Josh Hartnett Page 2

Ironically, this incident, where ship's cook Dorie Miller took charge and shot back during America's worst hour on December 7, 1941, is just about the only true event to be found in the entire, oppressive three-hour film. (And our producers are quick to remind us of just how ripped-from-history this little vignette is. Never mind that Gooding has a pitiful excuse for a role with maybe five minutes of screen time.)

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Surprise! Sin City is a mega-violent, highly potent vial of noir crack. And judging from the riotous burst of applause at the end of our screening, one that's destined to be a Matrix-style mass-cult classic.

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Well, with one cancer diagnosis and one death in the first 15 minutes, Blow Dry is hardly the feel-good romance you'd expect. Strikingly similar to The Big Tease, Blow Dry tells the story of a haircutting competition that descends on a small town in Britain. Celebrities (well, celebrity stylists) from around England arrive to compete, and the local boys get into the act as well. But while the drama unfolds with models and shears, another drama takes place among the locals -- largely involving various romances and a singular cancer victim.

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Easily the biggest problem with this movie is in the marketing. I can only imagine how pissed off Williamson, Rodriguez, and everyone else involved in the movie must have been to see the film marketed as just another schlocky entry into the horror genre, which generally takes the words aliens; teenagers; battle; suspicious; killer; small town; etc. and jumble them up to come up with a concept (to wit, this time: suspicious small town teenagers battle killer aliens). Now if you are already a big 80s horror fan, just skip this review, because you already saw the movie, but this review is for people who are highly suspicious of shelling out eight bucks to see a horror flick. The only reason I actually saw The Faculty was because my little sister begged me to. But now I'm trying to convince you to.

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Explaining the film - or even saying what genre it's in - is a bit tricky. Josh Hartnett plays a young ad executive named Matthew, who's obviously done well in parlaying a job as a camera repairman into a creative position in New York. Briefly back in his old home town of Chicago before jetting off to China, Matthew abruptly runs into old pal Luke (Matthew Lillard) and catches what he's sure is a glimpse of old girlfriend Lisa (Jessica Lange-lookalike Diane Kruger, last seen as Helen of Troy). Luke - on the cusp of marrying his boss's daughter (Jessica Paré) - is thrown into such a panic he blows off his trip overseas. What unfolds over the next two hours is the story of Luke and Lisa - how they met, how they abruptly split up, and the strange mysteries that are hidden in the past.

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One of the more gratifying feelings a movie critic can have is the feeling of going into a picture expecting tiresome clichés of an overplayed genre, only to discover delightfully surprising freshness and soul where all the hackneyed conventions usually are.

"40 Days and 40 Nights" is such a movie. Misleadingly marketed as just another misogynistic romp through the young male libido, this often ribald comedy about a frustrated 20-something giving up sex for Lent is what the puerile, simplistic "American Pie," "Tomcats" and "Saving Silverman" might have been, had they been made by people with imagination and wit.

Directed by Michael Lehmann -- the man behind the twisted teen angst and irony of the subversive '80s cult hit "Heathers" -- "40 Days" finds many new and inventive ways to make sexual frustration funny.

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"Blow Dry" is a leaden British dramedy about an estranged family of hairdressers reconciling when a big coiffeur competition comes to their small town. Like "The Big Tease" -- a similarly themed English mockumentary that came out last year, delaying the release of this one -- its laughs come mostly from tired flamboyancy stereotypes.

Hairdressers with over-styled, out-of-date dos and David Copperfield-like showmanship bite each other's backs to win what is apparently a prestigious award for clever and speedy hair cutting. Meanwhile a sad-sack local barber (Alan Rickman) enters the competition with his son (Josh Hartnett, "The Virgin Suicides") to face down his former salon partner (Bill Nighy), now the nation's star hairdresser and the dirty-tricking front-runner in the contest.

Besides suffering from the same problems "The Big Tease" had -- basically that it's a cliché-riddled underdog sports movie with a dye job and a limp wrist -- "Blow Dry" is also saddled with a maudlin, comedy-antidote subplot about Rickman's estranged lesbian ex-wife (Natasha Richardson), who is bravely dying of cancer 10 years after leaving him for his hair model (a criminally under-used Rachel Griffiths). Brought together again by the competition, everybody gets busy forgiving.

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The handful of battle scenes that make up a good hour of "Pearl Harbor" are adrenaline-pumping and hyper-realistic on a massive scale.

You feel the impact of every single 7.7mm round from dive-bombing Japanese Zeros as they rip through pavement, planes and people in the infamous attack around which the film in centered. Director Michael Bay's camera goes inside cockpits, rides along on bombs from release to explosion, captures the terror of a torpedo in the water from the deck of a ship and includes some of the best special effects ever put on film.

The money shot is a hull-buckling blast that rips through the USS Arizona. It makes being on a luxury liner hit by an iceberg look like a 25-cent carnival ride.

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Whether it's a skill learned hanging around the sets ofher father's movies or something in the family blood, SofiaCoppola has definitely inherited a distinguishable talent as a filmmaker.

"The Virgin Suicides" -- her moody, dark andwhimsical first feature from behind the camera -- is a mesmerizing andaccomplished directorial debut about an enigmatic quintet of innocentlyseductive teenage sisters who all kill themselves in the course of onemonth in the mid-1970s.

The story was adapted by Coppola herself from a best-sellerby Jeffrey Eugenides, and is curiously told from the perspective of a handfulof neighborhood boys, smitten and spellbound by the girls as teenagersand still haunted by their inexplicable deaths 25 years later.

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