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December 18-24, 2008
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Dark times
by Christopher Borrelli
A Sorta Rican holiday movie
by Christopher Borrelli
 Dark times
by Christopher Borrelli
Dark Streets lost me early, real early, like still-adjusting-my-eyes-in-a-dark-theater early: “Welcome to the blues,” growls the entertainer with the mohawk and the full-length ringmaster gown. A match is lighted and a cigarette smoked, the camera tight on the glowing tip. (Funny? Pretentious? You decide.) The man’s voice, of course, is pure experience, all gravel and gunshot. There is neon involved, and — as if I need to add — it’s dark. All of which should be a honking signal that this odd little picture — with its rain-soaked alleys, twinkly eyed budding showgirls and character actors dressed like 14th-century ninja turtles — plays more like a stoned marketing department’s idea of the blues than the real deal. Not that Dark Streets intends to be a slavish tribute.
Elias Koteas, of the grim thousand-yard stare, arrives as the police lieutenant, dressed in armor and chest plates, for no apparent reason. The film, which centers on a club named the Tower, features far more jazz than my-dog-done-got-shot blues. And the sets (dark and dank and dripping with moisture) look as if they were appropriated from one of the Alien sequels. The idea, and I’m assuming this, is that the film is meant to be set out of time, which is pretentious-filmmaker speak for not quite the ’30s and not quite the ’40s. Think steampunk, that sub-subgenre in which cars fly, but with propellers, not jet engines.
Nothing flew, however.
My attention, perhaps. The story involves a young club owner (played by Gabriel Mann) who owes money to gangsters. He has a star performer (“a real belter”) played by Bijou Phillips, who makes a great dame, but Koteas’ police lieutenant enters into the club one night (there’s little daylight on Planet Noir) and urges a replacement — a milk-faced chanteuse of the long, slow burn, played by Izabella Miko. There’s more story, I suppose: Chaz, our club owner, is mourning the apparent suicide of his father, except you know it wasn’t a suicide because Chaz’s father was the head of a power company, an additional mysterious wrinkle. Which brings me to maybe the one clever idea in Dark Streets: Director Rachel Stevens, paying homage to not only jazz and blues and the ’30s and the ’40s and Blade Runner but film noir, has the power drop out every few scenes, throwing the club and the city (an unnamed Every Noir Town) into pitch blackness.
On second thought, a pretty literal shorthand for noir, no? Perhaps, but then Dark Streets is entirely a stylistic exercise, hollow and ugly, studded with a handful of hard-to-recall musical numbers and original songs (Etta James, Dr. John), and so desperate to come off like a fever dream that the very edges of the picture are smudgy and gauzy. No snow globe enters a scene, for instance, without the sole purpose of sliding out of a palm and smashing. And there is an angel of death, who is pale and silent and tall and who wanders through the plot like a deathly ill Mr. Magoo. It’s the kind of movie so shameless it even adds a way to make you feel lousy on the way out of the theater — there’s a disclaimer that Dark Streets was made in honor of the displaced musicians of New Orleans. Half the film’s profits will go to them. Which is generous until you think, what’s half of $3,000?
—MCT
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 A Sorta Rican holiday movie
by Christopher Borrelli
Are holiday movies the new musicals? There are a lot of them. We don’t believe a minute of them. Yet the key to them is milking real charm from real people reacting in real time. For instance, before I offer this review of the easygoing Chicago-based Puerto Rican Christmas picture Nothing Like the Holidays, I should point out that I am a fervent admirer of The Family Stone. It has been one week since my last viewing; with Christmas edging closer, I expect to fall off the wagon again, probably late at night. The Family Stone, which crams in more concerns than a season of The Oprah Winfrey Show, has everything: silent looks, walks in the snow, a dying parent, uptight outsiders who feel distant from the clannish family, a clip of Meet Me in St. Louis, a deaf son, a gay son-in-law and an improbable finish, after which everything’s fine. Yet, I don’t write that with a wink and nudge — I love The Family Stone so much I watch it in July.
Then again, to spin Tolstoy ever so slightly: All happy families in holiday movies are alike, but all unhappy families in holiday movies, these days, they’re pretty much alike, too.
Nothing Like the Holidays, if you are a sentient being on this planet, should strike you, after a short glance at a short TV commercial, as crushingly familiar (The Family Stonendez), done before, done last week, done every year, the latest holiday film about a varied, dysfunctional everyday family that comes together at Christmas, lugging a 12-car pileup of anxieties, then tidying up every one, in a warm red bow, within 98 minutes.
A tweak, of course, is required with each new holiday film, to preserve the illusion that you are not buying a new ticket to an old movie. It’s not much of a twist, but it’s more thoughtful than you would expect. Director Alfredo De Villa is as interested in the rhythms of these families, and the details of their lovingly worn middle-class homes (painted metal railing on the stairs, decorations on the kitchen sink), as with the clichés he’s expected to deliver (and does).
The primary family here is the chaotic, everyone-doing-everything-at-once Rodriguez clan, who haven’t spent a holiday together in years: Jesse (Freddy Rodriguez) is back from Iraq, nursing survivor’s guilt and a romance with an old flame (Melonie Diaz); sister Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito) is a struggling actress with modest success in Los Angeles, waiting on The Phone Call From Her Agent That Could Change Her Career; Ozzy (Jay Hernandez) is Jesse’s childhood friend, itching to strike at the gang who killed his brother (Ozzy is also smitten with Roxanna, and Roxanna with Ozzy); Alfred Molina plays the mountainous patriarch, unfaithful to his wife (Elizabeth Pena), both of whom hold tight to a grim secret; Luis Guzman drops by as the big, loud family friend.
Who else?
Oh, yes: John Leguizamo jets in as the rich New York businessman with a rich, white high-powered wife (Debra Messing), whom we
know is high-powered because she wears a Bluetooth. Their biggest contribution to the Circus of Complications is they haven’t had grandkids — or as the family calls their inevitable offspring, “Sorta Ricans.”
Likewise, Nothing Like the Holidays is Sorta Rican, too — sorta authentic, when it allows this big wonderful cast to talk to each other, catch up, laugh, evade. Those hundreds — nay, thousands — of subplots? Practical ways of throwing actors together, and nothing more; watch the way their faces brighten in conversation, the smiles that spread slowly across their faces in moments of genuine warmth. It’s what we need at the holidays, and it’s the modest goal of a modest little holiday picture like this — to capture something heartfelt and real, finding anyone doing anything and meaning it, regardless of how patently false the situation seems. Sounds like the holidays to me.
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