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Mystery Men is a one-joke movie, while the Buena Vista Social Club is a joy.

here's trouble in Champion City. The trouble isn't, however, that there are marauding super-villains on the loose. It's that there aren't. Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear) has put them all away, which is making it tough for his publicist to set up crime-fighting ops. His endorsements, which cover every inch of his rubberized body suit, are slipping.

So runs the premise in the inverted superhero saga Mystery Men. The film begins with the sub-par heroes of the title attempting to interdict a heist at a nursing home and getting their asses kicked terribly in the process -- until, that is, Captain Amazing arrives and makes short work of the perps before being escorted into a waiting limo. With the crime-fighting so meager, Amazing decides to appear, as alter-ego Lance Hunt, at the parole hearing of his arch-nemesis Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) in order to secure his release and solidify his own lagging market profile.

Would-be superheroes The Shoveler (William H. Macy), Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller), and The Blue Raja (Hank Azaria), meanwhile, sit around in a coffee shop and fret about their inability to hit the big time. Maybe they should hire a publicist. Maybe the Blue Raja, "master of silverware," should actually have some blue in his costume, or throw knives, instead of forks, with deadly precision. Little do they know that their shot is coming when Captain Amazing's plan to resume battle with Frankenstein backfires.

It's a clever premise, an offshoot of Dark Horse Comics' Flaming Carrot series, and one that lends itself to a lot of goofing on the superhero genre, particularly when the three up-and-comers hold auditions to expand their ranks and entertain pitches from wannabes like The Waffler (armed only with a waffle iron) and Pencil Head ("erases crime"). Ultimately, the trio teams up with The Spleen (Paul Reubens), whose powers derive from the fact that he once passed gas and blamed it on an old gypsy woman; Invisible Boy (Kel Mitchell), who can only turn invisible if no one is looking; and The Bowler (Janeane Garofalo), who fights crime with the help of a bowling ball inhabited by the spirit (and skull) of her dead father. Under the tutelage of The Sphinx (Wes Studi) -- a mysterious figure who speaks in self-help slogans and splits guns in half with his mind -- and with kooky tech support from Dr. Heller (Tom Waits), inventor of the "blame thrower" and other non-lethal weapons, this motley crew is ready to take a run at saving their lush Tim Burton-esque city from Casanova and assorted allied baddies.

The real mystery behind Mystery Men, however, is how so much big-time talent was recruited for this lightest of light entertainments. Oscar nominee Kinnear is smugly funny as the arrogant hero, and the likewise-honored Macy is lovably sad-sackish as a henpecked husband who won't let go of his dream. You have to go back to Gary Oldman's absurd villian-turn in The Fifth Element, however, to see an appearance as unlikely as that turned in by the Oscar-winning Rush.

Stiller, on the other hand, is true to form as the most self-deluded and insecure of the bunch -- his superpower is getting extremely, if ineffectually, angry -- as he resists the Sphinx's counsel and eventually comes to doubt his own (nonexistent) superpowers. Stiller has compared his character to a guy who starts a band, but is the band's least talented member, an accurate comparison and one that underlines the movie's main point: that superheroism is really just another wing of the entertainment industry. Garofalo's bone-dry sarcasm, meanwhile, serves to supply some much-needed winks to the audience.

Gag are abundant, if something short of knee-slapping, but Mystery Men is still essentially a one-joke movie, a lot funnier in the first 20 minutes than the last, much of which are, needless to say, consumed by copious explosions. -- Jim Hanas

The Buena Vista Social Club is a joyful documentary of what one participant accurately deems "a crucially important event in the tradition of Cuban music." For anyone who has come to know and love the critically acclaimed and best-selling album of the same name, Wim Wenders' behind-the-scenes film will provide access to further rejoicing and deeper appreciation; for newcomers to this extraordinary act of cultural conservation, it will serve as a seductive introduction to the music itself.

In the 1970s, musician Ry Cooder and his wife sojourned in Cuba, where he discovered what was to become a deep and lasting affinity for the island's traditional regional music. Amid the superimposed austerity of a new Marxist regime only awkwardly fitted to the creole nation, Cooder sought the true pulse of the native cultural temperament. He found it, albeit languishing and isolated, in Cuba's uniquely felicitous musical hybridization of European troubadour, western African, and Moorish influences. Here and there, in some hole-in-the-wall club, he would come upon one of the great masters of a 300-year tradition, which had last invigorated itself for a major run of glory days from the 1920s through the '50s.

Cooder was acutely aware that this gorgeous and important music -- not unlike the American landmark tradition of Gershwin, Porter, and Kern which has only recently come appropriately and fully into our perspective after a couple of decades of misconsigned "old-fashionedness" -- was in peril of being lost to the cultural straightenings and exigencies of Castro's brave new world. State radio had little use for "decadent" art; the old masters had no proteges. "But," says Cooder in the film, "I didn't know what to do about it."

Twenty years later, quite fortunately for all of us, Cooder did know what to do. At the urging of record mogul Nick Gold who knew of his frustrated passion, Cooder became our man in Havana. In 1996 he returned to Cuba, gathered, from retirement and near obscurity and humble circumstances, an unprecedented ensemble of the old legends (now in their 70s, 80s, or 90s); together, they recorded the album as "The Buena Vista Social Club." The record has now sold millions of copies and led to several fine spin-offs -- the best of which is 72-year-old lead vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer's eponymous album -- and to Wenders' remarkably moving documentary.

The most evocative aspect of Wenders' film is its tone. Without being pretentiously ponderous, it is, with perfect justification, gently reverential. The Buena Vista Social Club project was indeed a once-in-a-century musical salvaging and celebration and, even more, resuscitation of a tradition that resonates from as far afield as western Europe, the Ivory Coast, and even Arabia, through most musical genres of the New World. In his choice of desaturated color and sepia filters, Wenders perfectly captures the faded grandeur and graciousness of Havana and makes the viewer poignantly aware just how imperiled with extinction was the cultural flame of this music. We are able to participate in a rare moment of beauty rescued, not merely as archive but as a great tradition rediscovered and renewed. There is background footage of the once-glamorous architecture of the city, now dowdy and begrimed, the brashly '60s-shoebox tower of the Karl Marx Hotel with one of its giant marquee letters missing; a fading, scruffy sign that reads unpersuasively "The Revolution is Eternal"; row upon row of parked cars from the late '50s; and the palpable atmosphere of a once-vital sense of place that became confused, betrayed, estranged from its own moorings. (Author Martin Cruz Smith's most recent suspense novel is set in Havana, and he has said that during the months he spent there his feelings for the city were those "of a gentleman for a lady in distress.")

The music of "The Buena Vista Social Club," and now Wenders' documentary, are charged with the deeply satisfying thrill of salvation and restoration. Many viewers will be hard-put to remember when they've seen a documentary film that is so powerfully framed by loving focus and sheer joy and through which we feel such a strong sense of privileged witness. Whatever the mixed legacy may be of Cuba's flirtation with communism, and however her people may escort the "lady in distress" into the new millennium, we see here the triumphant revival of an honorable cultural tradition in which life and art are passionately inseparable.

The film would have benefited from more complete performance sequences. But there is enough to whet the appetite; the film is sure to boost the already popular original CD, Ferrer's recent release, and the other individual-artist offshoot productions.

The performers are the key. They have tremendous natural dignity and they are also having the time of their lives -- a time, it is quite clear, they never thought to see. Whether caressing the tristesse of a lush ballad or sashaying through the riffs of a hot improvisation, from their coming together for the studio sessions to their big concert dates in the summer of 1998 in Amsterdam and at Carnegie Hall, we are consistently delighted by their humor, touched by their modesty, and dazzled by their talent and the sensuous vitality of their music. -- Hadley Hury

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