First Night

Apocalypto

2006-12-16T12:35:00.000-08:00

Reviewed by: Edward Douglas
Rating: 9 out of 10
Movie Details: View here

Cast:
Rudy Youngblood as Jaguar Paw
Iazua Larios as Sky Flower
Dalia Hernandez as Seven
Jonathan Brewer as Blunted
Morris Birdyellowhead as Flint Sky
Carlos Emilio Baez as Turtles Run
Ramirez Amilcar as Curl Nose
Israel Contreras as Smoke Frog
Israel Rios as Cocoa Leaf
María Isabel Díaz as Mother in Law
Espiridion Acosta Cache as Old Story Teller
Mayra Serbulo as Young Woman
Lorena Hernández as Village Girl
Itandehui Gutierrez as Wife
Sayuri Gutierrez as Eldest Daughter

Directed by Mel GIbson

Summary:
Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" is an impressive achievement in filmmaking, a true vision in every sense of the word, realized as a stunning ballet of unforgettable visuals and unrelenting violence.

Story:
When Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) and his tribe are attacked, he hides his pregnant wife and child in a cave for their own protection, but then he's separated from them as the survivors from his tribe are taken to be sacrificed to the Gods. Knowing that his wife only can survive for limited time, Jaguar Paw must find a way to escape and get back home.

Analysis:
For only his fourth film in thirteen years, director Mel Gibson proves that the scope and vision of "Braveheart" was no fluke, as he takes his third step into the distant past with a story set during Mayan times. When Mel Gibson announced he'd be making a film completely in the language of the Mayan tribes, people started wondering about his sanity, but you have to give him credit for executing his vision into an accessible movie filled with action, tension, drama and even a bit of humor. While nothing can prepare the view for the visceral experience of "Apocalypto," there's also a beauty to the simplicity and purity of the storytelling which uses a standard three-act format.

The film's hero is Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young hunter who comes to the harsh realization that the world is changing when his jungle-dwelling tribe are attacked by a more advanced group of savages. He hides his pregnant wife and child in a cave as the village is pillaged, men are killed, women are raped, and parentless children are left alone to fend for themselves. Jaguar Paw and the survivors are bound together and led on a journey across miles to a hugely-populated city with an imposing pyramid where people are being sacrificed to the gods to help the failing crops. An unexpected event saves Jaguar Paw, but his opportunity to flee is merely a chance for a bit of target practice. Being a fast runner proves to be a blessing for the resourceful young man, who finds ways to evade and fend off his pursuing captors, knowing that he has limited time to get back to his wife and child.

"Apocalypto" is by no means an "art film' and there's very little to think about, since we know right away who's good, who's bad--hint: the latter are the bloodthirsty killers with absolutely no redeeming qualities--and Rudy Youngblood's impressive performance as Jaguar Paw makes him the type of hero you're rooting for as soon as you meet him. Never while watching this do you feel as if you're watching actors reading lines in a movie, because Gibson sets things up to feel as if you're being given a glimpse into the past with real Mayan savages. It's easy to watch the film and be awed by the way Team Gibson captures this singular vision from the lovely scenery to the intricate costumes and jewelry worn by different tribes. When Jaguar Paw arrives at the city, we get to see the full scope of Gibson's vision through the young man's eyes, as it is an extravagant spectacle of different tribes, races and costumes unlike anything we've seen before, and even more impressive after so many scenes set in the jungle.

It shouldn't be too surprising that "Apocalypto" is far more violent and brutal than "Braveheart" and even "Passion." After all, these are savages surviving in the jungle. (Anyone intrigued by this concept should check out "The End of the Spear" which shows how similar South American tribes were warring even centuries later.)

Surprisingly, Gibson throws quite a bit of humor amidst the violence, including an early physical gag that would have fit easily into a Farrelly Brothers movie. The biggest laughs come from a few frivolous subtitle translations like when a large tree nearly kills someone and they yell, "I'm walking here!"--a phrase frequently used by New York pedestrians—or when a tribesman tells his poisoned mate that he's "f**ked." Not the kind of statements you'd ever think to be in a Mayan's vocabulary.

Sure, the vengeful nature of the last act leads to a few silly moments like when Jaguar Paw does a wicked power slide to avoid an assailant's blow that would make Tenacious D proud or some of the things his wife has to endure while in the cave. Still, for a film about a strange time in history executed completely in Mayan languages, "Apocalypto" keeps you riveted to the screen for over two hours without any of the lulls or dips normally found in similar epics.

The Bottom Line:
Not every fan of Gibson's "Braveheart" or "The Passion of The Christ" will be able to get into this story about warring Mayan tribes, but there's something to be said about how Gibson has created one of the most original and visually-stimulating epics to come around in ages. Whatever people want to say about Gibson, his amazing vision, his sense of humor and his ability to entertain points to him being a filmmaker still in top form and doing the best work of his career.

Flushed Away

2006-11-06T19:54:00.000-08:00

Review by Peter T. Chattaway | posted 11/03/06

Cast:
Hugh Jackman (Roddy), Kate Winslet (Rita), Ian McKellen (The Toad), Jean Reno (Le Frog), Bill Nighy (Whitey), Andy Serkis (Spike), Shane Richie (Sid), Kathy Burke (Rita's Mom), David Suchet (Rita's Dad)

The other day, I was reminded that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was the first movie—or at least the first major Hollywood movie—to show a flushing toilet. I wonder what Hitch, or the censors he offended, would have said if they could have foreseen that, less than half a century later, his fellow Brits would make a family-friendly animated cartoon in which a flushing toilet is one of the central plot devices.

Indeed, it's right there in the title. Flushed Away concerns a mouse named Roddy (voice of Hugh Jackman) who has been living a cushy, if caged, life as a child's pet in a posh London neighborhood. One day, while the humans are away, a slobby sewer rat named Sid (Shane Richie) emerges from the kitchen sink and, in no time at all, begins to act like the place is his own private pigpen. Roddy tries to get rid of him by tricking him into thinking the toilet is a Jacuzzi, but Sid sees through this immediately and sends Roddy spinning and swirling down the pipes.
Roddy (voiced by Hugh Jackman, right), a pampered pet mouse, thinks he has finally gotten rid of Sid (Shane Richie), a common sewer rat, by luring him to the 'whirlpool'

The rest of the movie takes place almost entirely in the sewer system, where Roddy discovers a thriving society of rodents, amphibians, insects, slugs and fish, all modeled after modern-day England; there are streets, and bobbies, and doomsday prophets, and even fish-and-chips shops (though it is not clear whether they do, in fact, serve the talking fish). Given how scatological even family films have become in recent years, Flushed Away could easily have indulged in gross-out gags, but thankfully, for the most part, it refrains from that (apart from one or two bits, like the scene early on in which Roddy mistakes a chocolate bar for something else).
When Roddy is 'flushed away' into London's underworld, he is in for an unappetizing meal of maggots as a couple of slugs look on

The film—directed by first-time feature directors David Bowers and Sam Fell from a script credited to Fell and no less than six other writers—takes a while to find its footing or to build any sort of momentum. Okay, Roddy's lost, and he wants to get home—that seems clear enough. So he tracks down a boat captained by a mouse named Rita (Kate Winslet). But she's being pursued by a couple of gangster rats named Spike (Andy Serkis) and Whitey (Bill Nighy), who want a ruby that she may have stolen from their boss—a pompous, over-dramatic amphibian who is obsessed with the monarchy, and who is called, simply, The Toad (Ian McKellen). And no sooner is the jewel taken care of, in a manner of speaking, than we discover that The Toad has a much bigger, and even more dastardly, plan up his sleeve.

As another critic once remarked about Shark Tale, this movie has lots and lots of plot, and lots of gags to go with each new plot twist, but it's difficult at times to figure out what the story is. Is it that Roddy wants to get home? Is it that Rita needs the jewel? Is it that The Toad's plans for sewer domination must be stopped?

Fortunately, the film throws just enough lunacy at us to keep things entertaining even when we're not really sure where it's going. Like other films produced by DreamWorks and Aardman Animation (Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit), Flushed Away is loaded with groan-worthy puns ("Pardon me, my fly's undone," says The Toad when an insect he swallowed tries to escape) and pop-culture references (I spotted nods to James Bond, Superman, The Fly, Batman, Lady and the Tramp, Finding Nemo and Mary Poppins, among others), and it playfully mocks horror-movie clichés, as well (the old fisherman who takes Roddy to the docks where Rita can be found speaks into a bottle to make his voice echo).

But the film is at its best when it turns human artifacts toward new purposes (such as the chase scene in which the rats ride egg-beaters as though they were speed boats), or when it unashamedly sends up national stereotypes (old British women go inexplicably nuts over Tom Jones, Americans are dumb tourists, and the French—who are frogs, of course—are quick to surrender). These two elements come together in a deliriously funny scene, when The Toad addresses our heroes through a cell phone worn by one of the villainous frogs, and the frog in question happens to be a mime who supplements The Toad's ominous words with glib body language.

And then there are the slugs. The first time we see one, it's basically a throwaway gag, but the slugs build, and build, and build their presence throughout the film until they become a sort of Greek chorus, popping up at unexpected times to set the mood and comment on the action through shrieks and songs. They are kind of like the mice in the Babe movies, but slightly more involved in the action. (Attention must also be paid to the film's intriguing mix of animation techniques; while this is Aardman's first CGI feature, the characters have been designed to look—and even move—like the claymation models that populated Aardman's earlier films.)

Things like this keep the movie entertaining, and by the end, it turns out the film has an actual message to pass on, and it's a good one, to boot: Community is better than isolation; and being involved in the lives of others, however messy they or their environment might be, is better than living in a world of self-serving pleasures.

2006-10-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

Marie Antoinette (2006)
Drama Rated: PG-13

I wouldn’t say all the fuss over Sofia Coppola’s anachronistic Marie Antoinette – from the moment the project was announced through its premiere at this year’s Cannes film festival – is much ado about nothing, but it’s certainly much ado about nothingness.

Coppola depicts Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst at her girliest) as less monarch than entitled celebrity, reveling in an inconsequential life of endless shoes, luscious desserts, dazzling gowns and gravity-defying hairstyles. According to this history lesson, the French court of the late 1700s was something like a MTV Video Music Awards after-party, right down to the intermittent blasts of 1980s modern rock on the soundtrack.

Beyond this entertaining vision, Marie doesn’t really have much to offer – which would be fine if it didn’t seem like Coppola wished she could offer more.

The movie runs on far longer than its slight conceit can sustain, while the climax, set on the eve of the French Revolution and involving the offscreen shouting of rebellious peasants, feels something like a hangover. Coppola would have been better off not allowing messy history to intrude on playtime.

The Black Dahlia

2006-09-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

Two cops (Aaron Eckhart, right, and Josh Hartnett) are called to investigate the homicide of an ambitious actress, in The Black Dahlia.
Universal Pictures

So much for the early Oscar buzz The Black Dahlia was experiencing as we waited with bated breath for the kind of movie we haven’t seen since L.A. Confidential or Hollywoodland (OK, that movie came out last week, but almost no one went to see Hollywoodland). Now, all of the dreams of awards and praise are Dead On Arrival, just like the movie.

Set in post-World War II California, Josh Hartnett stars as Los Angeles Police Department detective Bucky Bleichert – a former boxer who has become a star after being used to help drum up support for a critical Bond Act that increases funds for the cops, and provides a crucial pay raise to all of his colleagues. Now, he and his partner, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), have become heroes, but their fate might not be as charmed.

While they are involved in surveillance and a wild arrest, the horribly mutilated body of a beautiful young lady has been found just a block away. Even though Lee has big problems to deal with, and Bucky is dedicated to solving the case they are assigned to at the moment, Lee gets them placed on the high profile assignment of finding the murderer of the slain lady, who has been dubbed The Black Dahlia in sensationalized reports and by a public fascinated with her story.

Can Bucky and Lee find the killer?

He once was a great director, but I don’t know why Hollywood still allows Brian De Palma to make movies. De Palma hasn’t had a good movie in 10 years – a decade of mediocrity that has seen stinkers like Snake Eyes, Femme Fatale, and Mission To Mars force a new generation of moviegoers to wonder what’s so special about this guy. The Black Dahlia keeps that streak alive in ways even his biggest supporters will have to acknowledge.

First, the story, written by Josh Friedman (based on the novel by James Ellroy) is all over the place. It’s two or three movies in one with a strange love triangle between Johansson, Eckhart and Hartnett; a lady who looks like the Dahlia (played by Hilary Swank) who mysteriously enters the scene; her screwed up family; problems Eckhart faces with an old arrest; Johansson’s past; and the whole Black Dahlia mystery. The result is a very convoluted story that kind of wraps up at the end, but the mystery about this film is why anyone thought it was a good idea in the first place. With all of these subplots, it’s barely about The Black Dahlia and extremely hard to follow, especially as you stop caring where it is all going.

Second, the tone of the movie is all screwed up, and that responsibility falls to De Palma. The movie quickly has more laughs than a Rob Schneider comedy, but not in a good way, as we watch the wheels fall off as The Black Dahlia should be getting more gripping and demanding of our attention. The film is supposed to be suspenseful, sexy, moody, dark, danger-around-every-corner, hard hitting drama, but it devolves into laughter at the overwrought acting performances of Eckhart, Swank, Johansson, Fiona Shaw and Rose McGowan (again, I blame De Palma, see the next paragraph).

The worst part of the movie is how De Palma has directed all of the women to act like a parody of a 40’s film noir characters. You can’t take these performances seriously because they are all trying to be Ingrid Bergman or Katherine Hepburn instead of playing the characters, and do so in embarrassing ways that detach the audience from the movie. Maybe McGowan is supposed to be a little nuts, or Shaw is supposed to be ALOTTA nuts, but both go a bit too far, while Johannson and Swank don’t give off the smoldering chemistry you want.

2006-08-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

Snakes on a Plane Print E-mail
Written by Cindy White
Friday, 18 August 2006

ImageIf ever there was a critic-proof film, it’s the high-altitude thriller, potential classic-in-the-making Snakes on a Plane. Few films in recent memory have enjoyed the amount of pre-release publicity as this one, generated by the public fight between the studio and the filmmakers over the title (the studio’s tin-eared choice? Pacific Air Flight 121) and star Samuel L. Jackson’s eagerness to talk up the project in any form of media that will pay attention. As Jackson has said, “You either want to see that, or you don't.” He’s not wrong. For undecided moviegoers, the level of interest in the film based on the title alone is likely in direct proportion to the individual entertainment experience to be had while watching it.

The plot (as if it matters) centers around laidback surfer-dude Sean (Nathan Phillips), who witnesses the murder of a Los Angeles prosecutor in Hawaii by infamous crime boss Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson). After saving Sean from Kim’s hitmen at his home, FBI Agent Nelville Flynn (Jackson) convinces him to come out to Los Angeles and testify against Kim in court. The two of them, plus Flynn’s partner, commandeer the first-class section of a 747 on a red-eye flight headed for L.A. and, well, the rest is cinematic history.

The film takes a while to ramp up, and the exposition is rather heavy-handed as we meet the passengers who will share their reptile-infested journey. The plane is populated by a shallow mix of instantly recognizable types: the honeymooning couple, the two youngsters flying alone, the obsessive-compulsive rap star, the haughty princess and her accessory dog, the earthy young mother and her baby. Besides Jackson, the only other person to get any kind of characterization is flight attendant Claire (Julianna Margulies), who possibly dooms the plane herself by stating the first time she appears on screen that this is her last flight (she’s off to law school) and she hopes it’s filled with low-maintenance passengers.

But aside from Jackson, in full badass mode here and having a pretty good time, they’re just insignificant faces in the crowd compared to the real stars of the show — the snakes. Both real and (sometimes very obviously) CGI, they come in all shapes, sizes and colors. And they’re lovingly photographed, gleaming and slithering through pools of light inside the bowels of the plane. When the scaly, fanged beasts finally do show up (about 20 minutes into the film) and start attacking people (about 40 minutes in), the action comes hard and fast from that point on. It seems as if the writers sat down and made a laundry list of all the gags they could get out of the premise. Snakes falling out of the oxygen mask compartment? Check. Jumping out of an air-sickness bag? Check. Biting into various naughty bits while a couple is in the midst of joining the mile-high club? Check. There are even some pretty gruesome injuries that have nothing to do with snakes.

But unfortunately, the film is a one-trick pony that fails to achieve much beyond cheap thrills and the simple, powerful hook at its center. The dialogue is awkwardly written (the only explanation the villain gives for devising this insane plan is, “You think I didn’t exhaust every other option?”) and the plot doesn’t stand up under any kind of scrutiny (if the saboteurs could rig the cargo-bay door to allow the snakes into the cabin at a certain time, why not just mess with the electrical equipment and make the plane crash?). It all leads to a very unlikely climax and an unsatisfying denouement (followed by a truly cheesy music video during the end credits), but none of that matters all that much. Snakes on a Plane delivers exactly what it promises. Nothing more, nothing less. B (New Line, R, 105 mins.)

Monster House

2006-07-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

Friday, July 21, 2006

Come in, come in ... 'Monster House' is a monstrous original

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE P-I

The most imaginative and delightful computer-animated movie of recent years outside of the Pixar brand, "Monster House" is a Halloween ghost story by way of monster-movie adventure.

MONSTER HOUSE

DIRECTOR: Gil Kenan

CAST: Voices of Mitchel Musso, Spencer Locke, Sam Lerner, Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal

RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes

RATING: PG for scary images and sequences, thematic elements, some crude humor and brief language

The sign in the yard says it all: "Beware of house." Cranky Mr. Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi) spends his days chasing kids from his yard and tossing their errant toys into his ramshackle old home until he keels over in an apoplectic fit directed at neighbor kid DJ (Mitchel Musso). As the very blades of grass grasp desperately at the gurney that takes Nebbercracker away, we know that there is something very dangerous about this creaky old relic.

This being Halloween, no one believes our intrepid adolescent heroes -- DJ, his cape-draped best friend, Chowder (Sam Lerner), and spunky Jenny (Spencer Locke), whom they save from the gnashing maw of the house -- as they try to convince the adult world that this old dark house has an appetite for trespassers. That's a problem because, this being Halloween, an entire army of costumed hors d'oeuvres are preparing to march right into the belly (or rather, basement) of the beast.

First-time director Gil Kenan uses the "motion capture" technique used on "Polar Express," which animates over the movements of actors recorded on video. While the computer animation is a tad bland and restrained on the human side, it gives the kids a subtly expressive body language to match the dynamic personalities and terrific chemistry created by the young actors.

The star of the film, however, is the magnificent house, a bad dream gone wild with splintered floorboards for teeth, eaves and shingles bent into angry eyebrows and a carpet that flicks out like a frog's tongue to lap up human insects. And that's before it goes mobile in a climax that is both thrilling and touching. Kenan lets his "camera" loose through the suburban world with free-spirited abandon throughout it all.

With a sensibility that falls somewhere between the Stephen King and Tim Burton, this is a horror movie for kids with bite, heart and a poignant happy ending that is entirely earned and completely rewarding.

"Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest"

2006-07-15T15:27:00.000-07:00

'Pirates' sequel long but occasionally strong
By Glenn Whipp, Film Critic

Just like its predecessor, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" is an exercise in forgiveness, asking its audience to sit through the bloat to get to the treasure.

Blowhard director Gore Verbinski gives us two of everything — villains, self-sacrificing fathers, love triangles — when one would have sufficed. He never stages an action sequence that he doesn't want to repeat for lessened effect. The result is a 21/2-hour movie that starts slowly and only gets up to full sailing speed by its last hour.

Johnny Depp redeemed the first "Pirates" movie, and if they gave Oscars the way baseball crowns its league MVPs — for contributions to the success of the team — Depp would have won best actor, hands-down. Take him away from that 2003 film, and you're left with an empty, unwatchable spectacle.

again playing everyone's favorite, mascara-wearing prancing pirate, this time leaning more on the character's Pepe Le Pew inspiration, though Keith Richards still comes through, too. While the thrill of discovering the character and Depp's performance is gone, it's still a joy watching him play this narcissistic, word-slurring anti-hero. Just seeing Depp run — and Capt. Jack runs a lot in this movie — is to behold a Chuck Jones cartoon come to life, and it makes me smile every time.

Given how Depp so thoroughly stole the movie from Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley the first time around, you wish producer Jerry Bruckheimer would have been smart enough to jettison the bland characters and let Sparrow fly alone this time around. But that would violate the laws of sequels, not to mention run the risk of alienating the teen girls who blush at the sight of Bloom.

The problem is, credited screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio struggle in putting the three main characters back together, delivering an opening hour that is incoherent and largely uninvolving. Separated lovers Will (Bloom) and Elizabeth (Knightley) are present only because one of the villains (the boring, non-CG one) wants something from Jack.

Meanwhile, the other villain, the astounding, computer-generated, squid-faced Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) wants something from Jack as well — his soul. This is where the movie gets good, if not great: when Jones' submerged Flying Dutchman ship pops out of the ocean, revealing its barnacle-covered, bizarro crew of the aquatic undead, adversaries more than worthy of Capt. Jack. One other item of note: Jones commands a giant squid that makes the beastie in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" look like a wee jellyfish.

Davy Jones and his crew are fantastic,

flawless creations — you can't take your eyes off them. John Knoll's Industrial Light & Magic visual effects team have gone above and beyond the call here, creating a band of characters that impeccably serve the story without needlessly calling attention to themselves.

There's a Hammerhead Shark Man, a Hermit Crab Head ... really it's a rogues gallery straight out of Dick Tracy. Although they're almost entirely computer creations, they feel as real as the flesh-and-blood humans.

More real, in fact. If Depp was the Oscar nomination waiting to happen for "Black Pearl," it's Nighy's turn for "Dead Man's Chest." Nighy has spent his entire career elevating bad movies ("Underworld") or turning good films into near-great ones ("Shaun of the Dead"). Here, even though everything about the squid-faced Jones, even the eyes, are artificial, Nighy's performance comes through loud and clear, full of magnificent menace, a villain for the ages.

His presence makes the prospect of next year's third "Pirates" movie palatable, even if, given the progression of the series, Verbinski pushes the running time to 3 hours. These are movies that cry out for the "scene selection" feature on the DVD.

But when the scenes work and cook, they're the essence of summer moviemaking. They shiver your timbers and make you feel like a kid.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST
Our rating:
(PG-13: intense sequences of adventure violence, including frightening images)
Starring: Johnny Depp, Bill Nighy, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley.
Director: Gore Verbinski.
Running time: 2 hr. 30 min.
Playing: In wide release.
In a nutshell: Overlong, redundant, confusing — and at times entertaining as a summer day in the shade with a bottle of rum. Saved again by Johnny Depp and the amazing squidfaced Davy Jones, created on a computer and brought to life by the great Bill Nighy.

Nacho Libre

2006-06-21T12:48:00.000-07:00

Movie Review
The Mexican wrestling comedy takes one silly joke as far as it can

By Ty Burr

Boston Globe
Published: 06/16/2006

A couple of years ago, I finished a review of ``Napoleon Dynamite" with the words ``What remains to be seen is whether director Jared Hess has another movie in him -- a real movie, about real people."

With ``Nacho Libre," the jury's still out.

Some fussbudgets might want to get their dander up about this film, since star Jack Black is essentially doing a brownface routine as a low-level Mexican monk who dreams of being a masked wrestler. (He's not literally wearing makeup, thankfully, but the performance is still pitched at the level of Bill Dana's old Jose Jiminez character on '60s TV.)

``Nacho Libre" just isn't worth the bother, though. Very broad and very silly, it's a doodle of a comedy -- a one-joke idea (fat guy goes luchador) padded out to feature length by Black's willingness to do anything for a laugh.

He plays Ignacio, a woebegone friar at a rural orphanage who cooks daily doses of black-bean glop for the kids. (One asks, ``Couldn't we have a nice salad someday?") Moved by the appearance of a new nun, the lovely Sister Incarnacion (Ana de la Reguera -- Hess films her entrance as if it were the appearance of a saint in a 1950s religious film), Ignacio dons cape and mask and appears in the local arena as Nacho Libre, a wrestler of singular incompetence.

That's really all there is to the plot, and when the narrative stalls -- which it does, often -- Black strikes an idiot pose or flexes his tushie or (in the film's one moment of truly inspired lunacy) warbles a love song for Incarnacion that could be an outtake from one of Black's old Tenacious D records. Say what you will, the man knows he's a human punch line and acts accordingly.

So, yes, there are some decent, if callow, giggles to be had, as well as a genial sense of the bizarre that takes the sting out of the proceedings. When Nacho has to fight two midgets in lion costumes -- they resemble deranged Ewoks -- you marvel both at the absurdity of the scene and the film's deadpan refusal to take it any further. The image is the joke, so why bother with comic invention?

Since Hess uses the same uninflected tone that made ``Napoleon Dynamite" a hit in middle schools across the country, though, Black's exertions unfold in a void. At times, it's like watching a stand-up comic at a wake.

The director sure loves his freaks, though. He films the lumpy, cross-eyed Oaxacan peasants head on, like found objects at a roadside tourist stand, and he revels in the scrawny physique and jelly-lipped grin of Nacho's tag-team partner, Esqueleto (Hector Jimenez, who gets off a few good lines about his faith in science over religion).

``Nacho Libre" also spends a good deal of time with one of the orphans, a pint-size human bowling ball named Chancho (Darius Rose), and a wrestling promoter's obese daughter (Carla Jimenez), who has a crush on Esqueleto and literally tunnels through walls to get at him.

Racism, general misanthropy, or fond celebration of life's misfits? Discuss. It should be pointed out that the characters here are no less geeky or gawked at than anyone in ``Napoleon Dynamite," but also that ``Napoleon" took place in Idaho, the Utah-based director's backyard, and that goofing on nerds of other countries is dangerous business. In the end, ``Nacho Libre" isn't exempt because it's a comedy but because it's piffle. Dig up a ``Love and Rockets" comics compilation -- one featuring Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar stories -- if you want small-town Mexicans who are foolish, noble, absurd, and human.

Here, you have to settle for Jack Black pursing his lips and shaking his man-boobs , for tatty wrestling smackdowns and cow pies in the face. What remains to be seen is whether Jared Hess has a movie in him aimed at anyone over 13 years old.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.

The Da Vinci Code

2006-05-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

Posted by Michelle Alexandria on Friday, May 19, 2006, 11:03 pm, EDT

Let's start this review by asking, "What the heck was Columbia and Imagine thinking, pushing The Da Vinci Code as a summer movie?" There is no way that this, over long, pretentious, sometimes boring, but very intriguing movie should be shown in the summer months.

I walked into this movie, with not once ounce of excitement or intrigue towards it. I have no interest in the subject matter, and I didn't read the book. So I had no idea what to expect. Well that's not entirely true; it's Ron Howard (Pretentious Director), Tom Hanks (Pompous Actor), Akiva Goldsman (Screenwriter I actually like, except, when he works with Hanks and Howard) a trio that has a boatload of Oscar nominations and wins between them.

But I'm, admittedly in the minority on my total dislike of Ron Howard movies, and Tom Hanks. Although in the last few years, Hanks' film choices have been intriguing and his films have been growing on me. I loved Road to Perdition (didn't like him), liked Lady Killers (again, didn't like him), loved The Terminal (didn't like him) and loved Catch Me If You Can (didn't like him, notice a trend here?). I don't know what it is about Hanks that simply bugs me - maybe I can never get over his manic performance on Bosom Buddies, or, the fact that, in real life I can't separate his pretentious arrogance from his on screen performances.

So because of all this I could have cared less about this film, but I went anyway. And the first half hour of this film really clicks and moves at a pretty "brisk" pace - at least for a Ron Howard directed film. The film opens with a murder and then switches to a lecture as noted religious "cryptologist" Robert Langdon (Hanks) is giving a speech on the history of various symbols.

It's an intriguing presentation as we first see members of the robes of the KKK as he asks the audience, what this photo means. Naturally the audience shouts that it means "hate, racism, etc." but then Langdon explains the history of the robes had nothing to do with the KKK. He then shows the symbol of the devil's pitchfork, and the camera pulls back and shows it to be a piece of one of the Greek God's Trident.

Immediately I was sucked into the film, as it unfolds Langdon gets involved in a murder mystery and becomes the immediate suspect as a crooked French police officer Captain Fache (Jean Reno) uses any means necessary to track him down. Langdon eventually hooks up with the murder victim's granddaughter Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) who helps him try and put the pieces together of the true mystery of the whereabouts of The Holy Grail. I won't spoil the story by giving you any more info.

Throughout the search and chase, Langdon and Fache have to avoid being captured by the French police, stay a step ahead of a murderous albino monk named Silas (played by EM favorite and always excellent, Paul Bettany), and avoid getting trapped in a larger church conspiracy led by Dr. Octopus, ok that wasn't his name, Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina).

The cast was for the most part excellent, Bettany's Silas was a character that you actually sort of cared about, even though he was a killer, he wasn't really psychotic (well, maybe a little), just misguided and used by the people in the church.

Many say that the book, therefore the film, is anti-religious, I would have to argue with that. This film asks lots of interesting and intriguing questions about the nature of the divine and human and about the nature of faith. The film feels like it is anti-organized religion, but not against the idea of religion itself.

Ultimately the problem with The Da Vinci Code is that this isn't a film that is really meant for summer viewing and Ron Howard's directorial style is slow, meandering, and he can't direct action sequences.

There are times when this film, like Tom Hanks' hair, it laid there like a limp noodle. Is this film at times pretentious, overlong, and boring? God yes. There was a clear stopping point, but the film dragged on for another 35 minutes. I started mumbling to myself, when is the thing going to end? But it's also intriguing, suspenseful, and engrossing and got caught up with the mystery. I liked it well enough, that I'm actually going to read the book.

Final Grade B-

EM Review
by Michelle Alexandria
Originally Posted 5/19/06

United 93

2006-05-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

Director: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Lewis Alsamar, JJ Johnson, Trish Gates
Opens Fri., April 28

"It's time," are the first words we hear spoken aloud in Paul Greengrass' pulverizing United 93, which isn't just the best movie of the year so far, but has also grown in recent weeks into something of a cultural M-80. I've seen this film's trailer booed loudly in movie theaters, and been engaged in countless arguments with otherwise reasonable people who are nonetheless deeply offended by the very idea that such a film should even exist.

The sad truth of the matter is that over the last four and a half years, the events of 9/11 have already been so co-opted, vulgarized and exploited-particularly by a certain administration that shall remain nameless-it's hard to imagine a Hollywood movie, even if it turned out to be a tacky, lousy one, being much more than a drop in the bucket. Besides, I've always felt that however touchy, no subject should be considered off-limits for a film, just so long as the filmmakers approach their material with an appropriate level of integrity and respect.

You're not going to find a movie from a major studio with more integrity than United 93. Made with support of the victims' families, and hewing as close as possible to facts confirmed by the 9/11 commission report, the film isn't a cash-in. There's not an exploitative frame in the picture. It's also not an editorial, and it's most certainly not a Hollywood thriller.

United 93 is a fly-on-the-wall, cinema verite recreation of that awful day, shot in real-time with unfamiliar actors (some of them nonprofessionals) and jumpy hand-held cameras. The film takes place mainly in air-traffic control towers, as technicians try frantically to figure out what's happening, and only slowly does the full scale of the morning's mayhem become brutally, horribly clear. It's then that the focus shifts to that fabled flight, where a group of panicked, horrified passengers hastily try to fight back.

Writer/director Paul Greengrass began his career as a BBC documentarian, and hit it big in features with the lacerating 2002 Irish drama Bloody Sunday. Though he's best known to mass audiences for doing a bang-up job on The Bourne Supremacy-a rare summer action movie with a deadly serious moral gravity and dark understanding of the consequences of violence-United 93 is much more in the vein of Greengrass' previous film, utilizing his documentary instinct for observation, driven along by only the slightest, barely perceptible dramaturgical nudges.

As in Bloody Sunday, nothing here is staged for the benefit of the audience. We're not introduced to "characters," nor are we privy to any back-story, or really any information other than what's happening on-screen right at that moment. Any conversations are overheard in fragmented snippets, and the actors often trip over their pointedly inarticulate dialogue with unrehearsed freshness. (Even Todd Beamer's posthumously immortalized "Let's roll" is muttered under his breath, the line thrown away instead of pumped up into the action-hero catchphrase we were all secretly dreading.)

At no point during United 93 does it feel like you're watching a movie. It feels like you're there.

And being there, I'm not surprised to say, is a truly terrible, dreadful feeling. Greengrass understands that when you're dealing with material this incendiary, less is always more. There's no need to overdramatize, and he's often wise enough to let our own understanding of what's to come color the scenes we're watching. There's a remarkably poetic shot at the outset of 93's journey, casually regarding one of the terrorists sitting in his seat. Out of the tiny window we briefly glimpse the Twin Towers still intact-and as the plane moves forward they slowly, heartbreakingly drift out of view.

I don't begrudge anyone who wants to skip this film. We all have our own memories of that morning, feelings we hold dear. United 93 brings the sickened helplessness flooding back like it was yesterday; watching the film made me almost physically ill, and I still have no idea at what moment the tears started rolling down my face. Is there really any reason to go through this all again?

Maybe so.

Time and prevailing political winds have a way of embalming events like this one, and perhaps Greengrass has done us a service by presenting a matter-of-fact vision of that day, untempered by any ideology or Monday-morning quarterbacking. It's bracing to see the heroes of United 93 presented as regular folks forced to make quick decisions in an unfathomable situation, without the kind of comforting, flag-waving sentimentality that's usually par for the course in 9/11 memorials. The movie is as raw as an exposed nerve-which is exactly how it should be.

In other words, it's time.

MI III

2006-05-09T12:50:00.000-07:00

Cruise's latest 'Mission' is a pulse-pounder

Tom Cruise carries out a running theme in the new 'Mission: Impossible' sequel.
One StarOne StarOne Star

'Mission: Impossible III' Action thriller in which the team of gadget-conscious secret agents goes up against a savvy arms dealer. With Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne, Michelle Monaghan, Billy Crudup. Directed by J.J. Abrams (2:05). PG-13: Intense action violence. At area theaters starting tonight at 10.

Summer blockbuster season officially starts tonight with the opening of "Mission: Impossible III," a glossy, high-octane action thriller that asks the question on everyone's lips: Can Tom Cruise - oops, we mean undercover agent Ethan Hunt - pursue a high-stakes career and enjoy a normal family life at the same time?

The answer is murky, because as the movie (and Cruise's world-tour promotion of it following his daughter's birth) shows, the job usually comes first.

The movie opens with a grand slam that echoes director J.J. Abrams' work as creator of TV's "Alias" and "Lost." It's a heart-pounding countdown to doom, with Ethan in the "Marathon Man"-like hot seat, sweating out an interrogation. He has until the count of 10 before his new bride (Michelle Monaghan), bound and gagged in the chair opposite, is toast.

The gleeful toastmaster in this instance is played in excellent villain mode by Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose fleshy insolence complements Cruise's hard-bodied, full-boiling sense of determination.

After this appetite-whetter and the heart-pumping theme music by Lalo Schifrin, the movie backtracks to provide the setup: Ethan is barely able to enjoy his engagement party before being called back into the field by a fellow government operative (Billy Crudup, with weird hair). He tells his sweet, clueless honey that he's off on a business trip; as in "True Lies," she thinks her guy has a boring desk job.

"Trust me," pleads Ethan, and the poor girl does.

In the third installment of the franchise based on the gadget-heavy TV show, Ethan's mission, should he choose to accept it, is to save the planet from a super-duper arms deal that's going down amid so many jaw-dropping stunts that when he gets out the defibrillator, you hope it's for you, not the comely agent about to expire in his arms.

The supporting cast, including Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne and gorgeous Maggie Q, is underused, but the movie delivers the goods. At least we know now why Cruise was jumping on Oprah's couch - "M:i:III" calls upon him for frequent, Olympian bursts of aerobic activity. Mostly, he runs - although he does do some quick calculus equations while catching his breath.

The plot makes no sense, and the emotional pull of Ethan's relationship is negligible. But logic and humanity would probably gum up the (fire)works. The "Mission: Impossible" template is about being resourceful, using gadgets in interesting ways to infiltrate the Vatican or swing Tarzan-like over the rooftops of Shanghai. The pangs of love can't give these guys - or their target audience - the same adrenaline rush.

Originally published on May 4, 2006

RV

2006-05-04T16:52:00.000-07:00

RVStarring Robin Williams, Cheryl Hines, Jeff Daniels, Kristin Chenoweth, Jojo and Josh Hutcherson. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. Written by Geoff Rodkey. Produced by Bobby Cohen and Lucy Fisher. A Columbia release. Comedy. Rated PG for crude humor and language. Running time: 98 min.

Robin Williams and company get more mileage than one might expect out of the family comedy "RV." Williams plays Bob Munro, who finds that his family -- including wife Jamie (deliciously played by "Curb Your Enthusiasm's" Cheryl Hines), angst-ridden daughter Cassie ("Aquamarine's" Jojo) and wannabe bodybuilder son Carl ("Zathura's" Josh Hutcherson) -- has drifted apart in this cold, digital age of communication via instant messaging, cell phones and e-mail. Bob decides to alter their planned vacation to Hawaii for something a little more conducive to real bonding: a cross-country trip in a monstrous lime-green recreational vehicle.

What the rest of family doesn't know is that the whole trip is an excuse for Bob to save his job by driving to the site of a big company pitch meeting. Despite that one little hypocrisy, Bob truly pines for some family get-togetherness, thwarted first by his family's overt displeasure with replacing Hawaii with a big, obnoxious motor-home, and second by the Gornickes, a gritty, goofy family that lives in their RV all year round. Williams and Hines play it mostly straight, allowing the Gornickes (led by Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth) to grab most of the outrageous laughs as they constantly try to buddy up with them.

"RV" has some pacing issues and a few jokes with punchlines telegraphed weeks ago, but the strength of the performances and a troop of likable characters transform it from a film you merely wouldn't regret watching to one you'll actually enjoy. With sight gags for the kids (Williams covered in the vehicle's septic sewage) and jokes for the adults (trying to catch a Wi-Fi connection in the middle of the desert), "RV" is a textbook example of family entertainment. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it's a film everyone can see without feeling like they're doing someone else in the family a favor. - Matt Caracappa

Silent Hill

2006-04-28T16:30:00.000-07:00

Written by Roger Avary and directed by Christophe Gans, this adaptation of the hugely popular Silent Hill game starts out a suffocating fog of creepiness wrapped around a memorably malevolent child spirit, but squanders its meticulously established atmosphere on a lengthy climactic sequence that owes a significant debt of inspiration to Clive Barker's HELLRAISER movies. Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) is desperate to cure her daughter, Sharon (Jodelle Ferland), of nightmares and somnambulism, guided only by the words "Silent Hill," which the child wails in her sleep. When Rose discovers that there's a real Silent Hill, a ghost town in West Virginia — where she and her husband, Chris (Sean Bean), adopted Sharon — she decides to bring the girl face to face with her demons. And what demons they are! Where Rose expected nothing more than a deserted small town, she instead discovers a suffocating hell on earth where mine fires burn incessantly below the ground, fluffy ash falls like snow, and a pestilent darkness periodically transforms the landscape and unleashes hoards of deformed, bloodthirsty atrocities. Knocked unconscious while fleeing persistent police officer Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden) — and trying not to hit the small girl who appears suddenly on the dark, fog-shrouded road — Rose awakes in her car to find Sharon gone, the engine dead and her cell phone transmitting nothing but static. As she wanders the deserted streets of Silent Hill, a seething evil begins to reveal itself, and Rose gradually uncovers the town's dark secrets, rooted in the cult of witch hunters who unleashed a bitter evil 30 years earlier during a vicious "purification" ritual. Meanwhile, Chris and the local police chief (Kim Coates) join forces to search a Silent Hill that looks simultaneously like and unlike the one where Rose and Officer Bennett are trapped by menacing apparitions and hostile, degenerate cultists in thrall to a merciless creed rooted in the biblical admonition "though shalt not suffer a witch to live." "Silent Hill" is gaming anomaly, both because character and backstory are as important as action and because it's built around women — two fiercely protective mothers, Rose and a mysterious madwoman named Dahlia (Deborah Kara Unger), tough but empathetic Officer Bennett, fanatical cult leader Cristabella (Alice Krige) and little girl(s) lost Sharon and Alessa, her doppelganger. SILENT HILL runs out of story a good half hour before it runs out of spooky images, but it comes to a quietly chilling conclusion far more haunting than any bloody mayhem. --Maitland McDonagh

Scary Movie 4.

2006-04-18T19:34:00.000-07:00

'Scary' it's still here

Latest installment in the spoof series. With Craig Bierko, Anna Faris, Regina Hall. Directed by David Zucker (1:23).PG-13: Crude and sexual humor throughout, some comic violence and language. At area theaters.

The "Scary Movie" series wants to be for horror and sci-fi what "Forbidden Broadway" is for theater: an ever-updated spoof of the most recent season. Too bad so many of the movies it tackles are already so feeble they hardly need sending up - which means the "Scary" franchise is forever overstaying its welcome despite funny, good-spirited jabs at horror movies like "Saw" and at horrific pop-culture moments like Tom Cruise making mincemeat of Oprah Winfrey's couch.

David Zucker returns from "Scary Movie 3" to direct "4." The chief targets this time are "War of the Worlds," with versatile Craig Bierko as the irresponsible single father on the run from alien tripods, and "The Grudge," with Anna Faris playing against her sunny, all-American looks as a home-health aide in a haunted house.

There are plenty of chuckles at the expense of Dr. Phil, Shaquille O'Neal, Carmen Electra, Charlie Sheen and series stalwart Leslie Nielsen. But with no comic carryover from one skit to the next, true belly laughs are few and far between. There's only so much humor left to wring from the pup tent of "Brokeback Mountain" or the matted-hair fetish of the Japanese horror genre.

Lucky Number Slevin

2006-04-09T15:40:00.000-07:00

Lucy Liu and Josh Hartnett
Movie Info
STARRING
Josh Hartnett, Ben Kingsley, Morgan Freeman, Lucy Liu and Bruce Willis
DIRECTOR
Paul McGuigan
RATING
R
violence, language, sex, nudity, drugs
RUN TIME
110 minutes

Movie Review

By PHILIP WUNTCH / Staff Writer

Lucky Number Slevin is an odd but tasty duck.

Packed with wry one-liners and sly performances, the caper film defies you not to like it. It carries the smugness of a movie that's convinced of its own charm, some of which is borrowed from earlier films. Twelve years ago, Pulp Fiction's pop-culture references seemed spontaneous and clever. In Lucky Number Slevin, they seem forced.

For director Paul McGuigan, this mistaken-identity lark represents a distinct and happy departure from such morose dramas as The Reckoning and Wicker Park. Although boasting a high body count, Lucky Number Slevin is never morose.

The movie also boasts Josh Hartnett's most jovial performance. Mr. Hartnett's character of Slevin has little reason to feel jovial, but the actor registers a cockeyed optimist's sweet innocence.

When first seen, Slevin has had a bad day. He's lost his job. His apartment building has been condemned. His girlfriend's cheating on him. He heads for a friend's New York apartment, with no idea that he seeks haven in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For starters, he's mugged soon after landing. Worse, he faces the wrath of two bloodthirsty mob czars. Mistaken for his absent friend and unable to prove his true identity, the hapless Slevin is told that he owes large sums of money to both The Boss and The Rabbi.

The Boss (Morgan Freeman) and The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley) share a long, corpse-laden history and are now archrivals. Each enlists the bewildered but chipper Slevin as executioner for insubordinates and enemies.

Through it all, Slevin finds himself stalked by notorious hit man Mr. Goodkat (Bruce Willis) and grim Detective Brikowski (Stanley Tucci). Somewhat lightening his load is bouncy neighbor Lindsey (Lucy Liu), who's equipped with a lively wit and eager sex drive and may know more than she's telling.

The movie itself knows more than it's telling, too. It's a con game as well as a mystery-thriller-comedy. Everything is tied up tidily but not in the expected manner. Some audience members may cry foul while others will take the conning in the spirit meant.

The performances are largely first-rate. As mentioned, Mr. Hartnett shines as never before. Mr. Freeman and Mr. Kingsley reign as murderous monarchs of their respective crime families, and their scenes together set off sparks. Only Ms. Liu falters. She hasn't found a way to play relentless perkiness without grating on the nerves.

Lucky Number Slevin is good, deadpan fun. Sometimes it's even as good as it thinks it is.

Ice Age: The Meltdown

2006-04-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

20th Century Fox

Diego (Denis Leary) and Sid (John Leguizamo)
Movie Info
STARRING
With the voices of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary and Queen Latifah
DIRECTOR
Carlos Saldanha
RATING
PG
mild language, sexual innuendo, body humor
RUN TIME
89 minutes

Movie Review

By CHRIS VOGNAR / Staff Writer

The big-bucks computer-animated jungle is ruled by two divergent strategies. One appeals to adults by emphasizing story and character as much as gags and set pieces. Think Pixar. The other squeezes by on charm and hipster jokes. Think Chicken Little, then let it drift from your mind immediately.

The Ice Age movies fall somewhere between these polar opposites. They're not disposable but not particularly memorable. They're cute and clever, if not dazzlingly smart. They work best in pieces, as series of vignettes that come and go as pleasant diversions.

But the second leg of the franchise, Ice Age: The Meltdown, has one big edge over the first chapter. The animation is infinitely better, from the expressiveness of the characters' eyes to the texture and detail of the arctic backdrops. Execution can go a long way in this kind of movie; it helps you focus on the screen when the material gets pedestrian. So even when Meltdown melts down, it's still fun to look at.

It also scores by ditching the well-coifed humans of the original in favor of the prehistoric critters that get the kids into the theater. The principals – Manny the mammoth (Ray Romano), Sid the sloth (a slurring John Leguizamo) and Diego the saber-tooth tiger (a mellowed Denis Leary) – are all back and desperately scrambling to stay ahead of the floodwaters created by melting ice caps. Global warming: Even back then, it was a bummer.

Fans of the first movie will be happy to welcome back Scrat, the long-nosed, sharp-toothed squirrel-type thing who continues his Sisyphus-like quest to savor an acorn. The Scrat episodes play like short films unto themselves; he was the star of the original Ice Age trailer, and he gets the biggest laughs of both movies without uttering a word. The basic math: determined, contortionist critter + lots of ice and predators = funny.

The sequel is missing some of the original's tension, mostly because Diego is now a confirmed good guy whose biggest problem is that he can't swim (admittedly an issue when flood waters are closing in).

The crux of Meltdown's drama and comedy is Manny's discovery of a female mammoth (voiced by the very busy Queen Latifah) who thinks she's a possum. The relationship creates occasion for an amusing debate on the sexual politics of species saving. It seems that foreplay is a plus even when extinction is a distinct possibility.

Meltdown seems padded, even at just under 90 minutes. As much as you like the Scrat sequences, they start to feel like filler, the kind of thing used to stretch a movie to feature length.

You're best off sitting back and soaking in the sights, including a buzzard musical number that pays quick homage to Busby Berkeley and an assortment of animals that combine the features of humans and present-day and prehistoric beasts. Although the bucktoothed turtles are kinda creepy.

THE SHAGGY DOG.

2006-03-24T13:49:00.000-08:00

Tim Allen just dogging it

Tim Allen (r.) & Robert Downey Jr. in 'The Shaggy Dog'
One StarOne Star

THE SHAGGY DOG. With Tim Allen, Robert Downey Jr., Kristin Davis, Danny Glover.Director: Brian Robbins (1:38).PG: Mild rude humor.

Watching a pack of dogs sniff Tim Allen's butt - repeatedly - is probably someone's idea of a good time at the movies. Not mine.

In "The Shaggy Dog," a wan remake of Disney's 1959 live-action chestnut, Allen plays a prosecutor who falls prey to the kind of genetic testing on animals that he has been trying to disprove in a high-profile court case. A dog bite makes him turn canine when he least expects it.

First he's scratching behind his ear. Then he's growling at witnesses as he cross-examines them. When someone throws a stick or a Frisbee, he can't help himself.

There's no logic to it, but occasionally he morphs into an actual dog - the movie is lazy about showing the transition and the story doesn't really explain why he wakes up human again after a nap.

When workaholic Dave Douglas (Allen) is in dog mode, his family doesn't recognize him - metaphor alert! - but they like him better. The neighborhood dogs aren't so easily fooled. They all say hello the doggie way - a joke of which director Brian Robbins never tires.

In casting heaven, the shaggy man-dog would have been played by Robert Downey Jr., who instead is underused here as a cunning corporate mastermind who injects animals with the DNA of a spectacularly robust sheepdog. The resulting serum could someday make humans immortal but, in the early testing stages, it's only giving them fleas.

There are some fine humans supporting the animals, including Danny Glover, Kristin Davis and Jane Curtin, as a no-nonsense judge. Child actor Spencer Breslin holds his own as Dave's neglected son.

There are many delightful movie techniques out there available for making animals appear to speak, so it's too bad "The Shaggy Dog" doesn't use any of them. The small special-effects budget went toward creating such distracting crossbreeds as a frog with the head of a bulldog and a snake with a wagging tail.

But when Dave turns into a sheepdog, we hear Allen's voice-over for a dog whose lips don't move like Babe the Pig's. His canine alter ego isn't a character, just a prop for voice-over narration. You get the nagging feeling that Allen put in a week on the set, then recited the rest of his lines into a microphone and went home, tail between his legs.

V FOR VENDETTA

2006-03-20T21:24:00.000-08:00

Not letter-perfect, but fun

Latest H'wood Buzz: Natalie Portman
V FOR VENDETTA. With Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt. Director: James McTeigue (2:12).R: Strong violence, language.

You wouldn't think a movie character hiding behind an immobile smiley face would be as fascinating as, say, Jason in his hockey mask or Zorro in those sexy raccoon eyes. But Hugo Weaving, weaving deftly beneath a fixed plastic grin and Prince Valiant wig as the mysterious avenger in "V for Vendetta," both chills and amuses throughout this enjoyable - if occasionally irresponsible - comic-book thriller.

Even if the mask wears out its welcome, there's always Natalie Portman giving a fiery performance as Evey, a nice girl who turns political activist after V saves her from some dark-alley nastiness. Portman joins a select group of actresses (Sigourney Weaver, for one) who look just as sexy with their heads shaved.

V patterns himself after Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up the English Parliament in 1605. Fawkes has no resonance this side of the pond, but the Wachowski brothers, who adapted Alan Moore's graphic novel for the screen, reconfigured the futuristic, Orwellian England of the comic book into something that feels more like an allegory for the present-day United States. That's partly why Moore has washed his hands of the film, directed by the Wachowskis' "Matrix" collaborator James McTeigue.

In the world of "V for Vendetta," politics is all about spin, delivered by John Hurt as an emperor under a perpetual black cloud. A Bill O'Reilly-like pundit foams at the mouth while public (and even private) dissent is crushed. High culture is forbidden, civil liberties are under siege.

Weaving (Agent Smith in the "Matrix" movies) uses physical agility to compensate for facial expression as the scarred, tormented V. The character is clearly an intellectual. But he's also a madman, and this boldly stylish movie lets the audience disapprove of him even as it's drawn to him, an unusual twist for a story that offers Philosophy Lite along with some stellar action.

With able support from Stephen Rea as a reluctant detective, the movie raises uncomfortable questions about power and rebellion. Though you're initially inclined to side with V against the fascist gloom that has settled on London like radioactive dust, a lot has happened since Moore and illustrator David Lloyd wrote their comic book. The movie's release was moved back after the London Underground bombings. Today, one person's idea of social liberation through symbolic fireworks is another person's suicide bombing.

The Hills Have Eyes

2006-03-18T19:03:00.000-08:00

Randy Cordova
The Arizona Republic

There are a couple of things worth noting about The Hills Have Eyes.

First, splatter-movie buffs will love it as hillbilly cannibals terrorize a family stranded in the New Mexico desert.

The second thing: Your average moviegoer should stay far away, unless he has a strong stomach and a secret subscription to Fangoria magazine.

The gore runs deep here, with axes thrust into faces, fingers lopped off and one fellow's head blown off in a gleeful close-up. And that's not even mentioning the scene in which a little flagpole becomes a deadly weapon when shoved through someone's skull.

All the blood and guts - guts indeed are seen on-screen - splash across the landscape in this no-holds-barred remake of Wes Craven's 1977 drive-in favorite. Craven produces, but directorial chores are handled by Alexandre Aja, who helmed last year's delightfully nightmarish High Tension.

Aja again directs with a masterly hand, creating a tense, jittery atmosphere that grabs viewers from the beginning. The film presents the Carter clan, traveling to San Diego with a lumbering Airstream trailer, two dogs and an infant grandchild in tow.

Dad Bob (Ted Levine of TV's Monk) opts for a shortcut that takes the family far from the main highway. That's the family's first big blunder. The next comes when Bob and son-in-law Doug (Aaron Stanford of X2) head off into the desert in separate directions after their car is sabotaged by the cannibals.

Before you can say, "Watch the baby!" the clan is thinning faster than Matt Lauer's hairline. Not content to be the side dish alongside eggs and Canadian bacon (no doubt made from real Canadians), the ravaged Carters fight back in flashy Straw Dogs fashion. They even booby-trap the trailer, in a rattling scene that provides all the requisite thrills.

Aja creates an ominous sense of dread, with the isolated desert setting perfect for bloody good fun. He also has plenty of tricks up his ghoulish sleeve and delights in jolting the audience whenever possible.

The film has an unpredictable quality that keeps viewers unnerved. For instance, it's usually easy to guess in these movies which cast members are going to get it first. All bets are off here, as the characters' screen time has little relation to their chances of survival.

Equally surprising is the gruesome makeup work, which makes the mutant cannibals creepy and frighteningly believable. It's probably sufficient to note that one of the desert freaks is billed as "Big Brain" and that the moniker has nothing to do with his intellect.

Failure to Launch

2006-03-15T15:02:00.000-08:00

By Carina Chocano, Times Staff Writer

Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker look and act, quite attractively, like grown-ups, and their easy rapport makes them convincing and appealing as an on-screen couple. So all throughout "Failure to Launch," I found myself wishing they were in a different movie, maybe one as sophisticated as "The Philadelphia Story," which the movie references, but doesn't remotely live up to.

The premise requires that we accept the rakish McConaughey as a luxury boat salesman who still lives with his parents, played by an underused Kathy Bates, looking as if she's not quite sure what she's doing in the movie, and NFL commentator Terry Bradshaw. It might have worked had Tripp, McConaughey's character, been drawn as a lazy charmer, with no compunction about mooching off his parents for the rest of his life. Instead, this being paint-by-numbers romantic comedy, he is given a back story with a big, sympathy-grabbing explanation embedded in its chewy center.

ADVERTISEMENT
Parker plays Paula, a "transition consultant" hired by Tripp's parents to lure him out of the nest. Having pinpointed the problem — which in the world of the movie, is epidemic — to lack of self-esteem, Paula has developed a technique whereby she coaxes the apron-bound thirtysomethings into bonding with her and moving on. (She pulls it off without sex, the minx, and nobody seems to mind.) What happens when the newly bonded former mama's boys find themselves ignominiously dumped after the job is over is never addressed. Like Tripp, she is given a rudimentary single-issue back story, and otherwise left to fend for herself. More than a character, she's a stand-in for the soon-to-be upended status quo: Business is smooth sailing until Paula gets Tripped.

I suppose that once a character as thin as this has made it all the way to the screen, it's pointless to call attention to the other areas in which she rings hollow. But what can you do? Paula shares a large suburban house with a roommate, Kit (Zooey Deschanel), who looks and acts 15 years her junior. Although this comes as no surprise — Deschanel is, after all, 15 years Parker's junior — it raises questions the movie doesn't really intend to raise: Namely, why are these two friends, and why are they living together? Deschanel is charming and quirky as the sullen twentysomething, but she's given nothing to do other than obsess over a mockingbird that's driving her crazy. She eventually falls for Ace (Justin Bartha), one of Tripp's best friends who, like their other friend Demo (Bradley Cooper), still lives at home as well. (As with Deschanel and Parker, the boys are far too young to appear credibly as McConaughey's friends and peers.)

Had it been at all developed, Deschanel's character might have warranted a movie of her own. Not that it seems likely we'll see a comedy centered around a surly 25-year-old girl anytime soon. The studios' attitude toward women, young ones in particular, is unstintingly grim. But "Failure to Launch" is a good example of the industry's low regard for young men too. As if to compensate for the love story, the movie is peppered with teen-movie comedy cribbed from films like "There's Something About Mary."

This seems to be a trend in comedies — movies with premises that promise comedic insight into the way we live now, and then assiduously avoid mining their interesting, culturally specific and infinitely humor-rich subjects. Rather than take an organic and timely premise — the phenomenon of youngish adults returning home in their 20s and 30s — the movie casts around wildly for comic set-pieces, coming up with things like aggressive chipmunks, hostile dolphins and a dad who longs to be naked at all times. It's not exactly that the audience's intelligence is underestimated, it's that their relevance is.

You don't have to be smart, after all, to connect to a comedy about a guy who has messed up his short foray into adulthood to the point that he has to revert to childhood; or to root for the girl who loves him against her better judgment. But when it comes to romantic comedies, studios seem inexplicably hamstrung by a host of conflicting received notions and biases that they combine and recombine to similarly unsuccessful effect in movie after movie.

It's enough to make you think that Hollywood is run by the world's last and most dedicated but least inspired alchemists, sealed off in primitive laboratories, doggedly trying to turn lead into gold.

MPAA rating: PG-13 for sexual content, partial nudity and language.

`16 Blocks'

2006-03-08T12:25:00.000-08:00

By Allison Benedikt
Tribune staff reporter

A friend e-mailed recently with a simple request: Explain the success of "24." "What's it all about?" he asked earnestly of the hit Fox TV show. "And who cares if it's a day instead of lots of days?"

This friend would not like "16 Blocks," the new, real time-ish Bruce Willis action pic (the movie's 97 minutes, the plot 118) that reimagines the ingenious never-ending day device as a never-ending morning. Jack Bauer, meet Jack Mosley.

A professional drunk and bitter soul, NYPD detective Mosley (Willis) is all washed up, biding time until retirement with a bottle of scotch as his trusty partner. Hung over at 8:02 a.m., Mosley is assigned to transport the Chatty Cathy petty convict Eddie Bunker (Mos Def) from jailhouse to courthouse, where he is scheduled to testify in front of a grand jury by 10 a.m. It's a distance of 17 blocks.

Kidding.

What sounds like a simple task--a one-pint job, you might say--turns into a movie plot reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's "The Gauntlet": Bad guys with guns try to shoot Eddie, who is actually scheduled to snitch on some dirty cops, a.k.a. the bad guys with guns, including Jack's former partner Frank (David Morse).

Spurred to action by the sheer injustice of it all, Jack moves heaven and earth to get Eddie to the courthouse on time, and "16 Blocks" becomes, as only the marketing guys can compose with a straight face, "the story of how two men change--and change each other--during a tense 16-block struggle between life and death."

Filmed primarily in Toronto, director Richard Donner's lower Manhattan has more unlocked doors than taxis, so instead of hailing a cab, Jack and Eddie spend much of the movie ducking into random buildings, evading Frank for a few minutes of dialogue, then running and ducking again.

Def does most of the talking. As written by Richard Wenk, Eddie is a verbal savant, unable to control his own nasally chatter in even the most dangerous scenarios. The incessant chatter is annoying for the viewer, but worse, it's degrading for Def, whose evident talent is all but wasted on a script that manages to combine the wise black sidekick and the shifty ghetto kid into one condescending role.

Willis is more suited to his part. Though he's not exactly Serpico, it's about time the over-50 action hero acts his age, and he wears the mustache and gut convincingly. But he never develops a rapport with Def, and in the end it's not the predictable action but this lack of chemistry and camaraderie that sinks "16 Blocks," a surprise considering that Donner's directing credits include "Lethal Weapons" 1-4.

Then again, how close can two guys get in a morning? Next time, "16 Blocks: The Sleepover."

abenedikt@tribune.com

----
Directed by Richard Donner; written by Richard Wenk; photographed by Glen MacPherson; edited by Steven Mirkovich; production designed by Arv Greywal; music by Klaus Badelt; produced by Avi Lerner, Randall Emmett, John Thompson, Arnold Rifkin and Jim Van Wyck. A Warner Bros. Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:37. MPAA rating: PG-13 (violence, intense sequences of action, and some strong language).

Jack Mosley - Bruce Willis

Eddie Bunker - Mos Def

Frank Nugent - David Morse

'Date Movie'

2006-03-04T11:21:00.000-08:00

*This date sputters as a spoof.

By Carina Chocano, Times Staff Writer

It won't come as much of a surprise to learn that "Date Movie," which Fox declined to screen in advance for critics, doesn't play well in the theater — at least not on a Friday morning in Glendale with three people in the audience. Maybe if the theater had been packed with freshly concussed, oxygen-deprived teens on drugs, the scene might have been slightly less funereal. But I doubt it. The teens would have had to be conversant in every rom-com and vomedy produced since 1989 to get the full effect, and it seems unlikely you could gather all those characteristics in a single kid.

Directed by Aaron Seltzer and written by Jason Friedberg & Seltzer, who wrote "Scary Movie," "Date Movie" stars poor, plucky Alyson Hannigan as a Bridget Jones/Nia Vardalos type in Gwyneth Paltrow's fat suit from "Shallow Hal." At her black-Indian-Japanese-Jewish-Greek family diner, she meets and falls in love with a Hugh Grant type (Adam Campbell) called — you'll never guess what — Grant Fonckyerdoder.

After a visit to Hitch, the date doctor, and a "Pimp My Ride"-style makeover and liposuction session, she and Grant get together on "The Bachelor" and slog through a string of references to "The Wedding Planner," "Meet the Parents," "Meet the Fockers," "My Best Friend's Wedding" and that commercial where Paris Hilton seduces a hamburger, then eats it.

But, dudes, does a spoof count as a spoof if it's dumber and more obvious than the thing it's spoofing? (Like, what would happen if the toilet-using cat from "Meet the Parents" really, really had to go?) The only thing remotely resembling parody in this depressing waste of time and money is Jennifer Coolidge's sendup of Barbra Streisand as an over-the-top string of Jewish mother clichés.

She's the only remotely likable thing about the film — that and the generic straightforwardness of the title. But they should have been more honest. They should have called it "Flop."

MPAA rating: PG-13 for continuous crude and sexual humor, including language

Madea's Family Reunion

2006-03-01T20:42:00.000-08:00

Smoother, smarter, funnier
By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

No question, Tyler Perry knows what he's doing, and he's doing it better with each movie.

"Madea's Family Reunion" is a huge improvement over his debut theatrical feature "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" — which was directed by Darren Grant. But it's not just Perry taking over the director's chair that makes the difference. The writing and the acting are better, too.
Lions Gate Releasing

'Madea's Family Reunion'

B

The verdict: Much better than the first Madea movie and often hilarious.

Director: Tyler Perry
Starring: Tyler Perry, Blair Underwood, Lynn Whitfield, Boris Kodjoe, Henry Simmons
Run time: 107 minutes
Release date: Feb. 24, 2006
Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material, domestic violence, sex and drug references.
See showtimes

Behind the scenes
• Tyler Perry's appeal is universal.
• Being 'baaad' is so good.

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime
Rate 'Madea's Family Reunion'
Go see it
Make it a matinee
Wait to rent
Don't bother

Voter Limit: Once per Hour
View Poll Results

Like the first picture, "Family Reunion" is adapted from one of Perry's stage plays, which have earned him millions. But the new movie, also filmed mainly in metro Atlanta, is smoother, smarter, funnier.

It's still, it should be noted, a Madea movie. Meaning: Expect the outlandish characters, the farcical story lines intermingled with the more serious ones, and the playing-to-the-third-balcony style. Also, Perry shares an agenda with Bill Cosby and Spike Lee: He wants young African-Americans to take responsibility for themselves. He has no patience for drugs, careless sex, guns, fists, sexually provocative behavior, or blaming everyone else for what you're doing to yourself. His lesson is imparted by no less an icon than Cicely Tyson who, along with poet Maya Angelou, makes a cameo appearance in the film.

Perry reprises his drag role as Mable "Madea" Simmons, a no-nonsense, pistol-packing granny who speaks her mind whenever she feels like it. Which is quite often. And, yes, there is a family reunion. But first there are a lot of family problems before the fried chicken's put on the picnic table.

Beautiful Lisa (Rochelle Aytes) is engaged to handsome, wealthy Carlos (Blair Underwood). He's the kind of man who gives her everything: jewels, flowers, welts, bruises. She wants to call the wedding off, but her scheming, selfish, social-climbing mother Victoria (Lynn Whitfield) won't hear of it. "You must stop doing whatever you're doing to make him angry," is her helpful suggestion.

Difficult advice to follow when something as innocuous as a yawn can set him off.

Lisa's half sister Vanessa (Lisa Arrindell Anderson) is a pretty single mom whose romantic bad luck has made her wary of men. Even a man as nice and good-looking as Brian (Boris Kodjoe), a friendly bus driver who keeps asking her for a date.

At home, it's business as usual, with Madea constantly squabbling with her dotty, gaseous brother, Uncle Joe (Perry in old-age makeup). But there's a new addition: Nikki (Keke Palmer), a tough preteen runaway the court has ordered a very reluctant Madea to take in. The kid thinks she's got things under control until she gets a dose of Madea's tough-love tactics.

"Family Reunion" can be overly preachy and undeniably mushy, but Perry has such a firm hand on the pulse of his audience, it hardly matters. Plus, the movie is often laugh-out-loud funny. In fact, if the film has a flaw, it's that it could use more Madea. When she's off-screen, things aren't as lively.

Atlanta looks terrific. Perry has a gift for showcasing our city, for making it look like the jazziest, most romantic place imaginable. The Chamber of Commerce really should hire him.

And when the picture's over, be sure to stick around for the closing credits and more Madea madness.

Eight Below

2006-02-22T20:41:00.000-08:00

Gorgeous dogs, but the plot is pure mush

By AMY BIANCOLLI
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

The dogs are gorgeous. The cinematography is dazzling. The polar setting wows. The blinding vistas, the windswept ridges, the strange, rococo architectures built from snow and shadow — all spectacular.

As for the rest of Eight Below, a programmatic Disney tear-jerker about eight Antarctic sled animals and the man who loves them — well, as I said, the dogs are gorgeous. You'll care about them. You might even shed a tear for them, though you're forgiven if you don't: It's no reflection on you, your deficits as a human being or your insufficient fondness for pets, just the lack of a mindful plot.

Basically, what we have here is a stranded-animal movie in which the stranded animals are forced to split screen time with a mopey human character and his annoying, redundant friends. This makes about as much cinematic sense as remaking Homeward Bound from the pet owners' perspective, or casting Tom Cruise as the lead in an action flick and then cutting away to scenes of his worried mother.

In fairness, Eight Below gets off to a thrilling and adventuresome start. The setting is a research base in Antarctica, where expedition guide Gerry — get this — Shepherd (Paul Walker) learns he has to lead Dr. Davis McClaren (Bruce Greenwood) on a quest for a unique Mercurian meteorite lodged somewhere in the rime along Mount Melbourne. But it's late January, and the ice is thin, and after huffing about the dangers, Gerry determines that they'll have to take a sled.

Cue the dogs: old guy Jack, "best girl" Maya, new boy Max, plus Dewey, Truman, Shadow, Shorty and Buck. These intrepid eight pull Gerry and Davis to their destination, where Davis finds his hunk of rock and Gerry huffs some more about the dangers. A massive storm gathers. Davis falls through the ice. The dogs schlep him back, only to be stranded when the entire human population evacuates Antarctica. Gerry returns to the United States but can't shake his guilt over the dogs. Days, weeks, months pass as the animals fend for themselves in the icy underworld. Gerry agonizes. Gerry aches. Gerry, his friends say, get a grip.

All this amounts to too much Gerry. One of the movie's disappointments is its failure to flesh out its canine heroes, not with anthropomorphic touch-ups but in the natural, gradual manner of animals under patient observation. The movie offers this in small doses, but too few dogs show distinct personalities; just as we're getting a read on one of them, it spirits away to check up on moody brooding Gerry.

Walker is cute and all, and he has glittering blue eyes and all, and when he's doing his moody brooding thing in a tricked-out sports coupe, I kind of like him. But frankly? When he's co-starring with huskies? I don't give a single flying mush about Paul Walker. Get out of the movie, boy. Shoo.

Directed by Frank Marshall, whose previous exotic stomping grounds include the Andes, the Congo and the Moon, Eight Below is based loosely on a true story (told first in a 1983 Japanese film, Nankyoku Monogatari), but it doesn't bear close scrutiny.

And even on its own, purely emotional terms, the ending fails to satisfy: One prominent character is left out in the cold. Either key footage was lopped in edits, or screenwriter David DiGilio brazenly ignored the ravenous psychotherapeutic cravings of audiences weaned on Old Yeller. Surely he realized we need catharsis.

But hey. Did I mention the dogs are gorgeous?

When a Stranger Calls

2006-02-08T13:57:00.000-08:00

Not so much a remake of 1979's "When a Stranger Calls" as it is a remake of the first 20 minutes of 1979's "When a Stranger Calls," 2006's "When a Stranger Calls" is simply and succinctly one of the most inept, inert, and resoundingly unwatchable "horror" movies of the past few years. And keep in mind that the past few years have included remakes like "The Fog," "House of Wax," and "The Amityville Horror." And a dozen more you're now embarrassed to admit you paid to see.

"A girl wanders around a house, stopping only occasionally to answer a phone. Usually the call is coming from someone creepy."

There's your first 50-some minutes of When a Stranger Calls, and if you think I'm kidding, be sure to rent the thing one day and be sure to stay away from heavy machinery. This flick is the Nyquil of the PG-13 horror genre.

Jill's a babysitter in a bizarrely huge and arcanely contorted neo-mansion, and she's a girl who gets a whole lot of phone calls. After fielding call after call from a clearly deranged individual, she begins to realize that her harasser has easy access to the house. The amazingly clueless cops offer no assistance whatsoever, while a variety of blink & you miss 'em background characters populate the periphery and add absolutely nothing to the flick besides running time.

Hallway wander, ring, hallway wander, ring, and on and on it goes. Fake scares and shrieking strains of musical score occasionally punctuate the tedium, but those moments exist only to wake you up and annoy you. Pay close attention to the movie and you'll find yourself perpetually reminded of the Scream and Scary Movie series -- mainly because those flicks tweaked, satirized, and lampooned this one-note junk out of existence. (Or at least we thought it did...)

Strangely, nobody over at Sony Screen Gems bothered to remind director Simon West and screenwriter Jake Wade Wall that in order to stretch a 20-minute sequence into feature-length form -- you need to do a whole lot more than amp up the hallway wanderings and dole out a few "omg it was the CAT" pseudo-jolts.

Stylistically stillborn, narratively retarded, and intent on beating its one and only concept into the dirt with merciless monotony, When a Stranger Calls is a perfect example of why so many horror remakes get made these days: All you need is a semi-familiar title and enough of a "hook" to fit into a 2-minute trailer, and you're all but guaranteed a huge opening weekend from the 15-year-olds who, frankly, will go see any damn movie if it means they can hang out with their friends for a few hours.

This thing is a movie like static is a song.

Big Momma's House 2

2006-02-04T21:06:00.000-08:00

Kathy Cano Murillo
The Arizona Republic
Jan. 27, 2006 12:00 AM

There's only one reason to buy a ticket to Big Momma's House 2: Martin Lawrence in drag in a fat suit.

Don't expect a morsel more of substance or wit. We're delivered a sloppy serving of outrageous Big Momma skits, linked by an absurd plot about greedy villains and a wealthy but loveless family. Remove the padding and the gag is kaput. Lawrence, aware of that, tries to milk maximum chuckles from his rubberized alter ego.

The story picks up where the 2000 comedy left off, with Lawrence as FBI agent Malcolm Turner, who's expecting a baby with wife Sherry (Nia Long). To calm her nerves, he trades his undercover assignment for a job as a school safety officer, dressed in a ridiculous eagle costume.

Then Malcolm overhears his superiors discussing a national-security breach involving a missing computer disc. Knowing they need a "man" inside, Malcolm breaks out his Big Momma costume and is hired by the suspect's stuffy wife (Emily Procter) to care for the couple's three neglected children.

Aside from the inane plot, Big Momma's House 2 is a dish of empty calories. We're supposed to admire the relationship between the lonely kids and the lessons they learn from their impostor nanny. That's difficult when Malcolm ignores his stepson and very pregnant wife. Long, who co-starred in the first film and gave it a dash of class, has a few throwaway scenes in this one.

Then there are the fat-lady jokes. You'll chortle as Big Momma jiggles the junk in her trunk in a swimsuit, as a cheerleader and naked at a hoity-toity spa. It's predictable fifth-grade humor, but Lawrence's comic timing makes it tolerable.

Big Momma's House 2 is lowbrow fun but contains bitter moments, especially for younger children. For example, a toddler climbs on things and face-plants on the floor. It's a semi-amusing stunt the first time, but by the third go-round, it's disturbing. In addition, an adorable Chihuahua is given bowls of tequila.

So unless you crave a second helping of Big Momma, exercise your willpower and see something else.

Hoodwinked

2006-01-27T16:48:00.000-08:00

BY STEPHEN WHITTY
Star-Ledger Staff

(PG) Weinstein Company (95 min.)

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a screenwriter living in a magical place called Hollywood. And one day the screenwriter ran out of ideas. How was he going to keep the big bad wolf from the door now? How was he going to take care of his three little potbellied pigs, or pay the mortgage on his split-level, expanded-ranch castle?

The answer was Grimm.

Since that day, we've seen countless retellings of fairy stories, some straightforward ("Ever After," with a pre-Angels Drew Barrymore), some sarcastic (two full films of "Shrek," with another on the way), some underrated (the hard-working "Ella Enchanted") and some simply bad (the Hilary Duff "A Cinderella Story.")

"Hoodwinked," a CGI cartoon, is the latest. And it's one too many.

The inspiration is both the Little Red Riding Hood story and "Rashomon"; woodland police, arriving in the nick of time, are determined to find out exactly what crime almost occurred here. A smooth frog quickly takes charge of the interrogations; one by one, Red, Grandma, the Wolf and the Woodsman tell their stories.

Bit by bit, we fall asleep.

At this point in the funky-fairy-tale genre, it's important to have some sort of idea beyond the obvious; filmmakers Cory Edwards, Todd Edwards and Tony Leech don't, really, beyond the fractured storytelling. The songs -- apart from one crazy bluegrass number sung by Benjy Gaither, as a goat -- are all forgettable. The jokes are already several years out of date, tired cracks about gone-to-video movies like "The Matrix," "XXX" and even "Saturday Night Fever."

It's not that there isn't some talent on display here. Red has the cute clay look of a refugee from "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," and Anne Hathaway -- who, after "Brokeback Mountain," can probably see this as her farewell to a genre that encompassed two "Princess Diaries" as well as "Ella Enchanted" -- voices her with spirit and a sweet soprano. Patrick Warburton provides a few smiles as the Wolf, and the manic Andy Dick makes for a very peculiar rabbit.

But that's all there is here, and after so many versions of this story, that's not really enough. The CGI animation is, apart from Red, pretty ugly. The jokes aren't sophisticated enough for adults, or rapid enough for children. And the final scene, promising a sequel, is the saddest of all. If nothing else, "Hoodwinked" proves it's time to give the updated-fairy-tale genre a rest.

And then maybe we can all live happily ever after.

Underworld: Evolution

2006-01-23T16:45:00.000-08:00

Kate Beckinsale and her hybrid cohorts go running for the king of vampires.
Jan. 23, 2006

By Frank Scheck

Bottom line: You can put a stake in its heart, but this horror franchise probably won't die.
NEW YORK -- The scariest thing about "Underworld: Evolution" is its audience.

At the first show on opening day at New York's Loews Cineplex E-Walk (there were, naturally, no advance press screenings), a good percentage of the audience walked out shortly before the conclusion. It's not that they were visibly unhappy with the film, but rather because they were reasonably sure, having seen the chief villain get obliterated in the climactic fight scene, that there would be no more viscera on display.

Fortunately, they had plenty of bloodshed to satisfy them in the preceding reels because, like its predecessor, this tale of vampires and werewolves is a fairly nonstop melange of gore and violence. Opening-weekend grosses look to be substantial, especially considering the lack of new competition.

Besides the aforementioned carnage, no doubt the chief draw for fans is the ever-satisfying sight of Kate Beckinsale, as the vampire Selene, clad in the tightest form-fitting black latex imaginable.

Those with higher artistic tastes can enjoy -- or regret, depending upon their inclination -- the presence of such esteemed British actors as Bill Nighy (virtually unrecognizable) and Derek Jacobi in smaller roles.

The plot, or as much of it as can be determined, revolves around Selene and her hybrid cohort Michael (Scott Speedman) teaming up to battle the evil Marcus (Tony Curran), the king of the vampires, who is determined to free his werewolf brother William (Brian Steele) and take over the world. Much mayhem ensues.

Repeating their chores from the original, director Len Wiseman and screenwriter Danny McBride at least succeed in establishing a dark gothic mood.

Unfortunately, there's little wit or genuine suspense to elevate the proceedings above the level of a cheesy comic book. Considering the success of the first installment, one might have hoped that the creators would have taken the opportunity to provide the audience with something more than just a steady stream of ultraviolent action set pieces.

Tedium sets in early, with the repeated firing of automatic weaponry not doing much to raise the audience from their stupor. Beckinsale looks quite fetching reprising her trademark dual gun firing pose -- hell, she even looks great when half of her face is nearly burned off after exposure to the sun -- but her performance is ultimately as monochromatic as the visuals.

Underworld: Evolution
Screen Gems
A Screen Gems and Lakeshore Entertainment presentation of a Lakeshore Entertainment production
Credits:
Director: Len Wiseman
Screenwriter: Danny McBride
Producers: Tom Rosenberg, Garry Lucchesi, David Coatsworth, Richard Wright
Executive producers: Skip Williamson, Henry Winterstern, Terry A. McKay, Len Wiseman, Danny McBride, James McQuade
Director of photography: Simon Duggan
Production and creature designer: Patrick Tatopoulos
Editor: Nicolas De Toth
Costume designer: Wendy Partidge
Music: Marco Beltrami
Cast:
Selene: Kate Beckinsale
Michael: Scott Speedman
Marcus: Tony Curran
Corvinus: Sir Derek Jacobi
Viktor: Bill Nighy
Tanis: Steven Mackinstosh
Kraven: Shane Brolly
William: Brian Steele
MPAA rating R
Running time -- 106 minutes

2006-01-18T12:25:00.000-08:00

Director: James Gartner
Cast: Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Austin Nichols, Evan Jones, Emily Deschanel
Screen Writer: Bettina Gilois, Gregory Allen Howard, Marc Hyman, Christopher Cleveland
Music Score: Trevor Rabin
Release Date: 1/13/2006
URL: http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/gloryroad/
Genre: Sports
Genre: Drama

By Steve Schneider

If the prospect of another reality-based Disney sports drama makes you want to pull your fingernails out with pliers, you'll be pleasantly surprised by this bio of the 1966 Texas Western Miners, the first college basketball team to win an NCAA championship with a starting lineup of "Negro" players. Not shying away from its full historical context, the movie puts that other N-word on the table good and early, followed by scenes of the pioneering players suffering restroom beatings and having their lodgings defiled by the KKK. This is as much a civil-rights drama as a sports story, and the commitment to believability is felt in the interaction between the black and white teammates, whose path to total comradeship is more complicated than merely learning to appreciate each other's cute little music. The writing is blunt and obvious in places – at the end of the day, it's still a Disney movie – but the sentiments are genuine and the performances reek of pathos. (PG)

HOSTEL

2006-01-16T12:04:00.000-08:00

HostelStarring Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Eythor Gudjonsson and Barbara Nedeljakova. Directed and written by Eli Roth. Produced by Eli Roth, Chris Briggs and Mike Fleiss. A Lions Gate release. Horror/Suspense. Rated R for brutal scenes of torture and violence, strong sexual content, language and drug use. Running time: 95 min.

A couple of American college boys facing real life in the not too distant future decide to backpack across Europe. Paxton ("Crazy/Beautiful's" Jay Hernandez) and Josh ("Bring it On's" Derek Richardson) are hoping to hook up with some sexy European women and have the time of their lives. They fall in with a fellow traveler named Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson), a horny Icelandic dude with whom they sample the delights of Amsterdam. Then the boys learn about a hostel in Bratislava where beautiful women will be at their service. Of course, what they find out is that the hostel is really just a hunting ground where the rich track and torture anyone fool enough to fall for the promise of free sex and drugs. They even pay more for Americans.

None of this is particularly new in the annals of horror cinema. Young people debauching themselves and paying for it with their lives is a staple of the genre. But here we have something different by an order of magnitude that exceeds everything that's come before. And it's been plenty nasty up to now. "Hostel" is the most vicious, mean-spirited, horribly violent and sadistic collection of events committed to film, and that's saying a lot given the spate of recent movies hell-bent on conjuring up every depravity their filmmakers can muster, including the two "Saw" flicks, Rob Zombie's "House of 1,000 Corpses" and its sequel "The Devil's Rejects," the French thriller "High Tension" and "Hostel" director Eli Roth's own "Cabin Fever." Effectively, these movies attempt to parody the snuff films of lore (one hopes they're only lore), with scenes of mayhem strung together by the thinnest of narratives, spiked with gallows humor and an occasional twist. Is there a point? No. Will you like it? Perhaps, but if you do... you should see someone about that. -Tim Cogshell

Brokeback Mountain

2006-01-12T11:59:00.000-08:00

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal star in a tale of tragic romance.
STARRING
Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid
DIRECTOR
Ang Lee
RATING
R
sex, nudity, language, violence
RUN TIME
134 minutes
By PHILIP WUNTCH / The Dallas Morning News

A story of forbidden love on the range, Brokeback Mountain is acted, directed, written and photographed with heart-pounding beauty.

The film is in the windswept tradition of tragic romance, placed against a majestic setting and featuring a love that brings pain to the amorous couple and others.

What isn't traditional is that the lovers are both male. What's more, they're cowboys. It's a reasonable assumption that most 21st-century moviegoers will not shy away from the film on that account. And they will be rewarded with a heart-rending movie experience. Although it doesn't have the trappings of a holiday delight, the film, while sobering and thought-provoking, is not hopelessly depressing. It emerges as a tribute to human endurance and even resilience.

Brokeback Mountain has prestige in every corner. Co-adapted by Larry McMurtry, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove remains a Western classic, Brokeback Mountain is based on a short story by Annie Proulx, who won a Pulitzer with The Shipping News. Oscar nominee Ang Lee directed.

The story, set among the peaks and prairies of Wyoming and Texas, might seem an unlikely project for the Taiwan-born Mr. Lee.

Yet he's successfully helmed films with such disparate locales as Sense and Sensibility's early 19th-century England, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's 19th-century China and The Ice Storm's 1973 Connecticut suburbs. With Brokeback Mountain, his rhythmic direction is in complete cadence with the all-encompassing backdrops.

Heath Ledger, soon to be seen in the title role of Casanova, plays forlorn Ennis Del Mar. An internalized man never fully recovered from a loveless, chaotic childhood, Ennis shares a plodding shepherding job with seemingly carefree Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) in the summer of 1963. Ostensibly of different personalities, they discover they've experienced the same enduring sadness and transient pleasure. They have sex, protesting the next morning that they "ain't queer."

When they meet again, each has become a husband and a father. They still long for each other and arrange clandestine meetings for the next two decades.

Mr. Ledger is quietly, morosely magnificent. Ennis being a man of few words, Mr. Ledger gives a strongly physical performance, using the smallest gesture to register emotion. When he does speak, he barely moves his lips and is sometimes inaudible. But no interpreter is necessary, so revealing is his physical presence.

Mr. Gyllenhaal's more aggressive Jack is equally dynamic, his mournful-dog eyes at variance with his carefree stance and swaggering manner.

Anne Hathaway's Lureen, a cute Texas gal who marries Jack, makes an impressive transition from self-possessed cheerleader to embittered, neglected wife. Her final scene, which relies mostly on her vocal delivery, has a lingering impact. Michelle Williams is superbly intuitive as sweet Alma, who marries Ennis, witnesses his and Jack's passionate kiss and remains silently devastated.

The film is so intelligently directed, acted and written that even the briefest characters linger in your consciousness. But all of Brokeback Mountain will stay with you.

Rumor Has It

2006-01-08T11:42:00.000-08:00

by Tony Medley

Not a bad idea. Take the basis for the book “The Graduate” (1969), which was apparently based on an actual occurrence in Pasadena, and update it to determine in a comedic way, how the characters’ descendants were affected by what happened. Get Rob Reiner (“When Harry Met Sally” 1989) to direct, Kevin Costner, Jennifer Aniston, Shirley McLaine, and Mark Ruffalo to star and it’ll be a rollicking comedy.

Yeah, good idea; bad execution. Although Aniston does a yeoman’s job to save this thing, and although Ruffalo is good enough to garner an Oscar nomination, this film is terribly disappointing. The script (T.M. Griffin) and direction just fall short. Rather than a rollicking comedy, this is just a 90 minute story with little substance and almost no believability.

We are supposed to buy the idea that Sarah Huttinger (Aniston), a nice girl who is engaged to Jeff Daly (Ruffalo), a nice guy, would jump into bed with Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner) who bedded both her mother and her grandmother (Shirley McLaine). Maybe there are women who would find this an attractive proposition (my date for the screening didn’t) but the way Sarah is presented, she doesn’t look like a likely candidate for such an adventure. She’s nervous about marrying the man she loves, for heaven’s sake. We are to believe that a woman like this would want to bed the lover of her mother and grandmother?

I knew I was in for a long 90 minutes when the script had several people say near the beginning, “Nobody is from Los Angeles. But if they were they would be from Pasadena.” I guess Reiner and Griffin thought this was cute or funny or something. If you think it’s cute or funny or something, then you might roll in the aisles laughing at some of their other lines and situations.

Too bad, too, because Aniston gives a terrific performance. And, as I said, Ruffalo, who isn’t in it much, gives as good a supporting performance as you’ll see. It’s unfortunate they didn’t have more to work with.

This is not a terrible movie. I’ve certainly seen a lot worse this year. It just could have been so much better. If you go in expecting something, you’re sure to be disappointed. If you go in with no expectations, you could come out feeling like you got more than you thought you might.

Fun With Dick And Jane

2006-01-04T14:41:00.000-08:00

No 'Fun With Dick And Jane'
By JIM SLOTEK -- Toronto Sun
Carrey tries too hard in 'Dick and Jane'

First, to answer the question everybody asks about a movie like Fun With Dick And Jane: Yes. Every funny joke is in the trailer.

And the scene therein where Jim Carrey sings I Believe I Can Fly on an elevator is emblematic of everything that’s wrong with this comedic mishmash. It plays as if the script said simply “Jim gets on elevator and does funny stuff.”

So Fun With Dick And Jane is a slapstick Jim Carrey improv comedy. Or maybe it’s a biting satire of the Enron era. Certainly the studio wanted to know which one it was. After principal photography, the filmmakers were ordered back to reshoot the whole last act, reportedly to give the film more focus.

The problem is Fun With Dick And Jane doesn’t have the surehanded direction and timing to work as slapstick, and it’s not smart enough to work as satire.

A remake of the 1977 consumerist-spoof with Jane Fonda and George Segal, Fun With Dick And Jane is set in the “innocent” year 2000 and stars Carrey as Dick Harper, a corporate exec who, as the movie opens, is promoted to the v-p job of his dreams by the company’s cowboy jerk CEO (Alec Baldwin).

It turns out, however, that he’s been set up as the fall-guy when the CEO siphons hundreds of millions of dollars out of the firm and lets it collapse (along with Dick’s pension fund and future).

So far so linear. But the central gag in the original Dick And Jane — the yuppies turn to bank robbing — takes forever to arrive in this film as our Dick and Jane (Tea Leoni), run through a bunch of job auditions, wacky McJobs and bottom-of-the-barrel pursuits. Some of them are funny, some painfully unfunny, and all of them have a rough-edged, barely rehearsed feel to them that make them look as if Carrey came up with them the night before.

The bank-robbing is the only strongly-written stuff in Fun With Dick And Jane. Leoni, a natural comic actress, gets laughs just laughing derisively at her husband’s criminal ineptitude.

But just as the film seems to find a note, it veers off again — to that aforementioned third act, and a half-baked “sting” scheme to get the company’s money back. It makes no sense and, as a plot point, meets an unceremonious end. Like the rest of the film, the end seems made up on the fly, hastily and unfunnily, like a Krusty the Klown monologue.

Bottom line

A mishmash of a comedy that takes the bones of the 1977 George Segal/Jane Fonda original and grafts an Enron/Worldcom type “message” on it. The gaping holes are filled with run amok Jim Carrey slapstick turns that seem to have been improvised five minutes before the camera rolled.

2005-12-27T16:06:00.000-08:00

To call Match Point Woody Allen's comeback would be an understatement — it's the most vital return to form for any director since Robert Altman made The Player. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, with eyebrows serious enough to rival Montgomery Clift's, is squirmy yet sympathetic as an earnest young London climber who insinuates himself into his girlfriend's wealthy family but can't keep his mind, or his mitts, off her brother's fiancée: a luscious mound of trouble played by Scarlett Johansson with a husky voice and neurotic little-girl smolder that barely camouflage her desperate, lovelorn spirit. Hooked on the poshness of an upper-bourgeois life, but addicted even more to Johansson's charms, Rhys Meyers tries to have both — a doomed quest that Allen, liberated from all his musty Upper West Side tropes, turns into the sexiest, most closely observed adultery drama in years. Match Point is a fiendishly clever and sophisticated entertainment driven by lust, murder, and the swinging hinge of fate.

Syriana (2005)

2005-12-23T17:30:00.000-08:00

movie review by Bob Bloom, Journal and Courier (Lafayette, IN)

It is a mesmerizing global economic and civics thriller that will — or should — start you thinking everytime you turn the ignition in your car.
SYRIANA: 4 stars out of 4. Starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, Alexander Siddig, Christopher Plummer, Amanda Peet, William Hurt, Mazhar Munir, Tim Blake Nelson, Robert Foxworth and Peter Gerety. Based on the book See No Evil by Robert Baer. Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan. Rated R. Running time: Approx: 126 mins.

The simplest way to describe Syriana: Traffic with oil.

Writer-director Stephen Gaghan has assembled a star-studded cast to examine the global implications and machinations of the incestuous relationship between America's dependence on Mideast oil; the extremes the U.S. government will take to protect that flow; and the corporate world's shady dealings in keeping others from encroaching on what they consider their turf.

Told in the same multi-episodic manner as the Oscar-winning Traffic, which also was written by Gaghan, Syriana interweaves characters such as a CIA agent (a bearded and heavy-set George Clooney) who begins to uncover the truth about the undercover work he has been doing; a corporate lawyer (Jeffrey Wright) facing a moral dilemma as he tries to keep the government from interfering with the merger of two major oil companies; an oil broker (Matt Damon) who uses a family tragedy to further his career; an idealistic Gulf prince (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Alexander Siddig) who wants to keep the profits from the oil under his nation in his country to improve the lot of his people; and an unemployed Pakistani teenager (Mazhar Munir) wooed by fanatics with tragic results.

By the end, all these stories intersect and layer each other.

Syriana is rather complex, and at times difficult to follow. You need to pay close attention to keep track of who is working for whom, and who is following what agenda.

Don't let that deter you from seeing it, though. It is a mesmerizing global economic and civics thriller that will — or should — start you thinking everytime you turn the ignition in your car.

The basis of the movie is See No Evil, a memoir by former CIA agent Robert Baer. Gaghan uses the book as a starting point for Syriana, then goes on tell the story he wants.

The movie reflects the ambiguity and global scope of the energy situation.

Gaghan refrains from creating outright villains: Individuals act in the interest of national security, patriotism, religion or profitability.
Underlying the entire movie is a cultural clash between East and West.

The West, represented by the United States, see the Persian Gulf region as a series of backwards nations with leaders only interested in acquiring more wealth to collect more playthings - be they estates, falcons, cars.

Those in the East see the West as this all-consuming animal wanting to devour all the resources under the Mideast sands.

The irony is that the economic survival of both cultures depend on their dependency on each other. And when that ill-suited relationship is threatened, corruption races to the fore.

While fiction, Syriana creates a see-it-now immediacy. In a sense, it is more frightening than any horror film because of the lengths that men will go to ensure the status quo.

What is even scarier is that Gaghan’s film implies that nothing will ever change.

The Family Stone

2005-12-21T17:14:00.000-08:00

Dec. 16, 2005. 11:27 AM
SUSAN WALKER
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER

The Family Stone

Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Diane Keaton, Claire Danes and Dermot Mulroney. Written and directed by Thomas Bezucha. 102 minutes. At major theatres. PG

The Family Stone is a lot slyer than you might expect.

The marketing for this seasonally affected movie, including the raised ring finger on the poster, suggests another vulgar, holidays-from-hell comedy, stuffed with all the gross-out jokes that the formula engenders. The movie itself is actually better written, better acted and more moving than its promotion would lead one to believe.

As Sybil — offbeat matriarch and mom to five grown-up children — says, this family has its problems, "but we're all we've got." In the eyes of the girlfriend who Sybil's first-born son brings home for Christmas, they are a formidably united force to contend with.

The Stone family — a reference to some family members' drug preferences as well as an heirloom diamond ring — are not the Royal Tenenbaums. From mother Sybil down to youngest daughter Amy, the Stones are more interesting in their interactions with each other than they are as individuals.

Writer and director Thomas Bezucha, who broke into filmmaking after working as a designer with Coach and Ralph Lauren, gives an A-list cast something to work with. Diane Keaton is Sybil, aggressively liberal, making fun of her eldest son Everett (Dermot Mulroney) when his girlfriend Meredith demands separate bedrooms.

Sarah Jessica Parker, in a role that couldn't be more removed from her Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, is the wound-up Meredith Morton. She's an easy target for this self-congratulatory, non-traditional family. She wears a prim grey suit, stylish black stiletto heels and diamond earrings for an afternoon arrival at Everett's family home, a white frame colonial house in rural New England. Everett's dad Kelly (Craig T. Nelson), who on close examination is seen to wear a string of beads around his neck, is a professor at the local university.

Pregnant Stone daughter Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser) has already arrived with her daughter when Ben Stone (Luke Wilson) turns up. He's a pot-smoking film editor living in San Francisco. Thad Stone (Tyrone Giordano), who's deaf, brings his boyfriend Patrick (Brian White), with whom he hopes to adopt a child.

Rachel McAdams is Amy Stone, a goad to her mother. She is mouthy and petulant, the baby of the family, and recently fallen out with her boyfriend. She has met her eldest brother's girlfriend in New York, and finds her unsuitable.

Amy alludes to Meredith's throat-clearing tic as an affectation, but the viewer can see, by the way she stiffly extends her hand, that Meredith is extremely uneasy. Nervously chatty, far too conservative and a bit bossy, Meredith lands like a spark in a tinderbox. The Stones are as obnoxiously eccentric and bohemian as she is straight-laced.

The allusion to the big bad wolf is not accidental when Sybil replies to Meredith's compliment about her "lovely home" with the crack, "All the better to entertain you with."

Here, the unexpected dynamic at work is fear. "They hate me," Meredith wails on her cellpone to sister Julie (Claire Danes), an easy-on-the-eyes, easy-going contrast. She is brought in as reinforcement for Meredith, but brings more complications.

Relying on the unpredictability of human nature to govern a family tale that encompasses a full range of fast-acting emotions, Bezucha (director of a rather sappy first feature, Big Eden) challenges Parker with this role. Keaton's tendency to appear in variations of Annie Hall is left behind in her performance as a conflicted mother and wife, reeling from outrageously uncensored ("stick a silver spoon up a monkey's butt and it will behave ...") to terrified.

Wilson is lovable as Ben, family stoner who is actually more sensitive to what's going on than anyone else. He is funny, too, standing next to the car window in a pair of sweat pants that reveal a pointed interest in Meredith.

Bezucha's eye as a designer ensures that production design and wardrobe do a lot of the work of character building.

Grandma's diamond wedding ring, once promised to Everett for his wife and now sharply withdrawn, becomes the dramatic symbol of order in a film that is surprisingly multi-faceted.

King Kong

2005-12-13T17:24:00.000-08:00

Peter Jackson's "King Kong" is the most thrilling, soulful monster picture ever made. At last, it can be said without irony - I laughed, I cried.

Oh, how I cried. The sequence in which the 25-foot beast and Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), the blond actress he adores, slide together on a frozen pond in Central Park is one of the most innocently romantic moments ever put to film.

"King Kong" is also scary. And funny. It's everything people have ever wanted from the movies - action, romance, surprise, plus every monster menace you can buy for a budget north of $200 million. In addition to a roaring, snorting Kong, there's a stampede and deadly pileup of prehistoric dinosaurs, plus spiders and creepy-crawlies of every degree of bloodthirsty.

In short, it's brilliant.

The gorilla of the original 1933 horror pic and its campy 1976 remake was occasionally to be pitied - poor thing, in love with a screeching blond! But this Kong is an awesome creature: magisterial, melancholy, tender. When he loves, he loves completely and selflessly. Ann Darrow is a lucky woman.

Kong turns in the most moving performance of the year, even if it's against the rules to give an Oscar to something that's equal parts CGI, movie wizardry and the facial expressions of Andy Serkis, the actor who made "Lord of the Rings'" Gollum so devilishly complex.

Jackson slips in clever, sneaky commentary on the nature and ethics of the entertainment biz, particularly the film industry - whose box-office "King Kong" is poised to conquer the minute he's let loose in theaters next week.

Narnia

2005-12-09T15:19:00.000-08:00

In with a roar, out with a yawn
C.S. Lewis' 'Narnia' fantasy takes itself way too seriously

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
(PG) The C.S. Lewis classic brought to much too dignified life. More tedious than enchanting, although the acolytes will no doubt be delirious. With Tilda Swinton, Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Mosely, Anna Popplewell, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay by Ann Peacock. Andrew Adamson, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely. Directed by Andrew Adamson. 2:20 (violence, intense action). At area theaters.

BY JOHN ANDERSON
John Anderson is a regular contributor to Newsday.

December 9, 2005

Like devotees of "Star Wars," or Harry Potter novels or new Xboxes, avid readers of C.S. Lewis' children's classics will be so excited that the object of their obsession has hit the screen at last that the quality of the product will be rendered moot. What "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" proves, however, is how thin a line exists between magical and ridiculous. And that if The Bombay Company doesn't get knockoffs of that eponymous wardrobe into stores in time for Christmas, it's missing the marketing opportunity of a lifetime.

Lewis - Oxford don, confidant of fellow avid Anglican and "Ring" master J.R.R. Tolkien - created a Christ fable-anthem out of prophesy fulfillment, pure fantasy and four displaced children. The Pevensies - Lucy (Georgie Henley), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), Peter (William Mosely) and Susan (Anna Popplewell) - are shipped out from under the London Blitz to wait out the war at the country home of the mysterious Professor Kirke (Jim Broadbent). There, they discover that in the rear of a massive sheet-covered chifforobe exists a portal to another world, where the mythic is the status quo, and a lion deity named Aslan (voice of Liam Neeson) is preparing to battle the White Witch (Tilda Swinton) for the troubled Eden of Narnia.

Thanks to the fantastic elements, the vintage of the "Narnia" tales and the association between Lewis and Tolkien, comparison to "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy is inevitable. And "Narnia" doesn't stand up, not by a long shot.

Maybe it's the Disney logo that precedes the opening credits, or the way the fabulous animals are never quite integrated with the humans, but there's a deliberateness, a fastidiousness and a lack of daring and vision that marks the entire operation. The humor, what there is, is limited to young Lucy (Georgie Henley is wonderful, and the only member of the cast who is). Add to this the music - seven people are credited for the score, including Alanis Morissette - which is used like a cudgel. The tenor of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is far more insistent than seductive, the heroic tone of the music and landscapes unsupported by the direction, acting or narrative flow.

Crying children. Cell phones being passed up and down the aisle. Thunderous yawns. This was the "Narnia" experience at a recent screening. And while it may have been the ill manners of a particular crowd, one suspects that the film is infected with the avian flu of ennui. Too much, too nice, too boring. Can't wait for "Narnia Two."

JUST FRIENDS

2005-12-07T12:57:00.000-08:00

With 'Friends' like this, Reynolds doesn't need enemies
By ELIZABETH WEITZMAN
DAILY NEWS WRITER

With Ryan Reynolds, Amy Smart, Anna Faris.
Director: Roger Kumble (1:36).
PG-13:Language, sexuality.

If ever there were an actor in need of professional guidance, it is Ryan Reynolds.

The snarky comedic spawn of Chevy Chase and David Spade, Reynolds is funny and handsome enough to keep landing lead roles, but each of his projects — from "Waiting" and "Van Wilder" to the legendarily mediocre sitcom "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place" — has been worse than the last.

"Just Friends" is, at least, a bit sweeter than his previous films, and thus a (very) modest step in the right direction. But every holiday season welcomes a big-screen turkey, and this one's got extra stuffing.

Sporting the most grotesque fat suit since Gwyneth tipped the boat in "Shallow Hal," Reynolds begins the story as high school student Chris, an enormously overweight geek desperately in love with pretty, popular Jamie (Amy Smart). She cares about him, too, but — you guessed it — as a friend.

All is not entirely lost, since this devastating realization prompts Chris to turn his life around. When we see him 10 years later, he's a buff, tough music agent who dates celebrities like pop tart Samantha (Anna Faris).

Though they've broken up because Samantha is, well, psychotic, Chris' boss (Stephen Root) wants to sign her, and demands that Chris do baby-sitting duty over the holidays. The pair ends up back in Chris' hometown, where the temptation to call Jamie proves too strong to resist.

Unfortunately, Chris has shed not only pounds, but all his sensitivity as well. Though physically attracted to her old friend, Jamie is repulsed by his new personality. Making matters worse, fellow high school loser Dusty (Chris Klein) has also reinvented himself, and seems to be making a lot more headway with Jamie than Chris can manage.

The script does have some genuinely funny moments, but Roger Kumble's direction is as broad as Chris' senior-year backside.

And though Samantha is written as a sly spoof of Ashlee Simpson, Faris frantically overplays her. She might have taken a tip from Smart, a lovely, understated actress who wastes too much time in lousy films.

The same is increasingly true of Reynolds, who is fast becoming the patron saint of 21st-century stupidity. When an actor resorts to a fat suit for laughs, it's time he started weighing his options a little more carefully — before they are reduced to nothing.

'Aeon Flux': Call it future schlock

2005-12-05T14:30:00.000-08:00

By David Hiltbrand

Charlize Theron as a bedraggled lesbian serial killer? That's Oscar material. Theron as a futuristic action hero? That, as it turns out, is a direct-to-DVD proposition.

Aeon Flux takes place in 2415. We know it's the future because everyone has the most ridiculous hairdos, like Theron's pointy black bat wing as the title character.

Living in an uneasy utopia, Flux is the rebel movement's ultimate assassin. She is assigned to snuff out the regime's leader, Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas). But at the decisive moment, something stays her trigger finger. Flux spends the rest of this mercifully short film trying to figure out what stopped her.

She can't sit around pondering too much because she and Goodchild are being hunted by both the storm troopers of his evil brother Oren (Jonny Lee Miller) and a rebel cadre led by Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo).

Based on an obscure cartoon that ran on MTV, Aeon Flux has some cool-looking special effects, but not nearly enough to hold your interest. Theron uncorks some impressive acrobatics, but her fight scenes aren't going to make Jet Li lose any sleep.

The plot, about a DNA recycling project overseen by the Keeper (an unrecognizable Pete Postlethwaite, looking like a gold lamé-wrapped Humpty Dumpty), goes nowhere, leaving the cast standing around trading portentous lines like, "Don't you feel something wrong inside you?" Well, yeah, I feel like I just wasted nine bucks on this pooch.

There are many things we could conceivably endure from the future. Tedium is not one of them.

Produced by Gale Anne Hurd, David Gale, Gary Lucchesi, Greg Goodman and Martha Griffin, directed by Kayrn Kusama, written by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, photography by Stuart Dryburgh, music by Graeme Revell, distributed by Parmamount Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 34 mins.

Aeon Flux... Charlize Theron

Trevor... Marton Csokas

Oren... Jonny Lee Miller

Sithandra... Sophie Okonedo

Parent's guide: PG-13 (violence)

Yours, Mine and Ours

2005-12-03T08:47:00.000-08:00

Rene Russo and Dennis Quaid
Movie Info
STARRING
Rene Russo, Dennis Quaid, Linda Hunt, Rip Torn and Jerry O'Connell
DIRECTOR
Raja Gosnell
RATING
PG
mild innuendo
RUN TIME
88 minutes

Movie Review

By PHILIP WUNTCH / The Dallas Morning News

Before seeing Yours, Mine & Ours, you must examine your inner child.

If you're determined to adore each heavy-handed gag, relish the story line's utter simplicity and bathe in the glow of its calculated warmth, you may tolerate it. Maybe even more than just tolerate it.

But if you have even the smallest hint of cynicism, beware. The movie is a loose remake of the 1968 surprise hit that teamed Lucille Ball with Henry Fonda. That film actually benefited from good dialogue, most memorably Mr. Fonda's definition of love. The new version stars Rene Russo and Dennis Quaid and shows how low our comic standards have fallen. Why strive for good dialogue if a food fight will get faster reflex laughs?

Ms. Russo, always an asset, plays Helen, a merry widow who believes in progressive, positive reinforcement when it comes to her 10 kids. (Four are biological; six are adopted because they were "irresistible.") She also has a menagerie of pets, all accustomed to instant gratification. Mr. Quaid plays Frank, a widower Coast Guard admiral, whose eight children accept his military regimen with weary good nature.

Once upon a time, Helen and Frank had been high school sweethearts. Sparks fly again when they meet 30 years and 18 kids later, and they quickly marry. Their offspring hate each other instantly and hatch nefarious schemes to drive their parents to divorce. The two newlyweds also discover that they have different views on children and almost everything else.

The screenplay tries to make Helen and Frank seem extra likable by making all other characters extra obnoxious. These include Linda Hunt as a weird housekeeper who loves to watch wrestling on television, Rip Torn as a stuffy commandant and Jerry O'Connell as Helen's sad-sack early suitor. It's an obvious ploy. Mr. Quaid and especially Ms. Russo are likable enough on their own.

The same can't be said for the movie. Still, filmgoers may respond to its positive message, no matter how heavy-handed the delivery.

Far Side of the Moon

2005-11-30T12:58:00.000-08:00

By Michael Rechtshaffen

Bottom line: An achingly eloquent rumination.
In the masterful "Far Side of the Moon," an achingly eloquent rumination on our place in the universe, Canada's Robert Lepage has turned his stage play of the same name into a veritable one-man show -- serving not only as the film's writer and director but also starring in the dual roles of its introspective lead and his judgmental brother.

The filmmaker's journey is less an ego trip than it is the realization of a singular artistic vision combining stirring thoughts and lyrical images with expertly rendered performances and a soulful score by Cirque de Soleil collaborator Benoit Jutras.

Receiving its American premiere at the AFI Fest, Canada's submission for best foreign-language Oscar is still looking for a U.S. distributor, which should be a no-brainer given the acclaim Lepage's fifth feature effort is certain to reap.

Using the Soviet-American space race as his thematic launching pad (the title refers to the grittier lunar surface not seen from Earth), the Quebec-based Lepage has crafted a wondrously inventive and often quite amusing story about an aging doctoral student and part-time telemarketer dealing with the recent death of his mother and his ongoing tenuous relationship with his gay, TV weatherman younger brother as he maintains his search for signs of meaningful life in the cosmos.

From the first frame until the last, Lepage, working closely with cinematographer Ronald Plante and editor Philippe Gagnon, continually ups the visual ante with a series of increasingly inspired, seamless transitions linking the characters' earthbound lives with those more ambitious, ethereal pursuits.

By the time all the various themes arrive at one last poetic convergence, Lepage's ultimately uplifting film takes a final cue from docking footage of astronauts in the competing space programs, refusing to be held down by any conventional notions of gravity -- or moviemaking.

Pride and Prejudice

2005-11-23T20:04:00.000-08:00

SUSAN WALKER
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER

Pride and Prejudice

Starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Mcfadyen, Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn. Directed by Joe Wright. Written by Deborah Moggach. 135 minutes. At major theatres. G

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice has become, by adaptation, the Hamlet of moviemakers. For a long time, after Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson put their stamp on the characters of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in 1940, filmmakers left it alone. But since 1980, there have been no fewer than six adaptations of the 1813 novel.

Re-writing Austen for the screen has become a respectable trade: Aldous Huxley wrote the 1940 adaptation and Fay Weldon wrote the 1980 miniseries. Actor Colin Firth made the role of Mr. Darcy his own in the 1995 miniseries and Aishwarya Rai took Elizabeth into another culture in Gurinder Chada's Bride and Prejudice last year. But screenwriter Deborah Moggach (Love in a Cold Climate), first-time feature director Joe Wright, Keira Knightley and Matthew Mcfadyen take the high road with this latest Pride and Prejudice.

Not to be prejudiced, but this movie, of all the recent contenders, is most faithful to the spirit of Jane Austen. The novelist herself remarked to her sister how "the work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling," and acknowledged her own "epigrammist" style. And that, for screenwriters, is an opportunity to indulge in one-liners. Thus, Elizabeth responding to her sister's note that the dour Mr. Darcy "owns half of Derbyshire," cracks, "What? The miserable half?"

The five Bennet daughters, Jane, Lizzie, Mary, Kitty and Lydia, shepherded by their meddlesome, gold-digging mother, have come to the Meryton assembly, or ball, in Hertfordshire. Here the locals are to get their first glimpse of the new owners of the nearby estate of Netherfield, the handsome and high-spirited Mr. Bingley, his icy sister Caroline and Bingley's friend Darcy, tall, handsome and dark in every way.

Brenda Blethyn is Mrs. Bennet for the ages, embarrassing to her daughters; she thinks only of settling each of them, in order of age, with a moneyed suitor. She already has Mr. Bingley typed as having plenty of money for both him and Jane, and is gratified to see how much the young aristocrat (played by a red-haired, toothy Simon Woods), is taken by her eldest. Donald Sutherland is magnificent as Mr. Bennet, a kind and loving father and husband, keen to protect his daughters against any unsuitable pairing.

Mr. Darcy is vain and proud, but it is Lizzie's vanity we see when she overhears his remark to Mr. Bingley, that compared with her elder sister, Miss Elizabeth "is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me."

Mcfadyen is a little too poker-faced. But his visage is softened when Elizabeth arrives at Netherfield to tend to Jane who has come down with a cold while riding over to visit, and has remained there abed at her suitor's insistence.

Knightley embodies Elizabeth's wit and laughter. "I dearly love to laugh," she tells the stone-faced Darcy, "a family trait, I think." Then she throws back his "tolerable" remark, telling him she overheard.

Wright and Moggach have captured Austen's characters wonderfully well. Mr. Collins, a large man in the book, is portrayed as small, like his mind, by talented British actor Tom Hollander.

He is a cousin and a potential nemesis, as the Bennet estate will pass into his hands with the death of Mr. Bennet. A parson, Collins arrives for dinner with the intention of choosing a wife from among the Bennet daughters. Someone interrupts Collins' effusive praise for his new patron, Lady Catherine de Bourg, by noting his pleasure at making flattering remarks. "They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time," says the pompous Collins, "and though I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such little elegant compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions, I always wish to give them as unstudied an air as possible."

The line comes straight from Austen, but it is only in the movie that Elizabeth makes her calculating reply with a scintillating smile, "Believe me. No one would suspect it."

The plot thickens with the arrival in Hertfordshire of an army regiment. Lydia in particular is excited beyond modesty at the prospect of snagging a man in uniform, but it is Elizabeth who is taken by Mr. Wickham (Rupert Friend), an officer who proclaims that he was ill treated by Mr. Darcy. Wickham's father worked for Darcy's father and the fey young man, a blue ribbon tying back his blond locks, claims Darcy was jealous over his father's love for the young Wickham.

To pride and prejudice, one might add perfidy, a quality raised to a fine point in Caroline (Kelly Reilly), Wickham and the stately Lady de Bourg, inimitably played by Judy Dench. Wright shows many Austen-like traits in his direction, with visual symmetry and portrait-style scene settings. Such subtleties heighten the sense of order that was the ideal in the civilized Austen world. The flex of Darcy's hand, or the device of a dance where partners are exchanged, makes poetry from crucial bits of information.

Elizabeth's friend Charlotte tells her, "We are all fools in love," and in this way the truth of Austen's novel is revealed, and one sees that Lizzie, too, is nearly undone by her pride.

The gorgeous English countryside and the architecture of its stately homes do the rest. Like the classic novel itself, the movie brings a certain sadness when the end has come and there is no more to watch.

Walk the Line

2005-11-22T12:41:00.000-08:00

by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

James Mangold
20th Century Fox 11/05 Feature Film
PG-13 - some language, thematic material, depiction of drug dependency

When it comes to country music, people can agree on one thing: it's all about emotions. You can sing the songs loud or soft, fast or slow, but what people connect with are all those primal emotions of love, loss, yearning, jealousy, regret, and loneliness conveyed through the lyrics and the chords. The legendary singer and songwriter Johnny Cash once said, "You've got a song you're singing from your gut, you want that audience to feel it in their gut. And you've got to make them think that you're one of them sitting out there with them too."

Director James Mangold (Heavy, Girl Interrupted) has made a rousing movie about Cash and the woman destined to be his wife and soul mate, June Carter. Here is a biopicture that really rocks and registers on the emotions, much more successfully than last year's Ray. Fans of Johnny Cash will rejoice in the details from his life gleaned by screenwriters Gill Dennis and James Mangold from Man in Black and Cash: the Autobiography.

In Arkansas in 1944, Johnny is very close to his older brother who wants to become a preacher. They live with their drunken and abusive father, a sharecropper who works them hard picking cotton. While Johnny is out fishing, his brother dies in a circular-saw accident. His father blames Johnny for not being there, and tells him he wishes Johnny had been the one who died.

Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) leaves home, joins the Air Force, and spends some time overseas in Germany where he purchases his first guitar and sees a film about Folsom Prison that will have an indelible impact on his life. He returns home to Memphis and marries Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), who has big dreams of a prosperous and happy family life in the suburbs with their children. But Johnny can't wait to ditch his life as a door-to door salesman. He's already composing songs and has gotten together a band with two friends. They audition for Sam Phillips (Dallas Roberts) of Sun Records who is not impressed with their gospel tunes. After he challenges Johnny to make him believe what he is saying in his lyrics, Cash delivers a heartfelt song he wrote about being down and out. Phillips signs the band as Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. Their first hit is "Cry, Cry, Cry."

The course of this singer/songwriter's life is altered when he meets June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) behind stage at a concert. The daughter of the legendary Mother Maybelle Carter, she has grown up as a member of country music royalty. Not equipped with the vocal talent of her sisters, she has become a stage comedian known for her spunk and ability to reach the hearts of an audience with her charm and wit. Johnny is immediately attracted to her, but there's a snag: he's married, and soon she is too.

On their first dinner together, June resonates with this shy and intense man whose vulnerability is mixed with a self-destructive streak. In their first duet on stage, the sparks fly as they tune into each other's energy. June becomes a friend, one Johnny can turn to in times of exhaustion and need. But he is also depending upon a false ally: amphetamines. He quickly develops a dependence upon the drugs, using them to help him get through the pressures of touring, creating new songs and albums, and his guilt over not spending enough time with his wife and daughters.

There's a running joke in the film that when Johnny Cash dresses in black, he looks like he's going to a funeral. His retort is, "Maybe I am." Cash never quite gets over the early death of his brother, and feels imprisoned by the terrible judgment of his father that he is "nothing." But this is a love story, and it's clear that the relationship with June Carter is what sustains him. After ten years of friendship with June, Johnny proposes to her on stage in front of an audience in Canada. The moment is filled with honest emotion.

Cash is also known for his Christian faith, which is only alluded to in a brief scene when he and June go to church, and in her prediction after she helps him kick his drug habit: "God has given you a second chance to make things right." It all comes together during his performance at California's Folsom Prison, which is the high point of the film. When he tells his handlers that he wants to do a concert at the prison, they tell him not to do it: "Your fans are church folk. They don't want to hear you singing to a bunch of prisoners." "Then they aren't Christians," Cash replies, revealing that the man in black knew what the man from Nazareth was about. The scene of him stepping on the stage in front of an audience of prisoners crazy with excitement is something wonderful to behold.

Rabbi Jory Lang has wisely observed: "We're conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware — beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one. People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel." Director James Mangold has exquisitely crafted into this biopicture of Johnny Cash many such moments of emotional vibrancy, and it is to his credit that these moments add up to a delicious appreciation for the love that blooms between Johnny and June. She helps him see his true worth, and he draws out her songwriting talent which manifests in the classic rocker "Ring of Fire." We'll remember how they made us feel.

Breakfast on Pluto

2005-11-18T10:37:00.000-08:00

Director: Neil Jordan
Genre: Comedy
Publisher: Sony Pictures Classics
Released: 11/16/2005
MPAA Rating:
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Ruth Negga, Laurence Kinlan, Stephen Rea, Brendan Gleeson, Conor McEvoy, Gavin Friday, Ian Hart

Here Kitty, Kitty
A Review by Chris Barsanti
11/09/2005

The movies are made for transvestites, especially when they're played by Cillian Murphy, he of the chilly blue eyes, knife-sharp cheekbones and fey sense of mischief. As a sign of how our culture views such things, Murphy's hard-to-define yet razored androgyny has mostly been mined for menace in villainous roles in Batman Begins and Red Eye. But director Neil Jordan takes the same icy pretty boy looks and uses them for something altogether brighter in Breakfast on Pluto, his goony, big-hearted kaleidoscope of a movie; it's a match made in heaven.

Murphy plays Patrick “Kitten” Braden, an innocent in a harsh and ugly world. Born in the wee Irish town of Tyreelin in the late 1950s, Patrick was out of sorts from infancy, right after his mother, local hot blonde Eily Bergin, dumps him off at the parish church with Father Bernard (Liam Neeson), his likely da. Patrick gets fobbed off on a miserable foster family who, as he grows up, hassles him for wearing dresses, his luxuriant eyelashes or his dream-like, high-pitched whisper of a voice. The townsfolk are hardly any nicer to Kitten – the drag persona Patrick has taken on, more ladylike than any of the local women – and so he hits the road with a barely thought-out idea about finding his mother, whom he'd heard had been spotted once in London. From that point on, it's a Drag Pilgrim's Progress through the grim British Isle 70s, Patrick hitching up with a succession of puzzling and occasionally dangerous characters. It's a vicious world out there, just about every person and situation Patrick running into seeming intent on grinding him down into just another sad dull straight-lacer.

Although the material (from Patrick McCabe's novel) is dark, this is not the serious-minded Jordan of The End of the Affair or Michael Collins, it's the prankster of The Butcher Boy – another magical realist story of oppressive small-town Irish life and social ostracism – approaching misery with a murderous grin and Patrick's mocking mantra, “Oh, serious, serious, serious.” Helped along by his cast of regulars - Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Stephen Rea, Ian Hart, and of course the riveting Murphy - Jordan snaps off gripping scenes one after another, strewing Patrick's Candide-like journey with all manner of phantasmagoric goodies, from loopy dream sequences to Druidic bikers, Native-American-themed glam rockers, IRA bombings, a creepy Bryan Ferry, a peepshow confession straight out of Paris, Texas, and a pair of robins who talk (in subtitles, of course). There's little that seems off limits.

The all-guns-blazing approach can occasionally overheat, of course, there are times when the whimsical center cannot hold. But for every segment that doesn't work – like the draggy one in which Patrick works for the worst magician in the world (Rea) – there are at least a couple that do, wonderfully so. It's the kind of story which could easily have fallen into bathos, with naïve Patrick spreading joy and insight wherever he goes. But this is really a harsh tale of survival, where the too-fragile-for-this-world Patrick simply tries to make it from one threatening situation to the next, head held high and casting disapproving glances at a world taking itself so distressingly serious.

A lilting fairy tale told with feverish brilliance.

Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire

2005-11-14T18:17:00.000-08:00

By Kirk Honeycutt

Bottom line: The best one yet.
For legions of Harry Potter fans, the coming of a new film, the fourth adapted from J.K. Rowling's hugely successful literary series, is all they need to know. For nonfans or parents who accompany children, there is this: The movies keep getting better and better.

Where the first two films stood in awe of Rowling's work with all its magic and trickery, "Prisoner of Azkaban" and now "The Goblet of Fire" look more deeply into the developing human drama. As the three young protagonists move into their teens, they become more recognizable as young people rather than young wizards. They conront such coming-of-age issues as hormonal urges, questions of identity and peer pressure. They confront, in other words, emotions and experiences faced by all teenagers. Magic can't help them here.

But there will be magic at the boxoffice. The series actually has declined domestically from the dizzy heights of $317.6 million for the first one to $249.4 million for "Azkaban." This one suffers from a 156-minute running time that might cut into attendance by the very young, but the film should come close to equaling the success of the previous edition.

The new director is Mike Newell, which is interesting because he is the first British director on what is a very British movie series. Perhaps this explains why "Goblet of Fire" feels much more intimate. Newell and writer Steve Kloves, who has adapted all four books, waste no time in the world of the Muggles, humans with no magical abilities. From the opening nightmare to the last shot on the last day of Harry's fourth year of study at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the movie is rooted in the world of magic.

Harry's recurring nightmare features a room glimpsed from a dark corridor, wherein Harry's nemesis, the evil though unseen Lord Voldemort, conspires with minions. More disturbingly, as school opens and returning students visit the Quidditch campsite, dark figures attack. These are Death Eaters, who haven't materialized since their leader, Voldemort, lost his powers 13 years before on the night he murdered Harry's parents -- but failed to kill Harry.

The school year focuses on a rare Triwizard Tournament. Two other prestigious wizard schools -- the Beauxbatons Academy with its graceful girls and the Durmstrang Institute of athletic, vaguely Eastern European boys -- join Hogwarts for the competition.

The enchanted Goblet of Fire spits out the names of the champion for each of the three schools. Then a curious thing happens: A fourth name flies out -- Harry Potter. At 14, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) is too young to compete. Yet the Goblet rules, so Harry is entered into a dangerous competition against witchcraft students more advanced than he.

His inexplicable selection upsets the dynamics with his two best friends. Redheaded Ron (Rupert Grint) is angry and jealous, certain that Harry pulled some trick to earn the championship slot, while the lovely Hermione (Emma Watson) is confused and worried for her friend.

The school's head, Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), is worried too. Surely someone is setting up Harry for a fall, and the professor might not be able to protect him. He asks the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor -- the wacky, scared amputee Alastor Moody (Brendan Gleeson), called "Mad-Eye" for a bulging, all-seeing eye -- to keep an eye out, so to speak, for trouble.

The three "tasks" of the competition provide the backbone of the movie. Each is a magnificent set piece of action, danger and trial by fire reminiscent of the early "Star Wars" battles. One involves a contest with very cranky, fire-spewing dragons. The next sends the four contestants into the dark waters of the Black Lake to rescue marooned friends. The final challenge happens in a malevolent maze of tall, vicious hedges where pathways are thick with mist.

It is this final task that brings Harry into his first contact with Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), an almost reptilian personification of pure evil. Coming in the fourth movie, the much-anticipated confrontation does not disappoint. Voldemort emerges from a boiling cauldron, born again into venomous hatred for humanity, feeling power surge once more through newly formed muscles and tissue, while Harry trembles with hatred and fear. This initial skirmish sets the stage for battles to come.

Interspersed among the heroic tasks are the rising level of threats against the school and the discovery -- a different kind of magic to be sure -- of the opposite sex. Hogwarts' Yule Ball requires that boys come with dates. Despite his fame, Harry finds himself tongue-tied. He finally works up the courage to approach Cho Chang (Katie Leung). Meanwhile, Ron asks Hermione but does this so poorly, at least in her opinion, that she chooses to attend with Durmstrang's champion Viktor Krum (Stanislav Ianevski).

Here is the place where the film seems hesitant. Rowling's story insists that Harry pines for Cho Chang even as Ron looks at Hermione in a brand new light. Only Harry and Hermione must spend so much quality time together because of the plot that they seem to go together more comfortably.

The three leads continue to smoothly chart the evolution of characters who must learn lessons fast to survive. Also returning are Alan Rickman, as anal and crabby as ever as Professor Snape; Robbie Coltrane, the burly giant Hagrid, Hogwarts' caretaker, given the task of wooing Frances de la Tour's even taller Headmistress of Beauxbatons, Madame Maxime; Maggie Smith as the ever-practical Professor McGonagall; Timothy Spall, still looking rodentlike as Wormtail aka Peter Pettigrew; and Tom Felton, the representation of upper-class hauteur and cowardice as Harry's archenemy Draco. The one role left stranded is a gossip journalist played by Miranda Richardson, a character the movie easily could have jettisoned.

Newell achieves the same brilliant production values of his predecessors. Along with the brooding and at times ominous look by designer Stuart Craig and cinematographer Roger Pratt, Patrick Doyle contributes the best musical score of the series, one richly symphonic yet with a pop overlay that reminds us we are in a world of fantasy.

HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE
Warner Bros. Pictures
A Heyday Films production
Credits:
Director: Mike Newell
Screenwriter: Steve Kloves
Based on the novel by: J.K. Rowling
Producer: David Heyman
Executive producers: David Barron, Tanya Seghatchian
Director of photography: Roger Pratt
Production designer: Stuart Craig
Music: Patrick Doyle
Co-producer: Peter MacDonald
Costumes: Jany Temime
Editor: Mick Audsley
Cast:
Harry: Daniel Radcliffe
Ron: Rupert Grint
Hermione: Emma Watson
Professor Dumbledore: Michael Gambon
Voldemort: Ralph Fiennes
Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody: Brendan Gleeson
Hagrid: Robbie Coltrane
Lucius Malfoy
Jason Isaacs
Severus Snape: Alan Rickman
Minierva McGonagall: Maggie Smith
Wormtail: Timothy Spall
MPAA rating PG-13
Running time -- 156 minutes

Pride & Prejudice

2005-11-11T10:48:00.000-08:00

The latest version of Jane Austen's oft-told tale may not break new ground, but it walks a well-trod path with elegance.

Keira Knightley stars in Joe Wright's "Pride & Prejudice." Alex Bailey Focus Features
Jeff Strickler, Star Tribune

"Pride & Prejudice" is highbrow movie- making, in the finest sense of the term. Jane Austen's classic novel, which over the years has been adapted into everything from modern-day romantic comedies to last year's over-the-top Bollywood musical, gets a traditional telling that is lush with detail.

There's nothing really new here; some of the shots are so stock that they could have been scripted simply as "grand ballroom scene." But the handling of the elements is first-class.

The adaptation stays true to the source but it's been compressed. Although the book concerns the five Bennet sisters, director Joe Wright has turned three of them into background characters and reduced the fourth to a supporting role.

That leaves us with Keira Knightley. Proving that there's life after "Domino," she turns in a layered performance that belies the fact that she was still a teenager when this was filmed.

Knightley plays Elizabeth, the eldest of the five daughters of a middle-class couple (Brenda Blethyn and Donald Sutherland) who want their daughters to "marry up." But Elizabeth has a mind of her own. She insists on marrying for love.

When the well-to-do Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods) moves into a nearby mansion, Elizabeth's mother targets him as a potential husband. But Elizabeth is more interested in Bingley's friend, Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen), leaving Bingley for Elizabeth's sister Jane (Rosamund Pike) to pursue.

Knightley is the film's centerpiece. Her Elizabeth maintains a perfect balance between starry-eyed romance and down-to-earth practicality. While she acknowledges that her quest for love seems fanciful, she is determined not to compromise her dreams.

Director Joe Wright is making his first movie, but not his first period piece. His TV miniseries on King Charles II (seen in this country as "The Last King") won the British version of an Emmy. His admiration for the genre is evident. Filming on a series of locations that date to the story's era, he fills the screen with specifics, from elaborate costumes to intricate set designs.

He also borrows a page from Robert Altman, having people talk over one another. It adds another element of authenticity, even though it's not an original idea. Then again, fans of period set pieces are going to see many familiar elements. Wright is not trying to reinvent the wheel, but he sure does polish it up nicely.

Derailed

2005-11-08T17:09:00.000-08:00

In theory, “Derailed” has most of the ingredients for a passably enjoyable psychological thriller: a workable if familiar concept of an adulterous husband and a femme fatale, both married; a screenwriter, Stuart Beattie, who has done credible crimers like “Collateral,” a Swedish director who showed craftsmanship in his Oscar-nominated film, “Evil,” and a handsome and talented actor, Clive Owen, on the verge of becoming a star.

In practice, however, each of these ingredients proves to be problematic. Long, tangled, and preposterously plotted, “Derailed” has somehow forgotten its raison d’etre: To thrill.
The two leads are miscast and mismatched. While it’s not easy to accept Owen as a flawed hero who masochistically gets more than he deserves, it’s impossible to accept girl-next-door Jennifer Aniston, a limited actress with a TV baggage, as an alluring dame-in-distress. It doesn’t help that the actors are defeated by underdeveloped roles, and that Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom becomes the latest victim of a foreigner working in Hollywood.

We don’t expect anymore narrative logic from American thrillers, but we have the right to expect thrills and frills, some electric eroticism, or else the very foundations of the psychosexual thriller as a genre are shattered. Fritz Lang and Hitchcock understood the revelatory power of excitement of movies that burst against our nerves. “Derailed” begins by tickling our nerves, but then forgets to do the rest of the job. The yarn suffers from two major problems. It sets up situations but doesn’t deliver the payoffs, and it telegraphs them well in advance.

Lang pulled off this kind of mysteries with high style in his 1940s and 1950s noir classics, and so did Hitchcock in his “Wrong Man” scenarios, to which “Derailed” bears some thematic resemblance. Comparisons will also be made to the far superior “Fatal Attraction” and to “Unfaithful,” both directed by Adrian Lyne. Reversing the gender of “Unfaithful,” which boasted a wonderful performance from Diane Lane, "Derailed" is a dark cautionary tale about a husband who strays from his marriage and ends up suffering for it much more than he had anticipated.

An international production, “Derailed” is marred by the mix of its cross-cultural elements. The movie is directed by Swedish Mikael Hafstrom, making his Hollywood debut, and the cast features two European actors (the very British Owen, attempting an American accent, and the very French Vincent Cassel), two hip-hop artists (RZA and Xzibit) and one very American actress, Aniston, who seems unable to shake her TV image from “Friends.” The result is a mishmash of conventions, tones, and styles that lacks any distinctive identity or flavor.

Owen plays Charles Schine, a Chicago ad executive and family man saddled with troubles at work and at home. Going through male menopause, a mid-life crisis, Charles is losing the respect of his wife Deanna (Melissa George) and daughter Amy (Addison Timlin) and of his boss at the advertising firm where he works. Riding a commuter train, he meets Lucinda Harris (Aniston), an elegant business exec in spike heels. Their accidental but fatal train again evokes Hitchcock, this time “Strangers on a Train,” and also “Unfaithful,”

After some flirting, Charles and Lucinda begin to date and to confide in each other. We learn that, like Charles, Lucinda is caught in an unhappy marriage, and like him, she has a daughter. Just as they are about to consummate their relationship, however, a French gunman, LaRoche (Vincent Cassel), bursts into their motel room. After beating Charles and stealing his wallet, LaRoche forces himself on Lucinda, while Charles watches helplessly.

Terrified that the truth about their affair will be disclosed, the couple decides not to go to the police. Soon, however, LaRoche begins threatening Charles with blackmail demands that rapidly escalate from $20,000 to $100,000.
Unfortunately, the violent psycho LaRoche and his henchman Dexter (Xzibit) always have the upper hand and. Unlike Hitchcock’s thrillers, there’s never real tension or even temporary power balance between protagonist and villain.

Later, Charles' decision not to go to the police begins to haunt him, and his efforts to fight back, which involve a former co-worker named Winston (RZA), lead to disastrous results. We have seen flawed heroes in noir, but not hapless ones like Charles, who’s unable to protect Lucinda, his family, or himself; he gets beaten in a manner that makes him look a masochist. Owen has played successfully morally ambiguous and flawed heroes in “Croupier,” "Gosford Park," and most recently in “Closer,” for which he won an Oscar nomination, but the director makes little use of his natural charisma or strong physicality.

Aniston has an appealing TV personality, but, judging by her big-screen record, she may not have what it takes to become a leading lady, not to speak of playing a seductive femme fatale. Lacking the necessary look, Aniston gives such a pallid performance that it’s never clear what Charles sees in her.

The other element that “Derailed” shares with “Unfaithful” is cinematographer Peter Biziou, though you wouldn’t know it if you don’t stay through the end credits. An unimaginative piece of filmmaking, “Derailed’ doesn’t offer any pleasures of style. Artistically, the film is shapeless, and director gets little by way of menace or noirish atmosphere from either the back alleys of nocturnal Chicago or Charles' workplace.

Both director and writer seem to have watched many crime-thrillers, for they fill their movie with references to other movies. Charles finds himself in a succession of Hitchcockian “Innocent Man Accused,” though without the humor, wit, or irony. Based on James Siegel's novel, which I have not read, Beattie’s by-the-book script is too literate and not very skillful with the genre’s tricks. The plot’s few twists and turns are utterly predictable.

“Derailed” is a misshapen thriller that grinds on without ever being able to compensate for pathetic plot and underwritten characters. The picture goes from one location and characters to the next, and after a while the episodes become redundant. The seams always show and the clues plunk into place with such regularity that the whole thriller enterprise seem like an empty exercise.

The whole movie seems derailed. There my be something about the title, for the previous film called “Derailed,” a 2002 Jean Claude Van Demme actioner-thriller, was also a stinker.

Zathura (2005)

2005-11-07T18:41:00.000-08:00

Clever space adventure with dazzling special effects.
ZATHURA
By
Victoria Alexander
FilmsInReview.com

Based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg, ZATHURA in no way should be compared to JUMANJI wherein Robin Williams chewed up the scenery and jungle animals trashed a house. ZATHURA is a clever space adventure with dazzling special effects.

Ten year old Walter Budwing (Josh Hutcherson) and six year old Danny Budwing (Jonah Bobo) are spending the weekend with their newly divorced father (Tim Robbins) in his Craftsman mansion. Danny feels under-appreciated by his father and keeps annoying Walter. These two are normal, uncontrollable kids with an agenda – “Entertain us. We’re bored.” When Dad has to beg for a few hours out of the house to attend a business meeting, he should have done what all parents do: offer a bribe. Instead, he asks his teenage daughter Lisa (Kristen Stewart) to keep an eye of them. Completely disinterested in her brothers, she informs them to leave her alone. Danny goes hunting in the basement and finds an old board game called “Zathura.”

Danny begins to play the cursed game board. Immediately, a meteor hits the house and the game is on. Screenwriters David Koepp & John Kamps keep us off-balance and these boys have no safety net. The game takes them to outer, outer space around the rings of Saturn. Not only is the robot unfriendly and will not obey any commands, there are giant lizards, the Zorgons, for looking for food. The Zorgons make the ALIEN monsters look like backup dancers for Madonna. The Bulwing house is blasted to shreds to the delight of children everywhere. Now, if it was Mom’s house, the boys would have been worrying about staining the carpet and really freaking out. One of the Zathura cards brings an astronaut (Dax Shepard), who, like that space dude in 2001, played the game and has been wandering around space for fourteen years.

Note to Jon Favreau: You will soon be one of Hollywood’s most sought after directors. Not for bringing in a fantastic adventure with very cool special effects and a fancy concept, but for making "Punk'd" Dax Shepard appealing and sexy. You did it to Vince Vaughn many years ago with SWINGERS. Agents will take notice. You’ve got the magic and you weren’t even trying with Shepard. (For me, you have joined the elite, small group of directors - Tony Scott, Michael Mann, and Rob Cohen - who can make a male actor transition to “sexy.”) If only Ben Affleck had had faith in you he wouldn’t be looking for a political career now!

ELF was made on the cheap (the mogul lived in a tenement apartment in Brooklyn!) but now it can be said that Favreau had something to do with its success. Not all Will Farrell movies have been slam-dunks (BEWITCHED was nauseating).

I watched “The Apprentice” promotion for ZATHURA, but it was not necessary. The “task” – make a NYC float advertising ZATHURA - only brought to my mind that the film was desperate for publicity to lure in an audience. The filmmakers should have trusted their product – it outshines the depressing CHICKEN LITTLE.

Victoria Alexander can be contacted by visiting www.FilmsInReview.com or, directly, at masauu@aol.com.

ZATHURA
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures/Radar Films

Credits:
Director: Jon Favreau
Screenwriters: David Koepp & John Kamps
Based on the novel by: Chris Van Allsburg
Producers: Michael De Luca, Scott Kroopf, William Teitler
Executive producers: Louis D'Esposito, Ted Field
Director of photography: Guillermo Navarro
Production designer: J. Michael Riva
Music: John Debney
Co-producer: Peter Billingsley
Costumes: Laura Jean Shannon
Editor: Dan Lebental

Cast:
Walter Budwing: Josh Hutcherson
Danny Budwing: Jonah Bobo
Astronaut: Dax Shepard
Lisa Budwing: Kristen Stewart
Dad: Tim Robbins

MPAA rating: PG
Running time: 113 minutes

THE DYING GAUL

2005-11-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

Starring: Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson, and Peter Sarsgaard
Written and directed by Craig Lucas

reviewed by GABRIEL SHANKS

Craig Lucas, the award-winning playwright and director of Longtime Companion, The Secret Lives of Dentists and The Light in the Piazza, has crafted a sensational directing debut in THE DYING GAUL, a story about a peculiar love triangle of sorts that slowly and tragically becomes a circular firing squad. Adapted from his own play, Lucas' intimate drama comes across as a mannered exercise in restraint -- until the e-mails literally start flying through the air. Set against the convolutions of Hollywood at its most Babylonian, THE DYING GAUL follows Jeffrey, a studio executive (Cambell Scott) and his gorgeous if disaffected wife Elaine (Patricia Clarkson). Jeffrey, a closet bisexual, has just cozied up to Robert (Peter Sarsgaard), a novice screenwriter whose HIV-positive lover has recently died. The trio become fast friends, but as the transparent lies begin to bleed real blood, the alliances take a wholly unexpected and eviscerating turn. Rarely has a film exposed the tender and brutal line between love and cruelty so magnificently...certainly more than last year's similarly-minded Closer, and perhaps not since Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris.

Lucas' masterful screenplay and measured direction are complemented by an impeccable production design by Vincent Jefferds; the sprawling luxury of the Hollywood Hills contrasts sharply with the starving artist studio, and makes THE DYING GAUL as much a study of class warfare as one of romantic fidelity. The performances are uniformly superb. Campbell Scott gives Jeffrey the stiff, assured swagger that comes with power...and then allows it to dissolve into a puddle of self-doubt and confusion. Peter Sarsgaard, who is quickly joining Philip Seymour Hoffman as the finest actor of his generation, is even better than Scott; his woeful indecision and limitless grief are rendered with tenderness and compassion. It is Patricia Clarkson, however, who emerges as the stunning lifeforce of THE DYING GAUL; her fans will be happy to know that the trememndous work she has delivered time and time again, in films like Far From Heaven, The Station Agent and High Art, is surpassed here in a career-topping performance. If there is a God, and if that God likes textured and unclassifable roles like that of Elaine, Clarkson will win her long overdue Oscar.

The statue which gives THE DYING GAUL its name is a famous Roman work from the 4th century BC, and the film shares its sense of classicism and emotionality. Lucas has made the most intense romantic thriller in years, wrapped in a cool veneer that disguises the little earthquakes waiting below its surface. THE DYING GAUL is mesmerizing, fiercely original, and tantalizingly entertaining, but be forewarned...its dark heart beats without compromise or, even in the end, compassion.

Never Been Thawed

2005-11-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

By LOU LUMENICK October 7, 2005 --

CHEAP digital video equipment — and the increasing willingness of some theater owners to book almost anything for a check — have resulted in an increasing number of inane vanity projects like "Never Been Thawed" being foisted upon innocent moviegoers.

This painfully unfunny mockumentary about obsessive collectors of frozen-food entrees takes potshots at anti-abortionists, Christian rockers, aversion therapy for gays and the disabled — and misses almost every time.

Sean Anders makes his debut here as writer, director and star. With luck, there won't be a second...

Chicken Little

2005-10-31T13:09:00.000-08:00

Mark Dindal
Walt Disney Pictures 11/05 Feature Film
G

This snappy and clever computer-animated feature film zeroes in on the continuing adventures of Chicken Little, a character out of a long-ago fable who got in trouble for shouting "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" This tiny character is voiced by Zach Braff, star of the hit NBC series Scrubs and the writer, director, and star of the independent film Garden State.

Chicken Little finds himself a pariah after he causes panic in his community by claiming that a stop-sign shaped piece of blue sky had fallen on him. Others decide he's hallucinating after being hit on the head by one of the town's famous acorns. Forthe next year, the kids at school tease him relentlessly and all the mothers tell their children not to make eye contact with the crazy chicken.

Little's father, Buck Cluck (Garry Marshall), is a former baseball star raising the boy on his own. They don't talk much, and after the whole "the sky is falling" incident, Chicken Little is afraid he'll never measure up to Buck Cluck's high standards. Thankfully, this little tyke has some close friends who do think highly of him: Abby Mallard (Joan Cusack) who is nick-named Ugly Duckling; Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn), a 900-pound pig; and our favorite, Fish Out of Water, a fish who survives by wearing a five-galloon bottle of water.

In order to prove himself to his father, Chicken Little decides to try out for the local baseball team. The results are surprising, and precipitate a beautiful father and son reconciliation. But will it last when the improbable happens again and another piece of the sky lands in Little's bedroom?

Director Mark Dindal and the animators are aiming to reach both adult and kiddie audiences with this one. Children will have no trouble identifying with Chicken Little and his desire to win his father's respect. Adult audiences will want to savor all the visual references to Steven Spielberg films as well as the movie-within-a movie device. They will also have to keep their eyes peeled for whimsical touches in the town of Oakey Oaks where chickens ride in egg-shaped cars, sheep are barbers, a cheese store is owned by mice, and the Mayor is a real turkey.

Paradise Now

2005-10-30T12:02:00.000-08:00

One of the great gifts of art is empathy. Movies can make us feel for their characters, and great movies can make us understand characters we never imagined we had anything in common with. They extend our experiences and turn us into wiser, more forgiving human beings. The new film by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad stretches our horizons far enough to include some of the most reviled people on the planet. "Paradise Now" is a shocking, eye-opening attempt at understanding the minds and hearts of suicide bombers.

Abu-Assad, who made 2003's incisive drama "Rana's Wedding," is a sophisticated filmmaker who appears to have absorbed the rhythms of the best American independent cinema. The opening scenes of "Paradise Now" have the quiet, understated feel of Jim Jarmusch, transplanted from the Lower East Side to Nablus, the West Bank city where Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) go about their lives. They half-heartedly work at the car repair shop and chill with the hookah while they listen to tapes nicked from customers' cars. If it weren't for the occasional rocket blast in the distance, these guys could be anywhere: mellow, shaggy-haired members of the international brotherhood of slackers.

Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) in "Paradise Now"
All of this changes when Said and Khaled receive word that it is time; they have volunteered for a suicide mission, to slip into Tel Aviv and detonate explosives strapped to their bodies on a crowded bus. Their slacker-like detachment doesn't come from the ironic distance of a Williamsburg hipster, but from the knowledge that their time will be up soon. Life under the occupation was never livable to them in the first place. When Khaled says, "I am already dead," his stare is so horribly absent that we have no choice but to believe him. The men are bathed, shaved, put into suits and outfitted with a bomb jacket which they can trigger by pulling on a ripcord. They tape their "martyr videos" and eat a last supper.

These preparations interrupt the barely blossoming relationship between Said and Suha (Lubna Azabal), the daughter of a celebrated martyr who just returned to Palestine. Western audiences will find it easy to identify with her outsider's disbelief at the reality of life in the West Bank. Suha's vehement opposition to suicide attacks points to a possible way out of Said and Khaled's dilemma: while the men believe that "the occupation defines the resistance," she insists that a non-violent alternative is possible. Nonetheless, Said and Khaled slip into Israel as planned, but they get separated at the fence. Faced with their deadly choice by themselves, confused and lost, they have to reexamine the reasons for their murderous plans.

Shot on location under dangerous conditions, "Paradise Now" feels both realistic and fictional. The awful reality of the situation is driven home through conventions we can recognize--the pining mother, the botched mission, the last-minute love affair, and the humor that somehow always finds its way into the most serious moments. "Paradise Now" goes down easy but is difficult to digest. Abu-Assad makes it possible to understand how a person, driven by desperation, hatred, and shame, might end up committing the most heineous acts. But understanding is not the same as sympathy or forgiveness.

~ Jürgen Fauth

Gory 'Saw II' bloody awful

2005-10-29T15:13:00.000-07:00

By STEVE TILLEY - Toronto Sun
'Saw II' has more guts

PLOT: A burned-out police detective's son is one of eight people kidnapped by a serial killer and locked in a trap-laden house that's slowly filling with nerve gas. If the lethal vapours or the deadly puzzles don't finish them off, they could end up killing each other.

If you can sit through Saw II without gagging, gasping or covering your eyes, you are made of stern stuff indeed. And you should seek psychiatric help, since you might be a closet sociopath.

This sequel to last year's low-budget horror hit is so heavy on the close-up gross-outs, it sometimes feels like a particularly nasty kind of fetish porn, minus the sex. Eyeballs are punctured, brains are splattered, people are burned alive and sliced open and turned into human pincushions in a pit filled with dirty hypodermic needles. Um, ick.

But squirmy gore is what this movie is selling right from the opening minutes, when a hapless victim of the Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) wakes up to find his head encased in an iron-maiden-meets-venus-flytrap doohickey. He has 60 seconds to get the key that unlocks the contraption, the catch being it's implanted behind his eyeball. Scalpel helpfully provided.

The poor sap's death summons Det. Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) to the scene, and the bitter, world-weary cop soon finds out his son is among a group of criminals the killer has kidnapped and hidden away in a locked house slowly filling with lethal gas.

Oh yeah, and the only antidotes are guarded by Rube Goldberg deathtraps that require cooperation to overcome. These folks aren't what you'd call team players, either.

Saw II loses the original's mano-a-mano tension by throwing too many stock characters into the mix, none of whom we care much about. Live, die, whatever, it's all the same to us.

Aside from the blood and torture, if that's your bag, this quick 'n' dirty sequel's only redeeming features are Bell's chilling turn as a killer with absolutely nothing to lose, a few interesting tips of the hat to the original, and a surprisingly emotional performance by Wahlberg, though you won't be mistaking him for his brother, Mark.

But even the sort-of interesting twist at the end gets undermined by a flashback sequence that retells the entire movie in point form, just in case you spent too much time with your eyes covered. And it leaves the door wide open for Saw III. For better or for worse.

BOTTOM LINE: If you crave currents of crimson for Halloween, Saw II is right up your dark and foreboding alley. Just don't expect anything more, like an interesting plot or good acting.

(This film is rated 18-A)

G

2005-10-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

Drama. Starring Richard T. Jones, Blair Underwood, Chenoa Maxwell and Andre Royo. Directed by Christopher Scott Cherot. (Rated R. 96 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

The movie "G" was filmed so long ago that the cars and even some of the fashions seem dated. The star, Richard T. Jones, has appeared in more than a dozen films and a few TV shows since "G" started making the festival circuit in 2002.

But despite its unconventional path to wide release -- probably because of the lack of any huge stars -- it's still a movie worth seeing. Loosely telling the story of "The Great Gatsby" using hip-hop musicians in the Hamptons, "G" is an unpolished but entertaining tragedy filled with outstanding performances and memorable moments.

Jones stars as Summer G, a rap mogul whose methods of building his empire are in question. He's still in love with Sky (Chenoa Maxwell), who is married to the duplicitous Chip (Blair Underwood). A dozen minor characters are introduced, and most fit somehow into the main plot.

But the pivotal role -- and by far best performance in the movie -- comes from Andre Royo, an actor who has gone underappreciated for too long. Anyone who has seen Royo's performance as the junkie informant in HBO's "The Wire" knows his ability to bring nuances and sympathy out of a hustler. As Tracy -- the Nick character in "Gatsby" -- Royo carefully balances his options as he lives with Chip, yet starts to realize that Summer is a better option for his cousin Sky.

"G" is tense and often funny but has a few technical problems. With more than three years from completion to wide release, it's a wonder no one could get the sound mixing right. Bill Conti provides a serviceable score, but there's no doubt he's saving his best material for "Rocky VI."

And "Gatsby" purists will be constantly frustrated by distracting changes in the story, including an ending that has nowhere near the impact of the book. The Summer G character also seems a bit too sympathetic, and Maxwell can't quite keep up with Underwood, Jones and Royo as the drama unfolds.

But "G" is worth discovery. It took more than 25 years for F. Scott Fitzgerald's book to become a hit -- maybe three years isn't such a long wait, after all.

-- Advisory: This film contains profanity, sex and a few scenes of violence. Students who want to watch "G" before a test instead of reading "The Great Gatsby" should be warned -- there are several changes from the book. The best you're going to get is a C-minus.

-- Peter Hartlaub

Prime

2005-10-27T11:50:00.000-07:00

Your Guide, Rebecca Murray

Not Ready for "Prime" Time
I’m in no way exaggerating when I say “Prime” throws in every single romantic comedy cliché that exists without coming up with one original moment over the course of the film.

Lacking chemistry between the romantic leads or an engaging story, “Prime” quickly succumbs to silly jokes about religious stereotypes and the shapes of penises. “Prime’s” writer/director Ben Younger ("Boiler Room") also resorts to repeating the same lines with only slightly minor variations for what seems like an eternity but in fact is actually only one hour and 45 minutes.

The story is pretty basic and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out the very small plot twist way before it’s revealed. Uma Thurman stars as Rafi, a 37 year-old newly single woman whose best friends like to remind her that her biological clock is winding down. She has lots of stereotypical gay friends, is in therapy, and having just signed her divorce papers, figures out that a 23 year-old pretty boy (played by newcomer Bryan Greenberg) is just the ticket to happiness in the sack.

Why she falls so quickly for this much younger guy who’s handsome as hell but doesn’t seem to have much going on between his ears isn’t really explained, but we can imagine it’s all sexual. Actually, we don’t even have to imagine that’s the reason because we constantly see the two lovers shedding their clothes at the drop of a hat. Scenes are actually interrupted mid-stride so that we get another opportunity to see these two gorgeous creatures in bed together (though with sheets and other items strategically placed). Forget about trying to tell a coherent story or filling out the film with more than just caricatures, writer/director Younger seems to think none of that is as important as showing the audience just how randy these two are.

Meryl Streep co-stars as Thurman’s therapist in a role that wastes her talent and has her expressing emotions by rubbing her face and playing with her glasses. The face/glass touching becomes both annoying and distracting quickly into the film and you’ve got to wonder why Younger didn’t figure that out during production. Streep’s still one of the best actresses of her generation (even if she occasionally picks a real clunker to star in) and can certainly portray emotional turmoil without rubbing her eyes.

Jon Abrahams has perhaps the only interesting role in the film. He plays Thurman’s boy toy’s best friend, a disturbed man who gets his jollies by throwing pies at women who refuse to go out on a second date with him. Though his character's obnoxious and pathetic, Abrahams’ supporting role is the only one in the movie that doesn't come off as though it was written as an afterthought.

Given the fact he’s not required to do more than look handsome, it’s difficult to tell if Bryan Greenberg’s got much going for him as an actor other than his good looks. He's playing a totally one-dimensional character and until he's tested in a better role, I'm withholding judgment on where the fault lies with this particular performance.

The story is so ‘Movie of the Week’-ish it made me wonder what would have happened to this film had it not benefited from the star power of Thurman and Streep. I’m thinking “Prime” would have – and should have – gone straight to video. I suggest you wait until it does to see it and then only as a last resort when the good romantic comedies are all rented out.

GRADE: C-

"Prime" was directed by Ben Younger and is rated PG-13 for sexual content including dialogue and for language.

The Weather Man

2005-10-26T11:20:00.000-07:00

By Kirk Honeycutt

In "The Weather Man," Nicolas Cage doesn't so much play a protagonist, warts and all, as he plays a protagonist who is all warts. While not thoroughly unlikable, Cage's David Spritz, a weatherman for a local Chicago TV station, is the kind of guy who makes eyes roll in your head. He seemingly can't avoid social blunders no matter how many warnings he gets -- and ignores. So the challenge writer Steven Conrad and director Gore Verbinski face is how to get audiences to invest emotionally in such a schmo. They don't always succeed.

Cage brings so much positive baggage to his roles these days that he can redeem even the most anti-social of anti-heroes, as he did last month in "Lord of War." But David Spritz appears to have baffled him, too, so he takes the approach that David is simply not too bright. Therefore, the challenge faced by Paramount's marketing team is to sell a film, directed by the maker of "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" and starring Cage and Michael Caine, to mainstream audiences when the film probably should have been made by Paramount Classics. For this is a Sundance film gussied up with studio production values and big stars. It will be a hard sell.

In the opening shot, Cage wears such a sad-sack look you just know that, all superficial evidence to the contrary, David is one unhappy dude. Professionally, he is an overachiever, making far too much money working a couple of hours each day to deliver the usually bad weather news to Chicago viewers. He even has a promising feeler from a national morning show in New York. However, not too deep below this surface lies a wealth of insecurities and pain, which has little to do with the fact his "fans" love to throw the remnants of fast food at him on the street.

David is divorced and unhappily so. Despite the shrill and condescending manner of ex-wife Noreen (Hope Davis, in a continuation of her smug bitch in "Proof"), he wants to get back together with her. He struggles equally as fruitlessly to win the approval of his dad, Robert Spritz (Caine), a prize-winning novelist who might have a fatal illness. His son (Nicholas Hoult, the youngster in "About a Boy") is in counseling for marijuana use and his counselor (Gil Bellows) shows signs of being a pedophiliac. Meanwhile, his overweight daughter (Gemmenne De La Pena) feels sad and lonely most of the time. To bond with her he takes up -- archery?

The most depressing thing for David, though, is his job. With his father as a role model, he expects more of himself than being a TV weatherman. He is not even a meteorologist, for Pete's sake. A real meteorologist explains to him the risks of predicting weather: "It's just wind. It blows all over the place."

The movie blows all over the place, too, as its meandering plotlines do flesh out this portrait of a success who believes himself a failure, but never expands any further. You understand that David is absent-minded, self-absorbed and tries so hard to do the right thing that he inevitably does the wrong thing. How many illustrations of these lamentable facts do you need in a movie, though?

Somehow, at the end, clouds lift and the sun shines down and you're not sure why. David's big revelation is that it's OK to be a weatherman and not a Great Novelist. That, and his father for once speaks to him without weary disappointment in his voice.

Cage brings intelligence to his playing of a man sorely lacking in same. David often acts like an asshole, but the real problem is a lack of inner resources to confront and defeat the challenges he faces. Caine's exasperated father is his exact opposite, a man with few self-doubts and a novelist's facility for noticing the tiniest nuances in behavior. The young actors who play David's kids do wonderful jobs of expressing youthful confusions in their encounters with the pathetic world of adults.

Since the movie is set in Chicago and briefly in New York, winter weather certainly plays its role. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael makes you feel the cold even as he finds genuine beauty in the patterns of clouds, ice on Lake Michigan and bundled pedestrian traffic on chilly streets. Designer Tom Duffield contrasts the various environments of David's life from the sterile steel and glass of his apartment, noticeably bereft of hearth and family, with the comfy digs of his former suburban house and his dad's well-upholstered mansion. Hans Zimmer's music, often with an emphasis on the xylophone, is alternately cheerful and melancholy.

THE WEATHER MAN
Paramount Pictures
Paramount and Escape Artists present an Escape Artists production
Credits:
Director: Gore Verbinski
Screenwriter/co-producer: Steven Conrad
Producers: Todd Black, Steve Tisch, Jason Blumenthal
Executive producers: David Alper, William S. Beasley, Norm Golightly
Director of photography: Phedon Papamichael
Production designer: Tom Duffield
Music: Hans Zimmer
Costumes: Penny Rose
Editor: Craig Wood
Cast:
David Spritz: Nicolas Cage
Robert Spritz: Michael Caine
Noreen: Hope Davis
Don: Gil Bellows
Russ: Michael Rispoli
Shelly: Gemmenne De La Pena
Mike: Nicholas Hoult
MPAA rating R
Running time -- 100 minutes

The Legend of Zorro

2005-10-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

Oct. 24, 2005
By Kirk Honeycutt

Bottom line: Family-friendly sequel neuters the robust, saucy romanticism of the original film.
What have they done to the "Zorro" movie series? It's turned into "Spy Kids!" Instead of a lone masked champion of justice and freedom, the sequel to Amblin's 1998 "The Mask of Zorro" is now a family act. In "The Legend of Zorro," Antonio Banderas -- the star, of course, of both movie series -- fights the dark forces in 19th century California along with wife Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and 10-year-old son Joaquin (Adian Alonso). This is not all bad. The Mexican-born youngster is a genuine find, and no red-blooded male will object to the sight of Zeta-Jones in lacy, elaborate 19th century finery, paring and thrusting with a fine sword. But turning "Zorro" into a family movie with domestic squabbles and sitcom situations takes some of the luster off the romantic adventure of Old California.

Nevertheless, under returning director Martin Campbell, action sequences are many and the stars shine as stars are meant to, so Sony could realize a boxoffice take approaching the original's $235.1 million worldwide gross.

In 1850 California, the territory is poised to become the 31st state in the union. A referendum opens the movie, which gives Alejandro de la Vega disguised as Zorro (Banderas) the opportunity to recover a stolen ballot box from the clutches of marauding baddie Jacob McGivens (a sneeringly villainous Nick Chinlund). This is an extended and intricately choreographed series of stunts that sees Zorro take to the air nearly as often as Spider-Man.

Like most of the film's action sequences, Campbell leans heavily on close shots and quick cuts rather than sustained stunt work. Given that his stunt coordinator, animal wrangler and sword master all appear top notch, one can only presume Campbell didn't trust his actors to perform stunts in lengthy takes, which is understandable given the nature of much of the gravity-defying, circuslike gags.

Anyway, the referendum for statehood passes and happy crowds cheer. It really is amusing though to see so many Latino faces celebrating their "freedom" in a gringo-dominated government that will rule to the detriment of Mexican-Americans for another century and a half.

Almost immediately, a highly contrived quarrel between Alejandro and Elena leads to her filing for divorce, the estrangement of Alejandro from his son and comic jealousy that has Alejandro hit the bottle in reaction to the attention paid to his wife by French aristocrat and wine grower Armand (a not very French Rufus Sewell).

A foul plot unfolds soon enough in a story attributed to two teams of writers, in which neither Alejandro nor Elena's divorce attorneys are who they seem and everyone has a secret agenda. This far-fetched scheme concerning an ancient Christian order called the Knights of Aragon feels more like an episode of "The Wild Wild West." It does, however, trigger a succession of fights, rescues, skullduggery and chases that keep the screen excessively busy while pushing the running time well past two hours.

Unfortunately, the hero is made to fight with one hand behind his back -- for the PG rating and an emphasis on family values insist that we never see Zorro do more than hurt the pride of the villains despite their dastardly nature. One stunt has his horse outrun a runaway train, a pretty neat trick considering that the nag drinks more than Lee Marvin's mount in "Cat Ballou" and smokes as well. Must be steroids in his feed.

The heroic troika is the film's major calling card. Banderas exudes macho bravado and self-confidence, while Zeta-Jones combines drop-dead beauty with energetic athleticism. Alonso as Zorro Jr. has all his dad's moves -- though he doesn't realize his dad is Zorro -- and is cute without being cloying. Frankly, he steals the show.

Returning cinematographer Phil Meheux and designer Cecilia Montiel make the most of the location in and around historic Hacienda Gogorron in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, creating an authentic Old California of lavish haciendas, a Gold Rush town, inspiring mission, flowing fabrics, haughty caballeros and sultry senoritas.

THE LEGEND OF ZORRO
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures/Spyglass Entertainment present an Amblin Entertainment production
Credits:
Director: Martin Campbell
Screenwriters: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman
Story by: Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
Producers: Walter F. Parkes, Laurie MacDonald, Lloyd Phillips
Executive producers: Steven Spielberg, Gary Barber, Roger Birnbaum
Director of photography: Phil Meheux
Production designer: Cecilia Montiel
Music: James Horner
Co-producer: John Gertz
Costumes: Graciela Mazon
Editor: Stuart Baird
Cast:
Don Alejandro de la Vega: Antonio Banderas
Elena: Catherine Zeta-Jones
Joaquin: Adrian Alonso
Armand: Rufus Sewell
Jacob McGivens: Nick Chinlund
Fray Felipe: Julio Oscar Mechoso
Ferroq: Raul Mendez
Cortez: Gustavo Sanchez Parra
MPAA rating PG
Running time -- 129 minutes

USPIZIN (THE GUESTS)

2005-10-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

You don't have to be Jewish to delight in Gidi Dar's Ushpizin (The Guests). It's a welcome departure from the Holocaust movies that have for the most part defined the Jewish experience in narrative film. Dar's main characters are ultra-Orthodox Jews high on God-and their joy is infectious. The bliss Breslau Chasidim feel in the simple act of living shines through this parable, mostly because of lead actors Shuli Rand and his wife Michal Bat Sheva Rand, who are themselves members of an Orthodox community. The Rands are clearly enjoying a mystical existence lost to the rest of us, Jew and non-Jew alike.

Ushpizin is set in Jerusalem during the Succoth holiday, a commemoration of the Exodus. To celebrate, religious Jews erect succah, temporary dwellings, as a reminder of the tenuity of human existence. Unexpected guests who arrive during the seven-day holiday are considered a special blessing. On Succoth eve, Moshe and his wife Malli are penniless and, facing the prospect that they will not be able to observe the holy day, do what any religious Jews would in their situation: They pray for a miracle. True to real life, they are instead sent a test. Buddies from Moshe's former life arrive, bringing with them the proverbial chaos of unexpected guests, but also the unforeseen blessings.

Rand, who also wrote the script , was an up-and-coming theatre actor when he starred in Dar's first feature, Eddie King. Although Rand turned to religious orthodoxy and left acting, he and Dar, a secular Jew, remained friends. When Dar approached Rand to act in another film, Rand asked the advice of his rabbi. Concessions were discussed, and Dar agreed to certain restrictions. Then Rand declared it would be impossible to act opposite anyone but his real wife. Michal Bat Sheva was not an actress, but Dar acquiesced; seeing the wisdom in this approach, the director then cast all the speaking parts with Orthodox Jews who had once been actors. To her credit, Michal Bat Sheva gives a wonderful debut performance. In fact, the entire cast of Ushpizin is excellent.

Dar's light touch, and his obvious skill with actors, gives Ushpizin the crossover potential it achieved in Israel, where it was a box-office hit. Released to coincide with the actual Jewish holiday, the film will undoubtedly be enjoyed by the faithful, but it's also good family entertainment, both because of its uniqueness and its jubilant message, which have little to do with religion. Ushpizin celebrates the miracle of love and the possibility of second chances.

-Maria Garcia

STAY

2005-10-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

Be prepared for punishment and confusion; otherwise, stay away.
STAY
By
Victoria Alexander
FilmsInReview.com

My weekly column, “The Devil’s Hammer,” appears every Monday on FromTheBalcony.com. “Victoria Alexander’s Movies, Gossip & Sin” is on XRadio.biz Fridays from Noon to 2 P.M.

The pedigree is good: STAY is directed by Marc Forster (“Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland”), the screenplay is by David Benioff (“Troy” and “The 25th Hour”), and it stars Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, and Ryan Gosling.

Yet Forster and Benioff throw away a key cinematic device in building their supernatural thriller. They never explain a thing. STAY starts off incomprehensible and stays that way. Audiences will allow a certain degree of vagueness and confusion as the characters, plot, and themes are introduced, but at some point you have to do some conventional storytelling.

Forster and Benioff intentionally stay off track.

The small group I saw the press screening with came out frustrated. I attempted an explanation. No one was satisfied.

New York psychiatrist Sam “Short Pants” Foster (Ewan McGregor) treats pampered Wall Street investment bankers until a suddenly ill colleague, Dr. Beth Levy (Janeane Garofalo), asks him to see a young college student, Henry “Messy Hair” Lethem (Ryan Gosling). Foster is quickly intrigued by Lethem who casually tells him he will commit suicide in a few days on the eve of his twenty-first birthday.

Foster goes about trying to dope out who Lethem is and gets unusually attached to the young man. Foster has a girlfriend, former patient Lila (Naomi Watts), who also attempted suicide for some very good reason left unexplained. She’s moody and regrets failing at suicide. But Lila is much better now even though she has stopped taking her “meds.” The “meds” inhabit her work as an artist. Lila becomes interested in Lethem. They share a suicide bond.

Soon Foster is hunting for clues about Lethem and getting trapped inside what I think is Lethem’s dream world. You see, somehow everyone Foster meets or knows is somehow connected to Lethem.

I’m fascinated by dreams: Who are the people who populate our dreams? We seem to know them exceptionally well. We know their feelings, desires, and intentions towards us. Who are they? Have we passed these people in a crowd and somehow our subconscious mind made note of them? Are we wandering around in other people’s dreams?

Limping to its conclusion, I think STAY answers these metaphysical questions. Is Foster on the brink of psychosis himself? Is Lethem just the trigger? Lethem says he is hearing voices, but it is Foster who is seeing imaginary people. Why has Foster slipped so seamlessly into his patient’s life? As Foster becomes entwined with Lethem, they merge. Whatever Foster’s problems are, I was distracted by his terrible choice of clothes. Would anyone in New York with a medical degree wear a brown plaid suit one size too small?

As if to glamorize suicide, it seems that Lethem (and Lila who tells Foster the story) is enthralled with an unknown artist who called his suicide the ultimate work of art.

You come away from STAY confused. Are the filmmakers showcasing suicide as heroic? (Recalling “Monster’s Ball,” Forster seems fascinated with suicide.) Whatever Forster and Benioff were trying to accomplish here they missed the target. Unable to defend their premise, they just leave the audience stranded on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Doom (2005)

2005-10-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

movie review by Nick Rogers, The State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL)

A mostly standard-issue Marine fetish festival and also a regressive role for the Rock. He should never have to drop an F-bomb once, let alone 15 times, to seem tough.
By NICK ROGERS
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER SPRINGFIELD, IL

Should Mars ever become exploitable — oops, explorable — by humans, here’s hoping we don’t entrust it to a bunch of people with potential for psychotic behavior.

It’s an interesting idea that pops up in the final act of “Doom,” a film version of the shoot-’em-up video game that you probably didn’t think would bother with anything so fancy as an idea.

Unfortunately, the movie’s not entirely convinced of that, either. Up to maybe the last 20 minutes, it’s another cheap knockoff of “Aliens” and “Predator” (the ultimate Marines versus creatures films) and is as exciting as watching a numb-thumbed gamer go to town.

Those people’s encyclopedic brains can dispute and discuss whether the movie’s plot of a virus targeting unmapped portions of the human genome is faithful (or not) to the game franchise. It certainly makes this Mars movie a bit more than a sketchily edited, gruesome time-waster in which anything with a pulse expires with geysers of tissue and blood.

Things are running red on the Red Planet, and it’s up to the Rapid Response Tactical Squad to contain the situation. Led by Sarge (the Rock), the eight-man team is quickly dispatched to the remotely located Olduvai Research Station to investigate. (In 2026, there are no rocket flights to Mars, only a transporting, colorless blob of jelly called “the Ark.”)

Upon arrival, the Marines find some distinctly non-human adversaries ... or are they? John “Reaper” Grimm (Karl Urban) is the prerequisite soldier with a past, who left his doctor sister Samantha (Rosamund Pike) behind on Olduvai years before. And as the body count mounts, so does her evidence that there might have been some genetic-experimentation shenanigans.

The first hour of the film runs on SOP. Dialogue snaps with machismo. Beefy, buzz-cut guys lug heavy artillery while peeking around shadowy corners. The musical score is one Beavis and Butt-head would greet with enthusiastic “dunt-dunts.”

Shots of the Mars landscape look like tight close-ups of cheap models. And the closest it comes to romance is Sarge’s fetish for the BFG (last word “gun,” first word “big,” middle word unprintable in our newspaper).

Furthermore, it’s a weirdly regressive choice for the Rock, whose career path, frankly, seemed smarter than this. Aside from Sarge’s one-dimensional personality, the Rock should not have to drop F-bombs to seem like a tough guy. It’s the sort of part you would have expected him to do while still clenched in Vince McMahon’s WWE claws.

But it’s also a role requiring the Rock to stretch out to something he’s woefully bad at; it’s a slight hint to say he never was convincing at it in the ring, either. It’s the only real misstep after the movie abandons pretenses to become a ride — literally.

A much-talked-about sequence recaptures the game’s first-person perspective, and it’s not unlike a Universal Studios attraction. Grotesque monsters leap from nowhere to be dispatched with a gun or, say, a chainsaw.

The brief bit captures game-playing glory in a way no previous video-game film has tried, and the bold choice sparks the movie to life, even if only a few minutes remain. The movie also has fun with its gore, taking the “Alien” idea one step further with a nasty detachable tongue.
Too bad all of this precedes a rinky-dink mano-a-mano climactic brawl that gives You Know Who a reason to fireman-carry someone and slam him to the floor.

“Doom” is perhaps one of the better video game movies ever made, if only by virtue that it’s not entirely horrible. The Rock can make of that backhanded compliment what he likes. If he smelled what he’s cooking in this movie, he’d probably turn up his nose.

Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (2005)

2005-10-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

movie review by Sean Burns, Philadelphia Weekly

...a well-acted chunk of Velveeta.
DREAMER: INSPIRED BY A TRUE STORY
Directed by John Gatins
GRADE: C
Reviewed by Sean Burns
PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY 09/19/05

An assembly-line inspirational tearjerker boasting absolutely no surprises, the awkwardly titled DREAMER: INSPIRED BY A TRUE STORY is a well-acted chunk of Velveeta. There's not a moment you won't see coming at least two furlongs away, but the gifted cast makes it all go down surprisingly painlessly.

This heavily fictionalized story follows an injured filly, nursed back to health by precocious little Cale Crane (Dakota Fanning) and her grouchy, down-on-his-luck horse-trainer pop (the always reliable Kurt Russell). We begin with this poverty-stricken family in disarray. Dad's usually bickering with Mom (Elisabeth Shue), and Grandpa (Kris Kristofferson) hasn't spoken to his son in months.

No points for guessing that the horse's broken leg heals at pretty much the same speed as the family's fractured bonds. It's all textbook triumph-of-the-spirit stuff, complete with a soppy John Debney score and a wildly improbable finale set at the Breeders' Cup. If it weren't for the DreamWorks logo at the beginning, you'd swear this was a Disney movie.

As always, the young Fanning continues to amaze. So eerily poised and disciplined, she's got the wisdom of the ages behind those Bette Davis eyes. (Some friends of mine are waiting for the eventual scandal, when it's discovered Dakota Fanning is actually a 40-year-old woman with a severe glandular disorder that makes her look like a little kid.)

Is Kurt Russell the most dependable man in show business? Here's yet another one of his patented, effortlessly genuine performances. You can make an argument that Russell's even better when working with this kind of cornball material. Kurt's such a direct, unfussy actor that he's incapable of seeming insincere--the cheesiest, most crassly written speeches sound perfectly grounded when coming out of his mouth.

North Country

2005-10-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

Review by Damon Swindall

At some point in life everyone has to go through sexual harassment training. The boss sits you down and pops in that laughable, boring video with C-grade (over) actors crossing the lines with their coworkers. Everything seems completely irrational, that no one could or would ever do those things, but it is on there for a reason. NORTH COUNTRY gives the viewer a very effective glimpse into the life of a woman who had to endure those things (as well as much worse), and took a stand that changed everything for all women after her.

Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) moves back home, with her two children, to a small mining town in Minnesota after leaving her abusive husband. She is welcomed by a submissive mother (Sissy Spacek) and a father (Richard Jenkins) who blindly blames her for everything wrong in his life. Spending her days washing hair at a local beauty salon she runs into one of her old friends, Glory (Frances McDormand), who tells her about a job opening where she works, the Pearson Taconite and Steel Mine. After realizing that being a sink jockey would never get her and the children out of her parent’s house she decides to go for it, against her father’s wishes. She works there along with about a dozen other women making up probably not even one sixteenth of the overall staff. To these miners it is a man’s work and women have no right to be in “their place.”

Right off the bat life at the mine proves to be quite trying. Name calling, groping, highly obscene “cat calls” and rubber phallus’ hidden in lunchboxes are just the beginning of what daily life is like for these women. When Josey does not succumb to forceful advances made by a coworker, rumors fly that she is the one acting inappropriately by trying to seduce a married man. After numerous complaints, that do nothing but make the treatment even worse, she decides that there is something that must be done. In comes Bill White (Woody Harrelson), a lawyer that she met through Glory, who accepts the case for the chance at the first Class Action Lawsuit against sexual harassment. Unfortunately Josey is the only woman willing to step forward.

Though this is a fictionalized version of the real deal, director Niki Caro (THE WHALE RIDER) brings a very tough and important subject to the screen with a lot of skill. The film is quite intense but carries a good balance by cutting up the grim scenes of the female miner’s life with footage from the courtroom. It is not just the story of her case against the mine. Director Caro has add a couple of interesting subplots as well. The distant relationship Josey has with her father, all due to her getting pregnant at the young age of sixteen without knowing who the father is. That, in turn, has effect on the relationship she has with her teenage son, who is ridiculed by kids of the other miners calling his mother a whore.

You may as well chalk up another Oscar nomination for Theron, because she gives a stellar performance. A movie with such a powerful story is sink or swim on the right leading lady and she proves, without a doubt, that her last Academy Award was not just a fluke. Of course Harrelson, Jenkins, and Spacek are a wonderful team for her to be working with, making for an all around great cast. It would be no surprise to see McDormand (who is not stranger to the Academy) snagging a supporting actress nod for her role as the female liaison to the miner’s union.

Amazing to think that this one woman has changed everything to do with how women are treated in the workplace, and the laws put in place in attempt to prevent such things from happening. It would be really nice to see more of what happened as a result of this story at the end of the case, but with an already lengthy running time, I guess you do not was to overstay your welcome. Even though the story revolves around Josey and how she was treated, there should be more time devoted to the other women working in the mine. A little is shown about their run-ins with the men, but showing how it affected them in their personal time more would be a nice touch to see that Josey is not alone in her suffering.

A tough subject to sit through, this movie is not taken lightly at all. It is definitely not a movie for a date with some guy/girl that you barely know. Also probably not a movie you want to take the kids to, though some late teen girls may get a lot out of it. This film has such a great story to be told and it is a shame that most likely this will not pack theatres. Most people will not see it until their curiosity is peaked by Oscar nominations and though that will be too late for help at the box office maybe it will boost the rentals.

RATING: 4/5

--DAMON SWINDALL

Batman Begins

2005-10-17T09:22:00.000-07:00

Christian Bale's brooding Bruce Wayne recaptures series' dark magic in 'Batman Begins'

By Ty Burr
Boston Globe

In "Batman Begins," Christian Bale gives us the best Bruce Wayne that has ever graced the screen. He's grave, intense -- a tormented straight-arrow lacking any of the camp feyness of Adam West on the old '60s TV show. This Wayne has a streamlined profile and eyes that are all business, and his joking one-liners carry the weight of a man who's seen more than he wants to. Wayne may play at being an all-American playboy but behind the social mask he's closer to an American psycho, a role this actor once made his own in a film of that very title. From Patrick Bateman to Batman, Bale hints, is a very small step.

Then he puts on the costume and the movie stumbles. Under the cowl, Bale's face looks pear-shaped and strangely un-Baleful; where Keaton and Kilmer and Clooney gained a malevolent edge from the hooded eyes and art deco ears, Bale resembles Jay Leno stuffed into a leftover "Eyes Wide Shut" mask. It's an inexplicable miscalculation and not the only one in a movie on which the hopes of comic book freaks and Warner Bros. shareholders alike are riding.

Thankfully, "Batman Begins" does far more right than it does wrong. This is especially true of the long central section that stands as the most deliciously smart "origin story" in the long, pulpy history of comic book movies. If you've ever entertained doubter's logic watching one of these things -- Where, exactly, does a superhero get his outfit? What prompts a person to become a costumed arch-villain instead of, say, a carjacker or an IRS auditor? How do you excavate and outfit a state-of-the-art Batcave without the neighbors noticing the delivery vans? -- "Batman Begins" is here to explain it all to you.

That it does so with a certain amount of cheek is thanks to co-writer-director Christopher Nolan, who made his name with the time-shifting head games of 2000's "Memento" and who's sharper than his material here. "Batman Begins" is at its weakest when tending to standard summer-action-movie business: the fight scenes and chase sequences are blurry, over-edited tangles of murk in which it's difficult to tell who is smacking whom with what large object. But everything concerned with how a billionaire orphan with a bat complex might go about setting up shop is genuinely inspired.

Nolan's Gotham City is a diseased, crepuscular burg: part "Blade Runner," part "Metropolis," part Abe Beame-era "drop dead" New York. The vibe is Great Depression; the cars and clothing are day before yesterday. A tatty criminal enterprise run by Carmine Falcone -- British actor Tom Wilkinson with a juicy, fraudulent Chicaga accent -- controls the city. If there's a ray of sunlight anywhere in the movie, I don't recall it, and, anyway, the crew member responsible has probably been sacked.

The mugging deaths of young Bruce's parents is dealt with briefly and for maximum survivor guilt, and the director sketches the young man's early years with a lot of chronological back-and-forth. All you need to know is that he ends up in the high Himalayan training grounds of the League of Shadows, a group of extraordinarily Nietzschean gentlemen overseen by Ra's al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). Wayne's personal trainer is Henri Ducard, played by Liam Neeson with an air of melancholy distraction, as if contemplating the choices that have led him from Oskar Schindler to this.

Comic book fans and teenage boys will eat this portentous stuff up, but it's old hat no matter how jazzy the editing. "Batman Begins" springs to life as soon as Wayne goes back to Gotham and the character actors start popping up thicker than horseflies. Look, there's Michael Caine, single-handedly raising the film's pulse as butler Alfred; Rutger Hauer playing, for all intents and purposes, the Kenneth Lay of Wayne Enterprises, and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, the disgraced tech-genius who provides Bruce with all his toys. (The Batmobile as a mothballed Defense Department initiative? Genius.)

Scuttling between the scenes is Gary Oldman as a low-level Gotham City police detective named Gordon, one honest cop among the gleefully corrupt. Most surprisingly, there's Irish slacker-heartthrob Cillian Murphy ("28 Days Later") as Dr. Jonathan Crane, the prissy head psychiatrist of the Arkham Asylum for the Insane. Initially a cog in mobster Falcone's machine, Crane turns out to have his own nefarious plans, but Murphy plays it with such quiet blue-eyed creepiness that you realize with a start, well into the movie, he's a supervillain as well.

Everything in "Batman Begins" has its prosaic, real-world explanation -- The Bat-Signal? Gordon's hastily improvised way of getting Batman's attention -- and if you've ever had any emotion invested in this story, there's huge satisfaction as each nugget of bat-data clicks neatly into place. The one puzzle piece that never fits, futz with it though the filmmakers may, is Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, Wayne's childhood sweetheart (before he had that unfortunate fall down a bat-filled well) and the current assistant district attorney/sitting duck. An actor needs to live large in a movie like this, but our Katie is a meek, saucer-eyed presence with the voice and dramatic heft of a girl. Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane Watson could have her for breakfast and still feel peckish.

In the final act, Nolan is forced to knuckle under to the demands of plot, and the hollowness of the opening scenes returns. "Batman Begins" feints at topical notions of airborne terrorism and fundamentalist disgust with American decadence, but it quickly devolves into rubble and noise. The climax features the hero and villain battling each other aboard a bullet train carrying a doomsday device toward the heart of the city at out-of-control speed. There is no part of that last sentence that is not a cliche.

Thankfully, Bale survives, even more than Batman or Bruce Wayne. The previous iteration of this franchise -- the "Batman" movies kicked off by Tim Burton and pounded into inanity by Joel Schumacher -- were all surface pleasures and Special Guest Stars, with an everchanging, slightly out-of-focus Dark Knight at their centers.

Bale and Nolan tip their hats to Burton once or twice, but mostly they reclaim the character and make Bruce Wayne the author of his own fortunes. The dialogue leans hard on psychobabble about "becoming one with your fears," and the star is too much the earnest young pro to wink at such nonsense. But he conveys, better than any Batman before him, the ridiculous thrill of playing dress-up to save the world.

The Fog

2005-10-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

From Staci Wilson,

I have been personally blessed by John Carpenter. It was a couple of weeks back, while I was on the set of the remake of his 1980 horror flick, The Fog. “God bless you,” the legendary genre director and composer said, in response to my gushing about his original soundtrack music — now, I’ll admit I’d heard a horror story about what a bad mood he was in a few minutes earlier, but I wasn’t just saying that to get on his good side.

I really do like his soundtrack, and I was wondering if he’d be writing any music for the remake. “No,” he told me. “I think the easiest thing for all of this is to take the first score and have someone freshen it up. Everybody’s getting freshened up, so why not? But I’d love to. It’d be great. On the other hand, there are a lot of really interesting composers right now doing movies for low budget, high budget. It’s really an interesting time. So it’d be also fun to see what somebody else’s take on it would be.”

It will definitely be “someone else’s take” in the director’s chair this time around — Carpenter is executive producing the remake, while Rupert Wainwright (Stigmata) takes control of the project, which is peppered with hot young stars from TV and popular films (Tom Welling from Smallville, Maggie Grace from Lost, and Selma Blair from Hellboy).

The first time I ever talked to Carpenter was to interview him about Ghosts of Mars — I asked him if he’d ever want to do any space travel, if given the opportunity. “Naw,” he replied in his usual prickly tone, “Why would I want to do that, when I can sit home, drink beer, and watch basketball?”

I’d never spoken to Carpenter in a non one-on-one situation before, but this time there were a few other reporters on the set and it was interesting to see how he deals with questions he deems “dumb”, often shooting back another question in challenge. Personally, I think his curmudgeonly way is part of his charm, but then again I have yet to bear the brunt of it. When he was asked why a remake of The Fog should even be done, he barked, “Why not? If everybody else is making remakes and they want to pay me money to make a remake of an old movie of mine, why not?”

He did not, however, have any interest in taking the reins himself. “I don’t want to remake this. I mean, I did it once. This was not my favorite experience of my own career making The Fog. It was difficult. We had to go back and fix it once we shot it. I’ve done this once. Let some younger person do it.” He also added that he would not be doing a director’s cut of his 1980 version. “God no. If I’ve finished a movie, that’s my movie. I don’t want to fuck with it. These guys [who do director’s cuts] don’t have enough to do? They don’t — they want to remake their film. See, I don’t understand it. It’s insane.” (Personally, I enjoy a director’s cut if it’s because the studio has forced some other ending or some such on them, but if he’s referring to what Steven Spielberg did, in basically rewriting history in E.T., then I say, “Hear, hear!”)

I had re-watched The Fog DVD the night before our interview, and I was curious to know if there would be another “Dr. Phibes” in the remake, since I thought that was such a fun little nod. (Dr. Phibes is a character Vincent Price played in the early 70s; in The Fog, Phibes was the town’s coroner.) “There was [a character of that name],” said Carpenter. “You know, I’ve forgotten that. Alzheimer’s has started to kick in with me, so you’re going to have to remind me of all this stuff.”

Carpenter did not have an awful lot to say about what we can expect in The Fog remake, but he did chat a little bit about The Masters of Horror, a 13-part anthology which is also currently shooting in Vancouver, and will air on Showtime later on this year.

Carpenter is one of the Masters, of course, and he revealed that his one-hour story is called Cigarette Burns, written by Drew McWeeny (aka, “Moriarty” from Ain’t It Cool News). “I’ve never seen anything else like it,” he says of the script. “Really unique. We shoot it in 10 days. I’ll be shooting in July at some point. As I say, the first director up was John Landis. Last night I just had dinner with Dario Argento. He’s the second one up. They’re going to kick the crew’s ass, so by the time I get there, you know, they’ll — it’ll be fun to do. It’ll be a lot of fun to do.”

Nine Lives

2005-10-13T10:55:00.000-07:00

Nine Lives

USA, 2005. Rated R. 114 minutes.

Cast: Glenn Close, Sissy Spacek, Holly Hunter, Robin Wright Penn, Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Amanda Seyfried, Elpidia Carrillo. Also starring Stephen Dillane, Dakota Fanning, William Fichtner, Jason Isaacs, Joe Mantegna, Ian McShane, Molly Parker, Mary Kay Place, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Aidan Quinn, and Miguel Sandoval.
Writer: Rodrigo García
Original Music: Edward Shearmur
Cinematography: Xavier Pérez Grobet
Producer: Julie Lynn
Director: Rodrigo García

Grade: B+ Review by Carlo Cavagna

Nine vignettes. Nine segments. Nine women. Nine walks of life. Nine outstanding actresses. Nine obsessions. Nine stories. Nine camera shots. Nine Lives.

Okay, I sound like an advertisement. How else to describe this film, though? In nine short vignettes, writer/director Rodrigo García opens nine brief windows into the lives of nine women trapped in their relationships, imprisoned by cages of their own construction. It is, in a way, a film about the difficulty—perhaps even the impossibility—of letting go.

The film's first segment takes place, appropriately enough, in a jail. Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo) is trying hard to get time off for good behavior so she can be reuited with her daughter, but the need to see her on visiting day triggers her temper and sabotages her efforts. Another filmmaker might have closed with this segment instead of opening with it, thus building to the metaphor of the prison. This would have been a far less subtle artistic choice. Placing this segment at the start, when you still don't know what the film is about, makes the metaphor less obvious.
Jason Isaacs and Robin Wright-Penn
Jason Isaacs and Robin Wright-Penn star in Nine Lives.

The second segment is a virtuoso work of cinematography. One of the conceits of the film is that each segment consist of a single continuous Steadicam shot. No cuts. In this segment, the very pregnant Diana (Robin Wright Penn, who is too skinny for the pillow she's wearing), bumps into old flame Damian (Jason Isaacs) in a grocery story. Though both are now married to other people, they are within the space of a few minutes helplessly regressing to old emotions, and their unresolved issues re-emerge. How director of photography Xavier Pérez Grobet manages to choreograph their awkward dance through the store, with all its twists and turns, and capturing every significant glance from three aisles away, is an amazing artistic achievement.

In the disturbing third segment, Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton) returns to her childhood home to confront her stepfather (Miguel Sandoval) about the pain he caused her, and finds her much younger sister (Sydney Tamiia Poitier) there instead. It's taken a long time for Holly to work up the courage for this, and her resolve may be shaky. “If every memory was a bad one, how great that would be,” she exclaims in despair. The segment stops just short of its resolution, which could be a violent one. Nine Lives isn't about closure though. It's about how some things are never fully resolved, even when they appear to be.

Segment four finds Sonia (Holly Hunter) and Martin (Stephen Dillane) playing a call on Damian and his wife Lisa (Molly Parker). Sonia and Martin resent the other couple's money and seeming happiness and end up airing their dirty laundry in front of them. In segment five, teenaged Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) is giving up on her own future to care for her disabled father, and doesn't seem to mind. The glue of the household, she ping-pongs back and forth between parents whose relationship with one another has withered away.

The fairly twisted sixth segment follows Lorna (Amy Brenneman) as she ill-advisedly attends the funeral of her ex-boyfriend's wife, and finds herself pulled back into his orbit. In the seventh, Samantha's mother Ruth (Sissy Spacek) attempts a motel-room rendezvous with Henry (Aidan Quinn). The eighth segment portrays Camille (Kathy Baker), a woman facing a mastectomy who is frustrated by her body's deterioration, and the efforts of her husband Richard (Joe Mantegna) to comfort her. Finally the haunting ninth segment, which depicts Maggie (Glenn Close) and her daughter Maria (Dakota Fanning) having a picnic in a cemetery, provides an ending that lingers long after the film is over.

With such character-focused scenes each captured in a single continuous shot, Nine Lives does contains a few tedious acting-school-exercise moments. Yet the accumulated power of the vignettes packs a wallop. Or perhaps “wallop” is too strong a word. Nine Lives is a deeply thoughtful film whose deep thoughtfulness doesn't become apparent until the whole thing has sunk in. It's as if García has somehow seen into women's souls, and written nine truthful vignettes about unsatisfied desire. Responsibilities, regrets, and fear of an even greater emptiness are what cause these nine women to hold onto the dissatisfying relationships that confine them, begetting yet more unhappiness, longing, and yearning.

The President's Last Bang

2005-10-12T12:50:00.000-07:00

K-History: Slapstick Political Thriller Skimps on Context

by J. Hoberman

October 7th, 2005 4:08 PM

The President's Last Bang
Written and directed by Im Sangsoo
Kino, opens October 14, Cinema Village
South Korean history may not be a mandatory part of the American grade school curriculum, but ignorance does not detract from the disorienting experience of The President's Last Bang—a bloody Three Stooges account of the 1979 assassination of dictator Park Chunghee by his Korean Central Intelligence Agency director Kim Jaegyu.

Having contributed a bracing zetz of tabloid crassness to the New York Film Festival, Im Sangsoo's slapstick thriller—a dense scroll painted with an extremely broad brush—enters the marketplace. The President's Last Bang confines its action largely to a single chaotic night, opening with a scene that mutatis mutandis might have been transposed from Where the Truth Lies—a gaggle of cuties hanging out in the presidential pool while their chaperone entertains no one in particular by reading aloud from a softcore romance novel.

Business as usual: One of the president's gum-chewing henchmen kicks out a demure hooker and her pushy mama-san. The context is a bit sketchy. Park's family evidently sued to remove introductory newsreel footage of ongoing political protests from the film. Thus, the president (Song Jaeho) is introduced babbling about his regimen of seal testicles—to clinch the point, there's a staged political rally in which the point is emphatically made that Park is the nation. (The movie's Korean title, taken from a song, translates as "That Lover of Mine.")

The President's parade of officious fools, pompous tough guys, inept KCIA agents, querulous generals, and hapless bystanders can be a bit hard to follow without a scorecard. But once Park settles in for a banquet at the KCIA safe house, the scorecard, as well as the evening of geriatric karaoke with two not especially compliant hostesses, is soaked in gore. Who's on first? The lights in the room are cut too soon; the self-appointed assassin runs out of bullets and has to rush out for another gun. (Baik Yoonshik, who plays the dyspeptic KCIA chief, was last seen here as the victim of a madman in Save the Green Planet.)

From mid-movie on, confusion escalates (along with one's incredulity) as the body count mounts; a deadpan coda of haphazard prosecutions and executions only adds to the mystery. Was The President's Last Bang diminished on its home turf by failing to provide a motive for these bloody events? Did Kim shoot Park because of a bad stomach, an imagined slight, a sudden whim? As the president enjoys showing off his Japanese, so the KCIA director has a propensity for paraphrasing Chairman Mao. Still he remains an enigmatic figure, confounding all rational sense of history by raising the possibility of an assassination without a conspiracy.

Domino

2005-10-11T10:34:00.000-07:00

Oct. 07, 2005
By Kirk Honeycutt

Bottom line: Crass yet colorful exploitation of the sad, strange life of an English beauty-turned-bounty hunter.
Hyperkinetic cinematography, staccato editing, saturated colors and hipster-cool characters aren't enough to put across this twisted tale of real-life people in a fictionalized crime caper. What's missing from this trickster's Reality Show called "Domino" is any sense of reality. It looks and acts like "Ocean's Thirteen," as director Tony Scott borrows freely and unashamedly from Oliver Stone, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Elmore Leonard and Guy Ritchie.

Thanks to dynamic performances by Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez and a strong cast -- sometimes all but buried beneath irksome stylistic flourishes -- this dark and absurd melodrama certainly has raw energy. As is the case here, a bad movie is sometimes more watchable than a mediocre or just-OK movie. So one can anticipate strong business for this nonstop actioner from New Line, especially among young males.

The movie is inspired by the turbulent life of Domino Harvey, who died June 27 in West Hollywood at the age of 35, the victim of a suspected drowning after a drug overdose. The beautiful daughter of the late film star Laurence Harvey, Domino made her living as a gun-toting L.A. bounty hunter. Richard Kelly's screenplay, in Scott's words, "manufactured the story but left the characters as real, breathing people."

Not quite true. Before her death, Harvey was reportedly unhappy with a story that wrote out any mention of her drug use or bisexuality. More crucially, the movie resolutely avoids examining the sadness of a life, begun in privilege, that found its only excitement in the adrenaline rush of banging down doors with a shotgun in hand. Scott's movie merely wants to exploit that life, putting the movie on a par with "The Jerry Springer Show" and a reality TV program, both comically portrayed in the movie.

"Domino" begins at the end of a big case gone horribly wrong. Knightley's tattooed and bloodied Domino tells her life story in prison to a criminal psychologist (Lucy Liu, in a successful against-type casting). Her narrative rushes through her father's death -- when she was 4 -- her failures at boarding schools, a sorority, in modeling and as a socialite. By the time her mother, ex-model Pauline Stone, marries Hard Rock Cafe founder Peter Morton -- everyone's name other than Domino's is fictionalized -- Domino is bored and restless in Los Angeles.

An ad for a seminar recruiting bounty hunters catches her eye. Her future boss, the tough ex-con Ed (Rourke), immediately sees the advantages of having an English-accented blonde in his band of brothers that includes sullen Choco (Ramirez), who adores her, and Alf (Rizwan Abbasi), an Afghan driver obsessed with demolition.

Implausible adventures follow, including one in which Domino extricates her fellow hunters from a tense situation by performing a lap dance for a gang leader. Corny motifs run throughout the movie, too: Domino sees the deaths of goldfish as signs from above. And she likes to flip coins in the air while murmuring, "Heads, you live. Tails, you die."

Then a producer (Christopher Walken) of a reality TV show and his harried assistant (Mena Suvari) approach the bounty hunters about starring in a show called "The Bounty Squad." The movie's funniest gimmick has "Beverly Hills, 90210" stars Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green play themselves as the show's hosts.

A plot contrivance finds the squad's longtime bail bondsman (Delroy Lindo) and his girlfriend (Mo'Nique) desperate for a quick $300,000 needed for a life-saving operation for a granddaughter. This sends the Bounty Squad into a fateful, blood-soaked caper that involves a stolen armored car, Mafia money, a Las Vegas billionaire and an FBI investigation.

At one point, the Squad unwittingly winds up on hallucinogenic drugs in the desert. When Tom Waits abruptly materializes as a Wanderer from above, the whole movie goes on one bummer of an acid trip.

Under Scott's direction, his crew finds so many ways to annoy, from the manipulated color scheme and jarring cinematography to TV commercial-style editing. A soundtrack of hip-hop, rap and a few oldies is the only truly hip, edgy thing about this movie.

DOMINO
New Line Cinema
New Line Cinema and Samuel Hadida present a Scott Free Prods./Davis Films production in association with Metropolitan Filmexport
Credits:
Director: Tony Scott
Screenwriters: Richard Kelly
Story by: Richard Kelly, Steve Barancik
Producers: Samuel Hadida, Ridley Scott
Executive producers: Lisa Ellzrey, Toby Emmerich, Victor Hadida, Barry Waldman, Zach Shiff-Abrams, Skip Chaisson
Director of photography: Dan Mindel
Production designer: Chris Seagers
Music: Harry Gregson-Williams
Costumes: B.
Editors: William Goldenberg, Christian Wagner
Cast:
Domino Harvey: Keira Knightley
Ed: Mickey Rourke
Choco: Edgar Ramirez
Alf: RIzwan Abbasi
Claremont Williams: Delroy Lindo
Lateesha: Mo'Nique
Taryn Mills: Lucy Liu
Kimmie: Mena Suvari
Mark Heiss: Christopher Walken
Pauline Stone: Jacqueline Bisset
MPAA rating R
Running time -- 133 minutes

Elizabethtown

2005-10-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

Sep. 07, 2005
By Ray Bennett

Bottom line: Tedious humor and sentimentality bury what could have been a pretty good road picture.
This review was written for the festival screening of "Elizabethtown."

VENICE, Italy -- There's a winning little road picture with an appealing couple and great music in writer-director Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown," but it's not until Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst blow town that it gets up any speed.

Crowe makes an awkward start with a load of tosh about the shoe business, and he dwells far too long on a gaggle of sentimental small-town stereotypes instead of getting the leads out on Route 66 where they belong.

The overelaborate film, screened out of competition at the Venice International Film Festival, would be far better off losing a third of its 133 minutes, and its unnecessary length may contribute to a slack boxoffice unless the sparks that finally occur between the leads prompts positive word-of-mouth.

Told in high spirits throughout, the story centers on Drew Baylor (Bloom), a brilliant designer of running shoes who has spent eight years ignoring friends and family while developing a unique new shoe for footwear mogul Phil (Alec Baldwin).

For reasons not explained, the shoe is destined not just to flop but flop catastrophically, costing Phil's company nearly $1 billion. This turn of events causes Drew to contemplate suicide by attaching a sharp knife to his exercise machine so that it will stab him in the chest when he rides it.

Before he can pedal himself to death, however, his father dies while visiting Elizabethtown, Ky., where he grew up, and Drew is ordered by his sister and mother to travel from their Oregon home to collect his body.

Drew turns out to be the only passenger going to Elizabethtown on that flight, so attendant Claire (Dunst) is able to give him her undivided attention. This inauspicious beginning includes her divining the source of his despondency and personality analysis based on people's names.

Elizabethtown, Drew discovers, is populated by the kind of nosey, opinionated and loud people that cause so many to leave small towns like that. The major conflict is over where Drew's dad will be buried and whether he will be cremated, as they don't believe in that kind of thing in rural areas of the Bluegrass State.

Not only that, but Drew's mom Kitty (Susan Sarandon) is generally regarded as a wild one as she took Drew's dad away from Elizabethtown to California, even though they only lived there for 18 months and have resided in Oregon for more than 20 years.

There's a long and tiresome sequence in which a couple's wedding banquet is taken over for a memorial to Drew's dad. Kitty shows up, a very merry widow, and proceeds to dazzle everyone with a comical speech and a tap dance to salute her late husband.

Meanwhile, Claire has attached herself to Drew, even though she claims to have a married lover who is always out of town. Finally, the fun part begins when Drew sets off in his rental to drive from Kentucky across country to the coast, scattering his dad's ashes at wonderful places along the way.

Drew is guided by an intricate map created and narrated by Claire, complete with side visits, pit stops and fabulous music as he cruises through places like Memphis and Eureka Springs, Ark., and on to Oklahoma City and Scottsbluff, Nev.

The song score is excellent, with tracks from Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tom Petty, Elton John and many others perfect for a road trip. It's that, along with the chemistry of Bloom and Dunst, and the great open roads of the American mid-South and West that make the film worth seeing.

ELIZABETHTOWN
Paramount Pictures
Cruise/Wagner Prods. and Vinyl Films
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Cameron Crowe
Producers: Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner, Cameron Crowe
Executive producer: Donald J. Lee Jr.
Director of photography: John Toll
Production designer: Clay A. Griffith
Editor: David Moritz
Composer: Nancy Wilson
Cast:
Drew Baylor: Orlando Bloom
Claire: Kirsten Dunst
Hollie Baylor: Susan Sarandon
Phil: Alec Baldwin
Bill Banyon: Bruce McGill
Heather Baylor: Judy Greer
Ellen: Jessica Biel
Jessie: Paul Schneider
Aunt Dora: Paula Deen
Uncle Dale: Loudon Wainwright
Aunt Lena: Alice Marie Crowe
Sharon: Patty Griffin
MPAA rating PG-13
Running time -- 133 minutes

Waiting

2005-10-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

Instead of 'Waiting…,' don't even go
Crude gags drag down tedious tale of restaurant workers
By PIET LEVY
plevy@journalsentinel.com

A note to "Waiting . . ." filmmaker Rob McKittrick: If you make a movie set at a tacky, chain-style restaurant staffed by obnoxious and crude employees who hate to be there, don't expect an audience to want to spend an hour and a half alongside them.

Dean (Justin Long,) and Monty (Ryan Reynolds) are two waiters pondering their futures in "Waiting . . . ," a film that wastes the comic talents of its cast.

Granted, the "job sucks" comedy formula worked wonders for Mike Judge's ingenious "Office Space," which wittingly and winningly poked fun at chain restaurants in a few great scenes. The satire was so sharp that the film likely had an effect on TGI Friday's removal of its famous "flare."

But McKittrick lifts the concept of those few scenes and stretches it into a tedious 93 minutes of tired gags about the duplicitous nature of servers, the demanding attitude of customers and the lame behavior of bosses. Mostly, it just showcases a lot of "shocking" sex jokes, complete with frontal nudity.

Justin Long is supposed to be the soul of this soulless endeavor as Dean, a 22-year-old waiter at Shenanigans who is sick of waiting tables. But then Dean gets an offer to be assistant manager, prompting him, over the course of a workday, to wrestle with how he's living now vs. how he wants to live.

Working by his side are Monty (Ryan Reynolds), a wisecracking, schoolgirl-lusting smart-aleck; Serena (Anna Faris), a seductive server and Monty's ex-girlfriend; Calvin (Robert Patrick Benedict), a girl-phobic nice guy who has trouble using a public restroom; Amy (Kaitlin Doubleday), a nice waitress serving terrible customers; Naomi (Alanna Ubach), a screaming, swearing nutcase; and Mitch (John Francis Daley), the new guy who's shocked by everyone's shenanigans.

Then there's a smarmy, self-important boss (David Koechner); a flirtatious minor hostess (Vanessa Lengies); a wise, mysterious dishwasher (Chi McBride), a pair of stoned, gangster busboys (Andy Milonakis, Max Kasch) and a legion of disgusting cooks (including Luis Guzman and comedian Dane Cook), who pass the day doing disgusting things themselves and to the food.

So many zany characters, not a single laugh, even though some in the cast have shown great talent elsewhere. Koechner, from "Anchorman," is a funny guy. Cook's hilarious stand-up set is tear-inducing. Milonakis is amusing in doses on his MTV show and on his Internet skits. And Guzman, McBride and Daley from TV's "Freaks and Geeks" are fine actors. So what on earth are they all doing here?

McKittrick is making his screenwriting and directorial debut with "Waiting . . ." Hopefully, he'll be waiting a long time before he gets a chance to write and direct a movie again.

From the Oct. 7, 2005, editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

THE GOSPEL

2005-10-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

Regardless of its actual production history, The Gospel comes off as a shameless attempt to capitalize on the Tyler Perry/Diary of a Mad Black Woman audience. Written and directed by Rob Hardy, the film follows two childhood friends who attend seminary together and wind up on different paths as adults — one (Boris Kodjoe) has abandoned the church founded by his father to pursue a career as a bump-and-grind R&B singer, while the other (Idris Elba) is about to take over as leader of that very same church. Though that seems to set up The Gospel as an exploration of the secular-versus-sacred conflict that has burned from Elvis to R. Kelly, with insights into the contemporary culture wars, Hardy proves unable to mine what is interesting from his own premise. The film too hastily makes one of the two men a villain and sets the other on a discovering-true-values journey, bogging down both with unnecessary romantic entanglements. There’s a lot of talk here about religion, as well as plenty of gospel singing, but no sense of what these characters truly believe, what it is that drives their faith. Empty platitudes abound. There may be an audience out there for any movie about gospel music, regardless of how bad it is, but as filmmaking or as drama, it’s hard to imagine anyone singing the praises of this one. (Mark Olsen)

Two For The Money

2005-10-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

In Two for the Money, the latest of Al Pacino's dark-suited-dad-figure-who-can't-stop-shouting extravaganzas, Matthew McConaughey plays a sports betting consultant so wholesome, he has to be taught how to say the word f---. I never bought it, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy listening to Pacino wrap his joyful singsong rasp around some good old for-f---'s-sake obscenity. By now, no one of sane mind would go to a Loud Voice Al movie — a genre unto itself — expecting art. You go to watch Pacino entertain himself with his hyperbolic cheeseball mastery. This time, he's a goateed guru of football odds, a TV host who reels in suckers with a 1-900 number that allows them to get betting tips from his team of ace consultants. McConaughey, as a star quarterback retired by injury, is Pacino's hot new ace of aces: He knows so much about the players, coaches, and hidden fine points of the game that he can predict, as if by crystal ball, the winner of virtually every pigskin contest. Sports betting is a great subject for a movie, but Two for the Money is short on the number-crunching nitty-gritty. It's a series of semi-lame ''arcs'' — McConaughey's go-nowhere rivalry with a fellow consultant (Jeremy Piven, having fun in an underwritten role), his sudden, inexplicable cold streak, the fact that Pacino is cast as a recovering gambling addict who ''hates himself'' deep down. I didn't buy that one, either. At a Loud Voice Al movie, the self-love should be deafening.

In Her Shoes

2005-10-05T10:31:00.000-07:00

Director Curtis Hanson gets inside the scrambled lives of the characters, played by Cameron Diaz and Tony Collette, and explores the ties that forever bind.
Sep. 16, 2005

By Kirk Honeycutt

Bottom line: Engaging drama about two sisters' rocky relationship transformed by an unexpected source.
This review was written for the festival screening of "In Her Shoes."

TORONTO -- In "In her Shoes," director Curtis Hanson has made a chick flick with substance as well as style. With Cameron Diaz and the ever-versatile Tony Collette playing a pair of squabbling Jewish sisters, Hanson gets inside his characters' scrambled lives with sensitivity and compassion as he explores the ties that forever bind.

The drama has a sitcom feel so it takes awhile to see where Hanson and writer Susannah Grant (working from Jennifer Weiner's novel) are headed. One may also not buy a key plot twist -- that the two women are totally ignorant of the existence of a grandmother, played by Shirley MacLaine -- but this doesn't hinder the enjoyment of watching the interaction of the three stars.

The audience for "In Her Shoes" definitely skewers female. But Fox can count on Diaz to attract male viewers, who won't be disappointed by the sexy and stylish outfits her character, a clothes maven, wears in the picture. Boxoffice outlook is above average.

The two sisters are designed as polar opposites. Diaz's Maggie is wild, irresponsible, ill-educated and much too reliant on sexual magnetism to draw the affection she craves. Collette's Rose is a ambitious attorney in a top Philadelphia law firm whose work schedule and body issues preclude any love life.

Maggie's inability to hold down a job leaves her virtually homeless. She camps out on couches at friends' or the home of her father (Ken Howard) and bitterly resentful stepmother (Candice Azzara) or, as a last resort, her sister's. When Maggie does the unthinkable and beds a man her sister just started seeing, Rose orders Maggie out of her life for good. For once, Maggie obeys.

At this point, the movie springs the surprise of the long-lost grandmother. Maggie happens upon a stack of unopened birthday greetings to both sisters from the grandmother, which their dad hid from them all these years. So Maggie takes a train to Florida in hopes of caging a couch and possibly some money from Grandma.

Meanwhile, Rose is sufficiently upset about the direction of her life to quit the firm and create a job for herself as a dog walker while she thinks things over. During her "walkabout," she runs into a former colleague and gourmet named Simon (Mark Feuerstein), who takes her to lunch and won't take no for an answer to a follow-up dinner.

Turns out, Simon had the hots for Rose from day one at the firm. Surprised and delighted to find herself with a real boyfriend, Rose begins to lose weight and repair her self-esteem.

Maggie's grandmother, Ella, sizes up Maggie quickly enough and puts her to work at an assisted-living home. There a patient, a retired professor, gets to the bottom of Maggie's problem. Severe dyslexia has hindered her ability to learn or hold a job.

He works with her on the problem. In the meantime, at the lively senior citizen center where Maggie lives with Ella, Maggie starts to shake off her self-absorption and reach out to other people.

When Ella discovers Rose's address, she writes her other granddaughter a letter that will bring about a reunion that may or may not be pleasant. The issue that looms over all three characters turns out to be how the girls' mother died.

The story suffers from a certain tidiness, where many characters exist to teach each sister a life lesson and solutions come far too easily. But the actors are all on their game, especially the three stars, and Hanson never lets the movie bog down in sentimentality.

Diaz gives Maggie a genuine sweetness even at her wildest that makes her loneliness all the more acute. Collette demonstrates how braininess can cover up a person's complete ignorance of her own real worth. MacLaine, in one of her more restrained performances, brings to Ella the wisdom it took a lifetime of mistakes to acquire.

Technical work is thoroughly pro in Philadelphia and Florida, two areas of the country that look as dissimilar as the two sisters.

IN HER SHOES
20th Century Fox
Fox 2000/Scott Free/Deuce Three Productions
Credits:
Director: Curtis Hanson
Writer: Susannah Grant
Based on the novel by: Jennifer Weiner
Producers: Ridley Scott, Lisa Ellzey, Curtis Hanson, Carol Fenelon
Executive producer: Tony Scott
Director of photography: Terry Stacey
Production designer: Dan Davis
Costumes: Sophie de Rakoff
Music: Mark Isham
Editors: Craig Kitson, Lisa Zeno Churgin
Cast:
Maggie: Cameron Diaz
Rose: Tony Collette
Ella: Shirley MacLaine
Simon: Mark Feuerstein
Michael Feller: Ken Howard
Sydelle: Candice Azzara
Mrs. Lefkowitz: Francine Bears
Running time -- 131 minutes
MPAA rating PG-13

Bunny Business

2005-10-04T19:54:00.000-07:00

Blessed are the cheesemakers: Whimsical animated feature shows inventive minds at clay
by Ed Park
October 4th, 2005 12:59 PM

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Directed by Steve Box and Nick Park
DreamWorks, opens October 5
Though Wallace and Gromit, turophile inventor and canny canine, have only made four appearances in 16 years, the plasticine pair captures the dim-bright appeal of some classic British duos—Wooster and Jeeves, Watson and Holmes. Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) has technical ingenuity but lacks common sense; his mute, goal-oriented sidekick exists in a state of exasperation and melancholy, the only cure for which is a nail-biting bout of derring-do.

What creator Nick Park (no relation!), with the help of the Aardman Animations team, lacks in oeuvre output, he makes up in charming intricacy. A Grand Day Out (1989) is an elegantly austere fantasia in which man and dog voyage to the moon in search of cheese, simply because there's none left in the house; the two brilliant follow-ups, The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), keep things on earth while piling on additional critters, visual and verbal games, ever more elaborate chases, and dizzying devices of Rube Goldberg complexity. Amplifying the joys of this well-oiled machinery is time itself: It's fitting that the glacial stop-motion animation process should result in the construction of a more handcrafted era, an ambience of free-floating nostalgia in which every detail—wallpaper, a knit-sweater pattern, a refrigerator logo—is half remembered before being enjoyed.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, co-directed by Park and Steve Box, happily extends the heroes' small-scale allure to feature length. Once dedicated to cleaning windows with the assistance of bungee cords, Wallace and Gromit have now taken up humane vermin removal under the banner Anti-Pesto. Their job is crucial: Tottington Hall's annual Giant Vegetable Competition looms, and the townsfolk's prize pumpkins and monster squashes are tempting targets for late-night-snack- attacking rabbits. Luckily, Anti-Pesto has installed constant gardeners of a sort—gnome statuettes with infrared eyes that act as trip wires. Motion triggers an alarm chez Wallace that wakes him by proffering a plate of cheese to his dreaming nose, only to withdraw it and have his head smack the wall.

As in Park's 2000 non-W&G Chicken Run, there's a firm stance against cruelty to animals—but the superior Curse adds a nice reductio ad absurdum in which we feel sorry for the ravaged veggies too, as a mysterious gargantuan herbivore starts making the rounds. The Lady Tottington (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter), whose mouth structure suggests a shared bloodline with Mr. Bill and whose hair resembles a steel-wool baguette, proclaims with pampered authority, "I believe the killing of fluffy creatures is never justified." But even when said f.c. is capable of massive destruction? Her trigger-happy, Elvis-coiffed toff of a suitor, Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes), is only too happy to go on the hunt, sensing that Wallace is a rival for Lady T.'s affections.

Curse has echoes from the previous W&G outings—the captured bunnies recall the voracious sheep in A Close Shave, and one of the critters even starts to speak in Wallace-isms (after an ill-advised bit of "brain alteration"). But this latest and biggest installment is a whimsical success of a very high order: The pace never lags, the invention is incessant, and it makes you want to have a bite of cheese afterward.