Fort Worth Star-Telegram from Fort Worth, Texas • 127

git nto0 Untangling lUrbaniai a chore with rewards along the way e----' 7 I I )1 4- l'' CI''mk I '4L 1 i' 7' 0' IT I I I 4 '-t O'''' 4 fl 14 4'41 ki i 0 61" 4 or I P- It it tt 't "'''''''''413St n- Screen (ems Newcomer Michelle Rodriguez with Jaime Tire III seems closed-off and tentative in Girlfight even in her physical movements 1 fi I' 1 I 1'- 't 1 1 -f '--i 1 i 1 114 il I 1 tl 4 1 I I I ti 11 1 it El 1' 7110fATR9 By CHRISTOPHER KELLY STAR TELEGRAM FILM CRITIC 1 Urbania takes place in a dark and gloomy New 1 York City where something weird seems to be going on Charlie (Dan Futterman) a gay West VA-lager is searching for a particular man He goes to the bar where the man is said to be a regular but he isn't there So Charlie heads out into rT the night where he has all sorts of unusual litecto' 0 encounters IS le 1 with a bisexual atiftp: soap opera actor (Gabriel Olds) Rot an old friend a who is dying of AIDS (Alan Cumming) and the straight guy who lives in the apartment above his (Bill Sage) Along the way there are also some cryptic flashbacks to a boyfriend (Matt Keestar) Charlie seems to have once had and to some violent encounter involving a bunch of leather-jacketclad men What's it all mean? The fun of these sorts of movies (think of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs) is in piecing together what bizarre thing has happened to justify all the erratic behavior on display The problem with them (Neil Jordan's brilliant-but-maddening The Miracle comes to mind) is that when the final twist turns out to be not quite the earth-shattering revelation you were hoping for the entire movie starts to seem like much ado about nothing The concluding scenes of Urbania aren't quite that bad but they are a letdown (As the film drags on into a sentimental denouement set in a blindingly white apartment that I think is supposed to be heaven they also prove painfully mawkish) The director Jon Shear makes another mistake by stringing a distracting and unnecessary subplot about urban legends through the movie (By the way can we place a moratorium on the one also seen in last week's Urban Legends: Final Cut about the person who has tex with a stranger and then finds that his or her kidneys have been removed?) And yet Urbania shot in dark blues and blacks on super 16 and then blown up digitally to 35mm has style to burn The large ensemble cast is uniformly compelling And there's one scene that offers the most convincing portrait of homosexual seduction I've seen since Gregg Araki's 1992 The Living End with Charlie going up to the soap opera actor's apartment and the two of them acting out an uncommonly menacing (and ultimately disastrous) erotic pas de deux In an era when gay cinema is defined by candy-colored empty-headed cartoons about the beautiful and self-obsessed (Trick Kiss Me Guido) such achievements should not be taken lightly Urbania is rated for violence strong language and sexual situations Exclusive: UA Cine in Dallas re Dr1 ks st )t iti- ige By CHRISTOPHER KELLY sTAR TELEGRAm FILM cro-pc The shopworn hallmarks of the girls-in-sports genre are easily recognizable: a social-misfit tomboy authority figures who at first resist but then cave in and allow her to suit up a romance with a male teammate or rival and ultimate redemption usually shot in sensuous slow-motion Heck at some point you can usually even expect a grizzled old man to stand up and say something like "A girl? No stinkin' girl can play fill in the sport" Writer-director Karyn Kusama's Girifight about a Latina high school senior from Brooklyn who wants to box has all these cliches and more including a few even hokier ones about an abusive dad an unsupportive best friend and a leggy looker who wants to make our girl's boyfriend her own But what makes Girtfight such a chore to watch is that it isn't content to wallow in its own shamelessness indeed anyone who has gorged on such late-night USA Network classics as The Next Karate Kid (the movie Hilary Swank made before Boys Don't Cry) or the Helen Hunt TV movie Quarterback Princess can only sit back and wonder: Does the director really expect us to take this stuff seriously? Oh how she does From the first shot to explore these kids' music their dress and particularly their sexuality the movie comes up with more excuses for Diana and her boxer boyfriend Adrian (Santiago Douglas) not to have sex than a Hayes Code-bound 1940s screwball comedy Newcomer Rodriguez who's in almost every scene seems closed-off and tentative you feel the lack of confidence in her 1 line readings and even her 10 physical movements Girlfight shared the Grand tgne Ia Jury Prize (with Kenneth LonTVR7P ergan's soon-to-be-released You Can Count On Me) at this year's Sundance Film Festival Such laurels should suggest great promise until you remember that previous winners have included the overwrought prison-poetry melodrama Slam and the featherweight crowd-pleaser The Brothers McMullen I know American independent filmmaking is supposed to give underrepresentated racial and ethnic groups a voice in our hegemonic film culture But after seeing enough badly calculated badly made films one has to ask: Is it really worth speaking up when your voice sounds exactly the same as what we've been hearing at the movies for decades? Girlfight is rated for violence strong language and adult subject matter l'asam 1 Tangu a close-up of star Michelle Rodriguez's face eyeballs rotted up in their sockets this picture is as serious (and as dreary) as a heart attack Diana (Rodriguez) on the verge of expulsion at school for all the fights she's been in sees a possible outlet in the boxing club where heryounger brother Tiny (Ray Santiago) trains Without telling her father Sandro (Paul Calderon) she starts scraping together the money for lessons at first resis- Director a tant to the challenges and then welcoming Satag 11 them and then welt LEO Igu you get the idea Rated' Maybe a stronger director could have given this material a lift Kusama certainly can't Her camera is either stationary and poised in medium shot or herky-jerky and in the characters' faces but there's no rhyme nor reason to any of her shooting choices The screenplay is a bigger problem Written in flat declarative sentences that the actors don't have the skill to lend any texture to it gives the film the feet of a seventh-grade stage production in the early stages of rehearsaL Kasuma also wastes the potentially rich milieu of Brooklyn's inner-city teen-age Latino community She almost seems afraid GfrWIit Director a Stirs'? ic I ug tallith I Rated' GIrtfiht movie key: a must-see highly recommended good but flawed not recommended a must-avoid commended good but flawed not recommended a must-avoid 6 STAR TIME September 29-October 5 2000 STAR-TELEVAM worwstar-tetegramcomjustgo 1.