O

Grade: B+

Smart, fascinating take of a modern day “Othello,” set on a basketball court in a boarding school in the south. Josh Hartnett is fine here as the Iago figure -- shy, pained, smothering in hostility at his father’s affections for another and his second class status in life. Mekhi Phifer as “Othello” and Martin Sheen as Iago’s Daddy are also solid, although Julia Stiles is a major snore as the love interest – although she does die well. The film does a nice job taking us inside the mind of a high school killer, and the sense of isolation and anger that would bring one to destroy everything around him – his pleasure at being the “hawk,” flying over everybody else and being the center of attention in the final moments of the film is downright eerie. The race issue is also ever-present, yet the film avoids heavy-handed bigotry stereotypes and instead harkens back to the original text -- O is the hero everyone adores, yet also the outsider people are all-too-ready to hate. When one of his closest friends declares “he’s just a nigger,” and that “the street has started coming out of him,” the contempt percolating under the surface is startling – it is far from the racist free world the characters want us to believe it is. It’s also just plain fun to see how the screenplay adjusts and uses the tale in a modern world, which it does quite nicely. If it doesn’t quite always work all the way through, I for one have yet to see a version of “Othello” that does. This one comes close.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0184791/

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

Grade: C

It’s hard enough watching a one-time genius like Woody Allen making the same movie over and over and over again, harder still to see Woody Allen give the same performance over and over and over again. But throw in Helen Hunt giving the same performance over and over and over again, and you’ve a got a major major major bore. This one isn’t dreadful, but it isn’t particularly funny, original, or all that interesting, either. It’s just one of many, mildly amusing, lesser Woody Allen movies – it’s unfortunate, however, that at this point in his career, the lessers are starting to far outweigh the masterpieces.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0256524/

The Deep End

Grade: C

Moody, beautifully paced and photographed, even nicely acted – but where did half an hour of the screenplay end up? Admittedly, I felt a little uncomfortable right off the bat when a mother finds her son’s lover dead, assumes right off the bat her son killed the guy, then buries the man at sea supposedly to protect same son – or, perhaps, to protect herself and her husband from acknowledging her son’s homosexuality? It doesn’t really matter, because the film launches into an unconvincing, poorly thought out bribery plot, that fails to add up to much of anything in the end -- except confusing. Is one of the extortionists a lover of Mom? This would certainly go a long way to explain his torment and conflicted feelings, but there just isn’t enough there there to pull us deeper inside. Major disappointment.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0250323/