Movie Reviews
Domino
To watch "Domino" is to be pummeled with relentless audio-visual tomfoolery for two hours. I knew Tony Scott, director of "Top Gun," "Enemy of the State" and "Crimson Tide," liked his movies full of motion and chaos, but when did he commence his all-crack diet? It's like someone smashed open a piñata full of film-school devices and Tony Scott knocked over the other kids to get everything for himself. Oliver Stone, on his best day, couldn't make a movie this incoherent. It's about a female bounty hunter (played by Keira Knightley), and a crazy double-cross that gets everyone in trouble, and at one point Jerry Springer is involved. It has an over-the-top, at times incomprehensible screenplay by Richard Kelly ("Donnie Darko"), and is a marvel of editing, sound and music -- all wasted on a movie too dumb to deserve such attention.
Elizabethtown
"Elizabethtown" is Cameron Crowe's sixth film, and he's still trying to recapture the magic of his first one.
"Say Anything" addressed youthful indirection and awkward love, and it demonstrated Crowe's knack for creating a perfect movie soundtrac...
The Fog
"The Fog" is a bad movie, stupid in all the usual ways, with characters who behave foolishly and culminating in a catastrophically silly ending. Written by Cooper Layne ("The Core") and directed by Rupert Wainwright ("Stigmata"), it is a remake of a John Carpenter film from 1980, and whatever tension or spookiness that version had has been removed. Set on an island off the coast of Oregon, the film takes place over two nights when a dense, malevolent fog has rolled in. The cause, apparently, is Nick Castle (Tom Welling), whose fishing boat's anchor dislodged some long-dormant artifacts at the bottom of the bay, dredging up not just an old hairbrush and a pocket watch, but a century-old pile of vengeance, too. None of the absurdities matter too much if the movie is suspenseful, but it isn't. The threat is too vague (so there's ... fog? And it's going to ... do something?), and its effects are not especially chilling. The film isn't creepy or spooky or scary. It's atmospheric, but only in the literal sense.
Where the Truth Lies
Apart from the controversy over its steamy sex scene involving Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth and Rachel Blanchard, Atom Egoyan's "Where the Truth Lies" doesn't have much worth noticing, except maybe Egoyan's perfectly constructed film-noir-style scenes set in 1957 and 1972. The story, about a Martin and Lewis-type comedy duo whose career went down the tubes after a dead teenage girl was found in their hotel room, is an unimaginative whodunit whose ultimate solution is as cliche as they come -- a dime-store mystery novel that's been dressed up with tawdry sex. It's reasonably entertaining, for a while, until all the facts start to come out and you realize that instead of there being more to it than meets the eye, there's actually less. A very bad performance by Alison Lohman as a young reporter trying to get all the details 15 years after the fact certainly doesn't help.
In Her Shoes
"In Her Shoes," is a quiet movie, funny but not wacky or garish, about two sisters -- one responsible, one careless -- who annoy and love each other. Toni Collette is one; Cameron Diaz is the other. Shirley MacLaine plays their grandmother, to whom the irresponsible sister flees for support (and money). The movie can be deconstructed easily and stripped down to its basic elements -- it's rather obvious how the sisters wind up switching places ("In Her Shoes," anyone?), and the last several scenes seem like nothing more than a series of reconciliations. But credit director Curtis Hanson and the actresses for avoiding maudlin tears and melodramatic outbursts. Collette's forte is plain, emotionally damaged women, and Diaz has rarely portrayed a human -- an actual learning, growing human -- so well. It's funny in a serious way and serious in a funny way, and it has an emotional truth to it. I think it will ring true, at least some aspect of it, for nearly everyone who sees it.
Two for the Money
"Two for the Money" is completely forgettable except for Al Pacino, whose performance can be admired for being "interesting," if not actually "good." (He yells and blusters a lot, like usual.) He plays Walter Abrams, owner of a sports handicapping business where it behooves him to have someone on staff who can predict winners. He finds Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey), a college football player who got injured a while back and has a gift for picking champions. Does he get too cocky and start to falter? Does he "lose himself" somewhere along the way and have to go back and "find himself"? Indeed. Except for Walter's unpredictability, it's a pretty obvious movie, directed with TV melodrama impulses. It is the male equivalent of a chick flick, with bonding and fraternizing superimposed against (what else?) football, and it never finds a good way to go about it.
Waiting…
The indie comedy "Waiting..." is obsessed with sex, with its own genitalia, and with urination, and it speaks of all three subjects constantly. Its particular brand of puerile humor is often well-played enough to earn laughs, but there is room for improvement, too, as writer/director Rob McKittrick included every gag he could think of about the hell of working at a TGI Friday's-style restaurant, but he did it without regard for whether they all actually work. It paints a vivid picture, that's for sure, and a disturbingly accurate one, as anyone who has labored at such a place will attest. It isn't great, but it has some very entertaining moments.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
If you have never experienced the sublime joys of the Wallace and Gromit clay-animated shorts, then I regret to tell you that you have not lived. What you've been doing instead, I don't know. But not living, that's for sure.
From the British minds...
Good Night, and Good Luck
"Good Night, and Good Luck" is a fantastically compact film, with nary an extraneous moment, about CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's battle with rabid communist-hunter Joseph McCarthy in 1953-54. The film is in black-and-white, both literally and politically (McCarthy = bad; Murrow = good), but it recreates the heady, cigarette-laden world of early television news with precision, offering a sort of eulogy for real TV journalism, which barely exists anymore. David Strathairn is magnificently restrained and noble as Murrow, with George Clooney (who also directed and co-wrote) doing fine work as his producer, Fred Friendly. It's a tightly constructed story, told simply and clearly, and it's compelling from start to finish. (P.S.: History revisionists like Ann Coulter who try to make McCarthy a hero can bite me.)
The Squid and the Whale
"The Squid and the Whale," about an intellectual Brooklyn couple divorcing in the mid-'80s, is autobiographical for its writer/director Noah Baumbach, and its ofttimes amusing audacity makes it enjoyable -- but at its heart, it's just another coming-of-age indie comedy that thinks it has more to say than it actually does. The father (Jeff Daniels) and his older son (Jesse Eisenberg) take sides against the mother (Laura Linney) and the younger boy (Owen Kline), while each of the four, separately, has some issues to work through. Much of the film is little more than all four family members behaving indecently toward one another, yet we still manage to like them, at least occasionally. Ignoring its pretensions, it's a solid, quirky piece of work.
Into the Blue
More than an hour of "Into the Blue" has passed before we encounter anything approximating a conflict or antagonist. Up to that point, it's scene after scene of Jessica Alba and Paul Walker (occasionally joined by Scott Caan and Ashley Scott) swimming, snorkeling and otherwise cavorting in the beautiful waters of the Caribbean. Eventually they find a plot, and it has to do with sunken treasure and vengeful drug lords, but man is it ever slow up to that point. Sometimes when a movie gets really boring, I start to wish that a shark would eat one of the characters, just for some diversion. This film marks the first time that my wish has ever come true.
The War Within
Four years since 9/11, and now we're starting to see films that address terrorism directly. "The War Within," a film and taut and suspenseful as it is thought-provoking, follows a Pakistani man named Hassan (Ayad Akhtar) who, embittered by his brother's death during the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan, has become a Muslim extremist. He enters the U.S. as part of a vast underground network of Muslims planning another major attack on New York, and lives with his lifelong friend Sayeed (Firdous Bamji) and his family in the meantime, constantly wavering in his resolve to perform his mission. The film doesn't quite master the art of getting inside the head of a terrorist, but it does make us see Hassan as a human being, and we come to see how a person can get to the point he has reached. The question that plagues him and his friends is: If a Muslim becomes devout, does that mean he'll become a terrorist? Or is there still some middle ground?
Capote
"Capote" is a riveting biopic telling the story of Truman Capote -- or at least the six years he spent researching and obsessing over the story that would become "In Cold Blood," his seminal non-fiction novel about murders in a small Kansas town. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the fey, theatrical little man with perfect precision, but more importantly, he gives him weight as a fully realized, deeply flawed man. Watch as Capote befriends the two convicted murderers, seeks to help them, then realizes he can't finish his book until the story is over, which won't happen until they are executed. See the misery of a man trapped in a prison of his own making, a man desperate to be liked by high society and death-row inmates alike. Unlike most biopics, which try to make their subjects into saints, "Capote" lets Capote be himself: selfish, strange and scintillating.
Screen Door Jesus
"Screen Door Jesus" is an overlooked, ignored gem. I almost said "forgotten," but that's not true. Anyone who's actually seen it isn't likely to forget it anytime soon.
Crafted like a sprawling Robert Altman film, it has dozens of characters occu...
MirrorMask
The battle between style and substance rages at the heart of "MirrorMask," and style emerges as the victor. This is a film packed full of vivid imagination and brilliantly realized visual concepts -- all in the service of a so-so story with forgettable characters. Our 15-year-old heroine is Helena (Stephanie Leonidas), who, in the tradition of Dorothy and Alice, finds herself in a fanciful world where she must find a powerful object known as the MirrorMask in order to restore the balance between the Darklands and the City of Light. As with all good fantasy movies, there is real import lying under the dazzling ideas of magic and spells, but it is not, when you get down to it, any smarter or more clever than, say, "The Never-Ending Story" or "The Wizard of Oz," both of which it closely resembles. Then again, simply looking at the film is an awesome experience, if only to observe the endless procession of magical creatures, creative visual devices and cats with human faces. State-of-the-art technology, not to mention a director (Dave McKean) with experience in creating graphic novels, has enabled all of these ideas to be integrated seamlessly into the world of human actors.
The Greatest Game Ever Played
"The Greatest Game Ever Played" is not the greatest movie ever played. It focuses on the 1913 U.S. Open, where a 20-year-old amateur named Francis Ouimet went head-to-head with professional golf legend Harry Vardon. Did the underdog win? Well, duh. The pleasure of a film like this, if there is any, will be in the journey, and this journey, directed by Bill Paxton, is as by-the-numbers as a game of golf. There's a par for every hole, and Paxton pretty much hits exactly that -- sometimes over and sometimes under, but always close, with no surprises. There is simply nothing about the movie that warrants notice. The earnest-sounding musical score, the plucky urchin who acts as Francis' caddy, the basic Rich vs. Poor, rise-to-the-top story line -- it's the same here as at all the other courses. You hit the ball, you walk to the next hole, you hit it again. (You want more golf metaphors? I have more if you want more.)
Serenity
"Serenity" proves what many of us have always believed, which is that given the chance, Joss Whedon can write and direct better than nearly anyone in Hollywood. And he's ... gasp ... a TV guy!
His shows "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Angel" and "Fir...
Forty Shades of Blue
Rip Torn is the only reason to see "Forty Shades of Blue," a movie so contemplative and internal it makes "Lost in Translation" look like a Schwarzenegger film. The movie stops being interested halfway through, but Torn never ceases to be compelling....
Dirty Love
Former MTV hostess and pin-up girl Jenny McCarthy is attempting a comeback with "Dirty Love," a you-go-girl "Sex and the City"-style comedy designed to show off McCarthy's comedic skills. It does this perfectly: McCarthy has no comedic skills, and th...
Proof
David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) who fears she has inherited her father's insanity along with his brilliance for math is a better play than it is a movie, but it's a pretty good movie, too. Paltrow does some of her best dramatic work in years, and the film is surprisingly funny, too, as her character, Cathy, deals with her uptight sister (Hope Davis) and develops a relationship with her late father's student Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is currently combing through the old man's notebooks to see if he wrote anything coherent before he died. The performances are sharp (though I don't quite believe Gyllenhaal as a math geek) and the drama is tender. It's about math, but it's more about a family.
Flightplan
"Flightplan" is two-thirds of a great movie and one-third of a mediocre one, but hey, even the mediocre one has Jodie Foster in it. She plays a woman whose young daughter disappears on a transatlantic flight; what's worse, the crew is saying the daughter was never onboard to begin with. But she was! We saw her! But no one else did, and what we saw doesn't count. Is Mom crazy? What is at first a tightly wound psychological thriller eventually becomes something else, one of those movies with an elaborate scheme that's so complicated and requires such enormous foresight that you wonder why anyone would go to that kind of trouble. The questions are much better than the answers in this film, but it's still a pretty entertaining ride.
Corpse Bride
You can disqualify me from reviewing "Corpse Bride" if you want to, because I never cared much for "The Nightmare Before Christmas," the 1993 stop-motion animation film that is in many ways its progenitor. So it could be that my lack of fervent enthu...
Roll Bounce
Here is a formula for making a good movie about roller skating: Include lots of roller-skating scenes; avoid maudlin or sentimental sub-plots; wrap it up in 90 minutes. This formula is so basic that I am surprised the people who made "Roll Bounce" did not know it. Set in Chicago in 1978, the film is about a handful of young black teens who spend their summer days roller skating, eventually entering a disco-skate contest and hoping to win $500. The skating scenes (set to a very '70s soundtrack) bubble with the joy of carefree youth, and some other scenes capture the exuberance of being a kid in the summertime. But too many scenes focus on one kid (played by Bow Wow) and how his mom died and now he and his dad and his little sister are trying to get along without her, and it's all very "Full House."
Oliver Twist
The 1968 musical "Oliver!" and its cheerful punctuation notwithstanding, Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" is a dark, violent story, and Roman Polanski's version doesn't shy away from that. The more alarming aspects are put to good use, adding shadow and texture to the lively, plot-driven story that is still, after almost 200 years, pretty enjoyable. Ben Kingsley is noteworthy as Fagin, creating him from the ground up -- walk, talk and mannerisms -- as a wholly unique character. Polanski succeeds at giving the story high dramatic stakes, with peril at every turn, all while keeping it charmingly "Dickensian." You look at that fat-necked aristocrat, chowing down on turkey while Oliver gets busted for wanting more gruel, and you think: That guy looks like a character in a Dickens novel.
A History of Violence
David Cronenberg's adaptation of the graphic novel "A History of Violence" is cool, controlled and precise, not to mention enthralling, surprising and disturbing. It tells of an average American man (Viggo Mortensen) who performs an act of heroism that results in the death of two nasty villains. Thereafter, he is visited by other villains, who claim he is not who he says he is, who say he has killed men before. What happens from there I won't spoil for you, but the point of the film is that violence has repercussions. It is gross and ugly and serious, and we often forget that when we go to the movies. This film makes us look at the reality of brutality, even while it's entertaining us with a crackling good psychological thriller.
Dorian Blues
"Dorian Blues" is one of the best gay-themed films to come out (pardon the pun) in the last few years -- and it was written and directed by one Tennyson Bardwell, who, despite being named Tennyson Bardwell, is straight. I don't have any theories on w...
Venom
"Venom" is an old-school slasher movie, complete with randy teens, the slaughtering of hateful characters who were made hateful just so we'd enjoy seeing them get slaughtered, and a scene where a dead person comes back to life in the morgue and kills the coroner. It's set in a small Louisiana town where no one has a Southern accent, where a tow-truck driver is killed by snakes, but not just any snakes: VOODOO SNAKES! They have evil in them, and now the evil is in the guy, who quickly comes back to life and starts killing local youth. Not scary even for a second, though there are a couple mildly creative deaths, I suppose, and plenty of attractive gore. But mostly it's a lifeless, uninspired horror flick that ought to have been left in whatever hole they found it in.
The Thing About My Folks
Paul Reiser has written "The Thing About My Folks," a film in which he stars with Peter Falk. They play father and son, which seems like perfect casting. Together they bicker, converse, and interrupt each other like a yakkety real-life father-son duo. The film has them on an impromptu road trip after Mom walks out on Dad, prompting some soul-searching intermingled with hijinks. All of that is pleasant enough, and I'm a fan of Reiser's quick-witted brand of humor, but what really makes the film work is Falk. Seventy-five percent of the laughs come from his character, a garrulous old coot with a good heart who thinks the same way he walks: with an easy-going shuffle. This is a perfectly charming comedy.
Everything Is Illuminated
"Everything Is Illuminated" is a contemplative, bittersweet film, as much a sublime comedy as it is a drama about the urgency of understanding and learning from one's past. It's about an odd, quiet young man named Jonathan (Elijah Wood), who is always dressed in a suit and tie, who has come to the Ukraine to find the woman who helped his grandfather escape the Nazis years ago. He is aided by Alex (Eugene Hutz), an affable 20-year-old who speaks English like he learned it from SNL's wild and crazy Festrunk Brothers, and Alex's grandfather, who claims to be blind but who clearly isn't. There is much to admire in the film's strange, pleasant sense of humor, as well as in its more alarming themes, revealed as Jonathan and Alex both learn about their heritage.
Separate Lies
"Separate Lies" is a grownup drama about grownup people having grownup problems. The way they handle those problems, however, is childlike: They lie. Specifically, they are a prickly British man (Tom Wilkinson) and his self-conscious wife (Emily Watson), who has had an affair with a rakish fellow (Rupert Everett). The affair isn't what needs covering up, however; it's the accidental death of a local man, apparently caused by one of the parties involved. Everyone's ethics become situational, and they discover, as viewers already know, that getting away with lying is often harder and more nerve-racking than simply telling the truth. The acting is polished throughout, and writer/director Julian Fellowes -- the writer of "Gosford Park," making his directorial debut -- lets the actors do their thing.
Thumbsucker
Nearly all of the angst in "Thumbsucker" is internal. It is not a film about how people relate to each other, but how they relate to themselves. Yet despite the introspection, it's an accessible movie, a colorful and warm coming-of-age comedy with rich, funny characters. At the center, in a marvelous breakthrough performance, is Lou Pucci as 17-year-old Justin, who sucks his thumb when he is stressed. His father (Vincent D'Onofrio) doesn't know how to relate to him anyway, and his mother (Tilda Swinton) is too busy being obsessed with a television star who has just checked into the rehab clinic where she works. A school psychologist recommend ADHD medication, and it seems to help -- but at what cost? Is Justin really "himself" anymore? The film makes two points. The more obvious one is that being different is not necessarily bad. But the other one is this: Not having all the answers isn't necessarily bad, either. Justin, his parents, his New Age dentist -- each of them is making desperate attempts to discover what life is all about, to find "the answers." What the wise ones eventually learn is that maybe they don't know anything, and maybe that's OK. You can be uncertain and still be happy.
Lord of War
From Andrew Niccol, the writer of "Gattaca" and "The Truman Show," comes "Lord of War," another high-concept story about someone involved in a big lie. In this case, it's an arms dealer (played by Nicolas Cage) who's lying to himself. Told mostly like a dark satire, the story follows the gunrunner through the 1980s and '90s as he supplies all the world's despots, madmen and tyrants with the guns and ammo they need to kill each other. The film has sharp writing and some deft cinematographic tricks, but ultimately isn't as good a movie as it thinks it is. The gunrunner's crisis of conscience isn't convincing -- or, more to the point, sympathetic -- because he hasn't been portrayed as a three-dimensional character up to that point. Still, Cage's performance is good, somewhere between his Very Serious self and his Wacky Unhinged self. We get a few grim laughs and some scary ideas about guns and governments.
Just Like Heaven
Usually the conflict in romantic comedies is that the two people in question simply don't get along, or are kept apart by weak circumstances that are easily overcome in the film's final act. But the conflict in "Just Like Heaven" is that one of the p...
Cry_Wolf
"Cry_Wolf" is one of those cheap thrillers about teenagers being scared of something that may or may not exist. It's a pretty decent one, actually, as far as these things go, until its finale, which is either really clever or really stupid, depending on how on-board you are with the whole thing. It's set an an exclusive prep school called Westlake, where some bored students make up a rumor about a serial killer who follows a specific pattern -- and then things actually start happening according to that pattern. Is someone goofing around? Or did some maniac hear the rumor and decide to adopt the persona himself? It's more psychological than literal, i.e., the violence doesn't start until near the end. And then the twists come, and some of them work and some of them don't. It's a dumb movie, yeah, but it's so convinced it's smart that it almost makes you believe it, too.
An Unfinished Life
Robert Redford has been less active in recent years (as a movie star, anyway), but "An Unfinished Life" is a reminder that his talent is only getting stronger, that his acting life is indeed not yet finished.
Here he plays a gruff and solitary Wy...
The Man
It's an anemic buddy comedy in which a nerdy dental-supply salesman named Andy Fiddler (Eugene Levy) gets dragged into a case with a street-wise, tough-talking Detroit cop named Derrick Vann (Samuel L. Jackson). The roles are too easy for both actors. You can almost hear the pitch to the studio: "The cop is a Samuel L. Jackson type, a real bada** mofo, you know? And the other guy is a really dorky white guy with glasses, a real Eugene Levy type, you know?" And the studio exec says, "Why don't we just get Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy?" They could play these roles in their sleep is my point, though I give them credit for apparently taking it seriously despite the misgivings they surely had about the script. They pry a few chuckles from the standard "we're partners but we don't like each other" dialogue, but not many.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
Combine the gripping drama of "Law & Order" with the satanic frights of "The Exorcist" and you've got ... a movie that would be much better than "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," which borrows too heavily from one genre and not enough from another. It is, essentially, a flat courtroom movie that has been spiced up with a few scenes of demonic possession -- seen in flashback as various people testify in court as to the peculiar behavior of Emily Rose leading up to her death. A priest (Tom Wilkinson) is charged in her death; he claims he tried to save the poor girl, and that her death was due to natural (or supernatural) causes. Laura Linney is his Scully-ish lawyer, and Campbell Scott is the one-note prosecutor. You know how some comedies put all the funny parts in the trailer? Well, this one put all the scary parts in. Two minutes of creepiness, sprinkled over a long, dull legal story.
This Divided State (documentary)
Made by Brigham Young University alum Steven Greenstreet, "This Divided State" is an utterly absorbing on-the-scenes documentary chronicling what happened last fall when Utah Valley State College -- in ultra-conservative Orem, Utah -- invited Michael Moore to speak. (I'll give you a hint: All hell broke loose.) Greenstreet was there to film the protests, the petition drives, the lawsuits, the Sean Hannity counter-programming, and Moore's eventual appearance (which took place despite the efforts of many). A wealthy, misguided jackass named Kay Anderson emerges as the film's great villain, simply by speaking his mind: He equates Moore with evil itself, and believes that permitting him to speak in the community poses a great danger. The movie is a fascinating eye-opener about the delirious narrow-mindedness that exists in the world, and how people will twist their own religious beliefs to mean preposterous things never intended by the founders of those beliefs.
Mobsters and Mormons
This Mormonized version of "My Blue Heaven" has a New Jersey mobster (Mark DeCarlo) going into the Witness Protection Program and being sent with his nagging wife and sullen teenage son to ... Utah! Where the Mormons are. The standard fish-out-of-water jokes ensue, but DeCarlo plays them energetically, as if having the time of his life. Written and directed by John E. Moyer (co-screenwriter on the Mormon-based "Singles Ward," "The R.M." and "The Home Teachers"), "Mobsters and Mormons" turns out to be one of the better LDS comedies so far -- faint praise, perhaps, but sincere. Some jokes fall flat, many small roles are badly acted -- but the lead characters are likable and the jokes that fail at least don't annoy you in the process. And many of them are actually funny.
Echoes of Innocence
The best thing about "Echoes of Innocence" might be its title, which sounds like it's going to be soft porn, or maybe a Lifetime Network movie about child molestation. The funny part is that it's actually a movie about NOT having sex.
Innocence h...
Green Street Hooligans
In England, the soccer teams have "firms" -- what you and I would call "gangs" -- that roam the streets looking for fights with anyone, but especially fans of the opposing teams. "Green Street Hooligans" brings us into this world through the eyes of an American who is played by Elijah Wood, so you know he's way out of his element. (The character, not Wood, who does fine.) As the genteel ex-Harvard student dissolves into hooliganism, his confidence increases and he's happier than he's ever been -- all because he spends his days drinking and his nights fighting, sometimes vice versa. How can THAT be? The film has some pedestrian plot elements and dialogue ("What I was about to learn no Ivy League school could teach me," the American says in the opening narration). But the fight scenes are well-choreographed by director Lexi Alexander, and cut together in a way that enhances their bloody, often graphic, details. It's a visceral, macho film, and if the message seems to be that violence sometimes IS the answer, it's hard to resist the grimy, eloquent way that the point is made.
Eve & the Fire Horse
Julia Kwan’s “Eve & the Fire Horse� is a perfectly pleasant and emotionally resonant film that dares to suggest that religion -- gasp! -- can actually be a GOOD thing in a person’s life! Set in the 1970s in Vancouver, the film is about the Engs, a multi-generational Chinese family whose young daughters Karena (Hollie Lo) and Eve (Phoebe Jojo Kut) get involved in Christianity. Their earnestness is sweet amusing, and the young, non-professional actresses give winning performances. It’s one of the most charming family films in recent memory.
Touch the Sound (documentary)
"Touch the Sound" at first appears to be a dreamy, druggy movie about a hippie chick who does performance art and plays drums in the street and talks all touchy-feely about music and sound. Then we find out she's deaf, and the fact that she's an accomplished musician, albeit a weird one, becomes astonishing. Director Thomas Riedelsheimer follows her around the world as she makes her music (often with non-instruments), and he also includes many, many long shots of the environment, letting the ambient sounds of cities and nature create their own rhythm. You'll either sail along with it contentedly, or you'll start to think halfway through that maybe the movie could have been a lot shorter and made its points just as well.
Transporter 2
"Transporter 2" has dropped the unwieldy "The" from its title, but that's the only thing that's been streamlined from its 2002 high-energy predecessor. Most of what made "The Transporter" work -- quick-cut editing, well-choreographed fights and a super-cool demeanor from the title character -- is back, but in smaller doses. Frank Martin (Jason Statham) is back as the Transporter, a British military-trained driver, fighter and all-around handyman who makes a living on the underground delivering dangerous people and goods to their destinations. Here, he's chauffeuring the young son of a U.S. official to and from school, and attempting to rescue him when he is kidnapped. Written again by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen but with a new director ("Unleashed's" Louis Leterrier), this sequel suffers from the usual symptoms of sequelitis: too neglectful of what made its predecessor entertaining; too worried about out-doing itself. "The Transporter" was no great work of art, believe me, but the fight scenes were cleverly arranged and expertly performed, with Frank showing a resourcefulness that would make MacGyver envious. Here, his fights are few and brief, the one good one (involving ingenious use of a firehose) not occurring until near the end. His fondness for driving maniacally is similarly forsaken. Basically, there's not enough action in this movie that is essentially all about action.
A Sound of Thunder
It's hard to get excited about a movie when even the people IN the movie don't seem very interested. Such is the case with "A Sound of Thunder," a trivial sci-fi thriller in which Edward Burns can barely muster an excited yell even when he is leaping from a skyscraper. The movie, shot in 2002, does not suck as bad as most movies that are delayed for three years; its basic story, about traveling to the time of dinosaurs and accidentally doing something minor that drastically changes the future, is based on a Ray Bradbury short subject and is neat-o. But the characters (including Ben Kingsley as an insane businessman) are all ciphers and nobodies, and even the ones in the leading roles shuffle through their scenes mechanically, as if they knew the film might never be released and were saving their energy for more fruitful endeavors. However, even in its comatose state, it still has that nifty story and those sci-fi twists. It's the kind of bad movie that's so inoffensive and harmless that it almost seems unfair to point out how bad it is.
Margaret Cho: Assassin
Margaret Cho, once an edgy and fearless comedian, spends too much time in her latest concert film, "Assassin," bragging about how edgy and fearless she is -- which is pretty much the surest way to stop being edgy and fearless. This kind of self-important attitude is the sort of thing she should be making fun of, not indulging in. Filmed in May 2005, "Assassin" is a checklist of what was in the news at the time, with few jokes that will resonate even a year from now. She hits the mark here and there, and some of what she does is still funny. But much of it is more strident than satirical, more angry than amusing. Get over yourself and get back to writing good jokes, Margaret.
Underclassman
Get out your Cop Movie Cliché bingo cards and let "Underclassman" make you a winner! A reckless young Los Angeles bike cop named Stokes (Nick Cannon) poses as a student at a snooty private school to investigate the death of another student. He makes no attempts to blend in (because standing out is "funnier"), saves the school's desperate basketball team, woos a pretty teacher, and of course busts open the case, which involves drug deals and stolen cars and other stuff. This is the sort of action comedy that usually stars Chris Tucker or Martin Lawrence or somebody like that; I guess Cannon got it because they needed someone youthful and not on drugs. Cannon's a likable actor, and his skinny, unassuming charm goes a long way toward making "Underclassman" tolerable. But his efforts are hampered by an absolutely terrible script that, apart from ticking off the clichés wherever possible, sets up one desperate, unbelievable situation after another.
The Constant Gardener
There is a sense of urgency in "The Constant Gardener," the feeling that a lot is happening that must be discovered and dealt with immediately. It's a thriller -- political, criminal and marital -- but it's laden not so much with surprises as with re...
Matando Cabos (Spanish)
America has its share of Quentin Tarantino wannabes; why shouldn't Mexico? Alejandro Lozano is pretty good as wannabes go, though, and his first feature film, "Matando Cabos," is an enjoyably violent and vulgar dark comedy in the vein of "Pulp Fictio...
Undiscovered
"Undiscovered" is a lazy summer late-summer throwaway about an ambitious singer/songwriter (Steven Strait) who moves to L.A. to make it big and is assisted in that by two female friends (Ashlee Simpson and Pell James) who use the Internet and their show-biz connections to generate false "buzz" for him, which results in people coming to shows, which results in a record deal, which results in him ignoring his friends and family, which results in angst. It's also about the singer/songwriter having the hots for one of those female friends (Pell James, thank goodness, not Ashlee Simpson), but she won't date him because she doesn't date musicians, which is a pretty galling attitude coming from a model-turned-actress. It's an afterthought of a film, slow-paced and obvious, and a shameless grab at teenagers' disposable income. (Note: Ashlee sings two songs in the film, yet does not appear on the movie's soundtrack.)
The Brothers Grimm
Terry Gilliam's first film in seven years, and what a mess he's made of it! "The Brothers Grimm" is not just weird, but randomly, elaborately weird. Much of the weirdness obviously took a lot of time and money to create, and to what end? Oddness is f...
The Cave
This year's Late Summer Mediocre Horror Film is "The Cave," a yawning load about a group of pretty explorers who get stuck in an underground labyrinth where they are preyed upon by a beast of some kind. It is not unlike "Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid" (release date: Aug. 27, 2004), which had essentially the same plot and even shared a cast member, Morris Chestnut. The script has people shouting lines like "What the hell's going on?!" and "There's something in the water!" a lot, and the direction during the action scenes is jittery and chaotic. There's nothing scary about blurry things jumping around the screen while people holler, and there's nothing surprising about teams of explorers being killed one at a time in a remote location. So without "scary" and "surprising," what is "The Cave" left with? Flying amphibian monsters. Which are great things to have in a movie, I'll grant you, but not by themselves.
The Baxter
Michael Showalter (of "Wet Hot American Summer" and Comedy Central's "Stella") wrote and directed this light comedy, and also plays the lead role. The "Baxter" is the guy in romantic comedies whom the girl DOESN'T choose in the end. All his life, that's what Showalter's character, Elliot, has been: a nice guy, decent, pleasant-looking, but not right for the heroine. And while "The Baxter" starts out being a clever twist no rom-coms -- after all, how often do we see movies from the point of view of the loser? -- it isn't long before it simply BECOMES a rom-com, with all the standard devices. There is also the matter of Showalter's onscreen persona, which is heavily mannered and affected -- quite funny on "Stella," which is surreal in every detail, but difficult to manage when he's the central figure in a feature-length film. Showalter winds up sticking out like a sore thumb, a Baxter even in his own film.
The Memory of a Killer (Dutch/French)
The memory in "The Memory of a Killer" is fading: The aging assassin is beginning to suffer the effects of Alzheimer's, making his job difficult while also making him aware of his own mortality. In this energetic and clever Belgian caper, the hitman decides to right a few wrongs before he slips away, which means killing some bad guys while evading the bad guys who want to kill him, while helping the police catch a major slimeball, while evading the police, too. It's as polished and capable as many a Hollywood thriller -- though ultimately it's just as clichéd as one, too. Still, it's smart American-style bombast, repackaged in a foreign language.
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Andy Stitzer is not dumb, unattractive, or even socially awkward, at least not especially. He has an unsexy fondness for collecting action figures and playing video games, but so do thousands of other relatively average men. Yet for some reason, Andy...
Valiant
Most of this British cartoon, about pigeons who help the Allies in World War II, is slack and unimaginative, nicely animated but with no great characters or any amusing dialogue. It feels obligatory, like the boss barged in and said, "I want a movie about pigeons who help the British war effort on my desk by Monday morning!," and so everyone had to do it even though they didn't have any good ideas for it. The title character (voice of Ewan McGregor) is an eager young pigeon who wants to join up and work alongside his hero, Gutsy (Hugh Laurie), a dashing and rugged carrier pigeon who has successfully delivered many messages over the course of the war. Valiant is small and scrawny, but he enlists anyway, alongside a filthy pigeon (pardon the redundancy) named Bugsy (Ricky Gervais), a con artist who works the streets of London who joins the Royal Homing Pigeon Society only because his new pal Valiant leads him into it. The birds get into scrapes and eventually save the day, but obviously you need more than that to make something worth watching. This lacks the fervor and wit that an animated film for kids ought to have.
Red Eye
Directed by alleged horror-master Wes Craven, "Red Eye" is a straightforward suspense film about Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams), manager of Miami's Lux Atlantic Resort, who, while flying to Miami from Dallas, is befriended by a handsome stranger named Jackson Rippner (Murphy). Jackson tells Lisa that the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security is about to arrive for a stay at her hotel. Lisa is to call from the plane and have him moved to a different suite, where it will presumably be easier to kill him. If Lisa does not do this, Jackson will tell the hitman currently stationed outside Lisa's father's house to go inside and kill him. The film isn't much better than Craven's recent horror efforts, but he has an admirable work ethic, cranking through the movie's standard twists and turns without ever losing pace. There is not a single bit of the plot that is not predictable, but there is always a giddy thrill in seeing someone pop out from behind something where you had not expected him to be. It's spare, unadorned and competent, barely 80 minutes long and devoid of extraneous characters.
Asylum
"Asylum" is a dreary drama set in 1950s England about a repressed housewife who sleeps with a dangerous but handsome stranger. Ugh. Yet I was intrigued by Natasha Richardson's performance as Stella, an icy woman whose cold husband (Hugh Bonneville) moves them to the grounds of a cheerless asylum where he has just been appointed deputy superintendent. Stella goes through so much hell, and Richardson pulls it off so ably, you forget that all you're watching is a buffet of laughable insanity. It is among the patients at the facility that Stella accidentally finds her lover; he is Edgar (Marton Csokas), a former sculptor now imprisoned because he killed his wife in a jealous rage. Naturally, he and Stella commence an affair, and nothing good happens from that point forward. The film doesn't quite reach the depths of love-induced delirium that it aims for, but it tells its gritty, weepy story well enough to satisfy those who crave a little more melodrama and madness in their lives.
El Crimen Perfecto (Spanish)
Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia's "El Crimen Perfecto" is a well–oiled machine of wit, sex and violence, as darkly funny as the Coen Bros. (almost) and as visually interesting as Tarantino (almost). De la Iglesia, a cult favorite in his homeland, gives us the brightly colored, falsely cheerful world of Yeyo's, a Madrid department store where the rakish señorita's man Rafael (Guillermo Toledo) runs Women's Clothing the way Hugh Hefner runs the Playboy mansion. His pleasant existence is interrupted, however, when he accidentally kills a rival co-worker then loses the body. Lourdes (Monica Cervera), a plain-looking salesgirl, steps forward to help, on the condition that Rafael become her one-woman man with her as the one woman. What's a guy to do? By turns hilarious, dark, Hitchcockian and farcical, the film is a giddy journey through the world of murder, extortion and fashion.
Dead & Breakfast
I know you. You've been saying, "I wish there were MORE zombie movies being released." You feel the current rate of one per week is not enough. You are glad the genre has seen a resurgence in recent years because it means more zombie movies are being...
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Korean)
There are actually two men seeking revenge in "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," though I guess "Sympathy for Messrs. Vengeance" would have been a strange title. Ah -- or perhaps we are meant to sympathize with one vengeance-seeker and not the other. So m...
Supercross
"Supercross" is like a porno where all the sex scenes have been replaced with motorcycle scenes. People talk awkwardly and stiffly, the plot consists only of obvious things and foregone conclusions, and every couple minutes they stop what they're doing to go ridin'. (I've never seen porn, of course. I'm basing this on the Wikipedia entry on the subject.) It is the story of two brothers whose dream is to race professionally and whose lives take dramatic turns as they strive to do so. The acting is laughably dull, to the point that I assumed some of the characters were being played by real-life supercross stars. That would have explained the stilted, ungraceful delivery of the hackneyed dialogue. But no, nearly every role is played by an actor, not a motorcycle star, which leads me to my second theory, which is that everyone is just retarded.
Pretty Persuasion
Evan Rachel Wood plays a trashy, devious teen in "Pretty Persuasion," making it the second time (after "Thirteen") that she has done so. It's good to find your niche at such an early age, I guess. This film, a dark satire that eventually collapses into maudlin Seriousness & Importance, has Wood as a student at a snobby private school who accuses a teacher of sexually harassing her, hoping to parlay her 15 minutes of fame into a real acting career. What the film wants most is to be outrageous, to shock us with its sheer audacity for mocking things that aren't normally mocked. Much of that is guiltily funny, at least initially; the trouble comes in the last act, when there is an abrupt change in tone that sends the film careening out of control and ruins whatever good will you may have had for it up to that point.
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
Having been kindly disposed toward "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo," which I found amusing and even rather sweet way back in 1999, I spent the first 20 minutes of its sequel often laughing and figuring the bad parts were a case of solid comedic minds occ...
Four Brothers
So much of "Four Brothers" sounds unbelievable on paper, an exercise in preposterous "gritty drama" clichés. Yet the realistic lead performances and John Singleton's level-headed direction make it feel plausible, even likely, that all these events c...
The Great Raid
With all the battles, victories, skirmishes and missions that have comprised America's wars, Hollywood may never run out of stories to tell. But considering the nature of the most recent films -- all the speechifying and cliches and self-importance o...
The Skeleton Key
Like most movies that come out these days, "The Skeleton Key" is about a young woman who moves into a creepy house where weird stuff happens. What sets it apart is that the source of the creepiness is NOT a wet dead girl who crawls out of bathtubs. I...
Grizzly Man (documentary)
A documentary with a story so perfect, you'd think it was fiction: An off-kilter, self-styled wildlife preservationist named Timothy Treadwell spent 13 summers living among the bears of Alaska, loving them, naming them, caring for them, protecting them, worshiping them, until finally one day he was eaten by them. Director Werner Herzog -- a fine documentarian anyway -- narrates the film, which includes a good deal of footage shot by Treadwell himself in which he gives Crocodile Hunter-style commentaries in front of the camera while bears did their thing behind him. There are also interviews with those who knew Treadwell, people who knew he was losing touch with the human world and who were sad but not surprised when his end came in 2003. A fascinating depiction of obsession and madness.
The Chumscrubber
This is merely the latest film to explore the darkness that lurks beneath the sunny tree-lined streets of suburbia, but it's one of the better ones. Set in the fictional Southern California (where else?) town of Hillside, this is a surreal, stylized, satirized version of picket-fence America, where no one cares about anyone else, where the adults are oblivious and off-kilter, and where the kids are all on drugs either prescribed or illicit (the line between the two categories is thin). It begins with the suicide of a teenager whose best and only friend was Dean (Jamie Bell), whose pop-psychologist father is now cloyingly worried about him. Two of Dean's fellow students are heirs to the dead kid's prescription-drug-dealing throne and try to use Dean to get the merchandise. Meanwhile, there is a big wedding coming up, a memorial for the suicide boy, and various other subplots interlocking and intersecting in a shrewd, wonderful way. In his first feature film, director Arie Posin explores the parallel realms of dark comedy and true pathos to marvelous effect. There is also a sort of magical realism to the film, a suggestion that there is a cosmic hand ensuring that everything happens as it should. Characters are set up and given the downfalls of Greek tragedy figures, and those who are in need of solace do eventually find it.
The Dukes of Hazzard
Another week, another TV remake that can't decide whether to mock its cheesy source material or embrace it, and thus winds up uncomfortably in between. A new one comes out every seven days. You can set your watch by it. If you viewed that tape in "Th...
Saint Ralph
Here is another feel-good movie that's awkwardly written and staged, all knees and elbows, figuratively speaking, but you feel guilty criticizing it because it's about a kid running a marathon to save his mom from dying of cancer. CANCER, for crying out loud! What am I supposed to do with that? It's set a Catholic school in Canada in the 1950s, where 14-year-old Ralph Walker's (Adam Butcher) mother has fallen into a coma that would take a "miracle" to wake her, according to the nurse. Ralph decides that his winning the Boston Marathon would be a miracle and thus just the thing needed to roust mom, so he trains and has faith and avoids the crusty priest who runs the school, and so forth. It is an adequately inspiring film, often funny and always well-acted, and hard not to like. I just wonder how long I'll remember it.
Undead
You could make a case for all zombie movies being unnecessary, of course, but even fans of the genre will have to admit that "Undead" is struggling to exist in a world that doesn't need it. Made on the cheap by quirky Australians who have clearly seen their countryman Peter Jackson's "Dead Alive" a time or two, "Undead" is brimming with the usual antipodean whimsy and slapstick, plus a lot of gore and violence. What it doesn't have, in particular, is anything frightening, nor is any of it anything beyond mildly funny. Still, brother Michael and Peter Spierig, who wrote and directed, can be inventive with the special effects and assemble a witty exchange of dialogue when the mood strikes them. I was impressed several times, in fact, with the quality of the gore on what must have been a paltry budget. If an application were required to break into filmmaking, a videotape of "Undead" be a fine thing for them to include with their resume: not something you'd ever release, of course, but something that shows they've got skills.
Broken Flowers
It's Bill Murray doing the quiet, subtle thing again, but without nearly as much success as he did in "Lost in Translation" and "The Life Aquatic." Here he plays a retired Casanova who learns he may have had a son 19 years ago with one of his many lovers at the time. He thus embarks on a trip to visit each of the four possible mothers, none of whom he has spoken to in 20 years, and do you suppose maybe he finds himself along the way? Writer/director Jim Jarmusch favors the long takes and the unbroken silences, but it's often difficult to discern what the "meaningful" looks on the actors' faces are supposed to mean. Still, it has a straightforward, cleanly structured story and a few solid laughs amid the existential agonizing. I just fear Murray is reaching the point where he is simply imitating himself.
Junebug
An affectionate, unexaggerated view of the American South is so rare that by featuring it, "Junebug" almost seems groundbreaking. The people in this charming little film are ordinary Red Staters, decent folk, screwed up in their own ways and eminently real. It is the story of a British-born Chicago art dealer (Embeth Davidtz) who travels to North Carolina to woo an eccentric artist and also to meet her husband's family, who live in a nearby town. The family don't know what to make of her big-city ways, and she is surprised to realize the differences between her values and her husband's. But this isn't a silly fish-out-of-water comedy. Instead, it's a deeply satisfying comedy-drama that is rich with details in character and setting. Most wonderful is the performance by Amy Adams as the art dealer's sister-in-law, a talkative, innocent, optimistic young woman with whom you will absolutely fall in love.
Stealth
Beware of movies in which the human characters are less important than the machines. Your motorcycle movies and drag-racing movies and airplane-flying movies -- these usually neglect their humans because they know their male target audience is more i...
Sky High
In this jolly, clever comedy aimed at kids but awfully funny for adults, too, Sky High is a Hogwarts-like academy for the children of superheroes. Will Stronghold (Michael Angarano), a new freshman at the school, is dismayed that his powers haven't developed yet, and even more dismayed at the consequence: He's assigned to the Sidekick curriculum instead of the Hero track. (His parents, Commander and Jet Stream, played perfectly by Kurt Russell and Kelly Preston, are sure to be disappointed, too.) It's a teen comedy set in a high school for budding superheroes, with all the attendant angst and "Buffy"-style high-stakes drama (the climactic battle occurs at the Homecoming Dance, naturally), and it's got campy-sly performances by Bruce Campbell, Lynda Carter and two Kids in the Hall (Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald), too. What a swell surprise it all is!
Must Love Dogs
I can't pretend to like romantic comedies, but I can't pretend not to like Diane Lane and John Cusack, either. In "Must Love Dogs," a perfunctory but entertaining rom-com based on a novel by Claire Cook, Lane and Cusack play the parts Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks would have taken a decade ago -- except that Lane and Cusack are a little smarter, a little more mature than their predecessors. "Must Love Dogs," until its sell-out finale, is a rom-com with a brain in its head, where the only conflict is that the 40-something divorced lady likes two guys at the same time. I considered this lack of dramatic conflict a flaw before I realized I was enjoying the film anyway. It caves into the usual idiocy in the end, with public declarations of love and people jumping into rivers to pursue one another, that sort of thing, but oh well. The leads are likable, and the dialogue is generally snappier and funnier than the drivel these things usually have.
Tony Takitani (Japanese)
"Tony Takitani" is an unusually lovely film about a man struggling with loneliness. It's just 75 minutes long and has only a few characters. There is very little dialogue. The musical score consists of a piano playing an evocative, haunting theme. In...
The Aristocrats (documentary)
Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette had an idea: Film every comedian they can find telling the same joke, each putting his or her own twist on it, to document how a comic's mind works. They knew just the joke to use. It's "The Aristocrats," a filthy story that comics have been telling each other for at least a century, one that requires a lot of improvisation and ad-libbing in its middle section. (Only the punchline is the same every time; everything else is up to the teller, and the filthier it is, the funnier the punchline will be.) The resulting film is hysterically, pants-wettingly, horrifically funny, with descriptions of the most vile things you can imagine, all for the sake of this joke. But a lot of the film is the comedians -- about 80 of them, everyone from Robin Williams to George Carlin to Paul Resider -- talking ABOUT the joke, not just telling it. It's a fascinating examination of the nature of comedy and the mechanics of why things are funny.
November
"November" is a smartly assembled psychological thriller about a photographer who has trouble knowing which parts of her life -- her memories, her feelings, her guilt -- to keep in the frame and which to crop out. She is Sophie (Courteney Cox), an urbane photography-class instructor whose boyfriend, Hugh (James Le Gros), was shot and killed on Nov. 7 during a convenience store robbery. Sophie is plagued with feelings of remorse and regret, and then mysterious things begin to occur. A slide of unknown origin shows up in her classroom carousel, depicting what appears to be the convenience store on the very night of the murder. Does someone know more about this than Sophie does? The film plumbs greater psychological depths than most of its genre while maintaining a tight grip on the viewer's interest. As the events of Nov. 7 play and replay, each time with variations, we are as eager as Sophie is to learn the truth, determine what really happened, and solve the riddle. It's solid filmmaking, moody and dark and evocative. It's not the stuff classics are made of, but it's certainly what 70 minutes of psycho-drama entertainment are made of.
9 Songs
"9 Songs" is the story of two boring people who go to a lot of rock concerts and who, when they are not at rock concerts, have a lot of sex. The sex becomes kinkier as they progress; he is in love but she isn't; when they aren't in bed or at a concer...
Hustle & Flow
"Hustle & Flow" is the black version of Eminem's "8 Mile," which many will argue should have been black to begin with. It is not as good as "8 Mile," though, and much of it is unintentionally funny, being the story of a Memphis pimp who wants to leave the world of pimping and become a rapper, though once he achieves that, all he raps about is pimping. The man in question is DJay (Terrence Dashon Howard), a mildly successful hustler with a handful of hos and a stormy relationship with girlfriend/lead whore Nola (Taryn Manning). Inspired by the new stardom of Skinny Black (Ludacris), a local boy who has recently achieved fame as a rapper, DJay sets up a makeshift studio in his house with his friend Key (Anthony Anderson) and begins recording. This chunk of urban angst is written and directed by Craig Brewer, and he gives it the gritty, graphic feel that such a story undoubtedly requires. And to Terrence Dashon Howard's credit, he manages to make DJay -- who is, let us not forget, a violent flesh-trader -- a somewhat sympathetic character, flawed but honest. But he cannot overcome DJay's inherent ugliness, and the movie as a whole feels self-consciously "important," as if it's trying too hard to be a rising-up-from-the-streets story as powerful as "8 Mile" was.
The Island
In the year 2019, most of the Earth is uninhabitable, having been choked to death by a newly toxic atmosphere. Everyone must live indoors, in a city-sized underground bunker where the air is clean and where everyone yearns to win the weekly lottery, ...
Bad News Bears
The main joke in "Bad News Bears" is that adults and children swearing at each other is funny. But the movie has no idea how to go about it. Everyone's swearing randomly, with no sense of timing or creativity, and the shock value wears off in a few minutes. Billy Bob Thornton is trying to be "Bad Santa" again -- it's even the same screenwriters as that film -- but with a PG-13 rating, you can only do so much. He plays Buttermaker, alcoholic loser who takes over a bitter, worthless Little League team and whips them into shape (sort of). It's not unamusing in its way, with a few laughs here and there and a generally likable demeanor. But considering it's the fourth underdog sports comedy to be released in two months, and the third '70s remake in the same span, you have to wonder why they're even bothering.
Last Days
Gus Van Sant continues his latest fetish -- movies full of long takes and sparse dialogue where nothing happens -- with this fictionalized re-creation of Kurt Cobain's final days. We see an insane rock star named Blake (Michael Pitt) shuffling around his house in the woods, avoiding his friends, muttering to himself, playing the guitar and eventually dying. We see his friends hanging around the same house, doing drugs, alternately avoiding Blake and looking for him, and fooling around with each other. All in loooooong takes with little dialogue and no action. Surely there are universal themes to be found in Kurt's last days. Surely there is a "story" of sorts, something with elements resembling a beginning, middle and end. Or if not, then there must at least be a way of seeing what's going through his mind. But "Blake" eventually becomes a self-parody, a laughable lunatic stumbling around his house eating cereal and playing dress-up. If there's a real person in all this -- a real point -- he is lost in Van Sant's stubbornly experimental filmmaking technique. Experiments are only interesting when they work, you know.
The Devil’s Rejects
Who knew movies could be more unpleasant than Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses"? Apparently Zombie did, because here's "The Devil's Rejects," a work of unrelenting ugliness in which a handful of ugly actors play ugly characters who say and do ugly things, murdering, exploiting and plundering for 101 ugly minutes. Understand: I LIKE slasher movies. When they are done well, they are scary and haunting, or at the very least they feature people being killed in creative or amusing ways. When they are done badly, they are usually still entertaining for their outrageousness and for their "what were they thinking?" misguidedness. But "The Devil's Rejects" fits in neither category. It is not well done -- the killings are matter-of-fact and unalarming -- but neither is it so-bad-it's-funny. It is simply hateful, mean and thoroughly irredeemable.
The Edukators (German)
The wealthy people of Berlin are being terrorized by a group known as The Edukators. These people break into nice homes and, stealing nothing, rearrange the furniture, stacking the chairs, putting the stereo in the refrigerator, that sort of thing. They leave an ominous note behind: "Your days of plenty are numbered." The Edukators are just two disaffected 20-year-olds, the very intense Jan (Daniel Bruhl) and his more light-hearted roommate Peter (Stipe Erceg), idealistic youths who see the injustice and excesses of capitalism and want to fight it. An Edukators mission goes awry when the homeowner comes home early, and it turns into an impromptu kidnapping, a battle between the hippie liberals and the old conservatives (many of whom used to be hippie liberals, it turns out). It's a sublimely funny, surprisingly warm-hearted movie, not at all violent or unpleasant (as it might have been, given the plot outline) but focused on the conflicts between idealism and the real world.
Happy Endings
Don Roos, whose caustic "The Opposite of Sex" was one of the indie highlights of 1998, returns to the scene with "Happy Endings," a dark-undertoned comedy about unkind people manipulating each other, often amusingly and often with an ineptitude that is pitiful. We meet an abortion-clinic counselor (Lisa Kudrow) who gave a son up for adoption years ago, a fact now being exploited by a would-be filmmaker (Jesse Bradford), who wants to reunite mother and son -- but only if he can film it for a documentary. Meanwhile, the woman's stepbrother (Steve Coogan) -- once her impregnator, now gay -- is in a dull relationship with a man who looks an awful lot like the baby that two lesbian friends of theirs just had, so what's up with THAT? And there is also a closeted young man (Jason Ritter) who, trying to convince his dad he's not gay, sleeps with a girl (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who subsequently starts hitting on the dad (Tom Arnold), who is rich. Roos' major hurdle is keeping all the characters and stories in check without losing control, and he mostly accomplishes it, with actors full of energy and wit. That said, you wonder if it all needed to make the final cut: At 128 minutes, this is longer than most dramas, let alone most comedies, and you feel it by the end.
Wedding Crashers
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are part of a group that also includes Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell, where you take any two of them, drop them into a movie, let the others make cameos, and you've got yourself an OK comedy. It's Vince and Owen as the titular "Wedding Crashers," over-grown frat boys who regularly show up uninvited to weddings, pretend to belong there, mingle with guests, and have one-night stands with whatever single women they can find at the reception. It's a good life for them, something to do on the weekends, until they crash the wedding of the daughter of the U.S. Treasury Secretary (Christopher Walken). Vaughn's character gets trapped by a virginal psycho; Wilson falls for her sister (Rachel McAdams), who is normal but who already has a boyfriend; both girls are sisters of the bride and watched carefully by the Secretary. Everyone's invited back to the family's house for a weekend getaway, and that's where the movie eventually falls into standard romantic-comedy devices that kill the momentum. Prior to that, however, the laughs are loud and bawdy, Vaughn's rapid-fire delivery nicely complementing Wilson's lazy-surfer drawl.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
There is so much lunacy in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" that reaction shots seem to comprise half the film: Willy Wonka reacting to the loathsome children, Grandpa Joe reacting to Willy Wonka's wonkiness, Violet Beauregarde's mother reaction t...
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (documentary)
"Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus" is a fascinating documentary, but not a very fair one, and maybe not even a very nice one. It examines some of the strangest, most unflattering elements of the American Deep South -- and the filmmakers doing the e...
The Beautiful Country
The bui-doi are the Vietnamese children whose fathers were American G.I.'s, finding romance (or at least sex) with the local women when they were stationed there. "The Beautiful Country" follows the journey of one bui-doi named Binh (Damien Nguyen) as he tries to find his father in Texas. He finds his mother, first of all, and a little brother he didn't know he had, then winds up in a refugee camp in Malaysia, then on an overcrowded ship bound for New York. The film is ably conducted by director Hans Petter Moland, but it's only occasionally emotionally effective. Characters appear in Binh's life only to disappear again once that stage of the journey is over, leaving us with only Binh -- who is too one-sided and single-minded to be an interesting character -- to affix our devotion to.
Saraband (Swedish)
Readers expecting me to compare Ingmar Bergman's "Saraband" to his previous masterpieces "Scenes from a Marriage" and "The Seventh Seal" will be disappointed to learn that I have not seen those movies. I could compare them anyway, but I don't think t...
Cronicas (Spanish)
"Cronicas" starts out to be about ruthless journalists doing anything to get a story, and then it becomes even more alarming, where the journalists have done something irreparable and don't know what, if any, responsibility they should take. This sharp, intelligent film stars John Leguizamo as a Miami TV journalist who is visiting a small Ecuadorian village to cover the story of a serial killer of children. A man in jail for unrelated charges claims to have information on the killer, and Leguizamo keeps what he learns from the police, waiting to see if it develops into a better story for his viewers. It eventually is clear that the reporter and his crew have crossed a line, but where that line was remains ambiguous. The film raises a number of thought-provoking dilemmas even as it entertains with its good old-fashioned thriller story. Who'd have thought an Ecuadorian film would have so much to say about modern American journalism?
Murderball (documentary)
The recent surge of entertaining, mass-appeal documentaries has led up to this: "Murderball," which focuses on the sport of quad rugby -- played in wheelchairs by men with limited mobility in all four limbs -- has all the trappings of a heroic sports movie, with last-second victories and personal triumphs. But it also focuses on the players, letting them speak frankly about the injuries or diseases that put them in wheelchairs, showing us little parts of their souls. No one ever believes me when I say this, but "Murderball," a documentary, is every bit as exciting, funny, heartwarming and uplifting as any Hollywood sports movie. It entertains as much as it enlightens, and it is a genuine pleasure to watch.
Fantastic Four
What a mess "Fantastic Four" is. Everything about it bears the stench of amateurs, from the unspectacular special effects to the sitcom-lame dialogue to the butchered storyline. Hard to believe that in one 15-month period we have endured "The Punishe...
Dark Water
Here's another remake of another Japanese horror movie about another water-dwelling dead girl who terrorizes another woman. Jennifer Connelly is the victim this time, having just moved to a depressing little apartment after a messy divorce. Water drips from the upstairs apartment, and her little girl finds a Hello Kitty backpack on the roof -- even though there are no children living in the building. More weird things happen, and you know the rest. The finale is somewhat frightening and suspenseful, but it doesn't make a lot of sense. And what precedes it is only marginally creepy, your standard mix of bad dreams, whispery supernatural voices and red herrings. The whole thing is rather unsatisfying, I'm sorry to say, big on atmosphere but small on actual fright or dread.
Twist of Faith (documentary)
Dennis Gray was born in 1948, joined the Catholic priesthood at around the usual age, and got a job teaching religion at Central Catholic High School in Toledo, Ohio, in the 1970s. At some point during all that, he started molesting boys.
I have ...
Rebound
Martin Lawrence continues his unprecedented streak -- 10 bad movies in 10 years! -- with this lazy sports comedy about a hot-headed college basketball coach (Lawrence) who gets bumped down to the minors. The very minors, actually: He's stuck coaching a junior high school team. Wouldn't you know it, they're all wacky losers, and the coach helps them win games, and they help him become a Better Person, and everyone goes home happy. In a departure from his usual on-screen persona, Lawrence is not irritating or obnoxious here, just boring. And the movie's bad, but at least it isn't aggressively annoying. It has puke jokes, but hey -- no farts! Put those quotes in your ads, 20th Century Fox.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (French)
Romain Duris gives an excellent performance as Thomas Seyr, a Parisian man whose life is shaping up to be just like his father's, including a career in dad's business of thuggery and shakedowns. But then there is a beacon of hope: An old piano teacher rekindles his interest in music and he wonders if it's too late to become a concert pianist. As Thomas grows increasingly disenchanted with the world of crime, he becomes frustrated and occasionally violent, a man trapped between the beauty of music and the ugliness of his profession. Duris walks the line well, often hiding his deepest emotions from us only to let them out later in a rage. You can feel, quite palpably, Thomas' mixed emotions, his sense of loyalty being forced against his sense of creativity. Unfortunately, the film wraps itself up in Thomas' circumstances and doesn't do much with it. Still, Duris fills the role with enough sympathy to make the film decent, albeit not as good as it should have been.
