Banderas.

Based on the Thierry Jonque novel Tarantula, the sinister plot centers on Dr. Robert Ledgard (a lurid, sexy and riveting performance by Mr. Banderas), a handsome and wealthy but deranged plastic surgeon on the outskirts of Toledo who invents a “transgenic” therapy to create perfect human skin through the use of pig genes. Denounced by his peers, he retreats in secrecy to a palatial villa called El Cigarral, where he lives with an austere, chain-smoking, platinum-wigged housekeeper-cook named Marilia, who is really his own mother, and a beautiful mystery woman named Vera, whom he drugs with opium, wraps in a body stocking and holds prisoner in a locked, windowless room that he monitors night and day, the object of his macabre surgeries. Marilia sends sackcloth, double-sided tape, needles, scalpels and scissors for the doctor’s gruesome operations down to his lab in the basement in a dumbwaiter, guarding the experiments with her life. The precise nature of the relationships between these people takes a long time to unravel.

Everything changes when a weirdo dressed as a tiger arrives at the gate looking for Marilia and identifies himself through the security cameras by a birthmark on his rear end. He has just robbed Bulgari in Madrid and wants a face transplant. It appears he may have a dark history with Robert, as well as Vera, who every day looks more remarkably like Robert’s wife, who burned to death in a fire. Meanwhile, the movie meanders all over the place as time frames are juxtaposed to reveal an array of confusing clues from past and present, including a transsexual family secret. Chief among the revelations is a young man named Vicente, who raped and murdered the doctor’s beloved daughter years ago and then disappeared. What happened to him, and what is his relation to Vera? To reveal more would be disastrous to the shocking and violent conclusions Mr. Almodovar eventually draws. This is one you have to see for yourself. The film’s glamour—fashions by Jean Paul Gaultier, a jazzy score by flamenco fusion artist Concha Bulka, and huge framed Titians on the doctor’s walls—contrasts sharply to the dark, creepy gray color schemes. The Skin I Live In is not my favorite Almodovar film, but I’m happy to report he’s lost none of his flair for embellishing a sick, ghastly yarn with lavish, decadent flourishes that entertain while they keep you guessing.

rreed@observer.com

THE SKIN I LIVE IN

Running Time 117 minutes

Written by Pedro Almovodar

Directed by Pedro Almovodar

Starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya and Jan Cornet

2/4

The plot, which seems to have gone through a wood chipper, centers on a seedy Los Angeles private eye called Ned Cruz (Antonio Banderas), who is hired by a homicidal boxer called Anton the Pro--sentenced to life in prison after crushing an opponent's skull in the ring for a Mafia payoff of 30 million dollars in diamonds--to find his girlfriend, a stripper called Lexie Persimmon. (Mickey Spillane in a coma couldn't make this stuff up.) The search for Lexie and the diamonds (which are believed to be hidden in a ceiling fixture somewhere in the old Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel) leads to the creepy mansion of a movie star called Adam Nova (James Van Der Beek), who is hiding a deep, dark secret we never find out because he burns his albino dwarf roommate to death, tosses him from the top window, and commits suicide. Next up: the set of a douche-bag pornographic filmmaker played by Snoop Dog, who strips and joins the next XXX-rated scene, a woman who eats her own flesh and a kinky waitress in a New Mexico diner who serves lectures on quantum physics with the coffee. Nobody has seen Lexie Persimmon, but folks who get interviewed about her end up on a slab at the morgue.

Cruz finally hits the jackpot when he meets an insane zillionaire recluse (Sam  Elliott) who is digging a tunnel 300 feet beneath the desert near Los Alamos and aiming two proton beams at 99.9% of the speed of light to destroy the world. Talk about slumming. It's sad to see Sam Elliott, who used to specialize in cowboys and Marlboro Men, reduced to a cross between Dr. No and Dr. Seuss, with bushy black Groucho Marx eyebrows, a bushy white Santa Claus moustache and bleached yellow hair down to his navel, spouting "God is the Wizard of Oz--and tomorrow I'm opening that curtain!" Meanwhile, the woman in Anton the Pro's 8x10 glossy signed "Lexie" is the rich lunatic's wife, while the real Lexie Persimmon is his partner in crime, a cross-dressing physicist. Oh, I forgot to mention the three sadistic cops who beat and torture Cruz to get the diamonds themselves. But enough already. It's 101 minutes long, but none of this campy gibberish makes even 101 seconds of sense. If you're still sitting in your seat at the end, wondering where the diamonds are, then you win the Masochist of the Year award. I've liked Antonio Banderas elsewhere, but in this chemically-induced tedium, he seems mentally compromised beyond his ability.  Has he been taking acting lessons from his wife, Melanie Griffith? 

There's no trace of a director, and although the scriptwriter once wrote Band of Brothers, his dialogue goes like this: "Wherever she is, I'm sure she's in bed dreaming of bungee jumping off your forehead!" The whole thing looks like it was filmed in a psycho ward. You go away wondering out loud (with merit) how and where they find the money to make any movie as brain-damaged, inept, unsupervised and moronic as The Big Bang.

rreed@observer.com

THE BIG BANG
Running time 101 minutes
Written by Erik Jendresen
Directed by Tony Krantz
Starring Antonio Banderas, James Van Der Beek, Sam Elliot 

0/4

A city-shattering lawsuit has been filed by Wall Street tycoon Alphonse Fletcher Jr. alleging that the board of the storied Central Park West co-op has a grave history of discriminating against not only applicants but owners like Fletcher, who has two apartments there. The banker, a resident since 1992, brought the suit after he tried to buy a neighboring apartment and was allegedly denied by the board for suspicious reasons.

The lawsuit's explosive allegations include claims that board members made ethnic slurs against prospective residents, including describing one couple as part of the "Jewish mafia" and suggesting that a Hispanic applicant was interested in a first-floor apartment so that he could more easily buy drugs on the street. The applicant, who was rejected, was married to a "prominent financially well-qualified white woman," according to the suit, and though neither is named, the timing and circumstances suggest that it was [Antonio] Banderas.

The suit accuses the board of several other instances of treating minorities unfairly, including repeatedly denying another black owner -- the singer Roberta Flack -- permission to install a new bathtub and then joking about it. Mr. Fletcher also accuses the board of self-dealing: shortly after his request was denied last year, a member of the board who lives on the same floor put her own apartment up for sale, offering it as a package deal with the apartment Mr. Fletcher wanted to buy.

Could that last fact, a spurned sale, be the real reason for the suit? The Dakota's board denied any wrongdoing to The Times, saying this was simply a matter of Fletcher's financial situation.

And while Antonio Banderas, apparently the "Hispanic applicant" alluded to in Fletcher's lawsuit, never moved into the Dakota, there are indeed a number of minorities who do or have lived in the building. In addition to Roberta Flack, there is Yoko Ono, Paul Goldberger, Connie Chung and José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón. Perhaps it's just that Fletcher is not one of the building's numerous artistic types.

Now something could dispel the prejudicial pretenses for good. It looks like the board of the Dakota may allow a former butler for one of its owners to finally move into a studio he inherited. The Journal reports that Indra B. Tamang, the former employee of actors Ruth Ford and Zachary Scott, has just gone to contract on another apartment Ford had willed to him, a three-bedroom unit that looks to have fetched $4.5 million.

For a time, it looked like the board might not allow someone so lowly to live in the building, according to The Journal, but it appears an exception has been made.

But the board, which usually operates under a deep cloak of anonymity, issued a rare statement saying that Mr. Tamang's "prior capacity as an employee of a Dakota resident would not adversely affect our decision about his residing here."

"We at The Dakota are proud that for many years ours has been an extraordinarily diverse community of residents," the statement said.

Tamang has spent four decades in New York, but he was born in Nepal. If he's allowed in, the former butler will certainly become a working-class hero.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Despite the gimlet eye of Richard Eyre, former director of England’s Royal National Theatre, and the top-echelon talents of an impressive cast, a dreary, disabled disaster called The Other Man drops dead at the starting gate. It’s been around for a few years, and the dust shows. Dissecting a case of unhealthy obsession with the same carefully wielded scalpel he used on Judi Dench as the predatory teacher in the far superior Notes on a Scandal, Mr. Eyre now tells the tale of Peter (Liam Neeson), the CEO of a successful software company, and his beautiful wife, Lisa (Laura Linney), a famous shoe designer, who mysteriously disappears after 25 years of marriage. Driven mad with jealousy and suspicion, Peter rummages through the personal files in his wife’s laptop and traces love letters from a man named Ralph (Antonio Banderas) to an email address in Italy. Peter tracks Ralph to Milan with the intent to kill, but instead engages the slick charmer in a series of metaphysical chess games, sending him false emails from Lisa’s computer, then ends up lending Ralph the money to fly to the glamorous Villa d’Este on Lake Como for a romantic weekend that proves to be anything but. In the ponderous events that follow, everyone hides a terrible secret, and with a stylized combination of Alfred Hitchcock and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Mr. Eyre piles on the twists and turns of dark obsession with an emotional intensity that seems deliberate and phony. The wild goose chase before we find out what really happened to Lisa just ain’t worth the effort. [Ed. note: Spoiler Alert!] Wouldn’t you know Ms. Linney is secretly dying of cancer? The embellishments and falsehoods of her illness, Peter’s unspoken love and Ralph’s pretense of being a rich international playboy (he is really only a janitor) add up to a movie that looks like a disarmingly simple love triangle, but gets bogged down in close-ups, dream sequences, snapshot montages of the past and confusing transitions that leave the viewer feeling manipulated for no reason.

Mr. Neeson and Ms. Linney rarely make a false move; Mr. Banderas gives a surprising performance as a bogus Latin Lothario who lives by his wits, recalling a young Marcello Mastroianni in his salad days; and once again, I have been electrified by Romola Garai, as Peter’s estranged but concerned daughter and the voice of reason, fearing for her father’s sanity. What a beautiful and accomplished actress, and what a range! You might remember her as the younger sister who wrecked so many lives in Atonement; she stole every scene. She does the same thing here, leaving everyone around her without a compass. Under the strain, the actors work up a sweat to sustain interest, but their involvement in their roles is only skin deep. The themes of desire, loss, forgiveness and adultery, both real and imagined, are framed without tension, leaving a fine cast to play cardboard figures in a board game. If they don’t care how it all comes out, why should we?

rreed@observer.com

Mi stai acoltando ? Are you with me? Antonio Banderas, he very, very, sexy. He some hunka meat. Si, e vero ! He so sexy, he make-a every girl swoon on the floor with what the show calls "boompa-boompa." Men, too! But he so short ! No problem-o. He have very big heart. Meesta Banderas, he play heartthrob Guido Contini.

Guido, he very, very sexy movie director who make-a the boompa-boompa on the floor, in the lobby, on the staircase, in the sauna. Che uomo ! What a guy. He like Fellini. But so short! All the women are his amore just the same. Like a beeg pizza pie! They cannot-'ow you say?-reezeest. Very beeg problemo for Guido. He sick of all this amore . He can take eet or leave eet! But Guido cannot reezeest either!

As the beeg theme-a song of the show goes:

Be Italian, be Italian,

Take a chance and try to steal a fiery kiss.

Be Italian, you rapscallion.

When you hold me, don't just hold me,

But hold this!

It very catchy.

There eez also a Little Guido. He eez short! Perche ? He little rapscallion. He 9-year-old version of Big Guido. Little Guido cloying Child Within. He look nothing like Big Guido. He onstage too much.

Va bene , even so. Carla, she sexy, sexy blond mistress of Guido. Carla is- come si dice? -a stereotypical slut with a heart of gold. Carla wear bodystocking and go boompa-boompa all day long. So what's it to you? She Jane Krakowski from Ally McBeal . She descend from heaven like the moon hit the sky! Fantastico .

Cootchie, cootchie, cootchie coo. I've got

A plan for what I'm gonna do to you, so hot

You're gonna steam, and scream,

And vibrate like a string I'm plucking-

That's our Carla! Not subtle, but a cootchie coo. Lady named Luisa, she very, very, troubled by cootchie coo. Well, can you blame her? Luisa eez the loyal, dignified wife to Guido. She bella madonna . Where have all her dreams gone? Now she suffer big time:

My husband spins fantasies.

He lives them, then gives them to you all.

While he was working on the film on ancient

Rome,

He made the slave girls take the gladiators

Home.

Lucky old gladiators. But Guido he suffer, too. He suffer for love. Guido big baby. He- come si dice ?-narcissist. But Guido eez blocked. Guido eez a genius . But Guido in despair! The press hounds him. Guido cannot create! What to do? Guido decides to go to spa in Venice! Where maestro David Leveaux will now create a flood.

Stage full of water, please advise.

Why is this flood different from any other flood? Because tonight, it's on Broadway! Director Leveaux's bold, cascading, Venetian water-rama has the cast merrily sloshing about the stage ankle-deep in water, or balancing somewhat gingerly above the fray on plastic chairs, trying not to get their tootsies wet like guests at a flooded Gritti Palace Hotel. I seem to have lost my Italian accent. But so did everyone else. Guido's certainly looking chirpier. He's gone for a paddle with his trousers rolled up to his knees, singing with some Germans:

This is the Grand Canal. (La la la la la la)

Its resemblance to life is not obscure

It is filled with the milk of human kindness

In spite of the fact that it's really a sewer.

It's an obscuer sewer. Guido is inspired at last! I don't know about Little Guido. Maybe he drowned. I blame it on the plot. The plot gets confused. It always has. Guido now seems to be making a film in water of a rococo opera about Casanova that strangely mirrors his own irrepressibly fiery plight. The big question is, of course, is this real or is he dreaming? Is it all going on inside Guido's head? Am I? Are you? Are we? Who knows!

Meanwhile, a French woman named Liliane La Fleur, played by Chita Rivera, is the ex-Folies Bergères star and despairing producer of Guido's movies. She seems to have hired a sexually ambiguous associate named Necrophorus, of all things, who serves as some kind of sour commentator. But let's not go into that now. " Pourquoi faut-il que je m'associe toujours avec les idiots ?" Madame La Fleur eventually protests to the idiots surrounding her, and thus she proceeds to relive her glory days in the Folies Bergères in a big production number involving audience participation.

" Bon soir . Hello zere? Deed you do eet? Deed you send me zer flowers .... "

Folies Bergères-

What a showing of color, costume, and

Dancing!

Not a moment in life could be more

Entrancing

Than an evening you spend aux Folies

Bergères.

That's not always the case, actually. But let's get back to Guido, who's in the spa catacombs with a cardinal. "My son," His Eminence tells him, "if you can believe in a world in which you can see the Devil, surely you must also believe in a world in which you can see an angel."

Whereupon Guido's mum enters to sing lovingly to Little Guido:

Don't conceal what you feel, Let it shine:

That you'd like to be always nine.

Let it shine ? That he always wants to be nine ? Anyway, the temptress Carla dresses up as a nun; Guido reminisces about Saraghina, the old buxom tart who initiated him into the joys of sex on a beach when he was but a little rapscallion; Guido's screen muse, Claudia, grows disillusioned; Guido strongly identifies with St. Sebastian; Venice floods; Claudia says ciao ; Luisa says ciao ; and I don't think I'll be sticking round much longer myself. As Little Guido sings so sweetly at the close in his farewell number entitled, "Getting Tall," when the depressed Guido decides not to shoot himself:

Guido, you're not crazy, you're all right.

Everyone wants everyone in sight ...

But knowing you have no one if you try to

Have them all

Is part of tying shoes,

Part of starting school,

Part of scraping knees if we should fall-

Part of getting tall.

Little Guido, tall at last. I don't know about Antonio Banderas. Now, that was totally uncalled for. Antonio Banderas, he very, very sexy. He sing, he tango, he send whole world wild with the boompa-boompa, O.K.?

The set design of Mr. Leveaux's new production is by Scott Pask, with a nod to Renzo Piano's cool plastic modernism; the costumes are by Vicki Mortimer with an eye on 1960's Vogue . The book is by Arthur Kopit, and the music and lyrics are by Maury Yeston, who received the 1982 Tony Award for Best Score. The original production was the Tony Award winner for Best Musical

Meticulously directed by Chile's Alejandro Amenábar, who also wrote the screenplay, The Others is that rarest kind of ghost story–sophisticated, stylish and suspenseful–with a mesmerizing performance by Ms. Kidman that provides a banquet of crow for her detractors to chew and gives her fans plenty to admire. There are inescapable elements of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and, unlike the overrated Sixth Sense , I dare you to guess the ending.

In a role unlike anything she's tackled before, Ms. Kidman plays a cool, formal, humorless widow named Grace who moves with her two children to a gloomy, remote mansion on the windswept Isle of Jersey after her husband is reported missing in action in World War II. Grace is eccentric, highly annoyed by the slightest noise or invasion of privacy from the outside world, and her two children suffer from a rare nerve disorder that prevents any exposure to even the slightest ray of sunlight. The house, which seems to have a sinister personality of its own, has no electricity and no telephone, but it does have 15 keys and 50 doors, all of which must be locked at all times.

One day three mysterious servants arrive unannounced, with a suspicious knowledge of the house and its locked rooms. Who are they? Have they been here before? Meanwhile, the children, plunged in darkness and isolated from the world, begin to suspect that they are not alone. Grace overhears them in conversation with an invisible child only they can see. The sound of furniture being moved across the floors in the upstairs rooms echoes through the empty house. The grand piano begins to play by itself in the night, the curtains vanish from the windows, and the servants' photos show up in the nearby cemetery. If the house is haunted, then why? And by whom?

This movie sends chills down your spine without the usual visual tricks and corny clichés, and it will keep you guessing all the time. The Others is a very odd film indeed, and one of the few I've ever seen from the ghosts' point of view–but who are they, and what do they have to do with Grace? By the end, one set of ghosts becomes three, and only one of them is human. The Others is a horror movie in which the scary elements are all psychological, but that doesn't mean it doesn't sometimes jolt the senses.

The excellent cast of supernatural presences includes Christopher Eccleston, Fionnula Flanagan and Eric Sykes, but it is really Nicole Kidman who keeps the pulse racing. Bathed in half-light, moving from one ominous setting to the next in the frosty English air, she's not only as lovely as ever–she's even lovelier. The 1940's June Allyson pageboy she wears appears to have been invented for her face, and the dark fashions of mourning accent her porcelain skin becomingly. She can also act. Tom Cruise, whose own movies get worse all the time, should be proud of producing this one and showcasing Ms. Kidman so stunningly. Was he a fool to let her go, or what?

Reading the Lobotomy Files

More creepy stuff permeates Session 9 , described by director Brad Anderson as "a contemporary tale of terror set in an abandoned insane asylum." Mr. Anderson is the talented director of the charming, offbeat romantic comedy Next Stop, Wonderland . This is his first venture into chainsaw-massacre territory. Session 9 is more gruesome than coherent, but there's no denying that Mr. Anderson is a man with a vivid imagination. The best thing about this thriller is the pulverizing tension Mr. Anderson builds out of practically nothing, and the really heart-stopping spookiness of the actual ruin in which the story was filmed.

Deserted and decomposing since 1985, the state mental hospital near Danvers, Mass., erected in 1871, is more frightening than any Hollywood set ever graced by Boris Karloff. Imagine the crumbling, gothic madhouse Frances Farmer described in her harrowing autobiography Will There Really Be a Morning? times 10, and you get the picture. It's the kind of place you wouldn't want to visit in broad daylight, much less in the dead of midnight. But to this existing Bedlam come five construction workers, assigned a contract to remove dangerous asbestos from the walls. In the week that follows, they find themselves lost in a labyrinth of hydrotherapy vats, isolation chambers where pre-frontal lobotomies were performed with ice picks, cells for the criminally insane and other daunting willies. The five-man crew has personal problems that are far from normal, but the characters are less interesting than the dark ruins that keep freaking them out. One by one, their minds seem to be affected by the grimness of their surroundings and, one by one, they meet with heinous disasters.

One hard-hat becomes so obsessed with the rampant patient abuse and medieval medical procedures detailed in the crumbling yellow case histories he discovers in a locked office that he starts to crack himself. The sessions of a particularly grim case involving demonic possession are detailed in a series of nine tape recordings. By the time he gets to Session 9, all hell breaks loose, hence the title.

A good cast that includes Scottish actor Peter Mullan, David Caruso, Paul Guilfoyle, Josh Lucas, Brendan Sexton III and Stephen Gevedon (who co-wrote the screenplay with director Anderson) works hard to build suspense, but despite the talent involved and the unbearable atmosphere of the asylum, the script is a letdown. The final resolution is more ludicrous than convincing.

Thou Shalt Not Cross Angelina

High on lust and low on logic, the preposterous Original Sin is an erotic thriller that evokes more laughs than sweat. The intellectually challenged and anatomically overrated Angelina Jolie is hopelessly miscast as a Victorian-era mail-order bride who arrives in Cuba to marry a lonely coffee exporter. The idea of Antonio Banderas as a handsome, wealthy coffee merchant who lives on a luxurious plantation and can't find a wife strains credulity. The fact that he destroys his life over Ms. Jolie as the sexiest femme fatale on the planet leaves me dumbfounded. But she keeps him in a state of anxiety and confusion anyway, overpowering him with sexually illicit ecstasy (and many nude scenes, carefully positioned to hide his family jewels and her battalion of tattoos).

Despite the advice of his cynical best friend ("Happily married is an oxymoron–like happily dead"), Mr. Banderas overlooks the fact that the woman he intended to marry has mysteriously vanished and Ms. Jolie may be a murderess. Before you can check your watch, she wipes out his bank account and disappears. He hits the brothels and stops shaving, but then a private detective shows up to lead the search and bring her to justice. As the movie drags on, she reappears, armed with guns, rat poison and a number of con games. The private eye turns out to be her lover and partner in crime, much mayhem ensues, and oh the Sturm und Drang of it all!

The two stars are as comfortable in period costumes as Rockettes in overalls. Thomas Jane, the gifted and versatile hunk with a destructive genius for picking the wrong roles in the wrong movies, is wasted again as the psycho actor-detective with a penchant for French-kissing Ms. Jolie and Mr. Banderas. It's hard to tell which one enjoys it more. This stupefying farrago of soft-porn giggling, on its way to a video store near you, was both written and directed by the same Michael Cristofer who once won a Pulitzer Prize for the excellent play The Shadow Box . There is nothing original or sinful about Original Sin , but it is positively amazing what movies can do to reduce genuine talent to rummage.

Coming to America

An American Rhapsody is a surprisingly touching and undeniably sincere attempt to explore the conflicting definitions of America through the eyes of an immigrant. Factually based on the life of its writer-director, Éva Gardos, it begins in 1950, in a Communist Hungary under the rule of Stalin, when Ms. Gardos' father, a book publisher, was forced to escape with his wife and oldest daughter to Austria and leave his younger child behind. The flight to freedom is dangerous and harrowing, and there is every expectation that the younger daughter will soon join them. But they are sent to a concentration camp, and little Suzanne is separated from them.

After the family finally reaches the United States and settles down in a suburb of Los Angeles, the distraught mother writes letters to the Red Cross, the U.N., Eleanor Roosevelt and everyone else she can think of for the next five years. At the age of 6, Suzanne is finally shipped to the land of Elvis, Coca Cola, hot dogs and bubble gum. The film carefully and lovingly recreates the years that follow in the life of a confused, rebellious teenager in search of her own identity. When she finally returns to Hungary for a visit in 1965, a sophisticated but unhappy young woman with a foot in two separate cultures without really belonging to either, the story tugs at the heartstrings in ways some people will label manipulative.

I found the film courageous, insightful and deeply engaging, thanks largely to a homogenized cast of wonderful Hungarian and American actors working diligently for the truth. Tony Goldwyn is forceful and sympathetic as the compassionate father, but the big surprise is Nastassja Kinski as the eternally guilt-ridden mother who tries to make up for lost years by being too strict and protective. It's her most challenging role to date, and she plays it with a focused maturity for which I was completely unprepared. Assembling the story in mosaics that contrast the starkness of Hungary with the kitschy furnishings and Day-Glo colors of sunny California, Mr. Gardos finds both humor and pathos in the material. An American Rhapsody 's confident sense of time, place and emotional content is more European than American, and despite a few narrative lurches, it's a moving experience.

He's not alone. In this athletic update on the old romantic thriller, there are two Zorros. The real one–old, imprisoned and caught at last–is Anthony Hopkins. Twenty years have passed since his wife was murdered and beloved baby daughter kidnapped by the evil Don Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson)–the powerful, ruthless former governor of Alta who has returned with a diabolical scheme to buy the rest of California with stolen gold mined by slave labor. When the aging Zorro escapes from his irons, he needs a younger hero to take his place. This is where Mr. Banderas comes in. There's only one problem. The new recruit is a thief and renegade outlaw with a price on his own head. It's up to Mr. Hopkins, looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past, to train this drunken, mangy reprobate in the etiquette of an aristocrat in order to grow from a clown to a servant of the oppressed peons, while falling in love with the old Zorro's long-lost daughter Elena (played by luscious Catherine Zeta Jones) in the process.

Before old scores are settled and true love conquers, Mr. Banderas must improve his fencing as well as his English. It's fun watching him do both. Knocking off adversaries with swords, swinging from chandeliers and sailing through the air like one of the Flying Wallendas, the star uses both action muscles and humor, tackling the most preposterous derring-do with skill and a comic timing that is surprising. Posing as a languid popinjay by day and ridding the cactus of tyrants by night, he's a most delightful sort of Scarlet Pimpernel. Handy with a blade, he can dance a torrid flamenco, too. Scaling walls, he sometimes crash-lands on his rear. Fighting off an entire regiment of soldiers with a sword in each hand, his arrogance borders on parody. In one jim-dandy duel after another, he exudes just the right spirit of romantic make-believe the director, Martin Campbell, intended.

Everything has the proper look of a spectacular gasconade, and the most spectacular ingredient of all is newcomer Catherine Zeta Jones, a Steven Spielberg discovery whose dark eyes, porcelain skin and meltingly radiant yet mischievous smile reminded me of the late, great Natalie Wood. Bounding along at a lively, exhilarating clip, the way all extravagant costume fictions should, The Mask of Zorro is irresistible fun.

Claire Danes Has One in the Oven

In an armpit comedy called Polish Wedding , Ireland's Gabriel Byrne, Sweden's Lena Olin, Australia's Daniel Lapaine and the very all-American Claire Danes all find themselves playing members of a lusty, hardscrabble family of blue-collar Polish workers in Detroit. It's a dismally colossal misfire all around.

The boring, sour-faced Mr. Byrne, who is turning up in every movie this year that doesn't have a role for Ben Stiller or Eric Stoltz, plays Bolek Pzoniak, a surly baker who heads a clan of scratching, belching Cro-Magnons who can obviously trace their roots all the way back to the peasants who killed Frankenstein. Ms. Olin plays the long-suffering matriarch, Jadzia, who cleans toilets to keep the family in kielbasa. We are asked to believe, among other ludicrous contrivances, that Bolek has lost all interest in Jadzia because after giving birth to four sons and a daughter she has lost her sex appeal. Hello? Ms. Olin has a waistline the size of a teenager's diaphragm and a bustline that would make Sophia Loren blush. She is too beautiful and sexy to play a snoring, child-bearing mound of fertility her husband won't even look at sideways. Sometimes she skewers him in his sleep with her unclipped toenails, and there's that guy she services on the floor of an office building urinal, but still.

The only hope for the Pzoniaks is their daughter Hala (Ms. Danes), who looks like such an angel that the local priest selects her to play the Virgin Mary in the annual church festival. It's an honor that forces the whole family to interrupt their bickering long enough to smile. It's also a job requiring chastity, innocence and virtue. Unfortunately, Hala is pregnant. Powerless to resist the call of passion, she's been sneaking out of the window at night to play Polish patty-cake with the neighborhood cop. Now the whole Pzoniak clan faces eternal damnation, not to mention Detroit ridicule. Will Bolek and Jadzia reconcile and hit the mattress humming? Will the cop make an honest woman of Hala after her family threatens his privates with their garden tools? The answers, my friend, are blowing in the wind.

With accordions playing and peasants dancing in vacant lots, Polish Wedding paints an odd landscape so foreign to Michigan it might as well be one of those postwar Italian neorealisms by Roberto Rossellini, but where is Anna Magnani now that we need her? Writer-director Theresa Connelly encourages a randy cast to smoke furiously, make rude noises from both ends, and display a voracious appetite for sex and food. Alas, the result is more bleak than amusing. In a world of pirogis, sausages, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, crying babies and no end to procreation and prayer, it's difficult to swallow the comic premise that there is no problem in life so serious it can't be solved by a belt on the jaw and another jar of pickles. Watching the Pzoniaks live by their guts and their groins not only makes you understand and appreciate Polish jokes better, but inspires you to think up a few new ones of your own.

There's Nothing Funny About Mary

I thought Armageddon was the worst film of the summer. I was wrong. I have now survived a load of sewage called There's Something About Mary . There sure is, and I'm not certain it's legal. Peter and Bobby Farrelly, two morons who polluted the ozone with Dumb and Dumber , specialize in silliness and vulgarity and in the rock-bottom mentality that permeates contemporary society, they have even, I'm told, found an audience of asinine fans. Their style is sophomoric frat-house sick jokes aimed at junior-high I.Q.'s. (Sometimes this includes critics.)

This time, their subject is a creepy 16-year-old Rhode Island dork (played by the peripatetic Ben Stiller with braces, one of Sid Caesar's old fright wigs and a rubbery, lovesick grin that makes Red Skelton's Clem Kadiddlehopper look like a nuclear physicist) who spends his prom night (and one interminably long, loud, painfully unfunny scene) with his genitals stuck in his pants zipper for the girl of his dreams (and the audience) to see. The girl is Mary (Cameron Diaz), who haunts him forever. Thirteen years later, looking more like the real Ben Stiller but still a geek, he tracks her down to Miami, only to find he's got at least three other rivals, all totally insane.

Designed to scuttle political correctness and offend everyone old enough to vote, the movie has no further plot. It just meanders scene by scene, from one nauseating sight gag to the next. Ms. Diaz, a perky actress who is candy for the eye, is the only moderately tolerable thing in this dud, but even she is working without a pilot light. She has a big fat mentally impaired brother and a black stepfather. While Matt Dillon, desperate to stretch, gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dog, a cretinous sunburned vision of horror named Lin Shaye, who looks like a female impersonator, sinks even deeper into John Waters raunch. She actually French-kisses the same dog, then sucks its tongue. Divine did even more obscene things on the screen, but why would a real woman want to compete with Divine? Wrapping up this agony, I thought I'd seen everything, but I have never seen anything like the scene where Mr. Stiller masturbates to Bizet's Carmen , then rushes to open the door with a big glob of semen hanging from his ear, and Ms. Diaz rubs it through her locks, mistaking it for hair gel.

I don't object to a bit of childish cinematic anarchy now and then, but this bit, with all the shock value of a poached egg with a dead rat on top, is the best reason I can think of for members of the Screen Actors Guild to finally Just Say No.