dir. Garry Marshall
Opens Fri May 28.
What if you worked at a top modeling agency in New York, were on the house list for every chichi red carpet club and restaurant, and could sleep with America's next top male model after dueting on a karaoke machine together? Would you want to give all that up to move to Queens and raise, as a single parent, three kids, the oldest of whom looks more like your barely legal girlfriend than your niece? Hell no. But this is the quandary Raising Helen's Helen Harris (Kate Hudson) is placed in once her older sister and brother-in-law die in a freak car accident and she is named as the kids' caretaker over her other sister, Jenny Portman (a once again prudish Joan Cusack), a doting mom with a bun in the oven. On a dime, Helen has to leave her apartment, the nightlife, and, eventually, her job behind to raise her nieces and nephew (ages 5 to 15), as well as dealing with Jenny's envy for not being the next mom in line.
Not to worry, though, as this is one of those movies where everything--and I mean everything--works out by the end. Tears are rarely shed, and when they are there's a joke (or a Paris Hilton cameo) around the corner. More than anything, actually, this movie feels like a PG-13 version of Sex and the City, where instead of the cherubic moneybags Carrie Bradshaw you have the fairly well-off and cherubic Helen Harris, both of whom everyone always adores. Even Sex and the City's John Corbett has a role (as a Lutheran pastor) to save the day in the romance department. Raising Helen is sweet and inoffensive, without, surprisingly, being too saccharine--but really it's one to save for the airplane, or any other time when you're stuck with only a few feel-good movies to choose from. JENNIFER MAERZ
Doppelganger
dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Mon May 31, 2 pm, Pacific Place.
A workaholic scientist has been developing a robotic wheelchair with mechanical arms for the benefit of paralyzed people. Deadlines are looming, the budget is being cut, and he's about to lose key staff members--but what's worrying him most is the fact that he's begun seeing his doppelganger all over the city. Legend has it that if you see your doppelganger, you are about to die. In previous films like Cure and SĂ©ance, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has proven himself to be adept at capturing an ominous and creepy tone, even if he can't always sustain it for the whole movie, and Doppelganger starts out with the potential to be another one of his super-creepy movies. It opens with a young woman who meets up with the double of a brother who has recently killed himself, then moves into the story of the scientist and his double. The more we learn about these doubles, however, the goofier the film gets.
As it happens, the scientist's double has a wicked sense of humor. Meanwhile, the brother's double is finally starting to write the book that the original kept talking about. As with Fight Club, the doppelganger is the id broken free, but unlike in that movie the double has a physical presence and is often mistaken for a brother or a twin. If these doubles are more likable than their originals, at least at first, they wear out their welcome with their completely selfish and self-involved behavior. The movie also threatens to wear out its welcome with unexpected plot twists, but ultimately it's too playful not to like. Then there's the expert use of split screens, the themes of doubles and doubling, and a Hitchcockian soundtrack that often pushes the music to the forefront, which makes Kurosawa into Brian De Palma's doppelganger--and that is very appropriate indeed. ANDY SPLETZER
Uniform
dir. Diao Yinan
Thurs May 27, 9 pm, Broadway Performance Hall; Sat May 29, 1:45 pm, Broadway Performance Hall.
When a young loser finds himself in possession of a police uniform, he exploits it for all he can to raise his status (social, financial, romantic, etc.). His father is in the hospital, his business is foundering, and he can't get a real job anywhere, so he begins stopping cars on the street to coax bribes out of the drivers. Perhaps desperation was his original inspiration, but this newfound authority brings out his vanity as he takes revenge on local bullies and wins over a girl working on his new "beat"--which he has conveniently located directly across the street from her store. She buys the whole act, unconvincing though it may be, perhaps because she has an equally embarrassing secret of her own.
The whole film has this wonderfully loose, breezy feeling that makes it eminently watchable and absorbing despite the characters' extreme passivity. The story is interesting--a beautiful little fable about moral relativity--but the film's power comes from its exact placement within a specific social context. Uniform's China is one of unemployment and mass discontent. Shouts and explosions occupy the film's background as workers at the local factory lash out against their unsympathetic employers. With such a silent, slow-moving hero, these bursts of violent activity jar the film out of its pleasant rhythms and into very powerful territory. The hero is forced to make painfully difficult decisions, but isn't really strong enough to make the right ones. Ultimately, the film becomes both a heartbreaking story about a doomed romance and a complex, understanding portrait of the sorts of moral crises that arise only in the most desperate of situations. The tragedy of the film isn't that its hero makes unwise choices, it's that he's forced to make these decisions in the first place. ADAM HART
Feathers in My Head
dir. Thomas de Thier
Sun May 30, 2 pm, Harvard Exit.
Set in a picturesque town in the Belgian countryside, Feathers in My Head seems to be about a perfect couple whose marriage is put to the test when their adorable son, Arthur, wanders out into nature, presumably to his death. The opening shot is a fish's-eye view of a bird crashing into the water for some food, which is quickly followed by a sequence where a baby bird that Arthur is taking care of goes missing, taken by the cat. Predators and prey, the death of innocence--these are the initial themes of the movie. But the key to the film lies in the beautiful cinematography, which has a scientific detachment in how it captures nature and the industrial pollution that encroaches on it. As it turns out, the camera shares the same perspective as François (Alexis Den Doncker), a gawky adolescent birdwatcher who is often performing his own experiments and recording them in his journal. François is just an observer in the first half of the movie with barely any screen time, but what he sees is crucial. Early on, he sees a high-school couple having sex on a hillside, and they catch his gaze and call him a pervert. Later on, in a parallel scene, Arthur is turned away from his parents' bedroom door because they are inside having sex, which is what inspires his walk out of the movie. This fear of sex is everywhere, and in the second half of the film it becomes increasingly clear that the whole story is being filtered through this awkward adolescent's point of view, through his idealized view of this family and a growing obsession with the sexy, grief-stricken wife. Like in a fairy tale, sex opens doors to strange and dangerous worlds, and Feathers in My Head turns into a bizarre yet believable coming-of-age story. ANDY SPLETZER
