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In theaters
SMALL TIME CROOKS. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated PG. Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.
Woody Allen’s “Small Time Crooks” feels like Dominick Dunne’s 1988 novel, “People Like Us,” charged with laughing gas.
Its first hour is some of Allen’s best work, his humor and wit never sharper as he swirls his latest around two charmless, unsophisticated yet likable morons who try like hell to buy their way into New York society after coming into loads of dough — literally and figuratively.
The comedy of errors that ensues is screwball slapstick, the work of an artist who loses his angst to prove he’s still just a wiseass from Coney Island who wants to pull the world’s pigtails.
In “Crooks,” Allen initially pulls so hard, the film’s soft, anti-climactic ending comes as something of a letdown.
In the film, Allen is Ray Winkler, a former bank robber whose marriage to former stripper and now manicurist Frenchy (Tracey Ullman) is straight out of “The Honeymooners.” Indeed, just as Ralph Kramden used to concoct schemes to get Alice and himself out of poverty, so does Ray, with Frenchy ridiculing those schemes in ways that would make Alice Kramden cheer.
Ray’s latest scheme certainly is ambitious. He plans to rob a bank in New York by leasing a building near it. In that building, Frenchy and her cousin May (Elaine May) will run a cookie shop while Ray and his friends (Michael Rapaport, Tony Darrow, Jon Lovitz) tunnel under a row of buildings to the bank’s vault.
To reveal too much would ruin the film’s surprises, so we’ll leave it at this: Frenchy’s cookies become a huge success, so much so that she and Ray are soon schmoozing with the ultrarich, decorating a new mansion in zebra stripes, leopard spots and ormolu everything, and exposing themselves for who they are — small-time crooks with hearts of gold.
Sophisticated and fun, “Small Time Crooks” comes alive in its dialogue. When Ray asks his friend Benny (Lovitz) what he’s going to do with the flower shop he recently bought, Benny says, “Burn it down. I burn everything down. It’s how I sent two kids to college.”
Lines like that and characters like this are what make “comedies” such as “Road Trip,” reviewed below, consistently feel like the low road taken.
Grade: B+
ROAD TRIP. Directed by Todd Phillips. Written by Phillips and Scot Armstrong. Running time: 91 minutes. Rated R.
Imagine a film that’s the cinematic equivalent of a 30-car pileup, with everyone dead or near death from the stupidity of their bad driving, and you’ll have a good idea of how Todd Phillip’s “Road Trip” dies in a fantastic fireball on screen.
This is one bad movie, so lame and unfunny that if you’re not a teen-age boy hooked on Hustler, swamped in hormones or still a virgin, it might give you road rage.
A favorite English professor of mine once said of her writing students’ mimicry of Stephen King’s works that “they get all of the glitz, but none of the depth.” The same can be said for “Road Trip,” which misunderstands what made films such as “American Pie,” “There’s Something About Mary” and “The Spy Who Shagged Me” work.
As raunchy as those films were, there was an underlying sweetness to them that’s missing from “Trip.” This film is tasteless for the sake of being tasteless. It believes that if you feature enough bare breasts, horny boys and shots of Tom Green shoving a live mouse in his mouth, then that’s great comedy, which it isn’t. It’s just dreck.
Grade: D-
On video
THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH. Directed by Michael Apted. Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Bruce Feirstein. Running time: 128 minutes. Rated PG-13.
In Michael Apted’s “The World is Not Enough,” Pierce Brosnan certainly proves he’s enough. The film, which is the 19th in the series, is Brosnan’s best outing as James Bond.
Now fully comfortable in a role still associated with Sean Connery, the ersatz actor strikes just the right balance of emotion, wit, style and substance in a story that’s filled with all the ingenious action that fans of the series have come to expect.
After a smashing opening that finds Bond jumping from a building, chasing a madwoman across the river Thames in a speedboat, and then leaping from an exploding hot-air balloon to what is nearly his death (yeah, right), the film settles down to its real business: Electra (Sophie Marceau), the daughter of a recently assassinated tycoon, is building a pipeline across central Asia to Turkey, something her deranged former kidnapper, Renard (Robert Carlyle), will stop at all costs.
When M (Judi Dench, perfect in an enjoyably expanded role) sends Bond to the Caspian oil town of Baku to protect Electra, the film — literally and figuratively — finds its legs.
As Bond girls go, Marceau’s Electra won’t disappoint, but Denise Richards’ Dr. Christmas Jones, a nuclear scientist who resembles Lara Croft from PlayStation’s Tomb Raider games, is no Honey Ryder or Pussy Galore. She can’t pull off the puns and doesn’t have the bite or the shrewd intelligence the role demands.
Still, she’s backed by an otherwise excellent cast, including Dench and Brosnan, who are more than enough to rocket this excellent series straight into the new millennium.
Grade: B+
Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide
THE VIDEO CORNER
Renting a video? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.
American Movie A Eye of the Beholder F The End of the Affair B+ Felicia’s Journey B+ Sleepy Hollow B- The World is Not Enough B+ American Beauty A Bringing Out the Dead B- The Straight Story A Anywhere but Here B+ Being John Malkovich C+ Dogma F Galaxy Quest B+ Fight Club B+ Flawless C- Music of the Heart B Tumbleweeds A The Bachelor D+ End of Days C+ The House on Haunted Hill F Mumford A- Stuart Little B- The Insider B+ Superstar B+ Three Kings A- Three to Tango D- Boys Don’t Cry A For Love of the Game B The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Ark C- The Phantom Menace B Jakob the Liar D Last Night B- The Sixth Sense A- The Omega Code F Pokemon: The First Movie C- Crazy in Alabama C Drive me Crazy C+ Guinevere A- The Limey A Outside Providence C+ Eyes Wide Shut B+ Buena Vista Social Club B+ The Bone Collector C+ Twin Falls Idaho A The Best Man B Random Hearts C- Stigmata C- Bats C
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