URBANIA A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2000 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): ***
Heard any good stories lately? Think any of them are true?
Jon Shear's edgy thriller, URBANIA, loves to mess with our minds, and it has lots of stories to tell us. Set on a night with a built-in extra hour due to the Daylight Savings Time shift, the episodic story has characters who relate incidents with varying degrees of believability. The reaction of the characters hearing the stories frequently reveals more about them than about the teller. Sometimes nervous laughter will be followed by painful introspection.
The disorienting film takes devious delight in layering various versions of the stories so that we feel like we're jurors looking into a courtroom lined with funhouse mirrors. What are we supposed to believe? One thing certain in this intriguing and distorting tale is that our eyes are glued to the screen. The wonderfully labyrinthic script by Daniel Reitz and Jon Shear is based on Reitz's play "Urban Folk Tales."
In a terrific, nuanced performance, Dan Futterman (THE BIRDCAGE) plays the story's protagonist, a gay man named Charlie, who is searching for his Mr. Right, Dean (Samuel Ball). When Charlie first laid eyes on Dean, a hunk with a heart and snake tattoo, Charlie decided that Dean was the man for him. Among the many questions is whether Dean, who appears to be a potentially violent homophobe, is what he seems to be.
Along the way this eventful night, Charlie encounters people gay and straight who have their stories to tell, most of which we see acted out. One story, about a woman with a wet poodle and a microwave, is thrown in as the story's only real joke. The script is especially good at not telegraphing which stories have legs and which end almost before they begin. One of the latter involves an attractive middle-aged woman who propositions a bartender with a purse full of fifties. Even the most minor of these incidents are staged with such creepy class that they become quite intriguing.
It's the sort of film in which even innocuous phrases such as, "Don't forget to set your clock back," manage to have dark, ominous portents. The crisp editing by Randolph Bricker and Ed Marx keeps us on our toes as images sometimes flash by like a hit-and-run and others times linger to haunt us. And Shane Kelly's cinematography captures the mood almost too well. Nightmares after this film are definitely possible, not so much for what happens as for the movie's raw intensity.
"Just give me a second to figure out the ending," Charlie tells us at the opening of the movie. The biggest disappointment for me was that URBANIA doesn't really have an ending. Oh well, as they say, "the journey is the reward." And for adventuresome moviegoers, URBANIA takes us through a fascinating night when danger is definitely in the air.
URBANIA runs a little long at 1:43. It is rated R for strong violent and sexual content, language and some drug use. It would be acceptable for college students and older.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
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