Director : Robert Downey Sr.
With : Robert Downey Jr., Alyssa Milano, Malcolm McDowell, Sean Penn

“Hugo Pool” is a bizarrely entertaining piece of intelligent brain candy. It goes like this: LA pool cleaner Hugo Dugay (played by Alyssa Milano – at her cutest) faces the challenge of cleaning and filling 45 pools in one day during the middle of a terrible draught. A neatly stylized film, filled with strong primary colors including the cool blues of Alyssa’s tank-top and matching vintage truck, add a bit of surreal to what seems like a straight forward story.

To accomplish the ominous task of filling and cleaning the pools Milano recruits her parents. She assigns her father, a recovering junkie played by Malcolm McDowell, the task of driving to the Colorado river and filling an empty water truck with the Colorado’s finest. Next she assigns her gambling addicted mother, Cathy Moriarty, to help her clean pool in exchange for paying off her $750 gambling debt.

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Director : Angela Pope
With : Ian Hart, Joely Richardson

The premise of the British film “Hollow Reed” sounds painfully like some trashy network Sunday Night Movie: A couple divorces because the husband discovers he’s gay, the wife gets custody of the child, and her new brutish boyfriend moves in. The focus of the movie, however, revolves around the divorced couple’s reclusive 8 year-old son Oliver Wyatt.

The film opens with the face of a frail and tentative boy running frantically through the woods on his way home from school. When he appears at his father’s (Martin Donovan) home with a bloody face he claims to have been beaten up by bullies in his class. Without reason to suspect differently the child is taken to the hospital, given stitches, and sent home with his mother (Joely Richardson).

Not long after that incident the boy appears again with a badly crushed hand, which he claims he had shut the car door on. As Olivier’s stories become more and more suspicious the bitter custody battle that exists between his parents intensifies. Soon we learn that Oliver’s injuries are the result of child abuse.

This is a devastating story told with unflinching realism. Unlike the made-for-TV films about the same subject, director Angela Pope vividly captures the disintegration of a family without sparing us an ounce of the pain and guilt. Poignantly acted and appropriately shot, “Hollow Reed” is a heavy-duty film that isn’t afraid to be honest. Not exactly a film that lifts your spirits, but certainly one that will make you think and feel.

Label: Verve

“Get It Together” is easily the best R&B effort I have heard in years. Like the first couple of solo Paul Weller and Jamiroquai efforts, Pete Belasco delivers more “pure” soul than any Motown record released in the past ten years. Sounding, at times, more like Marvin Gaye than the retro-white-boy-with-hipster-facial-hair that he appears to be, Belasco has succeeded in pulling the bell-bottoms over our ears and settling in on an authentic groove. Built around a steady diet of organs, strings and sax and guitars, Belasco has fashioned a bouncy bowling-shirt set of nightclub tunes.

The real beauty of Pete Belasco is his incredible range. Most R&B stars make concept records where they follow a singles thread throughout an entire album. This has always basically been the way R&B records were made. But Belasco glides smoothly through a spectrum of different styles. Beginning with the incredibly toe-tapping “All I Want,” an almost Ike & Tina Turner style R&B romp, Belasco mixes a spunky sax an organ with his silky but cool vocals. He picks up this boppy sax driven style on killer tracks like “I’ll Be Gone” and “Heat.” But the album is sequenced by alternating slow jams with poppy grooves.

This authentically retro 50-60′s masterpiece catches its breath between the upbeat songs by shifting gears into a slower almost Crowded House meets Marvin Gaye slow jams. On “Without Within” and “Love Train” you can almost see the smoky lava-lamp lit parties Belasco is playing to in his mind.

“Get It Together” is that surprise record I bought on a whim, forgot about, and then uncovered by accident after moving into a bigger apartment and subsequently rearranged my CD collection. Pete Belasco is the real thing, and the fact that Verve (a classic jazz label) released it is even further proof that this guy knows what he’s doing.