Kieslowski's parallel-fate parables, and if you want to make pretty pictures to tempt the eye, those aren't the worst templates to work from. Sun's 2002 romance, starring a then-356-year-old Gong Li, shuffles the stories of a gifted ceramics maker in the Northwestern Chinese industrial town of Sanming with those of a shy poet Chen Ching (Tony Leung Ka Fai) who she travels far to see and a veterinarian, Dr. Zhang Jiang (newcomer Sun Hong Lei who has a sly and wondrous smile) she meets on her twice-weekly three-hour journeys for love. On top of this, there's Xiu (Li again), a woman who lives for the poems that Chen Ching wrote to Zhou Yu. An inconsequential, wispy thing, Zhou You's Train is nonetheless memorable for its insistence on visual beauty.

Remote Possibilities

The stripped-down DVD of Kill Bill Vol. 2 has only one notable extra, an over-the-top eye-popping eye-rolling 1970s-true martial arts scene; as most reviews have noted, it's stop two on the Miramax three-for gravy train on marketing this malicious misfire.

August 16 , 2004

- Email Ray Pride