Limited movie runs: 'Renaissance' and 'Mad Cowgirl'

Friday, October 6, 2006

RENAISSANCE

A fumbling attempt to create the European equivalent of a Japanese manga thriller in the conspiratorial mold of "Akira" and "Ghost in the Shell" has a stunning look. Director Christian Volckman goes for broke on the "graphic" side of the animated graphic novel with a hard-edged, monochrome style that better captures the stark look of Frank Miller's original "Sin City" than the live film. If the motion-capture technique often is awkward in motion, the striking imagery is a refreshing change from the usual CGI animation. It's the novel side that fails, a convoluted, futuristic detective thriller about a maverick detective, a kidnapped scientist and a corporate conspiracy on the trail of immortality. It's pure pulp and the stilted, hard-bitten English translation is spit out like an unconvincing hard-boiled parody by a British voice cast (which includes Daniel Craig and Catherine McCormack) so self-conscious that their natural accents sound as phony as the secondhand story. (Sean Axmaker)

GRADE: C

At Varsity through Thursday. 105 minutes. Rated R for some violent images, sexuality, nudity and language.

MAD COWGIRL

Incest, rare meat, religious loonies and cornball kung-fu television mix it up in "Mad Cowgirl," the story of, uh, who knows? "A woman, who is dying of a brain disorder, begins a surreal journey that descends into violence," reads one of two synopses offered in the press kit. The alternate "cult version" puts it thus: "A woman hates her job and also the men in her life so she has to kill the 10 Tigers From Kwangtung to become a better woman." This much is clear: The woman is a meat inspector and hard-core carnivore named Therese (Sarah Lassez). She also may be insane or a serial killer or the no-budget reincarnation of the Bride from "Kill Bill." The men include her meatpacking brother (James Duval), a naughty pastor (Walter Koenig) and a Sri Lankan doctor (Linton Semage) who speaks in his native tongue, subtitled for our benefit, although Therese appears to be fluent, versed as she is in the lingua franca of the movie, a primitive dialect of crazy. A demented jag of blasphemy, multicultural weirdness, splatter-movie tropes and inchoate meat metaphors, "Mad Cowgirl" is an underground movie with little sense of grounding; the point is an aggressive pointlessness. (The New York Times)

GRADE: D

At the Grand Illusion through Thursday. 89 minutes. Unrated.