reviews

Billy Budd is back, and man, is he pissed. It seems that mean and no-good Los Angeles chewed up and spat out his beloved daughter Jenny, and he is coming to town to kick some ass. Spare and elegant, The Limey is no ordinary revenge tale, and it’s worth watching in no small part just to enjoy director Steven Soderbergh’s (erinbrock, outsight) exercise in unconventional storytelling.

Well, I’ll tell you where the money isn’t. It isn’t in wonderfully old-fashioned, grown-up little comedies like Where the Money Is. I hope I’m wrong — I hope this one does nicely at the box office, because I’m selfish enough to want to see more movies like this. But let’s face it: it has no nudity, only some brief suggestions of sex, no violence, and no foul language. Worse, it’s clever, smart, and underplayed. It’s doomed.

The Girl Next Door, a documentary by Christine Fugate, doesn’t offer any astounding new insights into the porn industry, but it is a riveting portrait — compelling in the same way that a train wreck is — of a little girl of a woman who’s lonely, miserable, and desperate for fame and attention to make up for her appallingly low level of self-esteem.

And now it’s a piece of cheese starring Dr. Emilio Lizardo, that guy from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and a former Miss America. Listless and unpoetic, Don Quixote — a TNT Original movie airing all this month on the cable network — manages to take a classic story of delusion and enthusiasm, madness and morality and boil it down into an overlong cartoon.

And then there are the kids who like their side of the tracks just fine. That’s the case with Francis Barrett, a young Irish Traveller who’s the subject of Southpaw, Liam McGrath’s friendly and unpretentious documentary portrait. Barrett not only represented Ireland in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics but, to some controversy, carried the Irish flag during the opening ceremonies. But he isn’t hoping to use his success as a boxer to escape roots among a marginalized, ostracized people — he wants to garner for them the respect they deserve.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are not just juvenile morons — I use the term affectionately — but also subversive geniuses. Sure, they take scatological humor to heights previously unseen (I venture to guess that never again will fart jokes be so vital to a movie’s plot as they are here), but they are also wise enough to make their creations — the impressionable little kiddies of the town of South Park — twisted versions of the Peanuts characters

Hollywood’s campaign to strip-mine native cultures for entertainment purposes continues apace in The Road to El Dorado, DreamWorks’ latest foray into the Disney territory of the animated musical. From Chinese history to African myths, Native American legends to that Middle Eastern book of fables known as the Bible, it has become traditional, in the last decade, for animated movies to draw on the past for their inspiration. More often than not, the results, while raising the ire of purists, are fairly enjoyable. With The Road to El Dorado, though, this tactic may finally be running out of steam.

Tumbleweeds, happily, does not fall into this category. Written by Angela Shelton and Gavin O’Connor, and directed with a delicate precision by O’Connor, this funny and poignant story about a young girl who helps her mother grow up maneuvers this dangerous story territory perfectly, hitting all the right notes and sidestepping all the potential traps.

Life in the theater has not changed much in the last century. As someone who has worked in theater production, I can’t tell you how many times I laughed with recognition at the foibles of actors, the demands of writers, and the soap opera that goes on backstage that’s depicted in Topsy-Turvy.