The old, old -- fifty-six-year-old, to be exact -- Alec Guinness vehicle retailored to the expansive personality and physique of Queen Latifah. As a mousy cookware clerk at a department store in New Orleans, given three weeks to live and determined to blow her bank account on a dream vacation at the Grandhotel Pupp (pronounced "Poop") in Karlovy Vary, the actress shows a bit more than her usual capital-A attitude -- a reserve, a restraint, a wider range. That's hard to sustain, though, when she's doing things like snowboarding down a "black diamond" ski slope or BASE-jumping from the top of a hydroelectric dam. You go, girl. She is flatteringly photographed in the bargain, although the lighting that gives her (and a nonthreatening LL Cool J) a golden glow, gives the white folks jaundice and anemia. One of those is the pre-eminent French actor of his generation, Gerard Depardieu, in a subordinate role as the hotel master chef who holds the secret of life: "Butter." Which is tantamount to seeing a French comedy starring Firmine Richard wherein Robert De Niro would pop up intermittently, speaking broken subtitled French as a philosophical hotdog vendor. Wayne Wang, the director, appears to feel no urgency to correct the course that has led him away from The Joy Luck Club and Eat a Bowl of Tea toward Maid in Manhattan and Because of Winn-Dixie. Not the most credible source, in other words, for a moral homily on living without fear. Timothy Hutton, Alicia Witt, Jane Adams, Giancarlo Esposito. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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