Upcoming Releases
BEE MOVIE (PG) Jerry Seinfeld returns from the stand-up comedy wilderness with this CGI-animated offering about a spunky little bee who wants more (as apparently do all animated creatures these days). The voice cast alone might be reason enough to investigate: Besides Seinfeld, Renee Zelwegger, Matthew Broderick and John Goodman, there's an eclectic ensemble including Rip Torn, Sting, Oprah Winfrey and Larry King. Opens Nov. 2 at local theaters. (Not Reviewed)
MADEINUSA (NR) A strange and beautiful little film set in an isolated village tucked away in the mountains of Peru, where the local custom is to indulge all manner of sins during Easter weekend — a time when anything goes since "God is dead and cannot see." Into this festive, perverse and luxuriously surreal environment stumbles a big-city photographer (Carlos de la Torre) who forms a connection with the title character (Magaly Solier), a beautiful teenager who plans to spend the weekend engaged in incestuous liaison with her father, the town's mayor. First-time director Claudia Liosa displays confidence and bold originality in a film that effortlessly fuses humor, humanism and apocalyptic darkness in a manner that might have made Bunuel himself take notice. Also stars Ubaldo Huaman and Yiliana Chong. Plays Mon., Nov. 5 at 7:30, one show only, as part of Tampa Bay's Festival of the Americas at Tampa Theatre. 4 stars
MARTIAN CHILD (PG) Lonely and quirky widower John Cusack adopts an even lonelier and quirkier child in this sappy time-waster about loving the alien inside us all. Cusak's new kid (Bobby Coleman) claims to be from Mars, and with his pasty skin and big bug-eyed sunglasses, he certainly looks the part — he's actually called a "mini-Warhol" at one point but is really a closer match to Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. The whole "Martian" thing is, of course, simply the script's exclamation point on the boy's outsider status, but nothing really happens here to convince us that the kid's half as troubled as he's supposed to be. The movie plods along as adult and child bond over Lucky Charms and baseball, with time out for a food fight or two and the death of a beloved family pet, set to Cat Stevens music. In the end, the kid actually does turn out to be from Mars, shape-shifts back into his original form of a 12-foot insect with venomous fangs and bites off Cusack's head. Just kidding. Also stars Amanda Peet, Joan Cusack, Oliver Platt, Richard Schiff and Sophie Okonedo. Opens Nov. 2 at local theaters. 2 stars
RECENT RELEASES
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (R) A languorous art-western in the fabled mold of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Heaven's Gate and Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, Andrew Dominik's two-hour-and-40-minute The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. Some will see it as a pretentious slog, others as sheer poetry, but one thing's for sure: They don't make 'em like this anymore. The film presents Jesse James (Brad Pitt) as an early contender in the Cult of Personality — he and Mark Twain were the only Americans known in Europe in the late 19th century — and much is made here of the urge to bask in the outlaw's celebrity, of people wanting to hang around him, even to be him. Meandering back and forth through time, the movie lays out its elliptical story assisted by a melancholy, matter-of-fact voice-over that gives up its details as methodically as Robert Bresson making his case in The Trial of Joan of Arc. The movie throws out much of the James legend, meditating upon its anti-hero as he goes through wild mood swings, alternately depressed, buoyant and unhinged, and ultimately even takes on a weirdly Christ-like aspect, wondering which of his squabbling gang members is going to betray him. James' Judas turns out to be Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), a confused hanger-on whose obsession borders on the homoerotic and whose titular act of violence briefly makes him even more famous than the celebrity killer he kills. An appreciation of The Assassination of Jesse James hinges less on suspension of disbelief than on suspension of our reliance on snappy pace and linear plotting, but those who do give themselves over to the film's demanding poetry may find themselves well rewarded. Also stars Sam Shepard, Paul Schneider, Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, Garret Dillahunt, Mary-Louise Parker and Michael Parks. 4.5 stars
DAN IN REAL LIFE (PG-13) Steve Carell stars as single dad with a house full of girls and a serious crush on his brother's girlfriend (Juliette Binoche). Also stars Dane Cook, John Mahoney and Emily Blunt. (Not Reviewed)
THE DARJEELING LIMITED (R) Wes Anderson's new movie often seems closer to fever dream than real life, but it's cohesive in ways that the director's previous film, The Life Aquatic, wasn't. The color-coded confusion and calculated whimsy that got the better of Life Aquatic still occasionally creep in, but Darjeeling is a funnier and more focused trip, giving us three strangers on a train — semi-estranged brothers Francis (Owen Wilson), Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Peter (Adrien Brody) — reunited for what the eldest promises will be a "spiritual journey" across India. (It's a promise made so solemnly it's impossible to mistake for anything other than totally absurd, like most everything that transpires here.) The brothers indulge themselves in synchronized chain-smoking, keep themselves buzzed with potent Indian painkillers, squabble and engage in virtually nonstop non sequiturs and poker-faced kvetching. The squabbles occasionally mutate into physical brawls, pepper spray and poisonous snakes are produced, the snake gets loose on the titular train, and Schwartzman plays passive-aggressive sex games with a sad-eyed stewardess in the train's bathroom. Anderson applies meticulously measured rhythms to even the film's most screwbally impulses, occasionally punctuating them with dreamy, slo-mo passages, so that The Darjeeling Limited often feels like a Marx Brothers movie on Thorazine. Also stars Amara Karan, Waris Ahluwalia and Anjelica Huston. 3.5 stars
GONE BABY GONE (R) Casey Affleck stars in brother Ben's surprisingly good directorial debut about something rotten in a working class Boston neighborhood where a little girl has gone missing. Gone Baby Gone is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, and, frankly, Affleck outdoes Eastwood in his understanding of the author's Boston-based turf. Affleck goes for maximum authenticity, trolling through the city's seedier sides with a camera that discretely observes the nonglamorous flora and fauna, making good use of virtual unknowns in several key roles. The director occasionally even shows himself to be a touch over-enamored with his blue collar grotesques — it sometimes seems like every Beantown resident with a hair lip, goiter or obesity problem gets screen time here — but Gone Baby Gone still manages to be an effectively disquieting descent into a local underworld. Lehane's source material culminates in a series of dubious plot twists involving a conspiracy of least likely suspects, but Affleck wisely uses this as a springboard to get into something more interesting, albeit uncomfortable. Also stars Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, John Ashton, Amy Ryan, Amy Madigan and Titus Welliver. 3.5 stars
INTO THE WILD (R) This is Sean Penn's meandering but strangely compelling take on the true story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), a child of privilege who burned his IDs, gave away his money and, reborn as Alexander Supertramp, hit the open road. Into the Wild unfolds on a certain level as a road movie, with Chris/Alex hooking up with fellow travelers as he makes his way across the country, but the film also offers frequent flashbacks providing a parallel story obsessing on the familial tensions supposedly being left behind. The flashback structure and ominous, anguished tone of the voice-overs leave little doubt that we're witnessing a tragedy, however, and the movie's pervasive fatalism provides a bottom note even to Into the Wild's brighter moments. To his credit, and despite a soundtrack studded with painfully sincere Eddie Vedder songs, Penn doesn't turn Alex into a hero — his quest ultimately seems as foolish as it is noble. The film is too long by at least a half hour, and its frequent attempts to provide Alex with metaphorical surrogate families are a bit transparent, but there's something important being communicated here about the beauty and folly of attempting a personal spiritual revolution, the closest corollary being Herzog's Grizzly Man. Also stars Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Brian Dierker, Kristen Stewart and Hal Holbrook. 3.5 stars
KING OF CALIFORNIA (PG-13) Further exploring the vein of aging eccentrics he's begun playing of late (epitomized by the pot-smoking head-case in Wonder Boys), Michael Douglas stars as Charlie, a recently released mental patient with wild eyes and formidable facial hair. There's an appealingly odd edge to King of California but the film is rooted in fairly conventional father-daughter bonding stuff, as Charlie moves back in with his level-headed teenaged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and, despite the love obviously dying to bust out in all directions, makes life immensely difficult for the girl. Things are further complicated when Douglas' character becomes obsessed with locating the treasure he's convinced is buried beneath his local Costco, but King of California is only intermittently successful as it treads a fine line between quirky character study and screwball adventure. Also stars Willis Burks II, Greg Davis Jr. and Gerald Emerick. 3 stars
LARS AND THE REAL GIRL (PG-13) A Sundance favorite that falls all over itself in an effort to be both enormously quirky and enormously sweet — but never achieves even a fraction of the depth it seems to be implying. Ryan Gosling stars as painfully shy and thoroughly delusional Lars, who buys himself an anatomically correct blow-up doll, introduces it around as his new girlfriend and, apparently won over by the sheer purity of his innocent soul, gets everyone in his community to treat it as a real person. Screenwriter Nancy Oliver (Six Feet Under) peppers the script with graceful moments, but the story never really gets beyond its one-joke premise, and most of the characters basically come across as caricatures pitched somewhere between Fargo and Napoleon Dynamite. Gosling remains one of our finest actors, although he spends too much time here simply blinking his eyes, the movie's code for a man furiously trying to shut out the world. Also stars Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer, Kelli Garner and Paul Schneider. 2.5 stars
LUST, CAUTION (NC-17) Set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai toward the end of World War II, Ang Lee's film follows a group of politically engaged Chinese college students as they make the leap from staging nationalistic theater productions to some real-life play-acting aimed at assassinating a high-ranking traitor (Tony Leung) who's collaborating with the Japanese. The student's mission hinges on placing a beautiful female (Wei Tang) within Leung's inner circle in order to seduce him, but things get muddy when the Chinese Mata Hari becomes a little too close to her target and finds herself converted by the power of rough sex. Lust, Caution is as carefully modulated and meticulously constructed as anything Lee's done, but when the violence erupts, as it does from time to time, the film can be genuinely jarring. Ditto for the occasional bursts of sex, which flash upon the screen with an unmediated intensity not normally associated with this director. Also stars Joan Chen, Lee-Horn Wang and Chung Hua Tou. 3.5 stars
MICHAEL CLAYTON (R) George Clooney stars as a former prosecutor gone to seed and long reduced to working as a fixer for a big law firm. It's a no-brainer Clayton's in trouble from the first moment we see him, but half the pleasure of Michael Clayton is watching its title character's slow-mo meltdown lead up to that revelatory moment of painful self-knowledge. The other half of the movie's pleasure takes the form of a curiously gripping conspiracy thriller that percolates on such an ominously low frequency it almost catches us off guard when it finally officially announces itself. What lies at the heart of Michael Clayton isn't ultimately that far removed from conventional socially-conscious melodrama, but where the movie excels is in how it puts all this together, coming at the story from unexpected angles and neatly folding its sweeping political agenda into the personal struggles of its individual players. 3.5 stars
