Opening This Week
OVER HER DEAD BODY (PG-13) Read Lance Goldenberg's review in the film feature.
STRANGE WILDERNESS (R) In a desperate attempt to turn around his sliding ratings, the host of a wildlife TV show (Steve Zahn) finds himself on the trail of Bigfoot. It's supposed to be a comedy, but we'll have to wait to find out since the studio decided not to screen the film in time for our review. Also stars Allen Covert. Opens Feb. 1 at local theaters. (Not Reviewed)
RECENT RELEASES
THE BUCKET LIST (PG-13) Director Rob Reiner layers on the schmaltz, and Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman supply the star power in a meathead's delight that might just have well been called Grumpy Old Terminally Ill Men. Freeman's obligatory opening voice-over sets the tone, cramming in the words "love," "fate" and "folks" in under a minute, as dying roommates Carter (Freeman) and Edward (Nicholson) decide to spend their final months, and a sizeable chunk of the latter's fortune, doing all the things they never got around to doing. Endless footage ensues of the old coots skydiving, getting tattoos, driving fast cars, and popping up in a virtual travelogue encompassing the Taj Mahal, the pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China. Freeman's wise but slightly prickly character periodically pontificates on the nature of the world, eventually teaching the meaning of life to the considerably richer but far more cynical Nicholson, and it all feels like the spitting image of a made-for-TV movie. Also stars Sean Hayes and Beverly Todd. 2 stars
CASSANDRA'S DREAM (PG-13) We've lost count of how many movies Woody Allen has made, but obviously buoyed by the success of Match Point, this is the third consecutive one the director has shot in England. It might be time for Woody to come home, however, as advance reviews of this latest U.K.-shot production have been extremely unkind. Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell star as brothers caught up in a terribly inconvenient murder. Also stars Hayley Atwell, Sally Hawkins and Tom Wilkinson. (Not Reviewed)
CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (R) Based on true events from the Reagan years, Mike Nichol's new film stars Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson, a hard-partying Texas congressman who sets monumental forces in motion, almost without realizing it, when he begins lobbying to supply Afghanistan's Mujahideen in their struggle against Russian invaders. Urging Wilson on is his occasional lover, a rich, ultra-right-wing dragon lady played by Julia Roberts. The individual players are fairly engaging, but Charlie Wilson's War never manages to muster up much dramatic momentum. The movie's tone is all over the place, veering from screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's trademark sitcom style to quasi-screwball satire to something approaching sentimental mush, and then straight into agitprop, with tears welling up in Hanks' eyes in the midst of multitudes of mistreated Afghan orphans. Charlie Wilson's War starts out strong and then slowly fizzles out just as it should be getting interesting. The covert war waged by Hanks' congressman results in the Soviet empire crumbling just as the film is ending, all but ignoring the more interesting twists that followed (specifically, how Afghan "freedom fighters" transformed into the legions of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, using American weapons and training against their so-called benefactors). The movie opens with a dreamily stylized image of a Muslim praying beneath a starry sky, then picking up his rocket launcher and aiming at squarely at the camera — which is to say, at us — but that's about as close as Nichols gets to that particular can of worms. Stars Tom Hanks, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julia Roberts and Amy Adams. 2.5 stars
CLOVERFIELD (R) The pitch here would barely fill a cocktail napkin — Blair Witch meets Godzilla — and the film never really makes a stab at expanding that conceit. The first half-hour introduces us to both the bogus concept (amateurish shaky-cam footage supposedly translating as a more credible, intensified reality) and to the disposable characters, a bunch of shallow yuppie twerps attending a going-away party for one of their pals. We're forced to sit through endless, headache-inducing footage of these non-entities standing around making small talk before things summarily start blowing up, and the big, bad monster initiates the extended (but not particularly exciting) chase scene that is Cloverfield. We're supposed to believe that everything we're seeing is being shot by one of the characters on his camcorder, but badly framed shots and nonexistent editing can only be excused so far. The giant monster is a huge guilty pleasure (I particularly liked the smaller, even more repulsive creatures that drop from its limbs like lice) — but, a few special effects aside, this mess looks like anyone could have made it, and not in a remotely interesting way. If this is the future of filmmaking, brace yourself for what comes next. Stars Michael Stahl-David, Odette Yustman, Lizzy Caplan, T.J. Miller, Jessica Lucas and Mike Vogel. 1.5 stars
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (R) Julian Schnabel's new film is the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), the jet-setting editor of French Elle, who was felled by a massive stroke in 1995 that left him unable to speak or move but, shades of Johnny Got His Gun, fully cognizant. Bauby eventually developed a rudimentary form of communication — blinking his left eye (the only part of him that still worked) to signal a specific letter of the alphabet, slowly dictating a best-selling memoir and dying days after the book was published. It's no exaggeration to say that the real star of Schabel's film is cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who is fiendishly ingenious in his use of the camera as a surrogate eye for the movie's protagonist. The entire first half of the movie is presented almost completely from Bauby's perspective, with Kaminski's camera bending and distorting the light in ways that appear random but are actually meticulously calculated, pulling images in and out of focus in order to simulate how the world looks to a one-eyed stroke victim awakening from a coma. The film eventually broadens its perspective, but Schnabel keeps the focus firmly rooted inside Bauby's head, peppering the film with heavy-handed visual metaphors but avoiding melodrama and the temptation to turn his main character into some sort of martyr. Also stars Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josee Croze, Anne Consigny, Marina Hands and Max Von Sydow. 3.5 stars
JUNO (PG-13) Director Jason Reitman's second film is loopy in a more conventional way than his first, Thank You For Smoking, but it's equally clever and, even more crucially, just as much fun. The deliciously baroque plot twists of Smoking are almost entirely absent in Juno, but Reitman makes good use of this new-found, off-kilter minimalism, focusing his often static camera on characters whose endearing qualities rarely get in the way of their monumental oddness. Ellen Page is extremely appealing as the title character, a self-described "freaky girl" who gets pregnant, opts not to abort, and agrees to hand the infant over to a barren couple advertising in the local penny-saver flyer. Things start out impossibly light and bouncy, with everyone speaking in bursts of such glibly stylized strangeness (think Rory Gilmore meets Kevin Smith) that it's sometimes hard to take the characters seriously — but Juno eventually allows just enough cold reality to seep in to get our attention. Still, even when our heroine's water breaks and she's rushed to the delivery room, Juno has time for one last kitsch clarion cry, hollering "Thunderbirds are go!" It's that kind of a movie. Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody seem to be having a ball referencing all the hippest bands and grooviest horror movie directors, and they fill their movie with music by Cat Power, Belle and Sebastian, and whimsical pop tunes a la The Velvet Underground's "I'm Sticking With You," which are so simple and achingly sincere they seem to cross the line into pomo irony. Just like the movie. Also stars Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Allison Janney and J.K. Simmons. 3.5 stars
MAD MONEY (PG-13) A feeble yuk-fest for The Great Depression II, Mad Money stars Diane Keaton as an over-educated, under-skilled yuppie who takes up crime when her husband is the victim of downsizing. Callie Khouri (screenwriter of Thelma and Louise) is the director here, so there's plenty of warmed-over girl power going on, as Keaton hooks up with an African-American single mom (Queen Latifah) and a cute space-cadet (Katie Holmes) to stick it to the man, take the money and run. The movie tests our credulity at every step, with friendships forged in perfunctory fashion between its paper-thin characters, gaping plot holes you could do laps in and a heist that's straight out of a Scooby Doo cartoon. By the movie's midpoint, the women are all bumpin' hinies in the bedroom to golden oldies, and the shrinking middle class is just a shot away. The brand of humor here is supposed to get funnier in direct proportion to the bleakness of the times, but even with the New Dark Ages breathing down on our necks, Mad Money is just a drag. Also stars Ted Danson and Stephen Root. 2.5 stars
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (R) Much has been made of No Country for Old Men being some sort of contemporary Western, but when the filmmakers are Joel and Ethan Coen, you can bet the "Western" in question is going to scream for quotation marks. An expertly crafted nail-biter steeped in the beloved noir the filmmakers have repeatedly tinkered with, the Coen Brothers' new film takes place in a dusty Texas wasteland as redolent with alienation as a vintage Antonioni landscape. Enter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a certified piece of trailer trash who happens upon a drug deal gone south and winds up fleeing the scene of the crime with a briefcase filled with cash. This inevitably puts some very bad people on Llewelyn's trail — chief among them a soulless super-psycho named Anton Chigurh (an exquisitely chilling Javier Bardem) — and right behind is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a small-town lawman resigned to the nasty ways of the world. No Country is a beautifully modulated film, folding intense bursts of periodic violence into a carefully orchestrated atmosphere of mounting tension that is both eerily poetic and a bit melancholy. In its elegantly world-weary way, this is as iconic a chase film as The Night of the Hunter, as deeply mysterious as the Coens' masterpiece, Barton Fink, and not without perverse grace notes all its own. Also stars Kelly Macdonald, Tess Harper and Woody Harrelson. 4.5 stars
RAMBO (R) Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the megaplex … Two decades after the last Rambo movie, Sylvester Stallone is back in the role that made him a household name, spewing up a storm of steroid sparks and kicking all manner of butt in Thailand. Also stars Julie Benz, Matthew Marsden and Graham McTavish. (Not Reviewed)
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (R) Unfolding in a perpetual moment just before the light gives out entirely, Tim Burton's new film is a velvety noir boasting more nuances of black than the Eskimos have names for snow. It's also a musical, based on Stephen Sondheim's popular 1979 stage production, although Burton eschews all but the faintest trace of Broadway glitz, giving the movie an exquisitely morbid look and an intimate, even claustrophobic feel. The director plays it close to the bone here, toning down personal ticks while letting his unmistakable style shine through the darkness, so that Sweeney Todd emerges as a blood-rare slice of Broadway for people who normally can't stand the stuff. Johnny Depp inhabits the title character with heartbreaking intensity and a hint of self-mockery, while the film layers on style in luxuriously decaying heaps, its cleverly devised color scheme — an essentially monochromatic palette with tasteful splashes of blood-red — a distillation of everything Burton's done to date. As elegant as it all is, be warned that Sweeney Todd doesn't spare the blood, and throats are slit with gleeful abandon, in abundant and graphic detail. Also stars Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and Sacha Baron Cohen. 4.5 stars
THERE WILL BE BLOOD (R) Loosely based on Uptown Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, this monumentally ambitious new opus from Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) offers up chilly scenes from the life of proto-capitalist Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a ruthlessly single-minded entrepreneur who makes a fortune raping the land during the early years of the 20th century. It's not always a pretty picture, but as captured by the camera of Anderson's longtime cinematographer, Robert Elswit, the process takes on its own kind of dirty poetry. Far from some grand oil-empire epic á la Giant, Blood is essentially a spare, almost painfully introspective art film, more driven by details than narrative momentum or life-changing events, and with moments of heroic power compromised by stretches that feel clumsily confrontational, as if the director were more interested in breaking down walls than advancing his story. Anderson's dazzling, convoluted movie is simply too big a meal to digest at one sitting, and I can't wait to watch again to see where it leads next time. Also stars Paul Dano, Kevin J. O'Connor, Ciaran Hinds and Dillon Freasier. 4 stars
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2008.