Short cuts

Say there’s nothing to watch out there? That every single movie released in the past couple of weeks has featured the words "Blood," "Ghost," or "Curse" in the title? For those willing to dig around the video stores or DVD racks, here are a few recent, more alternative, flicks of interest:

• Shattered Glass

Directed by Billy Ray

The real-life story of Stephen Glass, a young-and-rising reporter for American mag The New Republic, who fabricated dozens of stories before his bosses even had a clue that they were unwittingly in the fiction business. Played by Hayden Christensen with remarkable good manners and an ingratiating sincerity, Glass emerges as a strange by-product of modern journalism: pushed to compete with fellow reporters on a bi-weekly mag, he spins more and more fantastic tales – of impersonating a doctor on a call-in radio show, of witnessing Young Republicans on a drunken fratboy rampage through a hotel, and most disastrously, the one about a young hacker who is wooed with job offers and porn subscriptions by the major software company he hacked into. Bizarrely, his bosses (including unpopular new editor Peter Sarsgaard) fail to fact-check his more inventive pieces – until an online zine starts to unravel the hacker story, strand by strand.

Christensen shows more range than his wooden "Anakin Skywalker" portrayal might suggest, imbuing Glass with a pathological fatal flaw: his eagerness to please is mixed in equal proportions with his ambition, and so even his frantic backpedaling and vulnerability with his co-workers ("Are you mad at me?") seem sad and tragic. Shattered Glass is also a spooky take on the world of modern journalism, where accountability is as dubious as a fabricated website. Of course, Glass could have saved himself a lot of trouble by simply writing novels in the first place – which he eventually did, after being booted out of The New Republic.

• Party Monster

Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

In the world of New York party clubs, the names of Michael Alig and James St. James would be mere footnotes, had it not been for the tell-all murder tale (Disco Bloodbath) that’s the basis for Party Monster. Alig (played by McCaulay Culkin) and St. James (an exuberant Seth Green) are gay-club promoters who specialize in Rocky Horror make-up, transvestites and drug orgies. They ruled the NYC scene (briefly) as "The Club Kids," seeking out more and more decadent themes and venues. In Party Monster, they hook up with eyepatch-wearing club owner Dylan McDermott, who becomes an indulgent father figure to the wayward Alig, who seems to have things more under control than the drug-addled St. James – but don’t place your bets yet.

Directors Bailey and Barbato are not without a deranged, flamboyant style – something akin to Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and the script has some witty lines. But it’s mostly a drug-bummer flick that takes too many indulgent detours into scenes of snorting, shooting and nodding out to be of sustained interest. As the two über-homos, Culkin acts as if he were in a high school play, all stagy lilts and arched eyebrows, while Green supplies more genuine laughs as the slightly older club kid whose rug is being pulled out from beneath him. (Think All About Eve in disco drag and bloody makeup.) Chloe Seveigny appears toward the second half as a Texas groupie who joins the Club Kids on their downward spiral, and it’s a testament to how unappealing this group of characters is that Seveigny is the most wholesome of the bunch.

• Beyond Borders

Directed by Martin Campbell

Just in time for Mother’s Day, Angelina Jolie’s drama about a bored American wife (Sarah) living in London who takes up food distribution in refugee camps ties in well with her real-life role as a delegate of the UN High Commission on Refugees. She also adopted a Cambodian refugee child somewhere between filming Lara Croft and divorcing Billy Bob Thornton. So clearly this material is close to Jolie’s heart, but the story – which spans humanitarian missions to Ethiopia, Cambodia and Chechnya – wears its heart painfully on its sleeve. Clive Owen starts out well as Nick, the refugee camp doctor who crashes a World Aid fundraiser to show the upper-class British twits that they’re hypocrites, but he soon descends into grandstanding and nasty tirades punctuated by the "F" word for emphasis. Naturally, Sarah and Nick have an affair (he decides she’s more than just a bored, rich white woman after hearing her play Schumann on a piano that is – inexplicably – set up in the refugee camp).

But Nick is too concerned about saving the world to have a proper battlefield affair with Sarah – "I can’t go there with you," as he puts it. So he jets off to Chechnya where Sarah must track him down and save him. This gives Jolie an opportunity to try on a variety of smashing outfits – a pristine white get-up in the Ethiopian desert, tank top in Cambodia, and Dr. Zhivago cap in Chechnya – but good intentions and some beautiful locations (especially of Cambodia) are ultimately marred by a soap opera-ish script.

• Camp

Directed by Todd Graff

Kind of American Idol meets Fame in an upstate New York forest, Camp focuses on talented singers, dancers and actors surviving the rigors of a summer training session for aspiring performers. At Camp Ovation, Vlad, Ellen and Michael are just three of the campers who grind their way through three productions a week – everything from Stephen Sondheim to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? – while the audience gets a refreshing break from the usual love triangle storyline with periodic performances from the (genuinely talented) cast. It’s unfair to say this "puts to shame anything you’d see on American Idol" (as the DVD blurb does), since these campers specialize in Broadway musical numbers, while the American TV show sticks to pop tunes by the likes of Whitney, Elton and Celine. The kids in Camp get to display much more dramatic flair and depth – at least on stage. The plot is a slightly modernized version of the typical music school dilemma: there’s an unpopular girl with a crush on the camp’s only straight male, Vlad; a gay roommate who also has a crush on Vlad; a popular blonde happily steamrollered by her sycophantic understudy; and a washed-up alcoholic songwriter/director whose music rises from the ashes to form the core of the movie’s second half. All in all, it’s about as entertaining as a good episode of American Idol.