LYMELIFE There's nothing new under the suburban sun (save for infectious ticks) in Derick Martini's Lymelife, whose weighty allegorical title and fastidious 1970s accoutrements aim to do for beer-and-pretzels Long Island what Ang Lee's The Ice Storm did for tony, key-party Connecticut. Dad (Alec Baldwin) is shtupping the secretary (Cynthia Nixon); mom (Jill Hennessy) pretends not to notice; eldest son Jimmy (Kieran Culkin) is about to ship out to the Falklands War (the movie's handy Vietnam/Iraq surrogate); and 15-year-old Scott (Rory Culkin) feels his first pangs of lustful desire in the direction of the neighbor girl (Emma Roberts), whose father (Timothy Hutton) is suffering from the debilitating effects of Lyme disease. Adding insult to irony, Baldwin is a real estate developer, peddling picture-postcard views of the American dream while watching his own slowly implode, just as Hennessy discovers that all the bug spray and duct-taped pant legs in the world can't ward off the bite of disillusionment and self-deception. Hutton, meanwhile—a bedraggled figure in pajamas and ever-present hunting rifle (at one point, he communes with a deer, à la Helen Mirren in The Queen)—seems to be transformed by illness into a truth-telling seer. Given how steeped it is in symbolic portent, Lymelife proves surprisingly watchable from moment to moment, thanks to the uniformly fine playing (particularly of the Culkin frères), evocative production design (by Kelly McGehee), and handsome widescreen photography (by Frank Godwin). If only its substantial craft and atmosphere were matched by an equally compelling reason for being. (Opens Friday at The Belcourt) SCOTT FOUNDAS
LOVE N' DANCING Hobbled by a title that practically stands in front of the theater and waves you away, this featherweight dance drama is the modern-day equivalent of those ancient B musicals filling morning slots on TCM: painless, pleasantly corny and incapable of rousing strong feelings in anyone except maybe deaf dance instructors. Amy Smart puts the movie's best foot forward as an engaged schoolteacher who signs her inattentive fiancé up for pre-nuptial dance lessons with a hearing-impaired swing-dance champ (Tom Malloy). To the surprise of no one who's seen a movie, the engagement dwindles as soon as the instructor sees the neglected schoolmarm's potential as a dance-floor barracuda. The movie, written by Malloy, stands out more for what it doesn't do than what it does: it doesn't make Billy Zane's uptight fiancé into a leering villain—Zane handles the dreaded Ralph Bellamy role with unexpected comic flair—and it doesn't turn the climactic competition into an inspirational-sports nailbiter. Trouble is, the movie doesn't provide much to replace them. Director Robert Iscove stages the dance routines with skill and fluid cutting, but they're fatally lacking in the quality the movie holds highest—chemistry. Even so, this makes an appealing showcase for the underused Smart, last seen getting boinked mid-race on a steeplechase track in Crank: High Voltage—and she'd be even more memorable if the movie didn't give her one of those catastrophic generic-hottie makeovers. Here's hoping she gets an equal-sized role in a film that doesn't signify the heroine's transformation by prescribing her contacts. (Opens Friday) JIM RIDLEY
PARIS 36 Writer-director Christophe Barratier shovels Moulin Rouge, Children of Paradise, French Cancan, Cradle Will Rock, Boogie Nights, La Vie en Rose and Mrs. Worthington Presents into a telepod, and out pops the least interesting movie anyone could compress out of that combination—an addled, plot-heavy musical melodrama that wedges in anything from stolen children to self-sacrificing ingénues, yet fails to jerk a single tear. The year is 1936: The Nazis and the Occupation are looming storm clouds, and the (brief) rise of the leftist Popular Front emboldens the working-stiff manager (Gerard Jugnot) of a closing Parisian music hall to revolt against his gangster boss, seizing the theater, keeping it open and stocking it with a motley crew of seedy vaudevillians. As photographed by Tom Stern, who gives it the same widescreen polish he's applied to Clint Eastwood's movies over the years, Paris 36 is a relentlessly handsome movie, but Barratier overloads the movie with so much narrative whizbangery that nothing has time to engage, convince or dazzle—not even the movie's Satine figure, a bombshell named Nora Arnezeder who plays the theater's last hope. Paris 36 tosses in everything and the kitchen sink; the pity is that the pipes don't work. In French with subtitles. (Opens Friday at Green Hills) JIM RIDLEY
