Ty's movie picks for Friday, March 14

Well, let's not start out with a movie. Let's start out with a play.

I'm probably not the best person to trust on the subject of theater: I watch movies for a living, and The Globe has a writer who's more than up to the task of parsing, analysing, condemning, appreciating. Plus, I have to admit I'm fairly sour on the Boston area theater scene -- 20 years in New York followed by two subscription seasons at The Huntington that just about put me into a coma will do that.

Still, the plays and the productions have seemed to be improving lately, especially around the South End nexus, and there's the New Rep in Watertown, which under Rick Lombardo is finding a good balance between the crowd pleasers and the risk takers.

"The Clean House" starts as the first and ends as the second. The play's written by Sarah Ruhl, who's the Hot New Thing of the theater world (even John Lahr loves her), and it starts in stock class-comedy territory -- a rich bitch doctor (Paula Plum, the play's secret weapon) can't figure out why her Brazilian cleaning lady (Cristi Miles, bim-bem-bim) has stopped cleaning; the doctor's obsessive-compulsive sister (Nancy Carroll) takes over the job for her. Then it slowly lifts off into surrealism and poetry. By the end, "Clean House" has become something radically different than what it began as, in a wholly satisfying manner, and I thought to myself: Why don't more movies try this?

I'm not talking about the tonal mixmastery and genre pastiches of a film like Ira Sachs' "Married Life," which opens with a lovingly overstylized sigh today. I mean a narrative that allows itself to grow organically so that what begins as an ordinary shrub keeps flowering and sending off different shoots until it looks like a Dr. Seuss tree, with a swing on it for us to sit in. I can think of few filmmakers who try this approach -- Alan Rudolph springs to mind -- and maybe it's just not an endeavor suited to movies, with their emphasis on putative realism. It works with "The Clean House," though. The play's not perfect (Ruhl's ethnic calculus is too pat, for one thing), but it pushes buttons you didn't know you had. It's at the New Rep until the 23rd, but good luck getting a ticket.

Speaking of Dr. Seuss -- oh, right, this is a movie blog! -- "Horton Hears a Who" opens today, and it's perfectly serviceable product for the young ones. (Meaning my 11 year old was a little bored but reasonably diverted while the five year olds in the row behind her were in ecstasy.) I like what A.O. Scott had to say about it in the Times: "What distinguishes “Horton Hears a Who!” from the other recent Dr. Seuss film adaptations ... is that it is not one of the worst movies ever made." That's about right.

If you like horror/suspense movies, up to and including the "Saw" series, and you want your preconceptions and cultural tastes spit back in your face, by all means take the challenge that is Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," a remake of his 1997 Austrian film of the same name. This time Naomi Watts and Tim Roth are the bourgeoise couple assaulted by the polite young psychopaths (now played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet), but the sub-Brechtian tricks and fourth-wall breaking of the original remain. So does an inherent academic smugness not shared by any of Haneke's other films: in both iterations, "Funny Games" spanks the audience for behavior its director is convinced he's above. I'm not buying it, although Wesley is -- he thinks the new version is one of the year's best so far. I'll agree it's more professionally done (you learn a lot in 11 years) and that Watts brings a needed rigor to her role (not to mention opening Haneke's argument to the arena of celebrity -- do we respond differently to watching a trusted star playing tortured victim than we do to anonymous actors?). But the unexamined attitudes here (that the director's vision of moviegoers is any less reductive than the audience's vision of movie characters, for one thing) is impossible to respect. The movie's the deconstructivist equivalent of pulling wings off flies.

Phew. I feel better. If you're a fan of Gus Van Sant's artsier work, Wesley's review of "Paranoid Park" should make you want to go. "Alice's House" (photo above), at the Kendall, may not be a clean house but it's full of sensual misbehavior and bad luck for Brazilian women.

I'll be back later with a look at what's playing at the institutes and revival houses.