Opening Films

by Inlander Staff


The Corporation -- A smart, vital, hopeful, dense, and often very funny chock-a-block barrage of information about the force of business in contemporary life. Among other entertaining surmises, The Corporation uses the conceit that since an eighteenth-century legal decision deemed the business corporation to be a person, would not the behavior that a corporation uses in its self-interest match that of a conscienceless sociopath? With skeptical eye and sarcastic minds, The Corporation assembles enough information, facts, and quiet outrage to almost blow your head off. Jennifer Abbot and Mark Achbar's masterstroke in their case-laden telling is that people are not demonized and the greater good is not seen as an abstraction that cannot be achieved. (RP) Not Rated. (Showing at the Met Cinema Oct. 17-20 at 3:30, 5 and 8 pm.)





The Motorcycle Diaries -- The Motorcycle Diaries is a movie of little epiphanies, not grand ones. Feeling like a familiar story of Kerouac-style rebels on the open road, The Motorcycle Diaries is an exotic travelogue and a fable about growing up. Sure, these guys (Gael Garcia Bernal, Rodrigo de la Serna ) on their 1939 Norton 500 have ideals and dreams of a better world, but they seem to belong to the Easy Rider tradition of individualism, iconoclasm and almost metaphysical transformation. This is the story of Che Guevara divorced from politics and history, rendered as a young American. While some will lament that The Motorcycle Diaries isn't political enough, some may find it too sober. This reviewer, however, found it a lovely and supremely moving experience, a haunting symphony in a minor key. (Andrew O'Hehir) Rated: R





Shall We Dance? -- An American remake of the Japanese art house hit about a bored attorney (Richard Gere) who goes through a life change when he signs up for dance lessons after getting a look at the school's hot teacher (Jennifer Lopez). His wife (Susan Sarandon) thinks he's working late. Things get a little weird at home, but grow funny and impassioned at the studio. An outrageously bewigged Stanley Tucci plays another dancer. Directed with flash and pizzazz and gentleness by Peter Chelsom (Funny Bones). (E.S.) Rated PG-13





Team America: World Police -- South Park duo Parker and Matt Stone's action comedy is a brilliantly mindless, wickedly profane, relentlessly acerbic satiric alliance of Bruckheimer's worldview and the scary marionettes from Gerry Anderson's 1960s British TV series, Thunderbirds. There are layers of contrariness and self-reflexive satire, plus puppet sex and the best puke scene since The Exorcist. (RP) Rated: R





Publication date: 10/14/04