New Releases
HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE (PG) Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle presents us with yet another fantastical world unlike anything seen before on a movie screen. Magic is afoot here, and almost everyone in the movie seems to be under the power of some sort of spell or another, beginning with Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer), a young girl transformed into a 90-year-old woman at the whim of a romantically frustrated witch. Sophie wanders into the mobile household of the powerful young wizard Howl (Christain Bale), a tortured type who can't seem to stop himself from turning into a monster now and then, and a sort of love blossoms. With a storyline that's a bit more convoluted than usual and a few images that seem rehashed from earlier Miyazaki offerings, Howl isn't quite up there with the filmmaker's very best work, but it's still better than just about anything else playing in theaters at the moment. Also featuring the voices of Jean Simmons, Lauren Bacall and Billy Crystal. Playing one night only, Sept. 9, as a special free screening at Eckerd College's Miller Auditorium, 4200 54th Ave. S., St. Petersburg. ****
YES (R) Sally Potter is a filmmaker whose ambitious, high-concept projects run the gamut from the brilliantly enigmatic (Orlando) to the embarrassingly insipid (The Tango Lesson), and her latest, Yes, falls squarely into the most unfortunate recesses of that later category. Among its many misguided pretensions, Yes features dialogue spoken entirely in iambic pentameter (yes, it's just as awful as you're imagining), and focuses on an Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen) and a dark-skinned Lebanese waiter (Simon Abkarian), known only as "He" and "She," whose adulterous affair becomes a clumsy encapsulation for the current state of post 9/11 geo-politics. Potter's vision here is both relentlessly heavy-handed and jaw-droppingly shallow, with a romanticized, metaphorical notion of Islam — as the emasculated, exotic Other — that borders on unintentional parody. Yes apparently had its genesis as an experimental short of about five minutes duration, which is about all Potter's material deserves. This is the sort of thing that gives art films a bad name. Also stars Sam Neill and Shirley Henderson. Opens Sept. 9 at Tampa Theatre in Tampa. Call to confirm. *
RECENT RELEASES:
THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN (R) Ruder, cruder and more consistently funny than Wedding Crashers, this is 90-some minutes of comic anarchy with a 15 minute ode to middle-aged love inserted somewhere in there to show us the movie's heart is in the right place. Steve Carell (a regular on The Daily Show, and break-out performer from Anchorman) is the titular virgin, a sweetly clueless arrested adolescent who collects action figures and spends his weekends perfecting recipes for egg salad sandwiches. The movie's one big joke (variations of which are repeated endlessly, but usually hilariously) revolves around Carell's character being pressured by his male co-workers to have sex, and his bungled attempts to accomplish that mission, but The 40 Year-Old Virgin also gives us the lighter side of chest hair waxing, condom application, psycho speed dating and drunk girls puking in the faces of their potential lovers. Also stars Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen and Romany Malco. *** 1/2
THE ARISTOCRATS (NR) The Aristocrats tells us one of the oldest and (prior to this documentary) most obscure jokes around, a monstrously filthy monologue that describes all manner of depraved sexual atrocities. The punchline isn't much to speak of, but that's sort of the point: as the film is happy to remind us, repeatedly, it's never really about the punchline, but about how you get there. The horrifically dirty joke that The Aristocrats dissects is merely an excuse for comedians to give free reign to id and imagination, improvising in a jazz-like way that ultimately tells us more about the singer than the song. The Aristocrats wants us to think about what makes us laugh and why, digging deep into the roots of humor as both psychotherapy and sado-masochism. The joke is told, retold, inverted, subverted and dissected by dozens of famous comedians, but although much of this material is outrageously funny, even insightful, the movie eventually begins repeating itself, finally verging on overkill. Then again, would you expect less from the a film that attempts to cast itself as the last word on a killing joke? Features Jason Alexander, Hank Azaria, Drew Carey, George Carlin, Gilbert Gottfried, Eric Idle, Paul Reiser, Chris Rock, Bob Saget, Robin Williams and Jon Stewart. *** 1/2
THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY (R) A well-meaning but sometimes overwrought cross-cultural journey beginning in Vietnam and ending in America, featuring a multinational cast speaking a variety of languages, and directed by a Norwegian filmmaker. The Beautiful Country is the story of Binh (Damien Nguyen), a young man outcast by his fellow Vietnamese as bui dui ("less than dust") for being the mixed race offspring of a Vietnamese mother and an American G.I. father. When Binh's long-presumed-dead mother turns up long enough to tell him that his father is also alive and living in America, the boy embarks on a seemingly impossible mission to track the man down, a harrowing and sometimes implausibly charted journey that takes up the bulk of the film. The Beautiful Country lives up to its name during a lyrical and exquisitely photographed first act set in mostly rural areas of Vietnam, but the movie turns increasingly shrill and melodramatic as it progresses, culminating in a particularly nightmarish take on the immigrant experience in America. Also stars Bai Ling and Tim Roth. ***
BROKEN FLOWERS (PG-13) As with almost everything else Jim Jarmusch has done, Broken Flowers turns out to be both an adventure in minimalism and a heroically unsentimental road trip movie. Bill Murray plays an over-the-hill Don Juan named, appropriately enough, Don — who, despite his love of the ladies, seems so lethargic that he's on the verge on evaporating right into the ether. When a letter arrives one day from an anonymous ex informing him that he's the father of her 19-year-old son, Don dips his toes back in the world, setting out to revisit his former flames from two decades past in an effort to get to the bottom of the mystery. Jarmusch details a journey in which past, present and future fracture and collide, as Murray's character discovers the hard way that you can't go home again. Even the film's touchiest material is handled with the droll restraint you would expect of a project from Murray and Jarmusch — two masters of minimalism whose doubly deadpan collaboration borders on understatement overkill. Also stars Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy, Julie Delpy and Tilda Swinton. *** 1/2
THE BROTHERS GRIMM (PG-13) It's not that Terry Gilliam's first film in seven years is a bad movie exactly, but for the fans it might just be something worse: impersonal, and maybe even a little boring. Matt Damon and Heath Ledger star as the film's brothers, history's famous storytellers here reconfigured as 18th-century con men who discover the demons they've been claiming to exorcize are actually real. Despite incorporating snippets of legends like Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel that tease us into thinking the movie's going for some sort of 1001 Nights tales-within-tales discourse on the nature of storytelling, this is a film that really doesn't have much to say about anything. With no interesting characters or meaty ideas to concern himself with, the filmmaker slips off into CGI-Land, generating creepy-crawly vines-o'-doom recycled from Rami's Evil Dead and testing our patience with another round of computer-generated werewolves resembling every other computer-generated werewolf we've seen on screen over the last 10 years. Gilliam just doesn't seem to have his heart in The Brothers Grimm, not to mention his mind, and that's sad to watch. Also stars Jonathan Pryce, Lena Headey and Monica Bellucci. ** 1/2
THE CAVE (PG-13) So how bad is The Cave? It is the worst of all worlds, as soullessly slick as it is hopelessly inept, cheesy without being the least bit amusing, and lacking in even the faintest whiff of suspense or scares, genuine or otherwise. An expedition in the caves of Romania gets out of hand when explorers discover deadly beasties lurking in the dark, leading to a scenario that's three parts Alien, one part Pitch Black. That's where the comparisons end with those infinitely better movies, though. The characters in The Cave are complete non-entities who run in circles while the camera turns gratuitous back flips to the tune of ripped-off cues from Jaws and Psycho, and the big, bad creatures are seen in brief snatches edited at an ADD clip that makes all action incomprehensible. A major headache of a movie. Stars Cole Hauser, Piper Perabo, Lena Headey and Morris Chestnut. 1/2
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (PG) Not at all the dream project we were hoping for, Tim Burton's re-imagining of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a curiously flat-footed affair that has a hard time connecting with either children or adults. At the center of the picture is Johnny Depp as the ultra-eccentric candymaker Wonka, whose performance blends Emo Philips, Michael Jackson and Dana Carvey's Church Lady into a creepy, androgynous creation who seems to have imperfectly mastered the art of never growing up. Burton tries to humanize Depp's Wonka by giving us periodic flashbacks to his unhappy childhood, but these only serve to further disrupt the flow of an already erratically paced movie, and the tone veers uncomfortably from the sticky sweet to the gratuitously surreal to the borderline sadistic. Also stars Freddie Highmore, David Kelly, Helena Bonham Carter and Deep Roy. ** 1/2
THE CONSTANT GARDENER (PG-13) From its tasteful production design to its international locations, right down to its choice of lead actor, Ralph Fiennes, The Constant Gardener seems aimed at just the sort of audience that cheered The English Patient all the way to the Oscars. Fiennes plays a mild-mannered diplomat whose wife gets herself murdered when she comes a little too close to a scheme by nefarious European drug companies using unsuspecting Africans as human guinea pigs. Director Fernando Meirelles makes the most of the material, letting it play out in scrambled time, often shooting from the hip in a slightly toned-down version of that visceral style he employed in City of God, and layering the film with a convincing atmosphere of escalating dread (punctuated by a few brief but intense action sequences). It's only toward the end that the film lets its political messages get the better of it, and the discerning viewer is advised to run for cover when The Constant Gardener chooses to unleash its inner Erin Brockovich (insert Silkwood, The Insider or your own personal favorite little-guy-vs-demonic-big-business screed here). Meirelles is a director who has a way with actors, though, and the film's performances are strong enough to carry The Constant Gardener even when the narrative becomes a bit familiar or didactic. The movie's refined blend of romance, politics and suspense seems well suited for a crowd seeking something a little bit different (but not too different) and not particularly disposed to dealing with pesky subtitles. Also stars Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy and Pete Postlethwaite. ** 1/2
DEEP BLUE (NR) There's some astonishing footage to be seen in this feature-length documentary, beginning with sequences of death squads of tireless sharks laying into their prey, and killer whales seizing sea lion pups and flinging their bloody corpses 20 feet in the air. It's not all Faces of Death territory, though; Deep Blue isn't coy about the harsher truths about our underwater neighbors, but the film is almost always realized in the very best of taste, and is more often than not both fascinating and hypnotic. The final 20 minutes is pure sci-fi, a close-up look at the impossibly strange creatures that inhabit those deepest depths of the ocean where the sun don't shine. Directed by Alastair Fothergill and Andy Byatt. *** 1/2
DEUCE BIGALOW: EUROPEAN GIGOLO (R) Rob Schneider returns as the world's most pathetic male prostitute in this sequel to the crass-and-proud-of-it 1999 comedy. Europe gets the Deuce treatment this time around, when our skanky hero travels abroad to bail out his pimp pal (Eddie Griffin). Also stars a seriously slumming Jean Reno and Jeroen Krabbe. (Not Reviewed)
THE DUKES OF HAZZARD (PG-13) If you're a fan of the small screen Dukes, this big screen cousin may hold some appeal, since both are filled with wall-to-wall high-speed car chases, barroom brawls, backroads shenanigans and country girls displaying lots of skin. The behavior's a little more ridiculous and the characters even a little dopier in the big screen Dukes, which sometimes lends itself to some pretty funny material, although it just as often feels like some clueless Hollywood screenwriter's fantasy of what rural Southern life might be like. Stars Burt Reynolds, Jessica Simpson, Willie Nelson, Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville. ** 1/2
THE EDUKATORS (R) A fascinating and only occasionally flat-footed blend of noir-thriller, romantic triangle charmer and political diatribe, this shot-on-DV project from Austrian director Hans Weingartner lends an appealingly unglamorized, Dogme-like sense of reality to its curious take on young revolutionaries in love. The "Edukators" are a young German woman named Julie (Julie Jentsch), her boyfriend Peter (Stipe Erceg) and the boyfriend's pal Jan (Daniel Bruhl), a loose-knit group of somewhat confused radicals who break into rich people's houses when no one's home, rearrange the furniture, and leave notes declaring "Your days of plenty are numbered." When one of these prank break-in's goes awry, the trio wind up kidnapping the master of the house, a wealthy, middle-aged businessman who, curiously enough, turns out to have a revolutionary past of his own tucked away in the closet. The Edukators starts out strong, full of zippy energy and unexpected turns during its first half, but tends to bog down in the nuances of what sometimes seems like endless debate as it proceeds. Still, the writing is consistently smart, the performances solid, and the contradictions between political idealism and reality are generally explored with wit and imagination to spare. Also stars Burghart Klaussner. *** 1/2
FOUR BROTHERS (R) John Singleton's latest movie is like some vigilante revenge flick from decades gone by, juiced up with an omnipresent pop/soul soundtrack (Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man' is heard no fewer than three times), and with an interracial quartet of likeable young stars standing in for Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson. Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson, André Benjamin and Garrett Hedlund star as the foster brothers, reunited to track down the killer of their sainted mom, but Four Brothers' so-called plot takes a back seat to the movie's real raison d'etre — the gleefully sadistic, wall-to-wall violence. Also stars Terrence Howard, Josh Charles and Chiwetel Ejiofor. **
THE GREAT RAID (PG-13) Opening with that oft-dreaded mantra "Inspired by true events" (Hollywood-ese for "It really happened, sorta"), The Great Raid offers an account of American soldiers during World War II rescuing 500 POWs from a Japanese camp in the Philippines. This is one resolutely old-school opus, filled with determined, manly heroes who call each other "old pal" and "kid," patriotic speeches set to stirring music, and a very nasty enemy whose sheer evil is immune to the humanizing endearments of modern political correctness. The only old-school element the movie forgets to add is a little excitement. The film is beautiful to look at, but dramatically, the movie's pretty much a dud. Stars Joseph Fiennes, Benjamin Bratt, James Franco and Connie Nielson. ** 1/2
HAPPY ENDINGS (R) Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex, Bounce) juggles multiple storylines here, sometimes a bit awkwardly, finding oddball humor in a middle-aged woman being blackmailed by an aspiring filmmaker who's found out about a baby she gave up as a teenager; a gay couple who become convinced their lesbian pals have stolen their sperm to conceive a child; and a gold-digging drifter (an absolutely remarkable Maggie Gyllenhaal) who gets her claws into a clueless drummer and his even more clueless father. The film's most controversial element is the text that periodically pops up on the side of the screen, explaining and commenting upon the characters and their stories. It's a very strange device — somewhere between old silent film inter-titles and a Godardian deconstruction of word and image — and although it's often clever and effective, by the end of the film it begins feeling like a failed experiment, contrived and even a bit smug. Also stars Steve Coogan, Jesse Bradford, Tom Arnold, Jason Ritter, Bobby Cannavale and Laura Dern. *** 1/2
HUSTLE & FLOW (R) Terrence Howard is flat-out remarkable as DJay, a sleepy-eyed Memphis hustler who ekes out a living running drugs and women, but dreams of becoming the hip-hop world's Next Big Thang. The film's three loosely connected acts function almost like mini-movies unto themselves, but each is solidly entertaining, and director Craig Brewer gets the steamy, southern-fried flavor of DJay's surroundings down pat. Also stars Anthony Anderson, DJ Qualls and Chris Bridges. *** 1/2
THE ISLAND (PG-13) In the not-too-distant future, greedy corporations are secretly harvesting human clones for body parts and raising them in controlled environments where they're shielded from the truth of their nature and identity. Ewan McGregor (sporting a spiffy new American accent) and Scarlett Johansson (looking more old-school Hollywood voluptuous than ever) play two clones who discover the truth of their situation, escape, and immediately find themselves being hunted by a small army of mercenaries and semi-legal operatives. As expected, there's not really much to think about here other than the gaping plot holes, but if you like your action outsized and your summer movies full of non-signifying sound and fury, have at it. Also stars Sean Bean and Steve Buscemi. ***
MARCH OF THE PENGUINS (G) Director Luc Jacquet and cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison follow a group of emperor penguins as they embark upon their ritual trek to ancient breeding grounds — an impossible journey of 70 miles across treacherous Antarctic terrain — and then document their struggle to bring new life into the world and keep it alive. The filmmakers offer up some astonishing footage here, including surreal images of hundreds of birds huddling together for warmth, and one remarkable sequence of tender courtship and copulation. The narration by Morgan Freeman gets a little cutesy from time to time, but it's undoubtedly a step up from the original French version where the birds were anthropomorphized by having behind-the-scenes human actors supplying their speaking parts. *** 1/2
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (R) A movie that succeeds brilliantly when it isn't falling flat on its face, Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know relies on an alchemy so fragile it seems in danger of disappearing right before our eyes. It's almost a disservice to attempt describing this very curious movie in terms of plot, but at the center of it all are two people trying to make a love connection — a recently separated shoe salesman (John Hawkes) and an aspiring artist (July) — orbited by various underage boys and girls curious about sex in ways that will make more than a few adult viewers extremely uncomfortable. The movie isn't trying to shock us, though, and the film's characters project such absolute, unmitigated sincerity that it almost seems to double-back on itself, transforming into a homespun irony not dissimilar to what we get in some David Lynch movies. Also stars Miles Thompson and Brandon Ratcliff. *** 1/2
MUST LOVE DOGS (PG-13) Sitcom king Gary David Goldberg (Family Ties), to practically no one's surprise, brings sitcom finesse and, at the end of the day, sitcom formula to this generic romantic comedy about a middle-aged divorcee getting back into the dating game. Diane Lane and John Cusack (as the principal suitor) are surprisingly effective, both individually and together, in a whiney, mopey, neurotically self-aware way, but almost everything around them feels forced and fake, and for every line of clever dialogue there are two lines that are pretentious or just plain dopey. Also stars Dermot Mulroney, Elizabeth Perkins, Christopher Plummer and Stockard Channing. **
MYSTERIOUS SKIN (R) Mysterious Skin tells the parallel stories of Brian and Neil (Brady Corbet and Joseph Gordon Levitt), two young men living in the shadow of events that happened to them as children. One boy blacked out for five hours of his life and believes he was abducted by aliens. The other boy fell in love with his little league coach, a predator who wound up seducing him on a kitchen floor strewn with smashed Fruit Loops and Coco Puffs. Mysterious Skin follows Brian and Neil through the years, weaving between their stories and making it clear that they're somehow linked — a mystery that only opens up at the cathartic but not completely unexpected conclusion, where all the dots are finally connected. Also stars Bill Sage and Elisabeth Shue. *** 1/2
RED EYE (PG-13) Rachel McAdams is the movie's damsel in distress, trapped on a flight with sadistic psycho Cillian Murphy (he of the spooky, baby-doll glass-like eyes), who's blackmailing her into helping him with his latest act of terror. Wes Craven seems to be trying to remake himself here into Brian DePalma by way of Hitchcock, paying considerable attention to setting up the situation and positioning minor characters as potential cogs in the wheels of his plot, but the director doesn't seem to quite know what to do once things get rolling. By the end, Red Eye has thrown in just about every cliché in the book, and can't seem to think of anything to do with its characters but have them chase each other around until one can't get up anymore. Craven is usually much better reveling in clichés than in trying to subvert them (see Scream), but this looks like he's hardly even trying. Also stars Brian Cox. **
SAINT RALPH (PG-13) Predictable but reasonably charming coming-of-age stuff set in the sexually repressed environment of a Catholic parochial school in the early '50s. The titular saint is precocious, 14-year-old Ralph Walker, a budding Casanova and a near-orphan with a dead war hero dad and a sweet-faced mom nobly wasting away in a hospital room. When God Himself encourages Ralph to transform himself into a marathon runner, the boy becomes convinced that a win in the prestigious Boston Marathon would be just the miracle to bring his long-suffering mom out of her coma. The movie unfolds in a gentle, good-natured manner, with just enough of an edge to keep itself from drifting into pure pap, and with a few solid performances, notably one from Campbell Scott (as the boy's mentor), to keep us watching right up to the mandatory inspirational ending. Also stars Jennifer Tilly and Gordon Pinsett. ***
THE SKELETON KEY (PG-13) Kate Hudson plays a hospice caretaker who accepts a live-in position with an old woman and her husband, the latter a recently-paralyzed stroke victim. After stumbling on a skeleton key, her ferocious curiosity leads her to a secret room in the attic, where she earns about evil spirits tucked away in an old house surrounded by the swampy, backwater bayous of Louisiana. Despite some ghost story clichés, the hair-raising and intricately woven plot twists keep you guessing throughout most of the movie, and, mercifully, there aren't any blatant cheese-tastic moments to destroy the flow of the story. Also stars Peter Sarsgaard, Gena Rowlands and John Hurt. ***
Yeatie Morgan
A SOUND OF THUNDER (PG-13) Peter Hyams hasn't made a half-way decent movie since 1981's Outland, but if you think that Time Cop represented the director's absolute low point, wait until you get a load of this hunk o' junk. A Sound of Thunder is sloppy, half-hearted sci-fi action about a bungled trip to the past that affects everything in the present (well, it's the future, technically, since the movie takes place in 2055 — but never mind). The way the movie visualizes how the world changes is unimaginatively conceived (mostly just a bunch of overgrown vegetation and roaming packs of silly lizard-primate mutations) and the cheap-looking CGI is as unconvincing as the general level of acting on display (Ed Burns, in particular, looks like he's embarrassed to be here half the time; the other half of the time he just looks bored). None of it makes very much sense, and the computer-generated settings are so ugly and obviously fake that the movie's often actually a bit difficult to look at. Also Stars Ben Kingsley and Catherine McCormack. *
SUPERCROSS: THE MOVIE (PG-13) Expect a mother lode of death-defying stunts and hot young non-actors in this tale of two feuding brothers who put aside their differences to become champion motorcycle racers. Stars Steve Howey, Mike Vogel, Cameron Richardson and Sophia Bush. (Not Reviewed)
TRANSPORTER 2 (PG-13) Jason Statham stars in a sequel to the 2002 action movie that became an unexpected hit when it appeared on DVD. This time out, Statham's ex-special forces operator is lured back into action when a pair of young boys are kidnapped. Also stars Alessandro Gassman, Keith David and Amber Valletta. (Not Reviewed)
UNDERCLASSMAN (PG-13) A rough-around-the-edges L.A. cop goes undercover at a posh private school and culture clash hilarity ensues. Maybe. Stars Nick Cannon, Roselyn Sanchez and Shawn Ashmore. (Not Reviewed)
UNDISCOVERED (NR) Romantic sparks fly between an aspiring model-actress (Pell James) and a hunky but oh-so sensitive musician (Steven Strait). Also stars Fisher Stevens, Kip Pardue and Carrie Fisher.
VALIANT (G) DreamWorks' latest digital animation tells the story of a brave little carrier pigeon serving his country during World War Two. This is probably about as close to an actual history lesson as many kiddies are likely to come by these days, so be grateful for even very small favors. Featuring the voices of Ewan McGregor, Rupert Everett, Tim Curry, John Cleese and Ricky Gervais. (Not Reviewed)
WEDDING CRASHERS (R) A gleefully raunchy, R-rated comedy with a fantastically funny midsection bookended by a slightly less-than-satisfying opening and closing. Vince Vaughan and Owen Wilson are in top form as a pair of buddies obsessed with crashing weddings for the free booze and easy access to scads of vulnerable, available women. Wedding Crashers drags on for far too long and has problems reconciling the despicable things its characters do with the affection we're obviously supposed to feel for them. But, for at least half of its running time, it also manages to be the funniest movie of the year. Also stars Christopher Walken, Rachel McAdams and Jane Seymour. *** 1/2
Reviewed entries by Lance Goldenberg unless otherwise noted.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2006.