movies

Sex and the City: The Movie continues to lead the box office this week, ahead of Indiana Jones and Iron Man.

Sex and the City's rivals are pumped-up, action-fueled celebrations of grandiose masculinity -- which would seem to cast Sex as the little romantic comedy that could. In reality, of course, Carrie Bradshaw is at least as much a blockbuster property as Indy and Iron Man, and like many other summer blockbusters the big-screen Sex and the City is more or less review-proof.

Which is good news for the filmmakers, since they've given critics plenty to hate: The film takes everything that was unsettling about the series -- gratuitous materialism, deliberate elitism, cafeteria feminism -- and re-serves it up in a grotesquely glittered confection, in which posh real-estate, $55,000-diamond-rings, and gaudy designer bags serve as unapologetic proxies for relationships, and even the main characters' children are reduced to accessories. This visual orgy comes with fewer of the redeeming elements -- the occasional recognition of hypocrisy, the chatty histrionics, the schmaltz -- that swaddled and padded and helped us forgive the irritating unrealities of the series. And since so much of Sex and the City's success was in its structure -- episodic therapy, 30 minutes a week, over six long, tumultuous years -- there's a sense in which the filmic format (here dragged out to two hours and twenty minutes) betray the show's stumbling essence.

And yet, and yet -- the delightfully confused, giddy-but-torn, no-but-yes feeling that washed over so many women as they took in the series is there in the film as well. Despite its annoyances, it's often funny and almost always fun, and its length is a strength as well as a weakness, since it provides more of what makes women return to Sex and the City: Not the happy endings, but all the messy ambiguity beforehand. The willingness to wallow in the mess, rather than racing ahead to happily-ever-after, explains why the Sex phenomenon has provided more fodder for the post-feminist culture wars than any television series or movie before or since -- and why it will be a long, long time before any other pop culture phenomenon usurps its role in those debates. So those wringing their hands over its legacy might as well take their cues from Carrie's fictional Vogue editor, Enid: "Spare me a week of faux-soul searching, and just say yes."

Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood fixture for three decades as a director, producer, and actor, died Monday at 73.

As an actor, Sydney Pollack did one thing -- play the rumpled, cynical man of the world, with an avuncular exterior and a sinister streak -- and did it exceedingly well. As a director, he did one thing -- turn out middlebrow star vehicles pitched to grown-up audiences -- and all too often made a hash out of it, especially in the dud-riddled later stages of his long career. Pollack referred to himself as "Mr. Mainstream," a moniker that served as the jumping-off point for Bryan Curtis' memorable Slate takedown, which lamented the director's ability to "take any scenario -- from the ridiculous to the horrific, from Streep to strife -- and mold it into benign mush." But if Pollack's films were sometimes case studies in everything that's wrong with middlebrow entertainment, he left behind one shining example of how mass-market cinema for grownups ought to look. I speak, of course, of Tootsie.

Iron Man, starring Robert Downey, Jr. as the armored superhero, enjoyed a $100 million dollar opening weekend.

Comic-book fanboys should rejoice at this weekend's box office numbers, while moviegoers who either dislike superhero flicks outright or (like yours truly) enjoy them only in limited doses should be wringing their hands over Iron Man's haul. Coming at the beginning of a summer already glutted with superhero fare of various sorts, the film's success promises to cement the comic-book movie's Hollywood hegemony for years if not decades to come.

The Station Agent, writer-director Tom McCarthy's first feature film, was a tough act to follow. An intimate, occasionally madcap account of an unlikely friendship, the film was rightly regarded as a near-flawless character study, at once whimsical and profound. The Visitor, in contrast, feels deliberately urgent, suffused with the sense that 9/11 has rendered certain mostly unseen corners of American life Kafka-esque. But McCarthy's emphasis on character remains intact, and the result is a successful political movie that works precisely because it doesn't feel terribly political.

The card-counting flick topped the box office for the second straight weekend, beating out George Clooney's screwball comedy Leatherheads.

Last weekend, 21 looked like a disappointment, opening to mediocre reviews and an unspectacular $24 million take. But never underestimate the benefits of facing off against weak competition. March and April are never great months at the movies, but this post-writers' strike spring is particularly lackluster, and now that George Clooney has proven yet again that he isn't quite the box office draw that his fawning press coverage suggests he is, 21 looks like it has a chance to spend three straight weeks atop the heap. (All it has to do is beat out Keanu Reeves and Prom Night next weekend.)

Horton Hear a Who topped the box office for the second straight weekend, but Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns came in a close second.

Ho-hum: Another Perry film, another twenty-million dollar opening weekend. A decade ago, Perry was living out of his car, struggling to raise enough money to keep his plays up and running on the so-called "chitlin' circuit." Today, he's sitting atop an entertainment empire that spans theater and film, publishing and television. Yet if you aren't in his target demographic - black and middle-class, and maybe with a relative who reminds you just a little bit of Madea, his most memorable creation - then odds are you don't know a thing about him; indeed, your first Perry encounter won't happen come next summer, when he'll play the head of Starfleet Academy in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek revival.

The English Surgeon, a documentary about a London neurosurgeon who operated on Ukrainians' brains using a Bosch power-drill, raised questions about medical ethics.

Henry Marsh, the sawbones in question, has traveled to the Ukraine serially for fifteen years, always with the goal of helping Ukrainian colleagues make do with poor equipment, or none. Cutting open patients' heads and using screws and drills bought at a hardware store would be grounds for license-suspension and possibly imprisonment in England. Here, it appears to be an act of compassion -- and one that reveals a pernicious double-standard in medical ethics. MORE

The Academy Award-winning director Anthony Minghella died yesterday at 54.

Minghella won his Oscar for The English Patient, a gorgeous, literary, faintly silly epic that cross-pollinated Casablanca with Lawrence of Arabia and reduced those moviegoers too snobbish to weep at Titanic to tears. But his best film by far was his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, which remains criminally underrated almost a decade after its release. MORE

Horton Hears a Who!, the latest Dr. Seuss adaptation, netted $45 million and the year's best opening. Funny Games bombed.

Hollywood released two reimaginings of old stories this weekend. Horton Hears a Who! earned surprising critical praise, with most reviewers joining the New York Times's A. O. Scott in judging it a dramatic improvement on recent live-action Seuss adaptations like The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. (This was perhaps a low bar to clear, given that the earlier adaptations were -- as Scott put it -- among "the worst movies ever made.") MORE

10,000 B.C., the caveman epic from the creator of Independence Day, topped the box office this weekend with $35.7 million.

Did a tremor of fear run through Roland Emmerich when he saw the opening-weekend grosses for January's handheld-camera monster movie, Cloverfield? The German-born Emmerich has spent his career getting Hollywood studios to pony up obscene amounts of money so he can destroy the world (or at least Manhattan) over and over again. But Cloverfield demonstrated that you could do the same thing, and reap impressive box-office rewards, for a fraction of the cost of Independence Day (aliens destroy the world), The Day After Tomorrow (global warming destroys the world), or Godzilla (Godzilla destroys the world). MORE

Actor Patrick Swayze, celebrated star of Red Dawn and Ghost, has pancreatic cancer, and may have only weeks to live.

Swayze lived rough. In 2000, when he crash-landed his plane in central Arizona, many thought he had been flying drunk. Later, he blamed the fatality-free crash on impairment brought on by his smoking habit, at the time three packs a day, or about one cancer-stick every 15 minutes. That's a jones stronger even than Dalton, the enigmatic cooler he played in Road House.

The 80th Academy Awards looked away from American politics and toward the rest of the world.

This year's Academy Awards were noteworthy for their absences: The broadcast focused on the world abroad rather than domestic accomplishments, and the speeches avoided the tired political diatribes that have lately become Oscar staples.

Most commentators note that the four main performance Oscars (given to an Irishman, a Frenchwoman, a Spaniard, and a Scot) and several technical awards belonged to artists from across the Atlantic.  More telling, however, were the selections for best film, director, and documentary.  Instead of recognizing There Will Be Blood -- the weighty "epic American nightmare" -- the Academy chose the Coens' No Country for Old Men, a nightmare to be sure, but of an America unfamiliar to those of us outside the West Texas psycho-killer demographic.  And in the documentary category, the Academy passed over films on the health-care system and Iraq War, instead embracing Taxi to the Dark Side, a little-seen -- but still better-grossing than Paris Hilton's latest effort, The Hottie and the Nottie -- rumination on torture in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Gharib.

Excepting Jon Stewart's monologue, political commentary was sparse.  Presenters were silent on this year's election, but they appealed repeatedly to "hope."  Although the Vatican claimed that Oscar prized films "with no hope for the future," it seems that Hollywood remains hopeful enough about November's prospects that it chose to keep mum on American politics.  Or perhaps after the last two elections, Hollywood has finally learned that voters care even less about Paris Hilton's political views than about her views on hotties.