THIS WEEKEND - Critics are pretty well split on Robert De Niro's new movie City by the Sea (see yesterday's post for more details). Rotten Tomatoes currently shows 28 negative reviews and 24 positive, though none of those are particularly glowing. The consensus seems to be that this cop drama is formulaic and really nothing better than your average TV movie of the week except for its heavyweight cast -- Deniro, Frances McDormand, and up-and-comer James Franco. Here's how Roger Ebert sums up his 3-star review: "City by the Sea" is not an extraordinary movie. In its workmanship it aspires not to be remarkable but to be well made, dependable, moving us because of the hurt in the hero's eyes." Ebert's next line is the most interesting, having recently read the sharply-crafted Esquire article that inspired the movie: "A better movie might have abandoned the crime paraphernalia and focused on the pain between the generations... Obviously, I can't say Ebert is right or wrong since I haven't seen the film yet. But Mike McAlary's story focuses on just that -- "the pain between the generations" of the LaMarca family -- and not so much on the crime end of it. Leave it to Hollywood to take what could have been a fascinating character study and turn it into more or less just another conventional crime melodrama. Slate's David Edelstein does a nice job summarizing the real-life back story, and how its been altered for the screen. Overall, his praise for the film is faint : "That City by the Sea isn't laughed off the screen is testament to Caton-Jones' attention to actors and to some tightly written scenes...[De Niro] gets his mugging under control and gives a decent performance -- the plainest and maybe the best he has given in a decade or more." I'll see for myself this weekend.
Also opening today is Swimfan -- or as I like to call it, "Erika Christensen's Career Suicide Watch 2002." Is it that hard for a young actress to find work these days that you have to follow-up a strong performance in Traffic by vamping around in this "teen psychodrama" about a stud high school swimmer (Jesse Bradford) who gets in too deep (sorry) with the new girl in town (Christensen)? It's Fatal Attraction meets The Crush, and if Christensen isn't careful, she could soon end up in the "no longer relevant file" along with that movie's young star, Alicia Silverstone. Reviews are exactly what you'd expect -- out of 18 so far, only 2 are positive. Reel's Tor Thorsen is even brave enough to throw out a Hitchcock reference: "On the surface, the film is played straight, with sustained tension and effective frights. But the director has done his research, and fills every scene with a subversive humor that's 100% pure imitation Hitchcock." I suppose watching what amounts to a parody of Hitchcock might be entertaining, though I'm not sure I buy Thorsen's implication that director John Polson had this in mind all along. I'll probably avoid this one, especially since I am heading back to Chicago this weekend. Check back Monday for a review of City by the Sea. Also next week, I'll have reviews of two arthouse flicks available soon on video and DVD -- Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, both finally playing in Iowa City at the Bijou, the University of Iowa's student-run theater.

E-mail CinemaScoped@hotmail.com or start a discussion in the Feedback Forum