Not what Mike had pictured
Young Italian American Mike Manadoro (Kevin Zegers), a child of Brooklyn's old neighborhood and the protagonist of "The Narrows," has a gift for photography and a thirst to record everything with his camera. He sees it as his ticket out of the mean streets and into a fancy college. Too bad Mike's eye isn't observant enough to detect the hoary gangster melodrama around him that has his every move mapped out.
Director Francois A. Velle and screenwriter Tatiana Blackington -- adapting a Tim McLoughlin novel -- often can't decide if their movie is a brooding character study (as evidenced by Eddie Cahill's overwrought morphine-addicted war vet), a beautiful-people romance (Mike falls for a smart, pretty classmate played by Sophia Bush) or a stylishly lit genre piece. Eventually, mob dynamics win out in the final third when a delivery gone south becomes a battle for Mike's soul between his bookie father (Vincent D'Onofrio) and the local mob boss (Titus Welliver). D'Onofrio does his eccentric best to save the picture at this moment, but "The Narrows" is too riddled with cliches reaching past Scorsese all the way to Cagney flicks to be any more effective than a mowed-down capo.
--
Robert Abele --
"The Narrows." MPAA rating R for pervasive language, violence, sexual content and some drug use. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes. At Mann Chinese 6, Hollywood.
--
Safety was an unpopular idea
In his illuminating, timelessly timely "Sex Positive" documentary, Daryl Wein calls attention both to unjustly neglected pioneering AIDS activist Richard Berkowitz and his still widely ignored groundbreaking promotion of safe sex.
As the AIDS epidemic broke out in the early '80s, Berkowitz, a hustler who specialized in sadomasochism, joined forces with virologist Joseph Sonnabend and Michael Callen, the late singer and musician who became famous as an activist and longtime AIDS survivor. Of the three, Berkowitz was perhaps the most controversial, for he insisted on publicly acknowledging the role of promiscuity in the spread of the disease and argued that the way to stop it was to practice safe sex -- an unpopular notion in a time of great sexual freedom.
In 1983 Berkowitz self-published a 40-page pamphlet, "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach," now regarded as the framing document in the safe-sex campaign. His struggle in the cause for safe sex is framed by the Reagan administration's failure to respond to the pandemic's outbreak and the George W. Bush policy to emphasize abstinence over safe-sex practices.
