A Wise Bird Versed in Kidspeak

Movies teach, whether they're meant to or not, and movies made for young audiences teach most forcefully. Since many children's films these days are simplistic, frenetic and suffused with the shallow values of the entertainment culture, they're instructing little consumers to expect more of the same when they get to be bigger consumers. Is this a tobacco-style plot to target kids and hook them on trash? No, just another manifestation of the motion picture industry trying to survive by taking on the crazy-quilt colors of its competition--TV, music videos, video games. Yet future audiences for films of quality and coherence are doomed to dwindle if children's tastes aren't cultivated now, so it's good news when a lovely little movie like "Paulie " comes along.

The star of this DreamWorks production, a parrot who's sentient and, for the most part, unflappable, talks up a storm, knows precisely whereof he speaks, and teaches, by hilarious example, the richness and power of language. Like all good children's films--or children's books--"Paulie," which was directed by John Roberts, never talks down to its audience. If anything, its problem (though hardly a vice) is dialogue that's too rich or subtle for very young kids.

This is obvious from an early scene in which Misha (Tony Shalhoub), a recent immigrant working as a janitor in a research institute, finds Paulie caged in a dingy basement, discovers his gift of speech--as distinct from mimicry--and asks the bird how he ended up where he did. "It's a long story," Paulie sighs. "I'm Russian," Misha replies. "We love long stories." In fact, Laurie Craig's original script doesn't feel long, though it's episodic and, if truth be told, sometimes clumsily staged; don't expect the seamlessness of "Babe." (Or the briskness; though I admired Mr. Roberts's unhurried pace, I found several passages pretty sluggish.)

The bird's tale begins with Marie (played adorably by Hallie Kate Eisenberg), a little girl with a severe stutter that responds to Paulie's squawky coaching. When girl and bird become separated, Paulie sets out to find her on a transcontinental journey marked by encounters with Gena Rowlands as a spunky old dame in a Winnebago, Cheech Marin as a street vendor with a troupe of performing parrots (Paulie is smitten with Lupe, a Carmen Miranda flutteralike), Bruce Davison as a villainous scientist and Jay Mohr as an inept con man. (Mr. Mohr also gives Paulie his New York-accented voice.)

At the end of the journey, our fine-feathered hero--actually a blue-crown conure--is reunited with his beloved Marie, who has grown into a beautiful young woman and lost her stutter. Oddly, Paulie doesn't notice; he never asks the obvious question of how she, not to mention he, learned to talk so well. But this is a small lapse in a film that respects its important audience and honors its endangered genre. The real question is how wisely, wittily and well the parrot talks, and the answer on all counts is very.

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"Chinese Box " is that marvelous rarity, a movie sustained--no, supercharged--by the sheer excitement of its director. Wayne Wang, born and raised in Hong Kong but best known for an American film, "The Joy Luck Club," went back home to shoot this romantic drama, and you can sense how passionately he's trying to get the whole place on film, to capture the essence of a great metropolis in the throes of profound change.

If the essence eludes him, that's one point of the story. Mr. Wang's surrogate, John, a dying journalist played superbly by Jeremy Irons, knows all too well he can't penetrate certain mysteries before the end of British rule or of his own life. Normally I'd get twitchy in the presence of such a neat, elegiac parallel between personal and political decline. (At least John doesn't expire on the night of Hong Kong's handover to China, June 30 of last year.) But the more vivid, sensual and densely textured "Chinese Box" grew, the less interested I became in conventional notions of well-made movies.

The screenplay, written by the redoubtable Jean-Claude Carri&egrave;re and Larry Gross, seethes with life from scene to scene, while the screen sparkles with alluring apparitions: the fine Chinese actress Gong Li as Vivian, the secret love of John's life; the action heroine Maggie Cheung as Jean, a fascinating hoyden of the streets; Ruben Blades as John's buddy, Jim. (The movie stops, as well it might, for Mr. Blades to sing an enchantingly funny song about love and boleros.) And there's the city itself, chockablock and hugger-mugger with bars, shops, traffic, tiny factories churning out haute couture knockoffs, fighting dogs, swirling crowds. By the end of "Chinese Box" I knew I'd seen a singular film, and felt as if I'd been to Hong Kong.

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Short Takes :

"The Object of My Affection ": Jennifer Aniston gets pregnant by the wrong guy, then couples, or at least cuddles, with Mr. Right (Paul Rudd), whose only wrongness for her is that he's gay. There's a good, dark story untold here about a woman's capacity for denial in the face of desperate emotional need, and the dire imperatives of sexual orientation. The story that does get told is mechanical, insistently superficial and impersonal. Exploring all permutations of its plot, the movie illuminates none.

"Junk Mail ": A Norwegian film noir, of all things, and a strong, superlatively creepy one. Roy (Robert Skjaerstad) is a sad-sack postman; he's also a peeping, letter-purloining Tom. Obsessed by Line (Andrine Saether), an attractive, hearing-impaired woman, Roy gets embroiled in more danger than his dim brain can compute. Moral: When in Oslo use FedEx.

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Video Tip :

In 1995 Wayne Wang directed the charmingly shapeless, ineffably delightful "Smoke " and its companion piece, "Blue in the Face ," both set in Brooklyn and written by Paul Auster.


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