Incident at Loch Ness

Incident at Loch Ness
Opens Fri., Oct. 1, at Varsity

This fake documentary starts out like Jaws without a shark. In the Robert Shaw role, we have director Werner Herzog, infamous for behaving like Ahab on the set of movies like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God. But Herzog's not calling the shots in this film within a film within a film. On the first level, he's the subject of a documentary. On the second, he's directing a documentary about the Loch Ness monster, but he's constantly being undermined by his inept producer, Zak Penn (Incident's writer and director). On the third, he's just an actor in this wryly low-key comic debut feature by Penn—the writer of Hollywood fodder like Last Action Hero and Suspect Zero.

If you think that's a lot of meta-movie references for one paragraph, you're right. And if you're an NYU film student or Scarecrow employee, you'll probably get all Incident's backstage jokes and on-set humor, while less-informed viewers will wonder why this mockumentary isn't funnier—and why it turns toward horror in the end. The Blair Witch Project it's not, though there are parallels as the two film crews stranded on a boat on Loch Ness gradually succumb to fear, paranoia, and infighting. (Only here, it should be noted, the shots stay crisply focused.)

Yet there are some laughs on land and loch. Penn, clearly a Hollywood insider, convenes a B-list party of industry types at Herzog's home—including John Bailey (the great cinematographer, who's supposedly making the Herzog doc), Jeff Goldblum, and Ricky Jay, the magician and illusionist (hint-hint of things to come). Penn also makes himself the butt of every joke once the two crews reach Scotland; he's a conniving coward who arranges for everyone to wear matching Jacques Cousteau–style jumpsuits and surreptitiously slips a remote-controlled Nessie into the water to add "drama" to Herzog's dry, factual account.

By the end, Herzog is fuming, "It's a hoax. I'm smelling a rat. Against the wind." (OK, I don't understand that last bit either.) But as the boat is sinking and the first two films are collapsing, the third—Incident—isn't buoyed to the level of film-world satires like Living in Oblivion. The process of moviemaking is often absurd, yet Incident isn't absurd enough to appeal beyond the industry pals Penn invites to his next Hollywood dinner party. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER

Head in the Clouds
Opens Fri., Oct. 1, at Guild 45

A showbiz insider swears to me that then-married Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger were doing it for real back in their 1994 The Getaway. No wonder their sex scenes were so lame, fake, and painfully self-conscious! Now, present-day couple Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend have the same problem with the many naughty bits in Clouds—and the nonsex scenes in this World War II melodrama are even lamer.

The gauzy story reminds me of Jules and Jim, only it's about two girls and a guy, and writer-director John Duigan is more like Stanley Kramer than François Truffaut. As a decadent flapper minx who seduces an earnest Irish student (Townsend) at Cambridge in the '30s, Theron destroys all the acting cred she earned in Monster. She slinks unconvincingly, mumbles unvampishly, and maximizes the implausibility of Duigan's halfwit script. Townsend is a chunk of waterlogged wood with fuzzy eyebrows. Tyrone Power would have more chemistry courting Deanna Durbin in a deep coma.

Our boho duo lands pointlessly in Paris, where Penélope Cruz becomes the third wheel in a third-rate romance à trois. Her voice is as squeaky as a hamster huffing helium. The characters yammer and quarrel to no apparent dramatic purpose. After what seems like hours, the film morphs into an amazingly clichéd but at least barely watchable French Resistance drama. Truffaut said it was impossible to make an antiwar movie, because war is such an exciting subject you wind up rooting for it. War is none too exciting here, but it's a big improvement over watching these three stiffs listlessly simulate group sex. (R) TIM APPELO

Ladder 49
Opens Fri., Oct. 1, at Metro and Meridian

The acclaim for Denis Leary's new F/X Network firehouse psychodrama, Rescue Me, will likely draw some overflow to this forgettable, if good-natured, facsimile. It took a catastrophe of 9/11's magnitude to remind a nation of the extraordinary courage of the firefighter—and maudlin, feature-length fire department commercials like this to gloss over the whole lot as interchangeable everyday superheroes. Thankfully, that tragedy is never exploited—or even referenced—here, and director Jay Russell (Tuck Everlasting) manages to hold off until the coda's painful, endless montage before blowing his load of gossamer hero shots. The real problem is that he simply has no new insight into what compels and inspires this unique fellowship.

Ladder is really only worth ascending in that the unpretentious, straight-arrow storytelling mirrors its characters' unyielding drive to—as we're incessantly reminded—run into a burning building while everyone else is running out. Baltimore probie Jack Morrison (Joaquin Phoenix) recollects his entire firefighting career via flashback as he lies injured and helpless in a blazing 20-story building, and Ladder transforms, adeptly enough, into a collection of stark, well-composed snapshots. His predominantly Irish Catholic colleagues are a wacky bunch, natch, suckering naive transfers into divulging sexual blunders via staged confessions, downing Irish car bombs like eggnog on St. Patty's Day, and even lighting into each other once in a while.