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Beautiful restaurant owner Amanda Shelton (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is falling head over heels for handsome, hard-driving executive Tom Bartlett (Sean Patrick Flanery). Unfortunately, Tom is too busy to recognize that she's truly the girl of his dreams until Amanda puts him under her tantalizing spell!Call it
Buffy the Culinary Slayer. Sarah Michelle Gellar, who usually runs around staking vampires and fighting demons, turns cute and cuddly as an aspiring chef in this magical-realist comedy that borrows a page--heck, whole chapters--from
Like Water for Chocolate. Out at the market one day, Gellar stumbles on both a magical crab and the babelicious Sean Patrick Flanery who, wouldn't you know it, is opening up a posh restaurant at Bendel's department store (actually, the two have been! brought together by fairy godfather Christopher Durang). Odd and implausible circumstances give these two cuties more opportunities to moon at each other, and suddenly Gellar's cooking takes off--turns out all her nicey-nice feelings towards Flanery are going into her cooking, with the help of that quiet but powerful little crab. Gellar's almost-closed restaurant starts to thrive, and her desserts begin making everyone horny. A cute premise that never really takes off,
Simply Irresistible glides along on Gellar's charisma alone; in her off hours, Buffy certainly can be the lighthearted girl next door, and Gellar works to give some depth to her one-dimensional character. Flanery, though, while appealing at times, plays up his character's commitment-phobia to irritating degrees. Chock full of fairy-tale elements that never really come together (is that crab really necessary?),
Irresistible does boast charming performances by Patricia Clarkson and Dylan Baker a! s Flanery's secretary and boss, respectively. However, it's a ! little o dd to see these two, who scored raves for two serious and harrowing art-house flicks (Clarkson in
High Art, Baker in
Happiness) doing the light-and-fluffy romantic comedy thing. They're two of the very few ingredients that occasionally make this soufflé of a movie rise; at the end, however, it's flat as a pancake.
--Mark EnglehartPOSSESSION - DVD MovieIn this powerful film, four very different people on the edge of desperation are unexpectedly linked by their destinies. A top-notch cast featuring Forest Whitaker, Andy Garcia, Kevin Bacon, Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Emile Hirsch unforgettably brings to life the stories of a clairvoyant gangster, a rising pop star, an unlikely bank robber and a doctor desperate to save the love of his life. Filled with surprising twists and turns, this suspenseful, action-filled drama employs both brutal violence and aching poetry in a moving exploration of the search for happiness in a gritty urban world.E! very so often a crime drama with delusions of existential grandeur comes ambling down the pike. Sometimes, as in Tom Tykwer's
Run Lola Run, a philosophically-inclined filmmaker strikes cinematic gold. If video director Jieho Lee's erratic debut falls short of that estimable mark, he can't be faulted for lack of ambition. Set in an anonymous urban metropolis and divided into the four pillars of life--happiness, pleasure, sorrow, and love--
The Air I Breathe means to illustrate Henry Ward Beecher's opening epigram: "No emotion, anymore than a wave, can long retain its own individual form." A mild-mannered stockbroker representing happiness (
The Last King of Scotland's Forest Whitaker) kickstarts this disquisition into destiny when he decides to take a risk (all four principals are unnamed). Inspired by a coolly confident client who stands for pleasure (Brendan Fraser), he places an unwieldy bet on a fixed race, attracting the attention of sadistic loan sha! rk Fingers (Andy Garcia, doing his best Al Pacino impression).! Fraser' s character reports to the latter, who manages sorrowful pop star "Trista" (Sarah Michelle Gellar, last seen in the equally strange
Southland Tales). The psychic henchman also looks after his employer's motormouth nephew, Tony (an uncharacteristically unconvincing Emile Hirsch). The lovelorn doctor (Kevin Bacon) who treats the hitman after an injury turns to Trista when his best friend's wife (Julie Delpy) falls ill. Whew. Inconsistent acting and clunky dialogue aside,
The Air I Breathe infuses conventional genre thrills with introspection to intermittently engaging effect.
--Kathleen C. Fennessy
