by KEVIN LAFOREST and MARK SLUTSKY

Happy Endings

The latest from director Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex, Bounce) is an ensemble comedy/drama set in L.A., featuring the interweaving lives and loves of a handful of semi-troubled characters. It's like a whimsical, boring Short Cuts.

The most screen time goes to Mamie (Lisa Kudrow), an abortion counsellor who, years ago, was impregnated by her stepbrother Charley (Steve Coogan). While she claimed to have had an abortion, she secretly gave the child up for adoption, and one day aspiring filmmaker Nicky (Jesse Bradford) shows up claiming to know where the kid is now. At the same time, Coogan is becoming convinced that his best friends, a lesbian couple played by Laura Dern and Sarah Clarke, have "stolen" his boyfriend's (David Sutcliffe) sperm. Also, Maggie Gyllenhaal is scheming herself into Tom Arnold's bed.

Got all that? For the most part, I like all these actors but I just found them pretty hard to watch for most of the film. Roos's characters just aren't very engaging and he weirdly repeats stuff from his previous movies (yet another vixen seduces a confused gay man). It just gets boring - especially since the film is over two hours long, which is totally inexcusable. Not only that, the last five minutes consists of all of the characters slow-dancing to "Just the Way You Are" - which is also totally inexcusable. (MS)

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

This is Irish director Mary McGuckian's adaptation of the novel by Thornton Wilder, which was previously brought to the screen in 1929 and 1944. Set in Lima, Peru, the film details the quest of a monk (Gabriel Byrne) to discover the divine meaning of a freak accident that led the bridge of the title to collapse, killing five people. Framed by Byrne's trial for heresy in front of the Inquisition, the film exists in a series of flashbacks detailing the various dramas and intrigues of the victims' lives - although we don't know exactly who dies until the very end.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a very earnest and frankly dull picture, slightly enlivened by its weird casting. One of those movies where people who should be speaking another language (in this case, Spanish) speak only in English, it features pretty much no Hispanic actors in any lead roles. Instead we have Robert De Niro as the Archbishop of Peru - still talking like a New Yorker - F. Murray Abraham as the Viceroy, Harvey Keitel as entrepreneur/impresario Uncle Pio, and Kathy Bates as the possibly mad Marquesa. Of all these performances, Bates's is certainly the least distracting; you at least kind of believe she is who she's supposed to be. But it's one minor highlight in a film that can't quite connect all of its intertangled plots. (MS)

Pinocchio 3000

According to the press kit, this is the first Canadian 3D-animation movie. It was made in half the time and for a 10th of the money devoted to its Hollywood counterparts. While it's not as technically impressive as a Pixar production, it is well crafted enough. Unfortunately, everything else about it is abysmally bad.

The film is a futuristic update of the Pinocchio story, with Geppetto building a robot instead of a wooden puppet, a cyborg penguin playing the role of Jiminy Cricket and a villain intent not on turning children into donkeys, but on covering them and the whole metropolis in metal.

Did we really need another rehash of the Carlo Collodi tale? Even the sci-fi twist has been done before in Spielberg's A.I. For a movie that wets itself over the power of imagination, it doesn't show much creativity of its own. It's 80 endless minutes of unfunny pratfalls, pointless chases and awful, awful songs.

Worse, the film indulges in racial stereotypes right out of minstrel shows - from the Blue Fairy becoming a big-bootied mama to a long-limbed, thick-lipped robot slave who grimaces, does little dances and talks in a high-pitched, pseudo-Negro accent. I haven't seen the English version (which features the voices of Malcolm McDowell, Howie Mandel and Whoopi Goldberg), but if it's anything like the obnoxious French dub then beware. Mind you, little kids might be entertained, but then again little kids also enjoy eating crayons. (KL)

Pinocchio 3000, The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Happy Endings open Friday, July 29

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