A gripping 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'

Mess with this girl at your peril.

Based on the best-selling novel by Steig Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo may be one of those rare films that topples art-house walls, mostly because the book has received such wide exposure. How wide? When I see a book for sale at Costco - as was the case with this one - I feel safe in concluding that it doesn't qualify as arcane.

This could be a case in which the movie appeals to both readers of the book and to those who are unfamiliar with its story, which -- at least come crunch time - isn't all that amazing. That's not to say that Girl With the Dragon Tattoo isn't finely wrought. Deft direction from Niels Arden Oplev gives the movie an eerie, suggestive flow, and Oplev immerses us in a world full of violence and sexual perversity. Add connections to a Nazi past that's on the verge of being forgotten, and we've got a full-blown case of moral rot.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo draws an interesting and often uneasy parallel between two characters, a persistent investigative journalist and a computer hacker who works for a firm that conducts sensitive investigations into people's personal lives. Both eventually are lured into taking a fresh look at a 40-year-old crime, the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl, a member of the wealthy but viperous Vanger family.

The journalist (Michael Nyqvist) and the researcher (Noomi Rapace) are victims, as well as seekers of truth. Nyqvist's Mikael Blomkvist has been wrongly convicted of libel and sentenced to six months in prison. His face has been splattered across Stockholm's tabloids. His reputation has been ruined. Because Rapace's Lisbeth has a criminal record, she's being exploited and abused by her probation officer (Peter Andersson), one of the more disgustingly creepy characters to hit the screen in some time.

Both journalist and researcher are drawn into the same sphere when retired businessman Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) decides to hire Blomkvist to investigate the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, the niece Henrik had come to regard as a daughter. Vanger believes that Harriet long ago was murdered, but he wants the journalist to take a fresh look at a crime the police have been unable to solve. Vanger originally hired Lisbeth to check out Blomkvist, but even after she delivers her report, she maintains an interest in the journalist's work.

Rapace's performance provides the movie with at least as much mysterious charge as the crime that's being investigated. Lisbeth can hack into any computer system, but she's no geeky patsy. With a severe punk haircut and a variety of body piercings, Lisbeth is clearly an outcast, and the movie quickly lets us know that she can give as good as she gets. Lisbeth has a gratifying taste for vengeance, revealed after a gruesome and graphic scene in which her probation officer rapes her. Let's just say that it doesn't take long for Lisbeth to express her rage.

Like us, Blomkvist can't quite get a handle on Lisbeth, who eventually joins with him to look for Harriet's killer. He's attracted to Lisbeth, wary of her and never fully able to understand a 24-year-old who reveals little about herself. How could he? Rapace hides her character's interior life behind an aggressively hostile facade: leather jackets, a stony affect and the fearsome tattoo that gives the movie its title. (In Sweden, both book and movie were titled Men Who Hate Women, which gives you some idea about what lurks beneath the movie's surface.)

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo introduces a female character who's considerably tougher than her male counterpart. Blomkvist has six months to kill before the start of his jail sentence, but he's also emotionally tapped out. He has nothing left to say as a journalist, which may be why he takes a job working for Vanger in the first place. Lisbeth tends to steer clear of the kind of rumination that burdens men such as Blomkvist. She's a creature of instinct, and her impulses operate almost as quickly as the computers she so adeptly uses. As played by Rapace, Lisbeth seems hard-wired for self-protection.

It's Lisbeth who figures out the most important clues about Harriet's disappearance. And it's Lisbeth, finally, who has the stomach to exact every ounce of justice from the villains in the piece. The woman does not play.

I only became aware of the movie's 2 1/2-hour length during the extended coda that follows the story's real climax. Oplev has lots of loose ends to tie up. Some are interesting, but by the time they roll around, the movie already has delivered its biggest kick.

Still, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - a surefire candidate for a Hollywood remake - has the kind of cool surfaces that brim with tension, and Oplev keeps us wondering precisely what will crawl from under the next overturned rock. Isn't that a goal to which almost every worthy thriller aspires? This one's also eager to expose the soul of a society where the predators often seem to outnumber the prey.

Raunchy bubbles rise in 'Hot Tub'

The motley crew of Hot Tub Time Machine.

What do you say about a movie that aims for stupidity and hits its target? Do you applaud its dubious success or do you simply say the movie contains a few dumb laughs. I opt for the second approach re: Hot Tub Time Machine, a comedy that arrives on screen with an early positive buzz, having been compared by some critics to last summer's The Hangover. If that doesn't thrill you, read no further. Hot Tub Time Machine is not for those who are looking for a comedy that's steeped in either sophistication or wit.

Comparisons to The Hangover -- not an inducement for everyone -- result from the movie's abundant raunchiness, a collection of supposedly humorous vulgarities that includes projectile vomiting, a semen joke, bare male bottoms and … well … you get the idea.

The story is as preposterously goofy as its inspired title suggests. A group of friends revisits a ski resort they frequented in the 1980s. They're trying to cheer up one of their number. They believe their pal has become suicidally depressed, an easy conclusion to reach after this hapless dope nearly asphyxiates himself in his garage.

Turns out the resort is nothing like the spa of memory; it now looks like a cross between a slum and a ghost town or maybe an assisted living facility that long ago went bankrupt. But when our disappointed heroes jump into a rundown hot tub, they're magically transported back to the 1980s, where everyone treats them as if they were young again. Wham! The resort returns to its 1980s glory.

Whoopee! The '80s! It was a time without cell phones. No one had heard of e-mail, and if you had used the word “google,” people might have thought you were feigning baby talk.

John Cusack, an actor associated with a few '80s hits – from Sixteen Candles to Say Anything -- leads this purposefully cheesy and very backward march through time. Cusack's Adam is accompanied on his time travels by his nephew (Clark Duke), a suicidal but libidinous buddy (Rob Corddry) and another pal (Craig Robinson) who works in a dog-grooming shop. None of our time travelers leads the life he thought he'd be living back when all that seemed important was having a good time, which meant lots of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, the holy-trinity of the party life.

A couple of additional characters round out the cast. Chevy Chase – in a pointless and not especially funny cameo – plays the guy who knows how to fix the hot tub time machine so that our quartet of losers can return to the present. Crispin Glover portrays a one-armed bellhop. How Glover's character loses his arm becomes a running joke.

I laughed some, but didn't find the movie as hilarious as had been promised by some of the early reviewers. Like many recent politically incorrect comedies, Hot Tub's scabrous antics don't reflect the kind of joyous subversion of the status quo that's necessary to move beyond gross-outs and gimmickry. A trippy (is that an '80s word?) ending, proves a bit unexpected, but, for the most part, only the gross-outs make any sort of splash in this retrograde Hot Tub.

More flapping of wings -- in 3-D, of course

You will believe a dragon can fly.

Is it better blindly to battle an enemy or to find out whether it's possible to make friends? If you chose the second option, you already know the lesson that the new animated movie, How to Train Your Dragon, tries to teach. This unmistakably instructive bit of DreamWorks animation encourages kids to explore the idea that empathy might be more powerful than hostility.

How to Train Your Dragon operates on the assumption that ... well ... assumptions can be dangerous. To prove its point, the movie drops us into a world of scruffy Vikings who live on a rugged cliff overlooking an ocean expanse. For as long as anyone can remember, the movie's Vikings have assumed that dragons are an enemy that must be battled at every fire-breathing turn. Having constructed their society around combat, the Vikings never bother to get close enough to dragons to learn whether these fearsome-looking creatures represent a real threat. As a result, Vikings live in a world of severely reduced options.

Make what you will of the message. I have no complaints about it, but the delivery system doesn't represent a total triumph. Although How to Train Your Dragon has been made in 3-D, the movie's points tend to come across in a flat, cartoonish fashion that shortchanges the depth and mystery that marks the best animated films. What's left? A diverting bit of action-oriented 3-D, but one that isn't likely to establish itself as a timeless classic.

Now, let me mention right off that parents who think it's important that their kids understand that Vikings were Norse warriors, will have some 'splainin' to do. For reasons that never are made clear, the adult Vikings in How to Train Your Dragon speak with Scottish accents. The younger characters - particularly the endearing and oddly named Hiccup - sound like all-American kids recruited by central casting.

The movie's strange stew of accents tells us that directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois (Lilo & Stitch) were less concerned with verisimilitude than with finding ways to pour on the 3-D effects and to captivate younger audiences with a variety of colorfully designed dragons with names that sound as if they might have been lifted from the world of professional wrestling: the Hideous Stickleback and the Terrible Terror, for example. In this corner, "Monstrous Nightmare."

The story focuses on Hiccup's increasingly impressive accomplishments. Hiccup (voice by Jay Baruchel) is a sensitive kid who lacks the typical Viking physique. His father Stoick (Gerard Butler) can't help but be disappointed that the boy hasn't made the transition from wimp to warrior. Eventually, young Hiccup works his way into dragon-fighting classes where he's instructed by the gruff but loveable Gobber (Craig Ferguson). He also meets a girl who's well on her way to becoming first-rate dragon battler, the spunky Astrid (America Ferrera).

The movie's message begins to emerge when Hiccup wounds and then befriends a Night Fury dragon he beneficently names Toothless. At that point, the movie takes on the aura of a boy-and-his-dog yarn, except the dog is a dragon. The tension - if you can call it that - develops as Hiccup and Toothless learn to trust each other, a task that requires Hiccup to learn to fly around on Toothless' back and gives the movie's animation team a chance to flap its creative wings.

Will Hiccup be able to show his fellow Vikings that they needn't fight? Not without a finale in which a truly dangerous beast must be defeated. No matter how pacific a movie's goals, achieving them without a tumultuous end-of-picture battle remains a near impossibility.

How to Train Your Dragon, adapted from a book by Cressida Cowell, makes Hiccup a little too self-consciously modern, and the movie's message isn't subtly enough stated for anyone to miss it. But the 3-D can be fun, particularly, if you're one of its new fans, and the movie never seems overly impressed with itself. So I'm guessing that kids roughly from seven to 10 will enjoy Dragon's blend of action and instruction, even if it's a bit short on wonder and a bit long on noise. Come to think of it, where kids are concerned, I'm not sure that anything can be too long on noise.

'Chloe' takes the fun out of sex

Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore study each other.

The kindest thing I can say about Atom Egoyan's Chloe is to express the sincere hope that it's an anomaly from a gifted director with a variable track record.

This time out, Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) has ventured into soapy waters with the story of a gynecologist (Julianne Moore) who tests her marriage by hiring a young prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to tempt her flirtatious husband (Liam Neeson). During the course of all this, Moore's character tests some waters herself, dabbling in a lesbian affair with Seyfried's character.

Despite the erotic nature of the material and a fair measure of nudity, Chloe seems to have been stripped (you'll pardon the expression) of Egoyan's more idiosyncratic touches. Put another way, the erotic undertow that has marked such Egoyan thrillers as Exotica seems to have pushed to the surface. It's as if Egoyan, in adapting the 2004 French film Nathalie, has done his best to create a potboiler with potential to topple art-house walls.

Egoyan finally does himself and the movie in by wandering into Fatal Attraction territory. By that time, the thrill was totally gone -- at least for me. Despite a couple of plot shifts that make us take a closer look at Moore's character, Egoyan's movie enters a rarely achieved realm: It's trashy without being much fun.

'Repo Men:' Another futuristic dud

Jude Law and Forest Whitaker as scary repo men.
Ah, the things movies will do so that a couple of grown men can chase each other around a decaying city. Who knows? Without chases, three-quarters of Hollywood's output might be reducible by half. Don't pause to figure it out. Just keep reading, but know that without pursuit, many movies wouldn't exist at all.

That's the story of Repo Men, a futuristic thriller in which Forest Whitaker chases after Jude Law. The reason for this frenzied endeavor involves an elaborate story that wraps around some fairly routine action. Both Whitaker and Law play repo men, only instead of snatching cars from deadbeats who default on their loans, they retrieve artificial organs from people who can't make their payments, a procedure that enables director Miguel Sapochnik to pile on the gore.

In case you need elaboration on what I mean by gore, consider, say, the removal of an artificial heart. To take back someone's heart, you have to slice open his or her body and reach into the chest cavity. If you had trouble cutting up the fetal pig in freshman biology, you definitely will want to steer clear of this one - although there are many other reasons besides potential revulsion for ignoring Repo Men.

Not the least is an uninspired plot: Law portrays Remy, an ace repo man who operates without conscience. The repo man's credo: A job's a job. After an accident during what should have been an easy repossession, the tables turn on Remy. He receives an artificial heart, and loses his desire to carve organs out of organ recipients, almost all of whom were pressured into buying by a slick corporate type (Liev Schreiber).

The cliché applies: The hunter becomes the hunted, teaming up along the way with a woman (Alice Braga) who's also being chased. It seems that she's almost entirely made up of spare parts.

I'm not sure that Repo Men will live long and prosper, but it has one scene in which organ removal between consenting adults is treated with the steamy leer of big-screen sex. I don't know if that makes Law, who slices without dicing, a doctor of love, but it made me laugh in a way that little else in the film did.

The future that Sapochnik & company imagine isn't radically different from the present, aside from the fact that the movie takes place in a city loaded with neon and other low-rent hints that someone has spent too much time watching Blade Runner.

A footnote: With his hair cropped close and his face looking semi-skeletal, Law has the aura of an undernourished puppet. Whitaker, always good at off-kilter line readings, fares a little better, but this hasn't been much of a month for him. He struck out in the woeful comedy Our Family Wedding, and now finds himself in a movie that goes nowhere, other than to present us with one more evil corporation that, like every other big-screen monolith, gets away with murder.

NO COMIC BOUNTY IN THIS ONE

If you made it this far, you deserve a bonus. Here it is: If Repo Men tries to stave boredom with blood, The Bounty Hunter - a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler - is a bloody bore. Butler plays a bounty hunter who's trying to bring in his ex-wife (Aniston), who skipped out on her bail after a traffic offense. He's an ex-detective; she's a reporter. This less than dynamic duo bickers while becoming increasingly involved in an extraordinarily lame plot involving a potentially corrupt cop. If a license were required to make romcoms, then perhaps director Andy Tennant should have his revoked. I didn't expect much from The Bounty Hunter and got even less.

A battle royal in Philly's art world

Dr. Albert Barnes: better taste in art than in sportcoats.

The Art of the Steal is a documentary about the expression of some very unbrotherly love in the Philadelphia art world. The movie pits the Philly establishment against a renegade collector whose taste and fortune allowed him to amass more than 250 paintings from masters such as Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and Modigliani.

During the course of his eccentric life Dr. Albert Barnes became the proud owner of one of the world's most magnificent collections of Post-Impressionist art. His collection – so valuable it's beyond pricing – has been housed at the Barnes Foundation, a building located outside Philadelphia. Barnes, who died in 1951, did not want the Barnes Foundation to become a museum. Instead, he operated a school, which he ran according to his own idiosyncratic principles.

The Art of the Steal does not celebrate the splendors of the art accumulated by Barnes, who also developed a drug used to treat venereal disease. Instead, the movie tells the story of one man who – even after his death – found himself at odds with the Philadelphia cultural establishment.

This long-running antagonism began during a time when Philly's elite had its nose so high in the air, it practically brushed against treetops. Born into a working-class family, Barnes regarded himself as a man of the people. He hated the Philadelphia Art Museum. When he died, he left the operation of the Barnes Foundation to a small black college, Lincoln University.

But the story didn't end there. A sustained effort on the part of Philadelphia's powers-that-be attempted to bring the Barnes collection under the city's control. After a variety of court battles, it was determined that art would be moved to a facility that's now under construction on spacious Benjamin Franklin Boulevard.

A variety of personalities break through a complicated legal story that's heavily weighted in favor of the Barnes proponents. The possibility that the other side might be serving the best interests of the art and the general public receives short shrift, and the title leaves little doubt about where director Don Argott stands.

A more balanced film would have required some of the key establishment players -- the head of the Pew Charitable Trust, for example -- to talk to Argott. Most of them didn't. I also would have appreciated knowing a little more about how the Barnes school ran. But such limited liabilities shouldn't keep you from seeing a well-crafted and informative documentary that sheds significant light on the less-than-beautiful ways in which the art world sometimes operates.

A terrifying journey behind bars

A Corsican gangster (left) and his Muslim protege.

About a quarter way through the French movie A Prophet a title card pops up to introduce a new character. I've seldom been so relieved to see an obvious cinematic device because up until that moment, I felt as if I'd been thrown into a French prison and given a crash course in how its brutal pecking order worked.

My unease stemmed from the skillful ways in which French director Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips) turned his prison movie into a sustained visceral nightmare. Audiard makes us feel as if prison bars are slamming behind us, and like all good prison movies, A Prophet poses an uncomfortable but necessary question: What sort of behavior becomes acceptable in a brutal environment?

It's not just confinement that creates the movie's tension. It's the sense of danger that looms in every encounter, the feeling that one not only has lost one's freedom but also has become potential prey for any number of criminal factions. It's hardly news that prisons generate their own power structures, but that familiarity doesn't make A Prophet any less unsettling.

Audiard ably shows the inequities of prison life, conducts a complex study of ethnic loyalties and exposes the ways in which a relatively naïve “criminal” – in this case a young Arab named Malik (Tahar Rahim) -- comes of age behind prison walls. Of course, coming of age in prison isn't quite the same as going through the same process on the outside. At the hands of ruthless Corsican gangsters, Malik learns the criminal trade and discovers a capacity for violence that probably never would have emerged under different circumstances.

Thanks to an immersive filmmaking style, Audiard penetrates the prison experience in ways that very few directors have. We not only watch Malik, but we're forced to confront the choices he makes, to wonder how far would we go to make it to our next birthday or maybe the even to the next day?

Not long after being introduced to prison, Malik comes under the sway of a Corsican gang led by Cesar Luciano (Niels Arestrup). The gang offers its protection in return for a favor. But no matter what Malik does, he's still an Arab, an as such, he never fully earns the trust or respect of his Corsican masters, who treat him like a servant. Malik has protection from the other convicts, but who'll protect him from his Corsican oppressors?

Malik's relationship with the quiet but volatile Cesar proves entirely compelling. Played by Arestrup with the terrifying authority of a man who seldom needs to raise his voice to exert his power, Cesar becomes one of the screen's most unrelenting gangsters. Cesar seems to have more power in the prison than even the warden. The only thing he can't do is free himself. Beyond that, he runs the place as a kind of extension of his pugnacious authority.

Seldom off screen, Rahim gives a performance that more than does justice to Malik's range of prison experiences. He seems to mature before our eyes, and we have to keep reminding ourselves that Malik is a very young man of limited experience who probably didn't deserve to be jailed in the first place.

Brutal, gripping and tense, A Prophet stands as one of the strongest film's to come out of last year's Cannes Film Festival, where it won the grand jury prize. At various times, the relationships among the characters can become blurry and a deep comprehension of the movie's cultural dimensions may require a bit more background than most American's possess.

But the thrust of Audiard's prison drama is inescapable, and A Prophet earns an adjective that's used far too often and for far lesser achievements: It's unforgettable. A Prophet begins its Denver run Friday, March 19.

'Green Zone' peddles yesterday's news

Matt Damon searches for the truth in Green Zone.

Green Zone, which deals with the early stages of the war in Iraq, winds up firing more blanks than expected. The problem: The movie revolves around a discovery - there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- that's lost much of its punch. Put another way: It's difficult to watch director Paul Greengrass' urgently presented drama without wishing it would tell us something we didn't already know.

The atmosphere feels right and the chaos of Baghdad after the initial stages of the invasion couldn't be more convincing, but the movie's focus on an Army Chief Warrant Officer (Matt Damon) -- a non-com who's trying to discover why his squad has been given so much faulty intelligence -- turns the story into a frenzied quest for a truth we know before the curtain rises.

Make no mistake, though, there are some mind-blowing sights here. Greengrass does an excellent job of showing the disconnect between the foot soldiers who are living through life-and-death scenarios in the streets of Baghdad and the bigwigs who congregate in the Green Zone, a safe haven replete with swimming pools and a veranda for cocktails. The Club Med-like atmosphere of the Green Zone makes a mockery of the hardship endured by the average GIs, most of whom couldn't set foot in the "secure" facilities that were set up in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.

An end credit tells us the movie was "inspired" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and the movie does draw on some of Chandrasekaran's reporting, but Greengrass - who directed the brilliant United 93 and who directed Damon in the Bourne Ultimatum - chops up the action in ways that create at least as much chaos as comprehension. Obviously, war is a form of chaos, but on screen, a little chaos goes a long way, and by the time the final chase sequence arrives, you may already feel numbed to any potential excitement.

Damon, who's in almost every scene, does a convincing enough job as a no-nonsense soldier who's appalled by the idea that GIs may have been sold a bill of goods about why they're fighting in Iraq. A strong supporting cast includes Greg Kinnear as a duplicitous Bush administration representative, and Brendan Gleeson as a world-weary CIA agent who - unlike many others in Baghdad -- actually knows something about Iraq. Amy Ryan acquits herself well as a journalist who helped peddle the WMD story that whipped up false enthusiasm for the war.

Some of the interaction between the soldiers and ordinary Iraqis has the feel of authenticity, as well. The movie flirts with something truly interesting in the relationship that Damon's character develops with an Iraqi civilian (Khalid Abdalla) who hates Saddam's Baathist Party and wants to help the Americans, but who's never fully trusted by many of the soldiers he meets.

This time out, Greengrass's trademark approach - turning his images into pieces of cinematic shrapnel that are supposed to land with explosive force -- becomes (dare I say?) a trifle boring. And even some of the movie's smaller observations -- about bad U.S. decisions vis-a-vis the Iraqi Army and about the "real" reasons for the war - hardly seem shocking. As a result, Greengrass, working from a screenplay by Brian Helgeland, is stuck with a movie in which war-crazed confusion tends to overpower a less-than-compelling tale.

All of which got me to thinking: Old-time advertisements for topical movies used to scream, "Ripped from today's headlines." I doubt whether anyone ever tried to market a movie by proclaiming that its story was "Ripped from yesterday's headlines," but that's pretty much what Green Zone does.

'Remember' strains not to be forgotten

Emilie de Ravin and Robert Pattinson talk things over.

What you think of Remember Me probably depends on whether you believe the movie’s emotional end justifies the mediocre means by which it got there. I’d vote no.

Teen-age girls who are enamored of Robert Pattinson, of Twilight-movie fame, may well cast their ballots differently, and, no, I can’t tell you any more about the ending, except to say that – in my opinion -- nothing that preceded it earned the payoff that obviously was being sought.

For most of its 113 minutes, the movie seems like a vehicle concocted to showcase the talents of Pattinson, who served as one of the movie’s executive producers. Freed from his duties as a vampire in the Twilight series, Pattinson proves more interesting, although he hasn't entirely made the transition from a willful outsider to a fully engaged human being. He’s playing an alienated rich kid who spends a lot of time smoking cigarettes, brooding and acting as if he’s seen every movie James Dean ever made.

The story revolves around a romance between Pattinson’s Tyler Hawkins and Emilie de Ravin’s Ally Craig. He’s the son of a wealthy businessman (Pierce Brosnan). She’s the daughter of a working-class cop (Chris Cooper).

Both have daddy on their minds. Tyler blames his father for his older brother’s suicide. When Ally was 10 – in 1991 – she witnessed her mother’s murder at a Brooklyn subway station. Not surprisingly, her father has a very protective attitude toward his only child.
Director Allen Coulter alternates romance and overplayed dramatic scenes, and the screenplay uses an embarrassingly old trick to set up the relationship between Ally and Tyler. As part of a vengeance scheme (never mind for what), Tyler begins dating Ally. What begins with deception quickly evolves into true love.

The movie gets sidetracked with a subplot about Tyler’s younger sister (Ruby Jerins), an artistic prep school student who has an especially close relationship with her big brother. Tyler’ s mother (Lena Olin) long has been divorced from his master-of-the-universe dad, who spends all of his time in his office where he’s evidently busy acquiring companies and making oodles of money.

As part of his rebellion against his father’s corporate preoccupations, Tyler has taken up residence in a ratty apartment he shares with his roommate Aidan, an annoying Tate Ellington.

You’d have to be reasonably hard-hearted not to be moved by the ending, but upon reflection, it struck me as a cheat, a shameless last-ditch effort to elevate a mediocre movie into something special.

A WORD OR TWO ABOUT OUR FAMILY WEDDING

OK, this may be more than a couple of words -- but not much more. Our Family Wedding plays like the pilot for a sitcom that was rejected by all the major networks. What could have been a knowing comedy about the relationship that wariness between the families of a young black man (Lance Gross) and his Mexican-American fiancee (America Ferrera) devolves into ethnic shtick and stereotyping. Among other things, the movie may prove that Forest Whitacker, an actor whom I admire a great deal, doesn't really have the cops for comedy and that Ferrara, another talent, deserves better material. Director Rick Famuyiwa turns the movie into a kind of My Big Fat Mexican-American Wedding, a cacophonous blend of sentiment and misguided ethnic humor that can be painful to watch.