The Journal News from White Plains, New York • Page 62

8G Thursday, April 20, 2000 Hie Journal News RK www.nyjournalnews.com moviereviws 'Love Basketball' achieves dramatic goals 9 qfe I 'f Love -J Basketball Opening: Tomorrow Theatres: See rlovk Clod Starring: Omar Epps, Sanaa Lathan Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood Studio: New Lint Cinema Rating: PG-13 (profanity, adult themes, partial nudity, violence). Running Time: IOS minutes -J MARSHALL FINE The Journal News Films about middle-class African-Americans have become more plentiful in the past few years though, with the exception of "Soul Food," few of them have been box-office hits. That's an unfortunate fact, one that the romantic comedy-drama "Love Basketball" might be able to overcome. Where "The Wood" and "The Best Man" were also romantic comedies, "Love Basketball" has the added advantage of including, urn, basketball, in case you hadn't figured it out from the title. Written and directed by newcomer Gina Prince-Bythewood, the film uses hoops as a framing device for the story of two young Los Angeles residents, for whom the game means everything.

Needless to say, by the end, they've rethought their priorities. The two cagers are Quincy (Omar Epps) and Monica (Sanaa Lathan), who first meet when Monica's family moves in next door to Quincy's. Quincy's father, Zeke (Dennis Haysbert), is a professional basketball player and Quincy is determined to follow in his footsteps. Quincy is amused at Monica's basketball assertiveness until she proves she is as strong a player as he is. Her personality is also strong and they wind up as neighbors with an honest, sometimes abrasive relationship that seems to preclude romance.

The film checks in with them at various points in their basketball careers: in high school, where Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan portray next-door neighbors who share a passion for basketball and each other in 'Love a sports-oriented love story. pre-WNBA days. The plotting is a little too schematic, with Prince-Bythewood practicing a kind of zero-sum balancing act When one is up, the other is down. When they succeed at sports, they lose at love. And so forth.

But she draws strong performances from an attractive pair of leads in Epps and Lathan, both of whom have the acting chops and the athletic ability to be convincing in their roles. She surrounds them with a noteworthy supporting cast, including Debbi Morgan and Dennis Haysbert as Quincy's squabbling mom and dad, and 'The Virgin of teen-female angst Alfre Woodard and Harry Lennix as Monica's more staid parents. She also raises issues that normally get glossed over or oversinv plified in films about sports and life. The film looks at the toll on a marriage when one partner is on the road, and the pressure on female athletes to disown what is seen as this masculine side of their nature. But, by focusing the film on a pair of middle-class young people, Prince-Bythewood shies away from the notion of athletics as the only source of hope for these characters.

Quincy and Monica have other options beyond basketball, even if basketball is the dream that propels them. As "Love Basketball" hopes to communicate, their story is more of the norm than Hollywood would have us believe. And that's a refreshing change. house, emerging only to try to save a tree in their yard that has been condemned because of Dutch elm disease. In the end, they lure the neighborhood boys into a half-baked escape scheme that is actually a cover for their mass suicide.

Why? Who knows? More important, who cares? Certainly, life with a mother as strict and unyielding as the one Kathleen Turner plays can't be easy. On the other hand, it's only a matter of time before these girls will be 18 and free to 1 A .1 4..1 leave. Apparently no one vuiu them. This film is as ephemeral as the wispy music by the French group Air that plays on the soundtrack: Neither quite registers on the consciousness. Though Coppola finds a few laughs, she never finds enough of them to make "The Virgin Suicides" more than wanly entertaining.

Nor does she tap into any of the tragedy that might be implied by these overly symbolic characters. Which leave us with what? A movie that, like the book on which it is based, seems as involving as a pile of pocket lint Men, she observes, are rewarded for that kind of aggressiveness. "But I get told to calm down and act like a lady," she complains. The film is set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the explosion of interest in women's sports. So even though she is as valuable to the college women's team as Quincy is to the men's, it is Quincy who is the star and Quincy who draws the attention of sexually voracious fans.

Similarly, once they get out of college, it is Quincy who draws the big contract with the Lakers. For Monica, playing professionally means moving to Europe in those lifeless tale 1 The Virgin Suicides Opening: Tomorrow Theatres: Lincoln Square, Broadway and Street II2-S0-LOEWS i Loews tied Street Times Square, 42nd and Eighth Avenue. 2I2-50-LOEWS 572; Chebea Cinemas, 23rd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. 212-m-aVW 597; aS Hanhattan. Starring: lumen Dunst, Kathleen Turner, James Woods Director: Sofia Coppola Studio: Paramount Classics Rating: I (profanity, violence, adult themes) Running Time: 100 minutes self is never really explained.

The fact that she is young and hormonal seems to be enough of a reason. The only other Lisbon girl who seems to have a personality of her own is Lux (Kirsten Dunst), who Quincy is a star and Monica struggles to contain her emotions that get her ejected from games; as college freshmen, in which both learn a lesson about humility, as seniors, when both must contend with the future beyond college; and a couple of years after college, when both have dealt with the ups and downs of playing professionally. What's most intriguing about Prince-Bythewood's script is the focus on the politics of women's sports. As a high school star, Monica is a fierce competitor, a trait that works against her because she frequently gets technical fouls for arguing with referees. Suicides' a bling a plot or concrete characters.

It was a hit with critics; try finding anyone else who read it While Coppola's screenplay gives the film a sense of being anchored in something resembling the real world, it's only a sense. Not much, in the end, can be done to make this film into anything more than an oddball tale of self-dramatizing teen-female angst. The film, ostensibly set in the 1970s, centers on the Lisbon family, led by the dithering math-teacher father (James Woods, in a change of pace role) and an iron-handed mother (Kathleen Turner). What has the neighborhood boys in a testosterone funk are the five Lisbon daughters, who seem remarkably similar in age. "They knew everything about us and we couldn't fathom them at all," says the anonymous narrator, representing the various teen-age and preteen boys in the neighborhood who seem to chart the Lisbon sisters' every move.

If only this material were as deep as a fathom. The film starts with the suicide of the youngest Lisbon, Cecilia, who returns to haunt the rest of the proceedings. Why she killed her- MARSHALL FINE The Journal News A couple of years back, when George Lucas re-released the original "Star Wars" trilogy with digitally added characters, another rumor made the rounds: Francis Coppola, inspired by Lucas, was going to bring back "Godfather IH" and digitally replace the performance of his daughter, Sofia. Since that critically lambasted outing, Sofia Coppola has segued from acting (a pursuit to which she seemed uniquely unsuited) to being a writer, clothing designer and director. She makes her feature-film debut as writer-director with an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," a film that proves Coppola is a better director than she is an actress.

For that matter, "The Virgin Suicides" is a better movie than it was a book. Consider both damned with faint praise. Eugenides' novel was a phenomenon: one of those excursions into "new fiction" that was all atmosphere and literary noodlings, minus anything resem- 1 Kirsten Dunst co-stars in 'The Virgin Suicides a drama directed by Sofia Coppola. inspires the lust of high-school swain Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett). Because Lux and her sisters are forbidden to date, Trip hits on the notion of a group date, recruiting several friends to take out Lux's sisters; they'll all go to the same dance in the same car.

This, in an era before the minivan. When Lux comes home late from the date, the Lisbon sisters are grounded from school and everything else. They sit around the.