Dueling Destinies

With much of Orange County’s alternative film scene caught in the summer doldrums, it’s a perfect time to consider packing a cooler and heading to an even more alternative film venue.

For the third summer in a row, Newport Dunes Resort is offering its Family Flicks on the beach series, in which audience members can pull up a folding chair or spread out a blanket to watch movies projected on a 9-by-12-foot screen on the shore of the 100-acre waterfront resort at 1131 Backbay Drive.

With continuing balmy evening temperatures, it’s the perfect setting for light family-movie fare.

At $6 per car for admission and parking, it’s a movie bargain. And where else can you watch a movie and roast marshmallows over a campfire?

This week’s best Family Flicks offering, screening at dusk Friday: “A Simple Wish,” a PG-rated (for mild language) 1997 comic fantasy starring Martin Short as the world’s first male fairy godmother.

When an out-of-work actor (played by Robert Pastorelli) threatens to move from New York City to Nebraska if he doesn’t land a leading role in an Andrew Lloyd Webberesque musical based on Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” his motherless 7-year-old daughter (Mara Wilson) wishes for help from her fairy godmother.

Enter Short as Murray, the bumbling recruit from the North American Fairy Godmothers Assn.

Murray’s new at this fairy godmother business (he keeps referring to written instructions, and his spells are prone to going “ever so slightly awry”). At one point, after waving his magic wand, he transports himself and the girl to rural Nebraska rather than Central Park. Then, attempting to turn a menacing, shotgun-toting troublemaker into a meek rabbit, he instead turns him into a 50-foot-tall rabbi.

Kathleen Turner plays excommunicated fairy godmother Claudia, who has given in to the dark side and is up to no good.

The 89-minute comedy, written by Jeff Rothberg and directed by Michael Ritchie, did not fare well with most critics, although Short’s “gleeful performance” as the “bow-tied dervish” captured the fancy of The Times’ Kenneth Turan:

“Antic manic, easily perturbed and prone to petulant, sarcastic remarks (‘That’s Mr. Fairy to you,’ he says to a nonbeliever), Short’s Murray is quite a piece of business and guaranteed to be as funny a performance as the year will see.”

The Canadian-born Short, a gifted mimic with a flair for loopy voices (think Franck, the wedding guru in “Father of the Bride”), earned his first big break in 1982 when he joined the cast of “SCTV.”

Snared by “Saturday Night Live” two years later, he won over audiences with his string of memorable characters, including overzealous Ed Grimley, self-absorbed albino lounge singer Jackie Rogers Jr., songwriter Irving Cohen and paranoid lawyer Nathan Thurm.

Short, who made his film debut in 1986--in “Three Amigos!” with Steve Martin and Chevy Chase--was ideal casting for “A Simple Wish.” Not any actor could pull off playing a bumbling male fairy godmother--or would want to.

As Short told the Chicago Tribune, “I suppose the list of actors who wanted the part was pretty short. I think there was Frank Stallone, Jerry Mathers and me.”

Showing Saturday at Newport Dunes Resort is “Krippendorf’s Tribe,” a comedy released earlier this year, with Richard Dreyfuss as a recently widowed, money-strapped anthropologist who darkens himself and his three children to appear as natives in a fake documentary about an “undiscovered” tribe in New Guinea.

Both a critical and box office bomb, “Krippendorf’s Tribe” earned a PG-13 rating for its graphic verbal and physical sexual innuendo, profanity and toilet humor.

Family Flicks at Newport Dunes Resort will continue to screen Friday and Saturday evenings through October. (949) 729-3863.

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“Next Stop Wonderland,” an unconventional new romantic comedy by independent filmmaker Brad Anderson, opens Friday at Edwards Lido, 5459 Via Lido, Newport Beach. (949) 673-8350.

Director Anderson, who co-wrote the film with Lyn Vaus, explores the parallel lives of a Boston man and woman as twists of fate drive them unwittingly toward each other.

Hope Davis is Erin Castleton, a night-shift nurse who has been dumped by her activist boyfriend and is convinced she’ll never find anyone to match the brilliance and sensitivity of her late father. Her mother (Holland Taylor), who has no problem with her own love life, attempts to help her daughter by placing a personal ad for her.

Although Erin doesn’t recognize herself in the ad--”Frisky, cultured, with a zest for life”--she can’t resist following up on the calls that start pouring in. She needn’t bother. Her daters run the gamut of losers, from a salesman incapable of being quiet to a married man who hides his wedding ring in his wallet.

Meanwhile, Alan Gelfant as plumber Alan Monteiro wants to leave behind his debt-ridden father and the family plumbing business to follow his dream of becoming a marine biologist. In attempting to reinvent himself, Alan gets caught up in a romance that he knows is not quite right.

“The intent of the movie was to play on the issues of fate and destiny, to explore how people in their private moments create guidance and structure to see themselves through the difficulties of finding love,” Anderson says.

“I wanted to explore the two sides of the romantic fate coin. On one side is the belief that your love life is designed and controlled by some higher force. On the other is the more rational, scientific perspective that life is nothing more than a random series of accidents and chaotic events.”

Watching the film, Anderson says, “you could interpret the events through either perspective. But the point is that you’re left in a state of wonderment, a joyful curiosity about what’s going to happen next.”

Anderson, who allowed his actors to improvise, shot “Next Stop Wonderland” in a documentary, hand-held-camera style and has set the film to a jazzy bossa-nova soundtrack that contrasts with the contemporary Boston setting. Rated R.