Rico Torres/ Dimension Film
Shark Boy's dueling Taylors: Dooley (left) and Lautner.
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The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D
Opens Fri., June 10, at Metro and others
Kids should always be encouraged to dream and use their imaginations. However, when those dreams mean that your only friends are a fish-boy, a girl with smoldering purple hair, and a giant robot with a tin-can head, you've got problems. Or at least fourth-grader Max (Cayden Boyd) has problems in this kid flick directed by Robert Rodriguez and based on the stories of his 7-year-old son.
Max's parents (Kristin Davis and David Arquette) are constantly arguing, he's the school bully's primary target, and he's always being lectured about his overactive imagination. Then two of his imaginary friends (Shark Boy and Lava Girl) come to life and ask for help saving their Planet Drool from Mr. Electric (George Lopez, one of the few saving graces for viewers over the age of 12). The younger cast members have some talent, but watching Taylor Lautner flash his pointy Shark Boy teeth while dancing like a spastic karaoke performer is downright painful. Even though little boys will be stoked about the Lava Girl looks and ass-kicking abilities of Taylor Dooley (what was it with parents naming all their kids "Taylor" during the '90s?), her screechy pleas for self- actualization soon become annoying.
On top of that, the 3-D isn't especially remarkable, and the lack of exciting sequences where danger pops out at you make the 3-D goggles seem almost pointless at times. (Remember Angelica Huston's crazy fingernails coming at you in Michael Jackson's Captain EO? Now, that's my idea of 3-D.) Kids may eat it up, as they did Rodriguez's 3-D Spy Kids movie. Parents, you'll just find it grating and predictable. But, please, could you stop naming all your kids "Taylor"? (PG) HEATHER LOGUE
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Opens Fri., June 10, at Varsity
One of God's greatest mysteries is the fact that people keep trying to make a movie out of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize– winning 1927 novel. Previously attempted in 1929 and 1944, the third time's not a charm. The story is still unadaptable, because it's all told in momentum-killing flashbacks. And instead of focusing on a character or coherent group, it's a meanderingly pointless story about five protagonists who die when a bridge across a Peruvian gorge snaps in 1714. The philosophical Franciscan missionary Brother Juniper (Gabriel Byrne, glummer than ever, wearing his worst haircut yet) investigates the life paths that led to death that day, in quest of an answer to the question: Could these seemingly unrelated lives be part of some larger pattern?
Alas for the movie, the answer is, "Fuck no." They're unrelated, all right, despite coincidental connections aplenty. The film is overstuffed with characters, not one of whom adds up to much individually; yet when you put them together in a plot with no point, they become still more inconsequential. A truly impressive cast rallies to this lost cause, this artless art film. Robert De Niro plays the Archbishop of Lima who prosecutes Juniper for the crime of writing his report on the lives of the five bridge fatalities. Somehow, Juniper's account offends religious doctrine, but we never learn why.
De Niro's performance is an empty recitation of poorly written lines. Harvey Keitel is barely better as the manager of a flighty diva (Pilar López de Ayala), the greatest actress of her day. (López ain't.) In roles that are still more bafflingly superfluous than the rest, Geraldine Chaplin plays a do-gooder abbess who looks after a pair of orphaned mute identical twins (Mark and Michael Polish). One of them (don't ask me which) becomes the diva's stenographer for her love letters to a handsome matador. She's also inadvisably cockteasing the powerful viceroy (F. Murray Abraham), who's jealous of the matador.
I could go on, but you would go mad. Not one plot strand makes sense on its own, let alone randomly interwoven with the rest like a ball of rubber bands. The closest thing the film has to a hero is Kathy Bates as a rich woman who writes unrequited letters to her hateful daughter who's left Lima for Spain. Her actions are all senseless, but Bates' immensely sympathetic dignity lends emotional meaning to her intellectually meaningless part.
Apparently this film was funded because Tony Blair quoted the book's line about love being a bridge between the living and the dead at a ceremony for 9/11 victims. But the film isn't a bridge. It's just dead. (PG) TIM APPELO
High Tension
Opens Fri., June 10, at Meridian and others
Most good horror movies benefit from a twist. The psycho lives with his embalmed mother and dresses in her clothing. You're only in danger when you fall asleep. The killer has a twin. "The calls are coming from inside the house!" That sort of thing.
Made in France and partially dubbed into English (often to unintentionally comic effect), High Tension would not have been imported were it a routine horror flick, though it initially appears to be just that. College students Marie (Cécile de France) and Alexia (Maïwenn) are visiting the latter's family in the countryside. Once everyone save Marie is asleep, a van-driving stranger knocks on the door. (He's played by Philippe Nahon, the "Butcher" from I Stand Alone, so we know trouble's in store.) The farmhouse soon becomes a slaughterhouse, and it's up to Marie to save Alexia from abduction, torture, and dismemberment. Pretty standard stuff.
