THE GLASS SHIELD: An interesting if not completely well-executed movie about racism, sexism, and corruption in a sheriff's department, starring Michael Boatman (Carter from "Spin City") and Lori "Tanked Girl" Petty. Definitely worth seeing. (If Boatman's girlfriend looks familiar, that's because she's also on "Spin City.")
FOREIGN STUDENT: Starts out interesting, gradually gets boring. Adorable Marco Hofschneider is a French exchange student going to study at a Virginia university in the 1950s. While there, he meets Robin Givens and falls for her, leading to all kinds of trouble given his total ignorance of racial tensions in that area at that time. Givens has a horrendous Southern accent, and Hofschneider's "European" accent quickly gets irritating. Throw in that romantic-movie staple, Robin's misinterpreted glimpses of Marco with another woman, and it becomes too boring, predictable, and accent-heavy to watch through to the end.
SLAM DUNK ERNEST: A very touching movie -- poor Ernest just wants to be one of the guys and play on a basketball team, but the other boys won't accept him. It's a moving look at loneliness and isolation, the pain of not fitting in -- or so I gleaned from the 30 seconds I watched.
BREAKING UP: I rented this solely because Russell Crowe is in it. I'm happy to report I got to see his ass -- well, the top half of it, anyway. But that just wasn't worth the pain of sitting through the first half-hour of this movie. This is the kind of movie that should be starring Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz. Crowe and Salma Hayek (who's nearly as bad an actress as Jami Gertz) spend the entire movie breaking up, fucking, breaking up, eating, fucking, fighting... you get the idea. It's all repulsively coy, cutesy, and trite. I was actually embarrassed to watch Crowe lower himself to this kind of bottom-of-the-barrel, direct-to-video, waste-of-tape crap. First I put the "mute" button on, to be spared their whining. Then I fast-forwarded, looking for nudity (which tricked me into watching a scene where Crowe sits in the bathtub talking to Hayek on the phone, because I thought it might lead to a shot of him getting out of the tub. But it didn't). Then, even fast-forward was annoying, because you could tell they were just doing the same thing over and over again. I don't think I've adequately described just how truly putrid this movie is. This movie sucks. It really, really sucks.
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