OPENING THIS WEEK
LAKEVIEW TERRACE (R) Lake View Terrace, you may recall, is the Los Angeles suburb where in 1991 four LAPD officers beat Rodney King for more than a minute while a bystander caught the incident on video. In this incendiary social thriller by Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men), it's also the home of a black cop (Samuel L. Jackson) who takes it upon himself to get rid of the interracial couple who've moved in next door (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington). By scrambling the typical power relationship between black and white, LaBute focuses our attention on power itself, and by plunging into the still-taboo subject of black bigotry, he gets closer to the truth of bigotry in all its forms than does the pious white atonement of most racial dramas. This is being marketed as a slam-bang entertainment, but it's also one of the toughest and most relevant movies of the year. —J.R. Jones
RECENT RELEASES
AMERICAN TEEN (PG-13) Nanette Burstein's American Teen, ostensibly a documentary, goes down so smooth that a prime time broadcast on MTV wouldn't be at all out of the question. Burstein takes her camera into a typical high school in a typical, mostly white, mostly middle-class town, where she focuses on a group of seniors who seem to fit into easily recognizable molds, at least at first. We meet Colin the Jock, Jake the Nerd, Hannah the Rebel and Megan the Popular One (who leads a clique of hotties straight out of Heathers or Mean Girls), and watch their lives unfold as lines blur, identities are questioned, alliances fracture and form, and the kids deal with the various pitfalls of growing up. It's surprisingly gripping stuff, but the film's supposedly spontaneous emotional explosions don't always ring completely true. At worst, they feel a bit like dramatic recreations, almost as if the kids were milking the moment for the camera — but perhaps this is just the natural byproduct of what happens when you attempt to document members of a generation raised on Survivor, for whom the lines between reality and reality programming no longer matter. Credibility issues aside, though, it's almost insidious how easy it is to by seduced by the film as it roots around in the sometimes cruel but usually fascinating social dynamics of young adults trapped in a too-small space. Whether what American Teen shows us is strictly true or not is another matter, but, as we're constantly learning, the truth can be as fluid as we need it to be. Stars Hannah Bailey, Colin Clemens, Megan Krizmanich, Jake Tusing, Mitch Reinholt and Geoff Haase. 3.5 stars
BABYLON A.D. (PG-13) The new film from director Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine, Gothika) is a sci-fi-ish thriller with Vin Diesel guarding a woman hosting a virus that could destroy the world. There's also a cult lurking on the sidelines seeking to create some sort of a genetically altered Messiah. Also stars Meanie Thierry, Michelle Yeoh, Lambert Wilson and Charlotte Rampling. (Not Reviewed)
BANGKOK DANGEROUS (R) Nicolas Cage stars as a well-paid assassin who travels to Thailand to kill four people in this loose remake by the Pang brothers of their 1999 film. While Cage is appropriately laconic and surly as a loner whose only ties are to the people who hire him, his performance is unusually flaccid. The story includes several overused plot devices, including the clichéd final job with a big payoff that will allow Cage's character to retire permanently, but when he allows a Thai gofer into his locked-down world and decides to train him, things go predictably awry. While the film includes several exciting, creatively shot action scenes, the drama is otherwise so shopworn that the violent climax is a relief. With Shahkrit Yamnarm and Pamward Hemmanee. —Joshua Katzman
BOTTLE SHOCK (PG-13) Another movie that begins by telling us it's "based on a true story," Bottle Shock doesn't play as fast and loose with facts as some, but it doesn't hesitate to throw in a made-up romance or two and some trusty father-son tensions to embellish its essentially accurate account of the landmark event that finally gave American wines the respect they deserved. That event — a blind tasting held in Paris during American's bicentennial year, and judged by France's most esteemed oenophiles — resulted in a couple of rag tag California wineries shocking the world by, for the first time ever, stomping all over their French counterparts. The movie spends a little too much time watching its characters chase their tails, but Bill Pullman and Chris Pine are solid as the father and son proprietors of a struggling Napa Valley winery, and Alan Rickman is a lot of fun as the British wine snob who discovers the joys of California while putting the tasting event in motion. Like Sideways, Bottle Shock uses humans and wine as interchangeable metaphors for each other (adversity makes them both stronger), and it all takes place in a weirdly magical California where even the most rough and tumble bikers know the difference between a Merlot and a Zinfandel. The film splits its time between Paris and the rolling halls of Napa, the music an appropriate mix of Maria Callas and the Doobie Brothers, with scenery so voluptuous and sun-drenched you have to restrain yourself from sticking your face in the screen to lap it all up. Also stars Rachael Taylor Freddy Rodriguez, Dennis Farina and Eliza Dushku. 3.5 stars
BURN AFTER READING (R) A pair of dim-witted gym employees (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt) blackmail a disgruntled CIA analyst (John Malkovich) in this comedy from the Coen brothers. In contrast to their bleak Oscar winner No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading offers a hilarious parody of spy thrillers, replete with sinister music and shadowy figures following the protagonists. The Coens' fondness for anticlimaxes diminishes the film's potential punch, but the hilarious performances alone would make it worth seeing, including Michael Clayton co-stars George Clooney and Tilda Swinton. —Curt Holman 3.5 stars
ELEGY (R) In Isabel Coixet's Elegy, Ben Kingsley plays David Kepesh, an intellectual and avid womanizer whose age has crept up on him, leaving him staring out the window of his handsomely decorated Manhattan apartment and pondering how it's still possible he's "engaged in the carnal aspects of the human comedy." If this sounds like Philip Roth territory, it should — Elegy is an adaptation of yet another Roth novel about the complex dovetailing of mind and body (among other things), and Kingsley's Kepesh is a quintessential Roth hero, a tortured soul of enormous intellectual and sensual appetites, equally at home quoting Tolstoy and Bette Davis. A renowned literary critic and popular college professor, Kepesh is also fond of seducing female students 30 years his junior, but when he becomes involved with a beautiful grad student named Consuela (Penelope Cruz), Kingsley's fiercely independent character becomes obsessed, consumed by jealousy and riddled with paralyzing doubts that ultimately tear the relationship asunder. Kingsley is very good here (a welcome return to subtlety after the broad strokes of The Wackness), and Cruz is even better, but the film simply seems too enamored of melancholy for melancholy's sake to really be effective, and it never quite manages to convincingly detail the process by which basic physical desire transforms into something known, for better or worse, as love. Also stars Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard and Dennis Hopper. 2.5 stars
FLY ME TO THE MOON (G) Three talking houseflies hitch a ride on Apollo 11 in this first feature-length animation specifically designed for 3D. Getting to the good news first, the 3D effects are plentiful, cleverly imagined and often stunningly realistic, but technique will only get you so far. The animation itself is rather bland (beginning with the terminally cute and utterly forgettable insect heroes), and the story doesn't amount to much either. Outside of a few minutes devoted to the actual lunar landing, and a couple of minor acts of heroism on the flies' part, nothing much really happens here, and the trio of stowaway insects don't really do anything other than hang out in the rocket observing the astronauts from the sidelines, like, well, flies on the wall. The movie's 1969 setting prompts a smattering of classic rock on the soundtrack to keep grown-up viewers awake, but almost everything else about this trip to the moon, outside of that remarkable use of 3D, is strictly dullsville. Features the voices of Christopher Lloyd, Adrienne Barbeau, Ed Begley Jr., Tim Curry, Kelly Ripa, Nicollette Sheridan, Trevor Gagnon, David Gore and Philip Bolden. 2 stars
HAMLET 2 (R) Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) is the cartoonish hero of Hamlet 2, a failed actor whose resume consists of appearances in ads for herpes creams and juicers. Marschz has been reduced to teaching high school drama and directing student productions of plays based on Hollywood movies, Despite his artistic airs and ambitions, he has very little talent and even less taste — he genuinely loves that cookie-cutter crap that Hamlet 2 can't stop ragging on, movies like Mr. Holland's Opus and Patch Adams — and he's too clueless to even realize what a mess his life is. When word comes that the drama department is being shut down as part of the ongoing de-funding and de-valuing of the arts (a high school drama teacher being almost as expendable as a film critic at an alternative weekly paper). In desperation, Dana decides to produce an original play so spectacular he's sure it'll reverse his flagging fortunes — an all-singing, all-dancing sequel to Hamlet. Everything here is played for laughs, and no subject is too touchy to become a joke: the absurd "life lessons" doled out by Hollywood movies; the casual cruelty of high school kids and Coogan's pathetic character flaws and ultimate realization that his life is a "parody of a tragedy" — much like his play., a mind-bogglingly awful production that consumes most of the movie's last act with a barrage of Shakespearean characters dueling with light sabers, pondering group sex with Hillary Clinton and crooning a tender ballad like "Raped in the Face" and the pelvis-thrusting "Rock Me Sexy Jesus." Also stars Catherine Keener, David Arquette, Marshall Bell, Melonie Diaz, Joseph Julian Soria, Elisabeth Shue and Amy Poehler 3.5 stars
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (PG-13) State-of-the-art special effects will almost certainly be the real stars of this big-screen version of Jules Verne tale of a scientist discovering marvels, terrors and a fabulous lost city deep within the bowels of the earth. The movie will play at select theaters in a 3-D version, which is probably the ideal way to see this. Stars Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson and Anita Briem. (Not Reviewed)
MAMMA MIA! (PG-13) Based on the Broadway musical so beloved by aging boomers and their familiars, Mamma Mia! relies on the hits of '70s uber-group Abba to tell the story of a young bride-to-be (Amanda Seyfried) trying to discover which of her mother's three ex-lovers is her real father. Meryl Streep is a hoot as the bride's bohemian mother (a self-described ex-slut), again demonstrating her remarkable versatility by singing, dancing, doing light comedy and occasionally emoting, all with considerable panache — but the rest of the movie is a mixed bag, at best. Mamma Mia! doesn't pretend to be anything other than fluff, but even on those terms it's sometimes tough to take, with performances that practically shriek with campy desperation (prime offenders being Christine Baranski and Julie Walters as Streep's gal pals), and singing that ranges from the passable (Colin Firth's thin and reedy balladeering) to the flat-out embarrassing (Pierce Brosnan's rendition of "S.O.S." is sheer torture). It all takes place on an impossibly picturesque Greek island, so there's plenty of gorgeous scenery to gawk at, but the colorful locale is a lazy substitute for the original stage show's inventive stylization, and the naturalistic setting ultimately just doesn't feel right. On the other hand, the Abba music is just as ridiculously catchy as you want it to be (who can resist "Dancing Queen?"), even as rendered by often inept pipes, and the film manages to espouse both hippie free-love and the sort of classic romanticism that requires one of the male leads to get down on one knee and propose to someone by movie's end. And let's not forget the Greek Chorus (composed of actual Greeks) who burst out cackling when someone complains of a "cruel act of fate." Also stars Stellan Skarsgard, Nancy Baldwin, Rachel McDowall and Enzo Squillino Jr. 2.5 stars
PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (R) Strange bedfellows of the year: David Gordon Green, one of the most uniquely understated voices of independent cinema (George Washington, All the Real Girls) teams up here with Judd Apatow, a producer whose hit comedies rely on vomit and feces in much the same way that Jerry Bruckheimer depends upon explosions. The result — a comedy/action flick about a couple of potheads on the run from killers — is a weirdly competent move to the mainstream, with the indie auteur casting aside artistic pretensions and embracing a blandly self-effacing style that Andy Warhol might have blessed. The rigorously no-frills approach puts the movie's nuts and bolts front and center, from James Franco's fabulous turn as Seth Rogen's mush-brained pal (hands-down best comic performance by an overly serious method-actor since Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High), to the gleefully crude humor, mostly revolving around typical Apatow fixations like errant bodily fluids and faces shoved into boxes of cat turds. The movie's basic premise is that everything is funnier when high, and Pineapple Express essentially filters the conventions of buddy movies and action flicks through a stoner sensibility, so even when we get a slow-mo shoot-out à la Bruckheimer, it's with one of the characters screaming, "Prepare to suck the cock of karma!" The story arc of Pineapple Express isn't ultimately all that different from the movies it's supposedly spoofing — Rogen and Franco eventually realize they're "not very functional when we're high" and then hit bottom before emerging victorious — but the unflagging energy of the movie's one-damn-thing-after-another scenario is pure Apatow, screwball comedy for a toilet-humor era. Also stars Danny McBride, Gary Cole, Rosie Perez, Kevin Corrigan, Nora Dunn and Ed Begley Jr. 3 stars
RIGHTEOUS KILL (R) Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, working together for the first time since Heat (1995), are veteran New York City cops trying to track down a vigilante serial killer. Watching these old pros play longtime buddies is a pleasure, especially since they're together in most scenes. But this thriller by Jon Avnet (88 Minutes) is mostly by the numbers, and its surprise ending, though effective, feels somewhat forced. Avnet explores some dark corollaries between police work and sadomasochism, but they're eventually shunted aside by the plot machinations. With Carla Gugino, Curtis Jackson, Brian Dennehy, John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg. —Joshua Katzman
STAR WARS: CLONE WARS (PG-13) Adapted from the Cartoon Network series and buffed up for the big screen with 3-D CGI, this Star Wars animation takes place in between Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, with Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker trying to forestall an intergalactic incident by rescuing the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt. The trapezoid of scrolling type that used to open the movies has been replaced by voice-over, which probably says something about the deterioration of children's reading skills, and Hayden Christensen, who played Skywalker in the two earlier movies, has been replaced by ones and zeros, which is a big improvement. Without the grandiose narrative structure of the six live-action releases, this feels even more pointless, a mechanical attempt to milk the kids for every last dime. Dave Filoni directed. 1 star —J.R. Jones
SWING VOTE (PG-13) Just in time for election year, Swing Vote stars Kevin Costner as an aging slacker who, through a series of bizarre twists of fate, discovers that the election of the next president of the United States hinges on one solitary vote, which just happens to be his. Madeline Carroll costars as the adorable little girl who sets the whole mess in motion, and Kelsey Grammer and Willie Nelson show up, the former as the sitting U.S. President and the latter as himself. Also stars Paula Patton, Dennis Hopper, Nathan Lane and Stanley Tucci. (Not Reviewed)
TRAITOR (PG-13) Despite all the international-thriller trappings — there seems to be a captioned establishing shot every 10 minutes — this feature more closely resembles such stool-pigeon dramas as White Heat, Donnie Brasco and The Departed. The central character, played with winning gravity by Don Cheadle, is an American-born Muslim whose loyalties bounce like a pinball between U.S. law enforcement and the jihadist cell he's infiltrated. Based on a story by Steve Martin of all people, the script seldom rises above formula (Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough are especially ill-served as a pair of starchy FBI agents), but its respectful treatment of Islam is both unusual and welcome. With Jeff Daniels and Said Taghmaoui, excellent as Cheadle's jihadist pal. Jeffrey Nachmanoff directed. —J.R. Jones
TRANSSIBERIAN (R) A middle-American couple (Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson) hope to rekindle their marriage on an "adventurous" trip across Asia on the Transsiberian Railway, but when they meet a mysterious younger pair (Eduardo Noriega and Kate Mara), they find more excitement than they bargained for. Director Brad Anderson proves to be a close student of Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, cultivating a skin-crawling sensation of paranoia amid the former Soviet locations. It's the perfect film for audiences who find the Hostel films too low-brow, and The Darjeeling Limited too twee. —Curt Holman
TROPIC THUNDER (R) Ben Stiller writes, directs and stars in this uneven but often hilarious comedy about a group of pampered Hollywood actors who come under real-life fire in the jungle while making "the war movie to end all war movies." Robert Downey Jr. nearly steals the show while channeling Russell Crowe as a method actor with a major identity crisis (he's convinced he's African-American for most of the film); Jack Black is reliably Jack Black-ish as a drug-addled twit known for his Meet the Krumps-styled fart comedies, and Stiller plays a fading action star whose attempt at a career revival had him playing a mentally challenged boy who talks to horses ("never go full retard," is Downey's advice). The funniest bits occur during the opening sequences, but there's good stuff throughout as the movie hones the cartoonish excess of Zoolander through spot-on satires of Hollywood's machinery, from its moguls and superstars to its assorted satellite players. Tropic Thunder's plentiful cameos are also extremely entertaining (Steve Coogan, Bill Heder and Danny McBride are all a hoot, but best of all is Tom Cruise in a bald cap and fake chest hair). And don't miss the pre-show fake trailers, the best of their kind since Grindhouse. Also stars Matthew McConaughey, Brandon T. Jackson, Jay Baruchel and Brandon Soo Hoo. 3.5 stars
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA (PG-13) Scarlett Johansson plays a young dabbler in the arts, whose most notable achievement so far has been directing a short film about, as she puts it, "why love is so hard to define." Johansson's slightly pompous statement is the perfect set-up for a joke, and the punch line comes when someone dryly responds, "That's a big subject to cover in 12 minutes." Woody Allen's sly joke is that his movie addresses that same impossibly immense and elusive topic — and, in its modest way, actually manages to pull it off. The deceptively simple story here concerns Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and her friend Cristina (Johansson), two young Americans whose notions of love and romance go through curious changes while spending the summer in Barcelona. Vicky is the levelheaded one in this pair, happily monogamous with her dull, businessman fiancé, while Cristina's craving for adventure and "counter-intuitive love" draws her to a passionate and unstable Spanish painter named Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). The characters all wind up coupling in various combinations, and not the ones you'd necessarily expect, and when Juan Antonio's brilliant, volatile, sexy and totally unhinged ex-wife (Penelope Cruz) shows up, the dynamics change in even more unpredictable ways. Allen avoids playing any of this as melodrama, and although Vicky Cristina Barcelona isn't really a comedy, there's a lighter, tongue-in-cheek tone here that puts all the bed-hopping and hand-wringing in perspective, and that's certainly a refreshing change of pace from the director's recent forays in quasi-thriller territory (Match Point and Cassandra's Dream). Also stars Patricia Clarkson and Chris Messina. 3.5 stars
WALL-E (G) The animation whiz-kids at Pixar are no strangers to wringing emotion from talking toys, endearingly anthropomorphic fish and other decidedly non-human creations. But some of the most poignant moments ever found in a Pixar film occur in the first half of WALL-E, a nearly wordless journey through a decimated future where humans are conspicuous by their absence, and by the mess they've left behind. Those first 45 minutes alone make WALL-E arguably the first genuinely post-apocalyptic kid flick and also Pixar's masterpiece, a pitch-perfect blend of epic sci-fi and comedy pantomime recalling the glory days of silent cinema. The titular hero — a rickety robot who might be Chaplin's Little Tramp reincarnated as R2D2 — spends his solitary days cleaning up the mountains of trash left by vanished humankind, an endless routine that's finally shattered when our hero falls for a visiting fem-bot and follows her back to the mothership, where more than a few surprises await. The smoothly digestible freneticism of WALL-E's last act is a bit of a let-down after the near-minimalist poetry of the unconventional opening passages (scenes of WALL-E silently trying to make sense of our cultural bric-a-brac are particularly eloquent), but the amazingly human (and humane) robot-to-robot romance here is one for the ages, and the movie almost always gives us something wonderful to gawk at while serving up nods to everything from Silent Running and A.I. to Jacques Tati, 2001 and beyond. And don't miss the short film that precedes the main attraction, another concentrated dose of Pixar's slapstick brilliance that, with nary a word, sets the stage nicely for WALL-E, one of the best films of the year. Features the voices of Ben Burtt, Jeff Garland, John Ratzenberger, Sigourney Weaver and Fred Willard. 4.5 stars
THE WOMEN (PG-13) (PG-13) Meg Ryan plays a wife and mother whose privileged life crumbles when she discovers her husband is having an affair with a perfume counter clerk (Eva Mendes). "Murphy Brown" creator Diane English mishandles this remake of the classic 1939 screwball comedy with an all-female cast. Annette Bening stands out as a caustic magazine editor who struggles with professional compromises, but otherwise The Women offers conventional you-can-have-it-all uplift while sending mixed messages about label-obsessed materialism. Also stars Eva Mendes and Debra Messing. 2 stars —Curt Holman
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2008.