Film of the week

Roger Dodger (15)

Dir: Dylan Kidd

With: Campbell Scott, Jesse

Eisenberg, Isabella Rossellini, Elizabeth Berkley, Jennifer Beals

The opening scene of Roger Dodger is a great indie set piece: a rapid-fire round of intellectual posturing around a cafe table, variously recalling Steven Soderbergh, David Mamet, and Woody Allen.

Roger (Campbell Scott) regales his friends with a forceful monologue about gender politics; part science lecture, part stand-up routine.

This sequence sets up the film's central concern - sex as a Darwinian battleground - as well as allowing Campbell Scott a platform upon which to establish his compelling, layered performance. It's also cleverly misleading, however, giving us to believe that Roger is a natural leader with acolytes hanging on his every acerbic wisecrack.

Subsequent scenes reveal that this is far from true. Roger is an empty vessel, profoundly cynical about his advertising job, and resisting the imminent conclusion of an affair with his boss, Joyce (a particularly radiant Isabella Rossellini). When his oddball teenage nephew Nick appears for an impromptu visit, Roger's willingness to hang out with him signposts the hollowness of his own social life. Not that his loneliness dissuades him from setting himself up as Nick's lifestyle guru - or, more specifically, imparting his dubious wisdom regarding the pursuit of women. Sex and the City for boys? Not exactly. Where Carrie Bradshaw analyses urban mating rituals and yearns for true romance, Roger's advice is primarily concerned with sneaky ways to look down ladies' tops.

This crash course in covert voyeurism leads to a night of bar-crawling, the mission being to unburden Nick of his virginity. Almost inevitably, Nick's callow gentleness strikes chords where Roger's aggressive sallies fall flat. Initial targets Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals are charmed by Nick and repulsed by his self-appointed mentor, a development that skews the power balance between the two men (as well as providing a little wish fulfilment for every geekish male who ever felt intimidated by a slicker rival). The message is hardly subtle - it's really just a cosy extrapolation of the grandmotherly maxim ''you catch more flies with honey than vinegar'' - but the drama is played out with wit and sensitivity, thanks in no small part to great performances by Scott and his young co-star, Jesse Eisenberg. Furthermore, the murky palette and scrappy hand-held camerawork lends an effective

grubbiness and urgency to a set-up that could have been rendered somewhat bland by a more glossy aesthetic.

Dylan Kidd's screenplay also harbours pleasant surprises, destroying its ostensible hero Roger by way of a slow build-up of clever echoes and sidelong observations. Roger prides himself on knowing more about women than they know about themselves, but his vituperative attacks on strangers in bars reveal more about himself than they do about their undeserving victims. Roger tells one woman that she's destined to be a faithless man's trophy; another, that her fiance will flee when he realises how old she is. His real obsession, however, is the fear of his own obsolescence - heralded by the increasing social and sexual power of women. Roger has streamlined the process of seduction: rather than waste time on actual romance, he cuts straight from first glance to rancorous break-up. The pretence is that the women are not worth his while. The reality, implicitly, is that he's protecting himself from

being rejected by them, by nipping in and rejecting them first.

Meanwhile, Nick's standard line to bouncers requesting ID - ''I'm an actor researching a role'' - is less of a lie than it first appears. Roger (an advertising executive, don't forget) is teaching Nick to perform, to be something that he's not. Sex, according to Roger's philosophy, is a masquerade; the worst thing you can possibly do is reveal your true self.

But Roger also has a telltale repeated phrase: he refers to himself as Joyce's ''boy'', as if his real holy grail is a mother, his real fantasy parental acceptance. It's exactly the kind of psychological weakness he despises in others - he dismisses one girl with the words: ''Give me a week to study your father, and ways that he ignored you, and I could come up with a schtick that you'd be powerless to resist.''

These nasty undercurrents recall Neil LaBute's film In The Company Of Men, in which a breathtakingly wicked businessman named Chad breaks the heart of a blameless, vulnerable woman as an act of revenge against her entire gender. Yet LaBute's film had an unforgiving flintiness that Kidd forgoes. Roger gets punished with solitude and rejection, whereas Chad got off scot free. Kidd's an optimist; he doesn't want us to go away thinking that the Rogers of this world prosper.

This nice-guy earnestness is certainly more engaging than LaBute's misanthropy, but it does blunt Roger Dodger's teeth to a disappointing extent. Both the film's cheery, ironic moral (Nick's untutored naivete and sweetness win out over Roger's slyness every time) and its darker undercurrent (Roger's quips mask dangerous levels of misogyny, loneliness, and rage) are compromised somewhat, by the addition of an upbeat coda in which Roger visits Nick at his school. As Roger strives to boost the sexual confidence of Nick's nerdy friends, we're apparently encouraged to like him again - to recognise some worth in his relentless scheming. Given that we've seen him behave so atrociously, this final-reel pardon jars. In the end, Roger Dodger isn't as dark or as insightful as it thinks it is.

It's a playful, conventional buddy movie in arthouse clothing, closer in spirit to the gentle positivity of Cameron Crowe than to the cruel social scalpel work of Neil LaBute or Todd Solondz. Still, even if it doesn't take us very far into the underworld, its dry wit and winning performances make the journey worth while.

ALSO SHOWING

American Pie: The Wedding (15)

Dir. Jesse Dylan

With: Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Eugene Levy, Alyson Hannigan,

Eddie Kaye Thomas, January Jones

From a film directed by Dylan Kidd, to a film directed by Dylan's kid. That's right - Jesse Dylan is the son of Bob. So much for that whole angry politicised counter-culture thing. Maybe it skips a generation? In any case, Dylan Jr is here catering to a market with a wholly different understanding of the words ''blowing'' and ''wind''. The tripartite American Pie franchise has become shorthand for all that's puerile and vacuous in current US cinema - a post-PC Porky's, in which teen libidos run horribly rampant and no sacred cow is left untipped. For all their gleeful crudeness and stomach-churning scatology, however, the Pie films retain an oddly wholesome quality that their imitators lack. Girls get leered at but they also tend to get the last laugh; families are as loyal and loving as they are elaborately humiliating; homophobia and chauvinism are gently punished; and true love conquers

all. It's no surprise the series has arrived so quickly at the most conservative and romantic of eventualities - a wedding. Far from embodying the moral decline of a generation, the Pie protagonists are nice, middle-class youths who will emerge unscathed from their brief tour of duty in the hostile wilds of adolescence.

Jim (Jason Biggs), the nervy geek who memorably engaged in coitus with an apple pie in the first movie, has decided to leave the wild days of baked goods behind him, and say, ''Hello, Mrs American Pie'' to his girlfriend, Michelle (Alyson Hannigan). Wedding preparations have long provided a rich source of comic inspiration; here, the standard marital crises and scrapes simply get a gross-out makeover. The cake is wrecked - by an airborne flurry of pubic shavings. The groom tries to impress his future in-laws - and manages instead to convince them he's a flamboyant pervert with a sexual interest in animals and an Eastern European dominatrix in his wardrobe. The inevitable loss of the ring, meanwhile, culminates in a jaw-droppingly repulsive sequence in which the obnoxious Stifler is required to eat dog excrement. (No danger, however, of actor Seann William Scott doing the dirty deed for real,

as Divine famously did in John Waters's Pink Flamingos. There's little risk of that kind of genuine anarchy here; indeed, one imagines these nice young actors sloping off together at the end of a day's filming to do some yoga, or examine their stock options.) For all the depravity, nothing ever gets really nasty. There isn't even a bad guy. Every threat to the status quo or source of genuine controversy is efficiently neutralised - the anti-social Stifler, Jim's strident grandmother, Michelle's snooty parents. Even Stifler's homophobia is challenged. (In a scene set in a gay club, he initially resents the gay patrons' interest in him, then becomes anxious to have it confirmed, finally declaring: ''See? I told you that guy wanted to f*** me!'' Needless to say, the gay characters get to be very sympathetic indeed.)

Given the mainstream infiltration of much more intelligent and thoughtful tales of delinquency - Igby Goes Down, Tadpole, All The Real Girls, even Roger Dodger - the guilty pleasure provided by this kind of simplistic teen fodder is a little redundant. Still, in the words of Jesse Dylan's illustrious forebear: Come mothers and fathers throughout the land. And don't criticise what you can't understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. For the time being. But don't worry. They'll settle down, marry well, and get respectable jobs.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (12A)

Dir. Shinichiro Watanabe, Hiroyuki Okiura

With: (voices) Beau Billingslea, Wendee Lee, Melissa Charles, Jennifer Hale, Steven Blum, Daran Norris

With their languorous pacing, highly stylised artwork and outre sci-fi plots, Japanese manga movies have always been an acquired taste. However, the fact that their visual style is now so widely referenced - in the Matrix movies, for instance, and in countless films based on computer games and comic books - may have helped mainstream palates to adjust. (The crossover was acknowledged when Cowboy Bebop director Shinichiro Watanabe created two of the Animatrix shorts released alongside The Matrix Reloaded.) Now that large-scale special-effects sequences are often constructed digitally, the gap between live action and animated action is narrowing; certain frames in Cowboy Bebop could easily slot into a live-action film. Based on a Cartoon Network TV show and set in the year 2071, this is the story of a gang of renegade bounty hunters pursuing a terrorist poised to unleash a bio-chemical plague

on New York City during the Hallowe'en parade. This slim plot is explained in loving detail altogether too many times, and our fearless heroes tend to take an awfully long time to cotton on; but that's because the story is really just a cursory support act for the gorgeous visuals. Motionless, painterly tableaux alternate with kinetic action sequences; and the squalid, vibrant future city is rendered in wondrous detail. Street scenes are reminiscent of the sophisticated, cynical end of US comic book art, proving that influence runs both ways between Japanese animation and American pop culture.

The characters, too, have a certain vibrancy, despite corresponding with the usual sinister precision to idealised manga

body types (wide eyes, dinky noses, absurdly long legs, and torpedo-sized breasts where appropriate). Although some of the humour has doubtless been shed in translation, the dialogue is entertaining, and there are some inventive comic moments - including a cowboy-themed cable channel devoted to the interests of bounty hunters and a loving tribute to primitive twentieth-century video games.