FILM

by Cole Smithey

'O'
4 stars

No other film adaptation of a Shakespeare play has met with so much resistance as director Tim Blake Nelson's rendering of "Othello." "O" wrapped shooting just as the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School massacre occurred, and regardless of its merits as a well-crafted adaptation with historic performances, the film would never have been released were it
not for a legal battle against Miramax (who thought the film's high school setting too topical) in New York Supreme court. Set in an elite private high school in South Carolina, the classic tragedy of jealousy and manipulation plays out among teammates on the school's highly competitive basketball team. The film has a compulsive leanness and purity that cradles blistering performances by Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett and Martin Sheen. This is one of those rare movies that audiences will look back at for years to come to affirm the credible talents of the film's ensemble.

'Dont Say a Word'
1 star

"Fatal Attraction," "Falling Down" and "The Game" have conspired to pigeonhole Michael Douglas as the actor most likely to get bulldozed beyond the breaking point of violence. But "Don't Say A Word" finds Douglas
being nudged into snapping by kidnappers demanding that his psychiatrist character Dr. Nathan Conrad extract a cryptic code from Elisabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy), a not-so-insane psychiatric patient, to recover his 8-year-old
daughter. The movie is a glorified kidnap thriller that bundles together gaudy New York City atmospheres with worn-out detective story plot devices in the hopes of creating suspense and surprise. The plot never crystallizes because there's never any doubt about how it will end. As an exercise in performance, Douglas helms the movie with characteristic driving dedication while Brittany Murphy is all over the place as a teen-aged girl hiding behind mental disease to elude her pursuers.

'The Glass House'
1 star

If the summer of 2001 seemed like an all-time low for Hollywood movies, "The Glass House" is a perfect whimpering bookend of a teen thriller to polish off the season. Humorless and deprived of the genre's signature shock surprises and suspense, "The Glass House" is by turns a tame and literal thriller about two siblings handed over to conniving amoral guardians after the death of
their parents in a suspicious car accident. Leelee Sobieski ("A Soldier's Daughter") plays Ruby Baker, an impossibly mature 16-year-old who shepherds her little brother Rhett (Trevor Morgan) away from the threat of their adult
hosts played perfunctorily by Stellan Skarsgard ("Breaking The Waves") and Diane Lane ("A Walk On The Moon"). Director Daniel Sackeim apes the movie's glass image system so much that the film seems more of an artistic display of
watery images than a cohesive narrative package. Even the guardians' last name is Glass, making the obvious detail all the more redundant.

'Made'
3 stars

In his feature film writing/directing debut, Jon Favreau rejoins with "Swingers" co-star Vince Vaughn in a story about two dimwitted aspiring boxers and best friends turned wanna-be mobsters, who go from Los Angeles to New York to become "made men." Peter Falk plays a quirky old school mob king
with a high-stakes cash delivery job for the boys to prove themselves. The going goes from weird to worse when loose cannon Vaughn starts flaunting his mob street credit around Manhattan before the job is finished. Sean "Puffy" Combs makes a suitable film acting debut as a cool crime syndicate
chief. Slick suits, hip urban nightspots, and an over the top performance by Vince Vaughn make this rambunctious farce an enjoyable and unpredictable movie with some obligatory fist fighting.

'Rock Star'
4 stars

As the best movie to come out of Hollywood this summer next to "Rush Hour 2," "Rock Star" does a neat trick of giving the people what they want. If millions or even billions of people fantasize about being plucked out of their daily drudgeries to become rock stars, then Mark Wahlberg couldn't be cast better to encompass that impossible dream. With the character ambition of a "Rocky," the fashion vanity of a "Saturday Night Fever," and the fanatic excitement of a real heavy metal tour, director Stephen Herek ("Mr. Holland's Opus") unwraps a smart confection of the American dream.

"Rock Star" could be a companion piece with Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" for its sincerely executed attempts at recreating a musical tone and mood reflective of its time. The story's theme that "the glamour of the rock 'n' roll high life
isn't what it's cracked up to be," is about as pedestrian as they come but it works like a charm in this well-crafted tour through the mid '80s heyday of heavy metal excess.

'Training Day'
4 stars

"Training Day" is a brilliantly written and directed urban blood bath set in Los Angeles' mean streets of drug dealers, gang bangers, and undercover detectives. Denzel Washington is brutally cruel as a corrupt narcotics detective taking advantage of rookie officer Ethan Hawke on his first day of training for an elite detective squad. As Washington's character sinks deeper into completing his own cash fueled agenda, Hawke's character is forced to fight a very different battle against crime than he anticipated at the start of the day.

Director Antoine Fuqua ("The Replacement Killers") builds the film's ever increasing tension to a series of gut wrenching crescendos that put the movie on a par with Abel Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant." This hard-hitting movie raises uneasy questions about the tendrils of corruption that reach deep into America's corridors of power. Both Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke turn in commanding performances.

(R) GREAT ACTION DRAMA Directed by Antoine Fuqua Lead, starring Denzel Washington. Intense violence and profanity.