Jason Schwartzman Page 3

Scout leader Ward (Norton) sends out a search party when preteen scout Sam (Gilman) runs away from the camp. He can't get far on this New England island, and it turns out that he has run off with Suzy (Hayward) daughter of a local couple (Murray and McDormand). As Sam and Suzy's naive love blossoms in the wilderness, local police Captain Sharp (Willis) takes over the search and calls in Social Services (Swinton). But these kids are more tenacious than anyone expects.

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But with an eclectic cast that includes John Leguizamo, Mena Suvari, and Mickey Rourke, Spun is more about exuberant editing providing a humorous glimpse into a small, bored, drug community than a focus on any particular acting or writing talent. Once the pizzazz of quick cuts and graphic novel touches has washed over the normal tell-tale signs of substance abuse by all the characters, you're left with another drug movie that feels as if it's trying too hard to be Trainspotting, without the spiffy production design.

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And that's because the main protagonists are not slackers at all -- in fact, they're a trio of heady, hard-working college cheaters. Beginning with an elaborate scam that actually gives the movie some potential, we are introduced to our leads (Devon Sawa, Jason Segel, and Michael C. Maronna) as they simultaneously shoot video of the women's cross-country team, steal a physics exam, and fake getting hit by a truck. But screenwriter David H. Steinberg (story writer on American Pie 2) tries building an entire feature based on one decent scenario. And he, as well as the rest of us, are in some deep trouble for the remainder of the 87 minutes.

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And not "fake," like some butt-kissing movie actress, but really fake. Simone (or S1m0ne, as Niccol sharply titles the film) is the perfect pixilated creation of a Microsoft-age mad scientist, who's created his flawless CGI actress specifically for floundering moviemaker Viktor Taransky (a truly entertaining Al Pacino). Viktor needs a hit badly and the lead actress on his new feature -- played by Winona Ryder, in a painfully ironic appearance -- has just stormed off his new movie due to "creative differences." Nine months later (human gestation period, if I'm not mistaken) Simone is born to take her place. And since our obsessive inventor has quickly died from an eye tumor, contracted from too much computer use(!), only Viktor knows the true secret of his new lead actress.

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The one philosophy behind the existential screwball comedy "I ? Huckabees" (pronounce the ? as "heart") is that there is no one philosophy. A satire of spiritual gurus, self-help and other psychological gimmickry, it makes its point by being so esoteric and cerebrally akimbo that it will likely divide audiences between those who find its deliberately abstruse discombobulation amusing and to the point, and those who find it just abstruse and discombobulated.

Written and directed by David O. Russell, the observant and darkly comical wit behind the Gulf War derision "Three Kings," the ensemble storyline whirlpools around Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), an unhinged and obsessive young environmentalist who has seen the open-space preservation group he chartered slip through his fingers and into the hands of a snake-oil-charming corporate stooge named Brad Stand (Jude Law). Brad is, in fact, an executive at Huckabees -- a slick, corporate retailer with a habit of moving into small towns and building megastores where there had once been open space.

With his failure causing him to question his whole life, Albert seeks metaphysical peace of mind from Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin), a pair of unconventional, off-kilter and out-of-sync private eyes who specialize in solving the mysteries of their clients' inner turmoil. Soon they are, quite conspicuously, following Albert to work, peering through his windows, digging through his trash, and pairing him up with another lost soul as a partner in intellectual recovery -- Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), a blue-collar lug of a firefighter whose eye-opening visit inside his own head has rapidly become a slide into bemused Nihilism.

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Beneath the uncanny, inevitable and seemingly shrewd facade of the movie-biz farce "Simone" -- about a computer-generated actress taking Hollywood by storm because nobody knows she's not real -- lies a plot cobbled together from largely flat and uncreative moments.

The brainchild of inventive and otherworldly writer-director Andrew Niccol ("Gattaca," "The Truman Show" screenplay), who plucked the picture's concept out of the film industry's paranoid collective subconscious, "Simone" stars Al Pacino as Viktor Taransky, a washed-up and somewhat neurotic director whose last chance at making a big studio film has just walked off the set along with his petulant leading lady (Winona Ryder in a cameo).

But just as he envisions his career going off a cliff, a dying wacko computer genius and Taransky fan (Elias Koteas) brings the director a computer hard drive containing the culmination of his life's work: a program that creates a near-perfect, completely malleable, realistic simulation of beautiful girl. Called Simone (a contraction of Simulation One), in the confines of a computer she can walk, talk, flirt and cry with a single keystroke. She has a database of famous actresses' best performances to draw from for mannerisms and moods. She's utterly at Taransky's control and, of course, her fabricated "performances" can be digitally inserted into any scene of his movie, any way he chooses.

Continue reading: S1m0ne Review