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Summer Guide index

SUMMER FILM PREVIEW 2002: July
From "Powerpuff Girls" to "Austin Powers in Goldmember"

Ray Pride

I don't know if I want to see the movie, but I'd be darn curious what the composition of first weekend crowds will be like for "The Powerpuff Girls Movie." Probably a little different from that for John Sayles' latest didactic character study, "Sunshine State," which has glorious actors like Edie Falco delivering his difficult language with beguiling elan. Many of the usual suspects return for "Men in Black II," while the summer's most exotic movie may be its most primal and sensual, the nearly three-hour Inuit-made revenge epic, "Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner." For more primal and sensual, there's also Michelle Rodriguez and a couple of other chicks in bikinis surfing their cocky way through "Blue Crush."

Tom Hanks does the dark thing, too, in Sam Mendes' first picture since "American Beauty," the comics-adapted "Road to Perdition." Lighter fare includes "Stuart Little 2," superfluous sequel "Halloween: Resurrection"; manic David Arquette and a bunch of other creepy-crawlies in "Eight Legged Freaks." Freakish, too, might be Harrison Ford's turn as a Russian sub commander in "K-19: The Widowmaker" from gifted action stylist Kathryn Bigelow. Miramax takes the counter-programming cake for opening the modest, literate, furiously funny shot-on-DV sex comedy "Tadpole" against "Austin Powers in Goldmember."

(2002-05-23)

Also by Ray Pride

OEDIPUS WRECKS
A giddy light-saber duel near the end of "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones," full of glowers, pacing, feints, fakeouts and deliriously impossible action, bears an important lesson: George Lucas doesn't have to make a silent movie, but if he had made a mute one, minus an introductory hour of tedious, even superfluous self-mythologizing, the action sequences in this damn thing would sing.
(2002-05-16)

TIP OF THE WEEK
While comparisons to Hitchcock and Mamet were made on the festival circuit, writer-director Fabian Bielinsky's first feature has the cool classicism of directors like Wilder: The story is where the faces are.
(2002-05-09)

REAL SEX
Drawing from Claude Chabrol's 1968 classic, "La femme infidele," Lyne fashions one more cautionary tale against letting your knickers down. It's deeply mature work, with some of the most transportingly happy sex to be seen in an American-made movie in ages.
(2002-05-09)

SCREEN KISS
At the sight of her massively swollen belly, you can only inquire, How are you? "I'm eight months," she says, leaning back in her chair. "Any time. I'm very sensitive, y'know. I'm very pregnant. We take things very personally."
(2002-05-02)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-05-02)

WORLD WIDE WEB
(2002-05-02)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-04-25)

PLUG & PLAY
(2002-04-18)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-04-18)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-04-11)

CRAZY LOVE
(2002-04-11)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-04-04)



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