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'The Oh in Ohio'

By Curt Holman

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How many times has this happened to you? You're giving a presentation in a huge, sterile office meeting room, and suddenly the pager in your underpants starts going off. You continue your speech in front of the stuffy business-folk while trying to conceal your impending orgasm.

The comedy "The Oh in Ohio" drops star Parker Posey into several set pieces like that one. Director Billy Kent banks on laughs from situations so contrived you can't imagine them happening in the real world, only in that Hollywood fantasy land where Meg Ryan simulates extended ecstasy in a crowded restaurant.

Once, you could look to indie comedies for genuinely fresh, funny perspectives on the world, but "The Oh in Ohio" instead seeks to emulate formulaic movies, and it fritters away a fine cast and premise. In depicting a grown woman's discovery of orgasms after a lifetime of none, "The Oh in Ohio" should have been the female answer to "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," but instead is just a frustrating tease.

At first, Posey seems typecast as Priscilla, a perfectionist ad executive nicknamed "the ice queen." Posey built her career on a foundation of bitchy roles that specialized in above-it-all attitude and a flat, contemptuous delivery. Fortunately, Posey seems too aware of her image to let it limit her; she played as villainous sidekicks in "Blade Trinity" and "Superman Returns."
Would that Posey had a vehicle worthy of her this time. Priscilla maintains an appearance of personal satisfaction even though she's never had a climax, to the consternation of her husband, Jack (Paul Rudd), a sad-sack high school biology teacher. Psychological insight is not the script's long suit. "I suppose I don't not enjoy it," Priscilla remarks of their marital relations. The fact that she knows they've had sex "1,482 times, not counting this morning" hints that she lives too much inside her head, as opposed to any other part of herself.

"The Oh in Ohio" instead suggests there's nothing wrong with Priscilla a vibrator can't fix. Her discovery of carnal delight plays like a typical comedy of embarrassment, particularly when Liza Minnelli shows up as a hippie-dippy teacher of female masturbation. At least some of the jokes pay off, such as the scene in which Priscilla visits a sex shop and tries to buy a dildo the size of a fancy restaurant peppermill. Posey amusingly conveys Priscilla's eagerness to make up for lost time, putting her new battery-powered pal on the nightstand, then retrieving it for another go a few minutes later.

Director Kent does well with the rest of the actors, too, with the exception of Miranda Bailey as Priscilla's standard-issue best friend, who overplays her every line as if she's goosing an unseen studio audience for a laugh. As in "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," Rudd taps into the neuroses of seemingly every male of his generation, and particularly shines in little moments, as in the dirty look he shoots Priscilla's vibrator, like it's his romantic nemesis.

Danny DeVito adds subtlety to his role as "Wayne the Pool Guy," a swimming-pool mogul who woos Priscilla without coming across as too creepy. Jack finds personal renewal in the arms of a student (Mischa Barton), a gorgeous national merit scholar and budding biologist. Barton makes a lovely nymphet - so much so that you wonder if she's just a figment of Jack's stymied imagination.

The only surprising thing about "The Oh in Ohio" is watching a low-budget, offbeat film underestimate and condescend. You expect indie filmmakers to give us a little credit, treat us like equals and share some original ideas. "The Oh in Ohio" isn't just facile and familiar; its inconclusive ending leaves the story hanging. Of all movies, "The Oh in Ohio" should know to finish what it's started. CV

'Heading South'

By Mark Jenkins

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Anyone who's seen a fair number of French films knows what la plage means: the beach. The seaside vacation is a pillar of Gallic civilization, and French directors per capita set more movies at the shore than do filmmakers of any other nationality. The beach is a place for idle moments and casual romance; it's only natural that Eric Rohmer, the master of the philosophical makeout flick, so often returns there. But director Fran�ois Ozon takes a darker view of beaches and swimming pools; his new "Time to Leave" is not his first effort to mix the fragrances of sea spray and death. That's also the formula for Laurent Cantet's "Heading South," but then the film is set not in placid Normandy but in Baby Doc Duvalier's Haiti.

Cantet's two previous films, the admirable "Human Resources" and the extraordinary "Time Out," were informed by documentary and concerned with the unglamorous world of work. So is "Heading South," although the workplace and the product are quite different this time.

In late-'70s Haiti, middle-aged women frequent a beachfront hotel known for attracting beautiful, young black men. Valium-popping Savannah, Ga., refugee Brenda (Karen Young), who's introduced being met by hotel proprietor Albert (Lys Ambroise) at the airport, has visited once before. Still married then, she had a sexual awakening with teenaged Legba (MŽnothy Cesar). On her second trip, she discovers that Legba is now a much more accomplished gigolo. She also finds that his time is monopolized by Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), an imperious and professedly amoral Wellesley French-literature professor who spends all of every summer at the hotel. (Her job explains why Ellen speaks French; it's unclear why Brenda does.)

Coolly assured, Ellen takes command of the servants and her fellow guests, who also include pudgy Montrealer Sue (Louise Portal). Yet Brenda manages to get Legba's attention, and Ellen shows signs of jealousy while trying to appear too sophisticated for such emotions. The tussle between the two women is not the principal threat to Legba, however. The young man gets around, and he's made an enemy among Baby Doc's thugs. Brenda's attempts to protect him from indignities - such as Albert's ban on locals' eating in the hotel restaurant - ultimately prove to have little effect on his fate.

Although it was adapted by Cantet and co-writer Robin Campillo from three short stories by Dany Laferri�re, "Heading South" includes several documentary-like sequences. The most chilling of these are the opening scene, in which Albert is approached by a woman trying to save her teenage daughter from likely sexual enslavement, and a monologue in which Albert addresses the camera directly, revealing his venomous true feelings for the North Americans he serves.

The three soliloquies, delivered by Brenda, Ellen, and Sue, are less convincing. This may be because Brenda and Ellen speak in English, which has nuances that Cantet doesn't quite get. Their language is a bit unnatural, and their comments overly literary - not at all what a genuine documentary interview would have yielded. (Tellingly, Legba doesn't have a monologue; he's the merchandise, not the consumer.)

"Heading South" is more persuasive when its characters are hiding their deeper emotions, pretending to be having "fun" as they engage in a desperate struggle against loneliness or, in Legba's case, poverty. Each battle is unwinnable, but with very different consequences for thedifferent loser.

"Heading South" takes a little too long to arrive at a climax that is a little too foreseeable. Still, it understands the Third World-tourist dynamic, and neatly delineates the way two different kinds of people can live different kinds of existence in the same place. ("Tourists never die" is a cop's simple summation.) The occasional unworkable dialogue aside, Rampling and Young are altogether convincing, and Cesar both personifies and exemplifies Legba's effortless charm. It's easy to see why Ellen and Brenda would be drawn to him, even to the point of ignoring a social system that will inevitably destroy their fantasies - and much more as well. CV

'The Notorious Bettie Page'

By Curt Holman

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A recent New York magazine cover story suggested that "Pornography is the new wallpaper." Sexual images, formerly taboo and titillating, have become so common in the arts, the Internet and public discourse that they're practically decorative.

Our culture has become so desensitized to erotica that the context of "The Notorious Bettie Page" at first seems as alien as the Dark Ages. Writer/director Mary Harron's deceptively breezy biopic of "The Pin-Up Queen of the Universe" begins a half-century ago at a Times Square adult book store, where men's magazines with titles like "Wink" and "Titter" occupy the shelves.

Harron provides a snapshot of Bettie Page's career as would-be actress, "bondage queen" and cult figure with a light touch and complex attitudes. Harron previously directed "I Shot Andy Warhol" and "American Psycho," showing a flair for exploring extremes of gender politics. If this movies' peppy style sets audiences at a distance from its heroine's sexploits, actress Gretchen Mol's sensitivity bridges the gap.

"The Notorious Bettie Page" unfolds primarily in sleek, seedy black-and-white, comparable to 1950s noir flicks like" Sweet Smell of Success" or high school cautionary tales. Page's early life in Tennessee turns out to be a study in male oppression, and the pretty, book-smart girl suffers sexual abuse by her father, physical abuse by her first husband and a group assault by a gang of men in a brief but harrowing incident.

Harron doesn't turn Page's career into a tale of victimization, however. She moves to New York, and the more clothes she takes off, the more empowered she becomes. She models for private "photography" clubs and blossoms under the attention of nervous amateur shutterbugs. Page's casual exhibitionism leads her to fetish photographers Irving Klaw and his half-sister, Paula (Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor, equally funny). Despite their illicit profession, the Klaws provide a surrogate family: On meeting Bettie, Irving first offers her a brisket sandwich, then a pair of pumps with impossibly high heels.

Like Marilyn Monroe, Page's images have a tactile impression - as if you could reach out and touch her just from looking at a two-dimensional photo. Mol superbly replicates this aspect of Page's personality, and she takes witty advantage of the irony of playing a devout Christian who doesn't drink alcohol, but blithely turns herself into an icon of unusual sexual fantasies.

The film also touches on the free speech and hypocrisy issues raised in "The People vs. Larry Flynt" when people freak out at the sight of Page's pubic hair, and Page wonders what all the fuss is about, since Adam and Eve were naked.

"The Notorious Bettie Page" makes a framing device for the subcommittee hearings on pornography from Sen. Estes Kefauver ("Good Night, and Good Luck," David Strathairn). Kefauver's concerns come across as laughably overwrought, but Harron appreciates the questions raised by Page's life experience. Is it wrong for people to indulge their kinks? Paula Klaw declares, "It takes all kinds to make a world," and Page's fans and fetishists seem harmless compared to the thugs who brutalized her.

Vibrant, old-fashioned color occasionally splashes across the film, in Bettie's magazine covers and visits to sunny Miami. "The Notorious Bettie Page" implies that there's something more wholesome about her straight-up nude photos from Florida. With the bouncy songs by Esquivel and Peggy Lee, "The Notorious Bettie Page" often comes across as a liberating romp, anticipating the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

A more conservative filmmaker, however, could direct the same script, word for word, and turn it into the anti-pornography tract. It turns out the moral of Bettie Page's life lies in the eye of the beholder. CV

'Idlewild'

By Felicia Feaster

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Memorial photography, Hong Kong action, moonshine running and Bankhead booty-shaking make "Idlewild" a visual frenzy of history and hep to match the postmodern mash-ups of Baz Luhrmann.

In small-town Georgia, aka Idlewild, the riff-raff with the Parental Advisory attitudes are Prohibition-era moonshiners, pistol-packing thugs and tattooed playboys. The fur coats, cigars and macho shoulders draped in slatterns say hip-hop, but "Idlewild" asserts that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In his first feature-film effort, director Bryan Barber has already recognized an important fact that has escaped so many of the next breed of director hatchlings: Everything old is new again. Barber whips his eras into a delirious frappŽ, forging a link between the strutting, trash-talking dandies of gangster old with hip-hop's gangsta-lite in the current era of bling.

The film's action centers on two childhood friends: the straight-laced mortician's son, Percival (AndrŽ "3000" Benjamin) and the devilish Rooster (Antwan A. Patton, a.k.a. Big Boi), a man who hasn't let family life keep him from snacking on hot mamas in the backseat of his Caddy or laying down nasty raps at the local club. But the ironically named Church features very little praying beyond coital cries to the Lord, but plenty of dice-throwing, whoring and boozing to keep things jumping.

When Rooster isn't running moonshine, he's onstage performing lewd raps. In an increasingly busy array of storylines, good boy Percy, who plays the piano at Church, chafes under the thumb of his controlling father (Ben Vereen) and sets his sights on the beautiful young singer, Angel. Rooster tries to keep one step ahead of his adultery-sniffing wife, and wrest control of Church away from a trigger-happy gangsta (Terrence Howard).

The cultural hop-scotching is fast and furious in "Idlewild" especially in the deliriously cool dance numbers. In those, the jitter-bugging condemned in a previous era as salacious public foreplay is cross-pollinated with the wild-style booty-shaking and break-dancing of today, with some "Matrix" freeze frames to catch the gyrations mid-stomp.

Barber is a maestro when it comes to setting music to the kinetic hieroglyphics of sweaty bodies in motion, but the entire film feels like a life-support system for those outrageous numbers. And those interludes only serve to anti-hep out a script burdened with previous gangster-movie staples: the stuttering strong arm, the psychopathic "Scarface"-brand kingpin played by Howard, the henchman who repeats every word sotto voce out of his guru's mouth, and the piano player who falls for the songbird vixen.

Even if you didn't know wunderkind Barber got his start crafting OutKast's retro-cool videos like the stylish "Hey Ya," this movie's trick bag of effects soon makes his origins clear. Barber is a historically minded high stylist, his pockets loaded with visual ideas that feel artistically equivalent to the lush orchestrations mixed with the new-school beat and outrageous male bravado of OutKast's music. The opening sequence alone is worth the price of admission: Layers of black-and-white still images like something in a diorama come to life, and wink and grin like eyeballs moving beneath an oil painting in a haunted house.

But Barber's screenwriting chops are less original. On one hand, there are the musical numbers in which ideas are expressed in novel, fanciful new ways, and on the other hand is the relatively clumsy business of the gangster action.

As is a perpetual problem for cool cats making the jump from short form to long, the thoroughly innovative musical bits hit a brick wall of a story that aspires for some of the big themes of the gangster genre's warring angels and devils, from "Cotton Club" to "The Sopranos." But with its awkward fit of music and action, the film's rudimentary dramatic rhythms most often suggest another marriage of a hot pop act to story: the occasionally sexy but off-key Prince vehicle, "Purple Rain." CV

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