MAY 11, 1998: Newcity Chicago

A choppy, grainy Canadian production of the Louisa May Alcott tale in which a mature Jo (Mariel Hemingway) and her husband run Plumfield School for Boys, where the kids get to call the pair by their first names and blow off steam in carefully supervised pillow fights. But when the Boston street friend of their newest, wide-eyed classmate shows up, punches and knives are thrown. It doesn't amount to much more than a vehicle for young Ben Cook who, as the mischievous, defensive Dan, looks very much like "Clockwork Orange's Alex in a ragged bowler and walking stick while simultaneously exuding the alluring precocity that was so unsettling in Christina Ricci. (Ellen Fox)

Here's a world where the men are horny D-A-W-Gs and the women set 'em straight with crass humiliation. It's a Manhattan in which car alarms blurt "Step away from the car, motherfucker!", Billy Dee Williams emerges like a love prophet from the mist of a dingy precinct house, and one very special young man-bent on a night of sexual exploration-tears himself away from a bucket of fried chicken, dresses up in fuchsia pimp-daddy regalia and urges his girlfriend to climb on him and cluck like a "chicken ho." Not a single "Go on, girl!" (or "Woo!", for that matter) escaped my lips during this latest incarnation of the blind-date-from-hell genre, though I admit to cracking up at some of the more ingenious insults. Jada Pinkett Smith plays "Woo," a party girl whose face is revealed only after the opening credits sequence shows her pink-clad tits and booty ogled by countless men as she bounces across town to consult with her transvestite psychic. Woo is skeptical when the psychic tells her that love is close at hand: "Lamar"? I can't wear a beeper for "him!" But in an effort to get her out of the house so they can screw that night, Woo's friends foist her onto law student Tim, who, seconds before that life-changing phone call, is shown reaching into the darkness of his unzipped pants, swept away for a moment by the pelvic thrusts of a TV aerobics program. Sick, silly Woo shows up and leads pencil-necked Tim through all the familiar contours of urban mishap-car theft, mugging, punches in the face, irreparable humiliation of his friends. Even the requisite solitary reminiscence in the taxi-when Woo smiles to herself, lost in a musical montage of their adventures that night, realizing her love for him-gets tainted with irony: the cab fare runs about forty bucks. Disappointingly, Pinkett Smith displays only one mode of comic delivery: sarcastic eye-fluttering and tight, stretch-lipped smirks. Too bad I couldn't have watched "Woo" at night with my gang of sassy, cheering girlfriends, all of us loaded up on booze and blunts. (Ellen Fox)