Wed Feb 19 at EMP.
In 2000, musician John Cale went home to his native Wales for 10 days. During his visit, he hooked up with several popular Welsh bands and solo artists to create this combination scene document/meditative travelogue. The film plays like an impressionistic spin on the celebrity-TV-special form, with live studio performances broken up by extended footage of industrial and natural Welsh landscapes, narrated by Cale's dulcet ruminations about art and its machinery. These images are enigmatic but cold, and they play like what they are: artful filler.

The music, meanwhile, is also a bit of a mixed bag. Whatever one makes of Cale's career as a solo artist and producer, no one would deny that his work with the Velvet Underground--as a collaborator and sideman--is where he has shone brightest. So it follows with the performances in Beautiful Mistake. When he plays with bands--Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Super Furry Animals, and Catatonia, especially--he hangs back, providing color and shade where necessary, blending. When he performs alongside solo singers or takes center stage himself, it's down to the strength of the songs, and some of the ones represented here simply aren't all that special. In all, this is the terrain of dedicated Calies (ceilidhs?), Anglo-rock aficionados, and hardcore fans of the Welsh accent. SEAN NELSON

Daredevil

dir. Mark Steven Johnson
First some good news: Just four months until Ang Lee's The Hulk arrives. Now the bad news: Daredevil is stunningly bad. From inept direction to overreliance on digital effects to overuse of TRL-suitable music, it fails on nearly every level.

In theory, the Man Without Fear (AKA lawyer Matt Murdock, blinded as a child but given the gift of enhanced senses--including sonar-like hearing) may have seemed like perfect cinematic fodder, but writer/director Mark Steven Johnson has managed to take one of Stan Lee's most conflicted, interesting characters and turn him completely flaccid. And speaking of flaccid, why would anyone believe Ben Affleck could play a superhero? I dunno, but I suspect Daredevil's producers will be asking themselves this same question once the film opens. Affleck, whose talent plummets as a film's budget increases, slumps drowsily through the role, choking out his lines barely above a whisper. This would be fine if his character ever had anything interesting to say, but alas, he never does.

In the end, Daredevil's only near-saving graces are a couple of boobs--Colin Farrell, who appears to be drunk throughout the picture, and the boobs owned by Jennifer Garner. Seriously, that's it. BRADLEY STEINBACHER

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days

dir. Donald Petrie
As I purchased my ticket for the new romantic comedy How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, the guy at the register asked if I'd had a good day. I told him I had and that I'd stayed indoors reading and watching movies. "And now you're going to do more of the same," he said, making me feel dumber than when I originally asked for my single ticket. I took my retarded self into the theater and sat pitifully alone, watching Kate Hudson play a magazine columnist who pitches a how-to piece in which she will snag a guy and then lose him in 10 days--by freaking him out. Nearby Matthew McConaughey's ad-man character is betting his advertising firm boss he can sell diamonds to women by making them fall in love, and he'll randomly choose a woman and make her fall in love with him to prove it. What a coinkidink! The film is touching in those brief minutes when the two realize they might have feelings for each other, so long as the idiot soundtrack doesn't swell in and ruin the mood. Kate Hudson is cute and McConaughey moved closer than ever to the point where I almost bought him as a love interest. But on the whole, the story is predictable right down to the final scene, which happens to be set to a Gin Blossoms song I shamefully like, and there it was: How to Ruin a Great Day in Two Hours. KATHLEEN WILSON

Lolita

dir. Stanley Kubrick

Fri-Sun Feb 14-16, Tues-Thurs Feb 18-20 at the Grand Illusion.
Only Vladimir Nabokov could get way with writing a book about a middle-aged European teacher who kidnaps an orphaned American teenage girl and turns her into his "pet" or sex slave; only Stanley Kubrick could get away with making a film based on such a novel. The reason why they could do these things, and not most or even the very best of us could, is this: Most of us would have moralized the immoral situation; and in the case of the very best of us, we would have treated the sordid subject with total disdain, as if the rape of a girl-child was not that important, and what really mattered was making a work of art that transcended the limits of the scandalous theme. But Nabokov and Kubrick were too mischievous to be critical of Humbert Humbert and the mad/rational world he invents to sustain and justify his impossible needs. Nor were they distant or aloof, as the best of us would be. With the morbid enthusiasm of a celebrity photographer, Kubrick and Nabokov transport us right into the heart of the pederast's paradise--a paradise whose flowers are evil and sky is the color of hell flames. The entrance into hell for the book is Nabokov's words; for Kubrick it is Peter Sellers' acting. Put in other words, Kubrick, like Nabokov, was a great 20th-century artist, and only a great artist could get away with making a wonderful film about a middle-aged European who deprives an American girl of her one and only childhood. CHARLES MUDEDE