SWEET HOME ALABAMA. Like most recent vehicles for Reese Witherspoon’s wide-eyed spunk, Sweet Home Alabama is all about being out of place, usually with native charm shining against cold elitism (see Legally Blonde, Cruel Intentions, etc.). This time, Witherspoon plays Melanie, a trailer trash expat who reinvents herself as a New York fashionista. Her blue-blooded boyfriend (Patrick Dempsey) rents out Tiffany’s to propose to her, but there’s just one little bit of unfinished business: she’s still married to her high school sweetheart. When she goes home for a divorce, we all get to giggle about how funny people in the South are, and of course, learn the importance of Following Your Heart.
SKINS. Chris Eyre, director of Sundance favorite Smoke Signals, returns with another fearless survey of the afflictions of Native American reservation life: poverty, alcoholism and inadequate education. Lakota police officer Rudy Yellow Lodge and his self-destructive Vietnam vet brother Mogie, raised with Mount Rushmore looming above them, deal with their history and their anger at one another. Having created tragicomedy that is unstintingly political, Eyre put his money where his mouth was—this past month, his “Rolling Rez” tour took a mobile theater and screened the film free of charge at Indian reservations around the country.
JUST A KISS. Billed as “a romantic comedy as Kafkaesque nightmare,” this ambitious black comedy about naughty thirtysomethings toes the line between film and animation. One disloyal kiss throws the lives of jaded urban couples into chaos, sending them headlong into unlikely liaisons with a seductive cellist, a cinephile stewardess and a dominatrix bowling alley attendant (Marisa Tomei). While rookie director Fisher Stevens’ conception of Kafka seems to center on angsty witticisms, indie rock and lots of skinny people wearing black, the film’s imaginative play promises plenty of eye candy.
MOONLIGHT MILE. Slow, actor-driven pieces about bereavement may be acclaimed out of mere guilt—who has it in them to pan a sensitive, non-maudlin treatment of the aftermath of death? Like In the Bedroom and the lesser-known The Son’s Room, both of which dealt with families trying to live with the death of their child, this film has been lauded on the film-festival circuit. It-boy and Columbia dropout Jake Gyllenhaal (The Good Girl, Lovely and Amazing) is Joe, a faithful surrogate son to his dead fiancee’s parents (Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon) who faces a dilemma when he falls for someone new. FYI: humor reputedly prevails over dramatic outbursts and stony silences.
