Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>Crossing Over, An American Affair</em>
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<p>In <em>Crossing Over</em>, Harrison Ford plays an immigration agent who manages raids on factories to round up illegal immigrants. During one such operation he's unexpectedly moved by a young Mexican woman's pleas for help to recover her son, and he ends up helping her in a risky border-crossing mission. </p><p></p><a href="http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/54687/">NY Mag's David Edelstein</a> calls it "an L.A.-based ensemble social-problem melodrama for people who thought <em>Crash</em> was a bit too subtle... The most memorable scene is also among the most maladroit ever committed to film, a liquor-store robbery that begins with people getting splattered over the walls and builds to an earnest dialogue about the 'sublime promise' on the faces of immigrants about to take the oath of citizenship. The scene is a career-killer. The whole movie is, in a way... <strong>What a waste. I still say itâs better than <em>Crash</em>, though." </strong>Of course, that's not saying very much at all.
<p>Taking place between the Bay of Pigs fiasco and Kennedyâs assassination, <em>An American Affair</em> concerns, among other things, a 13-year-old boy's obsession with a CIA agent's sultry ex-wife (Gretchen Mol), who's having an affair with JFK. The boy's stalking gets him swept up in the intrigue boiling over in the months before the president's assassination. </p><p></p><a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/movies/27affa.html?ref=movies">Stephen Holden at the Times writes</a>, "Because it is crammed with vintage television and film footage of the Kennedy years, <em>An American Affair</em> has illusions of itself as a serious docudrama. But as it wades deeper into a conspiratorial swamp that involves angry Cubans, a shadowy C.I.A. plot and Adamâs pilfering of Catherineâs tell-all diary, the movie becomes a risible fusion of cloak-and-dagger melodrama and prurient coming-of-age story (<em>Summer of â63</em>?). <p></p>"In the most squirm-inducing scene, the boy and his centerfold, drawn together by grief, actually lock lips. <strong>Were it a farce instead of an earnest, paranoid thriller with pretensions to historicity, <em>An American Affair</em> might not seem so offensively exploitative. </strong>The fact that it is quite well acted, especially by Ms. Mol, who has the air of a sophisticated 1960s party animal down pat, only compounds the insult."
<p>Long unavailable, <a href="http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=926">BAM has secured</a> a new 35mm print of Marco Ferreriâs provocative 1969 film <em>Dillinger is Dead</em>. Michel Piccoli stars as Glauco, an alienated industrial designer "yearning to break free from his materialistic, humdrum existence. When he discovers a revolver tucked away in a kitchen cabinet one nightâwrapped in old newspapers announcing the death of John Dillinger, the notorious bank robber and murdererâthe gun becomes a symbol of redemption and freedom as he ritualistically sheds the vestiges of his bourgeois life." <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-02-25/film/ferreri-s-dillinger-is-dead-still-packs-heat/">Scott Foundas at the Village Voice</a> calls it a "centrifuge of ideas about the loss of self in an age when movies, TV, and commercial advertising had come to promise us the ability to be whomever we wanted."</p>
<p>Astra Taylor's documentary <em>Examined Life</em> encourages eight heavyweight philosophersâCornel West (<em>Matrix Reloaded</em>), Michael Hardt, Slavoj Žižek, among themâto hold forth on their ideas on moral philosophy. <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-02-25/film/examined-life-according-to-slavoj-142-i-158-ek-and-crew/">J. Hoberman at the Village Voice</a> says the film has "been assembled so that, without ever meeting face-to-face, the philosophers appear to critique each other's ideas... The beat goes on as political philosopher Hardt, co-author of <em>Empire</em>, rows the filmmaker around Central Park lake. Faint strains of salsa can be heard as Hardt explains how, 25 years before, he'd gone to Nicaragua to learn how to make a revolution. <strong>In the movie's best bit of improvisation, the professor gets so caught up in his ideas that he runs the boat aground."</strong></p>
<p>According to <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/movies/25bird.html?ref=movies">the Times's A.O. Scott</a>, Catalan director Albert Serra's film <em>Birdsong</em> is "less a retelling of the Nativity story than a dream about it, filtered in lovely black and white through a sensibility that recalls Luis Buñuel and Samuel Beckett... <strong>At times their bickering suggests the stooges more than the magi,</strong> as they negotiate deserts, thickets, mountainsides and the recalcitrance of their own slow, bulky bodies. But there is also a quiet, reverent grace in the way Mr. Serra films these serious, clownish men, treating them as curious features of the natural world... <em>Birdsong</em> is a quiet, contemplative, sometimes inscrutable film, which finds strangeness in a familiar story â and also in the world itself, from which Mr. Serraâs camera coaxes an obdurate, enigmatic beauty."</p>
<p>In the Book of Revelation, John describes his terrifying vision of a giant beast with three heads, "girt about the paps with a golden girdle," unleashing untold pestilence and agony upon the world with "a great voice, as of a trumpet." And so it has come to pass. Behold a pale <em>Jonas Brothers: 3D Concert Experience</em>, which <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/movies/27jona.html?ref=movies">the Times's Nathan Lee says</a> "isnât a movie so much as a devotional object, a kind of secular fetish designed to induce rapture...Submitting to the experience requires initiation into the teenybopper cult of the Jonas brothers trinity â Joe, Kevin and Nick â purveyors of innocuous, repetitive guitar pop and the kind of bland sexuality that provokes a certain type of teenage girl to wait 72 hours in the rain in Times Square for a chance to glimpse the godhead...<strong> If youâve ever wanted to crawl into Kevinâs chest hair, this is as close as youâre likely to get without incurring a restraining order."</strong></p>
<a href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Market/NewYork/NewYork_Frameset.htm">The Sunshine</a> has dropped ticket prices for their weekend midnight movies to $9.99, so you'll have extra money to spend on weed for this weekend's screenings of <em>Christmas on Mars: A Fantastical Film Freak out Featuring the Flaming Lips</em>.
<p>David Cronenberg's creepy 1986 remake of the classic sci-fi flick <em>The Fly</em>, starring Jeff Goldlum, <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/event?eventid=999852">screens at IFC Center</a> this weekend at midnight. </p>