NYLON - April 2009 - (Page 157) edited by also h g showing: i love you, man Paul Rudd discovers how to say those four little words in the latest from writer-director John Hamburg. In I Love You, Man, Rudd nails winsome awkwardness as newly engaged Peter, who is desperately seeking a best man for his wedding. Peter embarks on a series of man-dates until he meets Sydney, whose candidness challenges his uptight ways. This film represents bromantic comedy at its zenith, and watching the two “fall in friendship” offers a hilarious counterpart to chick flicks. MAI LYNN MILLER NGUYEN lymelife There are certain clichés in the suburban-ennui genre—over-sexed characters, familial dyspepsia, sketchy parenting—and they all appear in Lymelife. Only here, as with predecessors The Ice Storm and American Beauty, the tableau plays out sharply and slyly—any contrivances buffered by a smart script from newcomer sibling team Steven and Derick Martini. The movie takes place in ’70s Long Island, where a bout with Lyme disease debilitates a working stiff (Timothy Hutton) who is cuckolded by his self-absorbed wife (Cynthia Nixon); she is having an affair with her cocky, rich neighbor (Alec Baldwin), who in turn, is slowly becoming estranged from his spouse (Jill Hennessy). Making this tawdry affair even more lurid: a flirtation between the respective family’s kids (played expertly by Emma Roberts and Rory Culkin), both rattled by their parents’ destructive behavior. Its regrettable title notwithstanding, Lymelife succeeds in patiently weaving together these storylines without letting any of the uniformly strong performances— Kieran Culkin also delivers a swaggering turn as the latter couple’s older son—overpower one another. Domestic unrest has rarely felt so effortless. NISHA GOPALAN summer hours In this artful, Chekovian look at the modern French family, three siblings must decide what to do with the considerable family estate when their mother dies. To director Olivier Assayas’s credit he allows his narrative and his cast (including the wonderful Juliette Binoche) enough room to breathe—the result is a film that’s as delicate as it is effecting. MH the informers In the Los Angeles of The Informers, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s story collection, the kids are blond, the parents are rich, and nobody knows they’re in freefall. Ray-Bans rule (black for boys, white for girls); MTV’s always on (when the M meant, you know, music); Pat Benatar is hot, and safe sex means taking the pill (AIDS is something that only happens to, like, other people). Welcome to Hollywood, 1983. Less a narrative than an Altman-esque mood piece about the A-List and their brood, the first excess of The Informers is its sprawling cast: Mickey Rourke, Amber Heard, Billy Bob Thornton, Winona Ryder, Chris Isaak, Kim Basinger, the late Brad Renfro, Lou Taylor Pucci, and more. Most get lost in the shuffle, but Rourke and Thornton bring welcome depth to what Sugar traces a familiar arc but isn’t interested in fantasy-building. Yes, Sugar has talent. Yes, he moves up the ranks, carrying his cleats on a path to Minor League glory that takes him from the D.R. to Arizona to Iowa (where no one habla Español). But Sugar struggles in Iowa, where he’s taken in by a family that loves baseball almost as much as they love Christ. He doesn’t understand half of what he hears; the townies don’t like him dancing with their white women. For the first time in his career, his game is off. In a typical baseball could have been paper-thin men: The way Rourke turns a few lines about Barstow into a poetic mantra is inspired, raising the desert community to something mythical. Physically, mentally, morally, or spiritually, this is a group in decline. Altman’s Short Cuts worked so well as a film because of Raymond Carver’s minimalism; his stories are the exposed tips of very dark, very deep icebergs. Ellis is more of a maximalist; he’s interested in the excesses of people already prone to excess. But when empty people in an empty decade are your subject, something needs to fill that hole. The Informers gets the ’80s so right that it feels trapped in amber. Instead of lending perspective, it creates a chasm between them and us. MIKE HARVKEY sugar The American Dream is taking a hell of a drubbing these days, and Sugar is the latest of many recent films to peel the mask off our most popular myth. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck follow Half Nelson with this modest tale of a young baseball player, Miguel “Sugar” Santos, with Major League dreams. The story might sound familiar, but in Boden & Fleck’s hands it’s anything but. Mostly populated by untrained actors recruited in the Dominican Republic, flick, the question would be: Does he have what it takes to go all the way? But in Sugar’s case, we’ll never know, and neither will he, because he doesn’t stick around to find out. Buckling under the pressure and scrutiny, he heads to New York where, he’s heard, everyone speaks Spanish. There, he steps into the same struggle faced by much of the population before him. Even though he survives in the big city, finding work and a place to sleep, an occasional hint crosses Sugar’s face of what might have been. MH sin nombre One of the best movies at this year’s all-around exemplary Sundance Film Festival, Sin Nombre is the story of two teenagers and their journey through Mexico to the U.S. border: Casper (Edgar Flores), a member of the fearsome (and real-life) Mara Salvatrucha gang, and Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a Honduran teenager persuaded by her heretofore absent father to join the rest of his brood in New Jersey. That may sound like the cinematic equivalent of bran fl akes, but it’s not. Oakland-born director Cary Fukunaga shares an often-invisible Mexico that’s the fl ipside of the Cancún beach scene—from a gangs’ graveyard hang-out to trains, the tops of which are home to a sad, mobile community in which Sayra and her family try to wait out their northward odyssey. Though Fukunaga is savvy enough not to over-politicize his film, Sin Nombre offers a staggering reminder of the hellishness his characters—and millions of their reallife counterparts— often stoically endure in hopes of finding refuge in America. DIANE VADINO 157
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