New Releases
CHICKEN LITTLE (G) Disney's latest computer animated feature offers an increasingly familiar scenario: plenty of great stuff to look at, but not much by way of memorable characters or even a stick-to-your-ribs story. Even at well under 90 minutes, the movie feels a bit padded, with a first half-hour largely composed of amusing but basically gratuitous scenes of frenzied hyperactivity, with visual puns filling the edges of every frame. By the time Chicken Little finally shifts into its main narrative — the titular chicken and his misfit pals (a big, presumably gay, pig and an ugly duckling) get wind of what appears to be an alien invasion, but no one believes them — it feels like the movie's already over. The life lesson messages here and the Nemo-esque father-son dynamic feel recycled, and the obligatory pop culture references (including nods to E.T., War of the Worlds and, yes, even The Wizard of Oz), though often cleverly visualized, aren't enough to make up for the fundamental sketchiness of the story. It's all quite cute in a way that will appeal to very young viewers, and gorgeously rendered in a way that will appeal to animation geeks, but nothing you'll probably remember a year or two from now. Featuring the voices of Zach Braff, Garry Marshall, Joan Cusack and Steve Zahn. Opens Nov 4 at local theaters. ** 1/2
RECENT RELEASES:
2046 (R) The film is sort of a (very) loose sequel to Wong Kar-wai's masterful In the Mood for Love, with Tony Leung returning as Chow, whose unspoken and unconsummated, but no less grand, romance with a married woman was the bittersweet focus of that movie. The film takes place in the years following In the Mood for Love, with our once-wounded-in-love hero now an emotionally distant womanizer who we see crossing paths with a series of beautiful and mysterious women moving in and out of the hotel room across from his. We eventually come to see that the film's title refers not just to the room inhabited by Chow's various girlfriends, but also to the very curious sci-fi novel he's writing (and that we see visualized and paralleled throughout the film), which posits a place populated by androids with "delayed emotional reactions" and where all memories come to roost. Also stars Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong, Gong Li and Maggie Cheung. ****
ASYLUM (R) It's Wuthering Heights in a loony bin when the repressed young wife of an asylum administrator becomes obsessed with a hunky, brooding inmate. Director David Mackenzie is back on the passion-adultery-murder turf familiar from his dank and gritty Young Adam, although the treatment here becomes so broad and absurdly overheated that the movie sometimes feels like one of those Harlequin novels. The film transforms into something twistier and far more interesting in its last act, complete with a fabulously bizarre and complex finale that's well worth waiting for, but the bulk of Asylum isn't nearly as strange, erotic or as symbolically rich as it seems to want to be. Stars Natasha Richardson, Ian McKellen and Marton Csokas. ***
BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS (NR) During the latter stages if China's "Cultural Revolution," two precocious teens are shipped off to a mountainous region for Maoist re-education, only to charm and entrance the villagers around them. While on a visit to a larger city, the pair meet and fall for the daughter of a renowned tailor. When the boys stumble upon a suitcase full of banned books, they spend hours reading them to the girl in a secret meeting place. (Not Reviewed)
CAPOTE (R) Anyone who has read In Cold Blood or seen the 1967 movie version will be basically familiar with the raw material here — a pair of drifters reveal themselves to a reporter while awaiting execution for the senseless slaughter of a Kansas family — but Capote yanks the focus away from the killers and puts it squarely on the writer and his process. That writer is Truman Capote, portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in a performance that gives us traces of all the Capotes that we think we know — the narcissistic dandy, the sensitive artist, the twee fop with the whiney baby voice, the literary powerhouse — and fuses them all into a character too complex and human to be pigeonholed by any of those descriptions. Capote is not a bio-pic in the conventional sense but, rather, an evocative and richly nuanced character study, sometimes dreamy, sometimes disturbing, and with a rigorously constricted focus that concentrates on how In Cold Blood came to be written and what it did to the man who wrote. The film works on many levels, but it may be most invaluable for its insights into how artists (a term that certainly includes writers, as well as filmmakers) frequently exploit their subjects and sacrifice what some might call their souls just to get their art made. Also stars Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr and Chris Cooper. **** 1/2
DOOM (R) It's a toss-up whether you'll destroy more brain cells playing the video game Doom or watching this big screen "adaptation" of the same. Either way, the odds are against you. Dwayne Johnson, The Artist Sometimes Known as The Rock, stars in a sci-fi adventure that will surprise a lot of people (including me) if it features much of anything beyond a major body count, noise and lots of stuff blowin' up real good. Also stars Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike and Ben Daniels. (Not Reviewed)
DOMINO (R) Tony Scott, a pioneer of ADD-filmmaking who was making movies that felt like feature-length music videos before almost anyone else, here unleashes his flashiest and most aggressively discombobulated movie. Domino is loosely based on the fascinating and very brief life of Domino Harvey — Hollywood royalty (daughter of movie star Lawrence Harvey) turned fashion model turned bounty hunter — but Scott manages to transform a potentially great story into a barrage of pointless, hyperbolic style. We learn virtually nothing about the characters or why they do the things they do, but the film is constantly, relentlessly in motion — from the cameras convulsing over, under and around the on-screen action, to the ever-changing film stocks and speeds, to the strident, headache-inducing shock-cut editing. It's all undeniably attention-grabbing, but none of it is particularly original (Scott borrows shamelessly from Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, as well as from Tarantino and Guy Ritchie), and the film eventually throws any semblance of plot out the window. Stars Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Christopher Walken and Lucy Liu. * 1/2
EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (PG-13) Actor Liev Schrieber (The Manchurian Candidate) makes his directorial debut with this black comedy based on Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling novel about a Jewish-American writer traveling to Europe in search of family secrets. Elijah Wood heads up a crew of quirky characters, and the whole thing almost certainly gains in authenticity from having been shot on location in Prague. Also stars Eugene Hutz and Boris Leskin. (Not Reviewed)
FLIGHTPLAN (PG-13) Jodie Foster plays grieving aeronautics engineer Kyle Pratt, traveling home with her 6-year-old daughter, Julia, to bury her husband after his suicide. Onboard the plane, Foster awakens, panicked, to find her child missing. No one claims to have ever seen the girl and Pratt is assumed delusional and dangerous. Peter Sarsgaard plays the sympathetic air Marshal who attempts to help solve the mystery of the missing girl. With cool camera angles and intense close ups, the movie has an eerie, Twilight Zone-esque feel. Foster's usual command of raw emotion makes an otherwise blah film incredibly intense and thrilling. Also stars Sean Bean. ***
— —Yeatie Morgan
THE FOG (R) A remake of a lesser-known John Carpenter horror outing (about pirate ghosts a tad scarier than the ones found in old episodes of Scooby-Doo), the 2005 edition of The Fog was made unavailable to movie critics until it was too late to review the thing in time for opening day. The studio's lack of faith in the film might just tell you as much as an actual review would. Stars Tom Welling, Maggie Grace and Selma Blair. (Not Reviewed)
THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED (PG) Actor turned filmmaker Bill Paxton makes quite a leap here, following his intensely disturbing 2001 directorial debut about religious fanaticism and serial killers, Frailty, with this heartwarming crowd-pleaser about the game of golf. More than that, though, The Greatest Game Ever Played is an underdog movie in the classic Disney mold, although it's anything but subtle in its aggressive use of golf as an arena for class struggle and the enormous divides between haves and have-nots. The movie has a tough time finding its focus and its footing for the first act, but it eventually settles into a fairly straight-forward account of the 1913 U.S. Open, in which Francis Ouimet (Shia LaBeouf), a 20-year-old amateur from the wrong side of the tracks, successfully took on a slew of seasoned professionals, most of whom Paxton casts as lackeys of the snooty, idle rich. Also stars Stephen Dillane, Josh Flitter and Elias Koteas. ** 1/2
GRIZZLY MAN (R) Werner Herzog, a cosmic absurdist who has always been drawn to obsessives and holy fools, seems to have found a perfect subject in the bizarre life and death of Timothy Treadwell, an environmentalist and self-appointed protector of wild life who died at the fangs and claws of one of his beloved grizzly bears. Treadwell was a bundle of contradictions, an insecure, aging nature boy and an overbearing (pun unavoidable), egomaniacal clown — think Queer Eye's Carson Kressley crossed with John Denver — who manufactured his own larger-than-life image and religiously committed it to videotape in hundreds of hours of self-shot footage. Herzog incorporates much of this footage into Grizzly Man, sometimes commenting upon it (in his amusingly foreboding German accent) as a way of shaping and expanding the story, but often simply letting Treadwell's words and actions speak for themselves. The results make for one of the best films of the year. ****
HAPPILY EVER AFTER (NR) Run of the mill kvetching about a bunch of middle-aged guys feeling trapped by marriage, work and life in general, and compensating by fantasizing about sex (and, in some cases, acting out those fantasies). The film happens to be French, but it's very nearly as shallow and clichéd as what you'd expect in an equivalent tale from Hollywood, and is only slightly redeemed by the presence of the always engaging Charlotte Gainsbourg (Serge's daughter) and a few tasty cameos by the likes of Johnny Depp and Anouk Aimee. The blame for this self-indulgent time waster can mostly be laid at the feet of writer-director Yvan Attal, who also co-stars as Gainsbourg's philandering husband, who acquitted himself much better in the similarly themed but somewhat more energetic My Wife is an Actress. Also stars Alain Chabat, Emmanuelle Seigner and Alain Cohen. **
IN HER SHOES (PG-13) Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette play radically dissimilar sisters whose only common ground is a love for footwear, in this meandering, unfocused romantic comedy from normally dependable director Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential, 8 Mile). Collette plays the plain but dependable sister while Diaz gets to smolder and twitch as the sexy but dysfunctional bad-girl sister, a terminally unemployed nut-job who sponges off her sibling and then sleeps with her boyfriend. To its credit, this is a chick flick that doesn't focus on the sisters' man troubles so much as on their relationship to each other, but the characters and their conflicts are still pretty broadly drawn, and things soon become trite, then ridiculous. The responsible sister finds inner peace by getting in touch with her irresponsible side and quitting her well-paying, anxiety-producing job, while the ne'er-do-well sis straightens up, bonds with a gaggle of old folks (including her estranged grandmother) and, in her spare time, overcomes the heartbreak of dyslexia. Also stars Shirley MacLaine. ** 1/2
NORTH COUNTRY (R) An uncomplicated but rousing tale of female empowerment and workers' rights in the good ol'-fashioned, issues-oriented style of Norma Rae and Silkwood, North Country is the story of how the nation's first class action suit for sexual harassment came about. Charlize Theron stars as Josey Aimes, who runs away from an abusive husband only to land smack dab in the middle of a workplace polluted by some of the nastiest testosterone around. As we follow Josey's escalating humiliations at the hands of male co-workers and bosses, North Country combines elements of thriller, soap opera and courtroom drama, even as it succeeds in personalizing a critical moment in American history. North Country is the Hollywood debut of the New Zealand director Niki Caro, whose much-loved Whale Rider also featured a lone female treading in traditionally male territory, and the filmmaker fleshes out the dynamics of Aimes' tight-knit, Minnesota mining community with the same careful attention to detail she brought to the male-dominated Maori society of her earlier film. Caro is not always as subtle as she might be (Josey's struggle unfolds as the Anita Hill hearings beam into TV sets in the background), but that doesn't mean North Country is any less effective in communicating female outrage on its way toward a tipping point. Also stars Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sissy Spacek, Richard Jenkins and Sean Bean. *** 1/2
PRIME (PG-13) Written and directed by Ben Younger (Boiler Room), Prime takes a witty yet realistic look at the complications that arise in cross-generational dating. Academy Award nominee Uma Thurman stars as Rafi, a 37-year-old divorcee living and working in Manhattan. After meeting and getting to know Dave (Bryan Greenberg) in more positions than she ever thought possible, Rafi begins to see the possibility of loving another, even if he is 14 years younger than her, proving that the power of attraction lies not within the boundaries of social "norms" but outside definition and rationality. Falling in love doesn't happen without some obstructive consequences, however, as Rafi and Dave soon learn through Dr. Lisa Metzger (played by Meryl Streep), Rafi's therapist and, as we soon find out, also Dave's rather distressed mother. From the almost stereotypical romantic comedy introduction to its fitting conclusion, Prime is a well-balanced, live-and-learn type of film with spark, touch and very little lag. *** 1/2
— —ADAM C. CAPPARELLI
ROLL BOUNCE (PG-13) Director Malcolm D. Lee (Undercover Brother) offers what we suspect might be the silliest movie of the year. Lil' Bow Wow stars as Xavier ("X" to his friends), leader of a hotshot roller-skating gang (we kid you not) on the south side of '70s Chicago. When their rink closes, the gang heads uptown to a swankier one, where they engage in a skate-off against rival rollers. And, oh yeah — it's a musical. Also stars Chi McBride and Mike Epps. (Not Reviewed)
SAW II (R) As with the original Saw, an appreciation of Saw II largely depends on one's appetite for seeing people getting sliced, diced, skewered and charred. The premise here once again involves characters trapped in a controlled environment and picked off by a deranged but brilliant sicko in ways that the filmmakers hope we'll find ingenious. The plot, such as it is, involves the characters trying to find some way to stay alive (unsurprisingly, most of them don't), and, as with the original, there are also a few twists at the end, although nothing to get too excited about. The real show here is the screaming and the splatter, a grand guignol that's no more than a calculated repackaging of early Argento, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper, stripped of anything remotely resembling a frill (much less an emotion) and programmed with the unwavering forward motion of a video game. Stars Donnie Walhberg, Tobin Bell and Lyriq Bent. **
SEPARATE LIES (R) A hit-and-run incident shakes up life and exposes tensions in a quiet, upper-class neighborhood in the English countryside in this study of murder and adultery among people who aren't supposed to go in for that sort of thing. Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson deliver typically fine performances as the couple at the center of it all, and Rupert Everett steals the show as the pampered and vaguely unpleasant neighbor who becomes one more monkey wrench among many. The film drifts toward unbecoming soap opera before it exits, but the bulk of Separate Lies makes good use of a cool, almost Hitchcockian tone that allows the material to bubble up towards the surface and seethe. *** 1/2
SERENITY (PG-13) Devoted fans of Firefly, the short-lived show from cult TV guru Josh Whedon (Buffy, Angel), will likely go crazy for this big screen version, but the results are decidedly more mixed for the rest of us. Serenity is set in a future some 500 years from now, and follows a band of misfit rebels as they're chased across the universe by the Alliance, an oppressive coalition government that wants to get its hands on River (Summer Glau), a powerful, 17-year-old psychic traveling with the rebels. The storyline has even more interesting complications and convolutions, but the film doesn't really tie them together in a cohesive, satisfying way, and Serenity tends to lurch ahead in a curiously clunky, episodic manner that seems more suited to the small screen than the big one. Also stars Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Morena Baccarin, Adam Baldwin and Sean Maher. ***
TIM BURTON'S CORPSE BRIDE (PG) Corpse Bride is the sweetly macabre tale of a delicate young lad (voiced by Johnny Depp) who accidentally weds a dead girl and winds up preferring the no-airs company of her deceased pals to that of the pompous living. The movie starts out somber and a bit stodgy, with a severe visual palate in effect that's just a half-notch removed from pure black and white; it's only when the film shifts locales to the land of the dead that it finally comes alive, paradoxically enough, bursting into pastel color and bombarding us with a slew of half-morbid, half-wacky sight gags. Also featuring the voices of Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Albert Finney and Christopher Lee. ***
AN UNFINISHED LIFE (PG-13) Morgan Freeman turns out to be just about the only thing worth watching in Lasse Hallström's long-stalled project An Unfinished Life, a tepid melodrama where pretty much everything that's going to happen is known within the first 10 minutes. Precocious young daughter in tow, battered woman Jennifer Lopez travels to Wyoming and moves in with estranged father-in-law Robert Redford, who still blames Lopez for the death of his son, her husband, many years ago. It's only a matter of time before bonding happens between all of the feuding parties here, and the movie plods along on autopilot, occasionally injecting its cliché-ridden story with bits of overplayed symbolism. Also stars Becca Gardener and Josh Lucas. **
WALLACE AND GROMIT: CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT (G) Cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his faithful, mystery-solving pooch Gromit, stars of several Oscar-winning shorts by animator Nick Park (Chicken Run), arrive in fine form for their feature film debut. The plot here, by turns delightfully droll and ludicrous, is sort of a Sherlock Holmes mystery meets The Fly by way of The Wolf Man, in which a human character, after having his psyche accidentally fused with that of a rabbit's, winds up transformed by night into a giant, rampaging bunny. It's up to our heroes to save the day, naturally, as they trip the light fantastic through a steady stream of sight gags, slapstick, puns, quirks (including several characters whose obsession with vegetables verges on the perverse), screwball set-pieces and bad English dental work. As in all of Park's movies, there's charm, wit and visual style to burn, all delivered via some quaintly dated but lovely-to-look-at claymation and a sublimely silly and oh-so-British comedic sensibility. Featuring the voices of Peter Sallis, Ray Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter. *** 1/2
THE WEATHER MAN (R) Apparently driven by an urge to demonstrate that he's an auteur, too, director Gore Verbinski follows up his buoyantly charming Pirates of the Caribbean with this sophisticated but unappealingly mopey character study of a minor-level celebrity trying to make sense of his life. Nicolas Cage stars, as a not particularly talented Chicago TV personality dealing with troubled teenage kids, an ex-wife who doesn't like him, a job that ultimately means nothing and a famous father who he'll never be as good as. The bleak wintery Chicago settings make for an overstated metaphor for the state of Cage's soul, and, with its abundant and vaguely absurd navel-gazing, the whole movie often seems to be positioning itself as a quirky new remake of Camu's The Stranger. So far, so existentially correct. But when Cage's character's life of quiet desperation deepens and lands on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the movie finds itself in a rut from which it never recovers, and its brand of one-note misery simply becomes a drag. Despite flashes of smart writing and periodic comic edges, The Weatherman is ultimately little more than a chronicle of a downward spiral as draining as it is relentless. Also stars Michael Caine and Hope Davis. ***
Reviewed entries by Lance Goldenberg unless otherwise noted.
