Buffalo Soldiers, Camp, and More

BUFFALO SOLDIERS
Opens Fri., Aug. 8, at Varsity and Uptown

Buried by its studio (Miramax) after its Toronto Film Festival debut the week following Sept. 11, 2001, Soldiers is wholly out of stepand wholly welcomein the Bush II era of superpatriotism. It's set during the Bush I era of collapsed Cold War patriotism, as punch-drunk superpowers teeter exhaustedly in the ring, waiting for the Berlin Wall to fall in late '89. On a U.S. Army base in Stuttgart, supply clerk Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) is a thoroughly amoral black marketeer (like M*A*S*H's Radar O'Reilly gone very, very bad) who observes how he and his fellow enlistees in the all-volunteer army are "criminals and dropouts . . . with nothing to kill but time." For Elwood, the service is a wildly profitable scam until his racket is threatened by a hard-ass sergeant (Scott Glenn) with a babely daughter (Anna Paquin).

Driving 200 kilometers per hour on the autobahn in his tricked-out Benz, Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" on the stereo, Elwood and his interracial posse are the kind of criminals you root for in this unruly black satireparticularly when some violent Army thugs attempt to muscle in on a major smack deal. Swirling around them are ineffectual officers (e.g., a bewildered Ed Harris), bored and horny Army wives (e.g., a tragically Botox-ified Elizabeth McGovern), and a big war-games exercise that might threaten Elwood's arms-for-heroin score. Australian director Gregor Jordan barrels recklessly ahead with more energy than craft until the movie, quite literally, goes up in flames. Instead of an ending, it's like he pulled the pin on a grenade; the dramatic tension comes from wondering when it'll explode.

Some viewers may not want to see GIs shooting up, then shooting one other, but I suspect Soldiersbased on Robert O'Connor's 1993 novelis a movie Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) would approve of. Our boys in Iraq may be recruited from better stuff today, but guys like Elwood stand in a venerable military tradition: From King Rat to Three Kings, there's always going to be a crook in the ranks. (R) BRIAN MILLER

Young outcasts (i.e., gay boys and plump girls who worship Stephen Sondheim) get to commiserate in their otherness at a summer theater camp for kids. Writer/debut director Todd Graff and his drowsy editor Myron Kerstein muck up what is intended to be a socko openingjuxtaposing the performance of a soaring spiritual from The Gospel at Colonus with a young drag queen's beating at the hands of his high-school peersand it's all downhill from there. Graf gets a happy, hearty laugh here and there out of these kids' fearless earnestness (i.e., an ambitious teenage girl with a middle-aged wig belting out Sondheim's boozy, bitter "The Ladies Who Lunch"), but the film's tone is so inconsistent that you don't know whether he knows why it's funnyis this camp or camp? At any given time, the movie ineptly reaches to be Meatballs, Bring It On, and/or a particularly treacly TV Afterschool Special. It's a waste of what could've been a breezy summer vacation. (NR) STEVE WIECKING

I'm sure Ismail Merchant and James Ivory have a nice life in Paris, but in the 10 years since The Remains of the Day, they've been making stink bombs, most notably two set in Paris (about Jefferson and Picasso). So I was wary of their new adaptation of Diane Johnson's 1997 novel about American innocents in Paris. Too wary. The film is bookish, lacks their customary posh gloss, and has more characters and incidents than it can dramatize, but it's not a bad little bonbon.

Johnson originally wanted to cast Gwyneth Paltrow, but she says she was told Gwynnie was "pass頡nd too old." So Mssrs. M&I anchor the film with Kate Hudson as Isabel, a Santa Barbara girl arriving in Paris to visit her half- sister Roxy (Naomi Watts) the very day Roxy's weasly French husband (Melvile Poupaud) dumps her, pregnant. Soon Roxy is feuding with her snooty soon- to-be-ex-mother-in-law, Mme. Persand (grande dame Leslie Caron), over custody of her kids and a suddenly valuable family-owned painting. Watts is a past master of acting, but everyone else's roles upstage her weepy, generic grief.

We're more interested in Isabel's wide-eyed affairs with a bohemian youth (Romain Duris from L'Auberge Espagnole) and a suave old adulterous goat (Thierry Lhermitte) who happens to be Mme. Persand's brother. Then Isabel goes to work for an American writer (wise old Glenn Close), unaware that she once had an affair with the old goat when she was a young lamb.

A novel's worth of acute cultural- collision commentary won't fit into the slim form of the a screenplay, but what's here is choice. Its pleasantly overstuffed narrative is key to this movie's charm, although Bebe Neuwirth, Stephen Fry, Sam Waterston, and Stockard Channing are criminally underemployed in supporting roles. And Matthew Modine's crazed cuckold is so oddly at odds with the main story that he should've been named Deus X. Machina. But such flaws don't spoil Le Divorce, any more than Frenchmen's piggery spoils Isabel's flings. When all you're after is a taste of Paris, you can't get your heart broken. (PG-13) TIM APPELO