As I’ve commented on before, there’s a lot of bad
independent cinema these days that just sort of floats by hazily, its attempts
at courting more overt commerciality ironically rendering it indistinct. Then
there’s something like Shadowboxer,
the directorial debut of Lee Daniels — producer of the Academy Award-winning Monster’s Ball — and a movie that makes
you appreciate independent films, if in no doubt wholly unintended ways. Yes,
if you’re going to do bad, you might as well close your eyes and swing for the
fences like Shadowboxer, in the hopes
that someone mistakes all that effort and intensity for insightfulness.

An emotionally over-dialed drama, Shadowboxer centers on the warped, intertwined lives of a pair of
live-in assassins — preternaturally quiet Mikey (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his
mentor/lover, Rose (Helen Mirren), who years ago rescued him from an abusive
household as a child. Theirs is a relationship that recalls a pet and pet
owner as much as anything else — Rose bathes Mikey, and he sleeps curled up at
her feet. To add, though, to the… intrigue? well, let’s say convolution, Rose
has now been diagnosed with terminal cancer, leading to a bit of a shift in
their traditional caregiver arrangement.

The pair’s latest assignment finds them carrying out a
contract, sight unseen, for crime boss Clayton (Stephen Dorff), an out-there
club owner whose villainous motivations are less recondite than purely
baffling. After offing a lippy subordinate himself, Clayton includes his
pregnant wife Vickie (Vanessa Ferlito) in a series of in-house hits just on the
off chance that she may be cheating on him (“We’ll never know,” he says with a
shrug and a smirk). Rose and Mikey coldly dispatch a group of Clayton’s
henchmen, but Rose has a change of heart when she sees a panicked Vickie’s
water break. So begins a harrowing life on the run for this ultimate odd
quartet — Rose, Mikey, a bewigged Vickie and baby. A year passes, and while Rose
looks to redeem their tragic past in her remaining time on Earth, a reticent Mikey
dutifully if dispassionately protects their new adopted family.

Penned by William Lipz (perhaps a pseudonym?) and credited
with 15 producers on the project, Shadowboxer
keeps you guessing, all right, but never in a really good way. Though one
hardly ever knows what is about to follow, the accrued litany of garish,
puzzling and/or silly elements reads like a random grab-bag of stylized clichés
and truncated impov exercises, from Rose and Mikey’s wheelchair-bound contact
and bizarrely operatic and baroque score by Mario Grigorov to a zonked-out
supporting turn by Macy Gray and not one, but two sex scenes between Gooding
and Mirren — one preceded by a striptease set to rapper Nas’ “The Cross,”
allowing this reviewer to unfortunately spend an inordinate amount of time
contemplating just how deep-set Gooding’s ass crack is.

Independent of its execution the film scores a few, scant
points for its off-kilter, multi-ethnic casting and blind eye toward
conventionality. But eccentricity in place of substance and psychological
perspicacity in the end doesn’t fly any more than rote formula. Directorially,
Daniels substitutes slow-motion for meaning, and the performances are wildly
uneven (Ferlito in particular is awful), sometimes seemingly cobbled together
from tonally different films. Only Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as a shady doctor who
aids Rose and Mikey but then must deal with Clayton as well, escapes with his
dignity more or less intact.

Shadowboxer is
ostensibly a picture about colliding damaged souls, the legacy of sadism and
the toll and endless cycle of psychological abuse. But A History of Violence this ain’t. Lacking any natural flow or
cohesion, it instead becomes an unintentional comedy of unfortunate choices,
not the least of which is on the part of erstwhile Oscar winner Gooding, to
whom Chill Factor 2 must now be
looking pretty good. (Teton Films, R, 91 mins.)

When Robert De Niro speaks, people listen. Well, unless he’s
starring in The Adventures of Rocky &
Bullwinkle. Then, not so much — then they snicker, or shake their head. But
when a couple years ago De Niro put the word out that, specifically, he wanted
for his young Tribeca Film Festival, which just celebrated its fifth
anniversary, submissions dealing with the aftermath of Sept. 11, well, people
listened, particularly young filmmakers. A 2005 entry in the festival, The Great New Wonderful feels like the
perfectly mannered indie response to such an entreaty.

Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle also to his credit), The Great New Wonderful is set in 2002,
in the omnipresent but unmentioned aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
It’s a movie that’s all about rage — bottled, transmuted and otherwise refracted.
To this end, its characters are a disparate collection of somewhat inscrutable
folks.

There’s Emme Keeler (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a tightly wound,
high-end party pastry peddler who lives in a parallel material-emotional cocoon
alongside her husband Danny (Will Arnett). There’s Sandie (Jim Gaffigan), a genial
office drone who suffers a series of work-mandated meetings with a psychologist
(pricelessly played by Tony Shalhoub) who attempts to bait him into acting out
by prodding him with dispassionate professional “observations” like, “You’re
full of rage. Is that the little man inside your head?” There’s also David and
Allison Burbage (Tom McCarthy and Judy Greer, respectively), a young married
couple who try to cope with the aggressive acting out of their elementary
school aged son, Charlie (Bill Donner). Other strands center around an elderly
lady (Olympia Dukakis) who reconnects with an old high school classmate, and two
security guards, Avi and Satish (Naseeruddin Shah and Sharat Saxena,
respectively), one of whom is stricken with misplaced aggression.

The film is sharp in its detail and dialogue, with a few angular
laughs popping up from unexpected places — in young Charlie’s surly behavior at
a school geography bee, or when one character holds forth in rambling fashion about
“blousy, Emma Thompson-y dresses.” But Leiner too often pauses to ironically
frame the movie’s quirks, and the music flits from off-kilter incongruous (Bob
Seger’s “Night Moves” pops up on the radio) to heartbreakingly plaintive (The
Wrens’ “This Is Not What You Had Planned”). All of this combines to make the
film feel overly self-conscious — keeping the audience at arms’ length from
these characters, just as they in turn do with their emotions and feelings.
There are some prosaic charms to be found in The Great New Wonderful, but it frequently feels willfully vague
and indistinct, reaching wanly for a fuzzy, blanket profundity while not bothering
to color within the lines of its own cozy narrative. (First
Independent, R, 86 mins.)

The Village at least still had gripping sequences, Lady in the Water has only comparative
shots — and the careening sense of a lost auteur’s bike on a downhill “ghost
ride.”

Indulging a nonsensical “bedtime story” narrative stretched
treacherously thin, Lady in the Water
is an at-odds, slapdash collection of the literal and symbolic, a colorfully
unconventional work that comes off as simultaneously silly, indulgent and undernourished.
Scant passages of the film click and really engage you due to Shyamalan’s sheer
nervy aplomb — something never in short supply — but not so much as they were
probably originally intended. The connective tissue here is all flim-flam, something
Shyamalan himself probably knows because of the manner he so laboriously avoids
addressing basic questions within the narrative.

An animated passage of simplistic cave drawings somberly
narrated by David Ogden Stiers (“Man does not listen well…”) gives way to stuttering
building superintendent Cleveland Heep (a game Paul Giamatti), who oversees the
Cove apartment complex of suburban Philadelphia. That Cleveland
is a sad sack you can guess from the get-go, but Giamatti imbues in him a
certain wounded humanity that rises above the trite explanation of Shyamalan’s
script. Yes, names say a lot in Shyamalan’s world, so it’s unfortunate that the
object of Cleveland’s investigation
and protection for most of the rest of the movie is in fact named, in
bull’s-eye fashion, Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), a mythical “narf” who makes
her home under the complex’s dark swimming pool.

When Story is trapped above ground and stalked by a vicious “scrunt,”
a sort of wolf-like beast with grass on its back that is no longer observing
the labyrinthine rules of engagement laid out by Young-Soon Choi (Cindy Cheung)
in her recounting of the epic bedtime tale relayed to her by her Korean mother
(June Kyoko Lu), Cleveland must aid Story in her quest to find her “vessel,” a
writer whose work will bring change, peace, prosperity, enlightenment and slim
thighs and washboard stomachs to all humankind. (Or something like that.) That
writer is… Vick Ran (Shyamalan, triple-dipping), a genial loafer who lives with
his sister Anna (Sarita Choudhury). Vick and Anna fall in lockstep with Cleveland’s
quest, and soon help recruit from an eccentric assortment of fellow residents a
collection of coded explicators known as “the symbolist,” “the healer” and “the
guild” who will unlock their guest’s pathway to freedom. See, it’s all about
saving Story. Get it? If you don’t, it’s probably because you’re a mindless
lemming sell-out who needs Hollywood porridge spoon-fed
to you. Jeez. Stupid lemming.

While Lady in the Water’s problems are myriad, at least part of the
chorus of critical boos you’re likely to hear — the lesser reasoned portion,
perhaps, but still part — will have to do with as much with the movie’s desperately
un-hip mode of storytelling as its actual tonal and narrative fumblings. The
film is not a thriller, but small portions of it are directed (and sound foleyed)
with such furious energy that one will be easily forgiven for a few jumps.

Still (and I don’t know if anyone ever actually pointed this
out to Shyamalan) but as driven as it is by fairytale motivations, Lady in the Water is far from whimsical.
In fact, it’s often downright leaden. First there’s all the exposition from
Young-Soon Choi. Shyamalan also goes the extra step of awkwardly cramming in
visual and dialogue references to his other films, including a line that’s a
nod to Unbreakable when Cleveland
asks Story, apropos of nothing, “Do you get sick when you tell me things?” I
didn’t catch the Wide Awake and Praying with Anger homages, but
something tells me Shyamalan didn’t exclude them.

Driven by down-tempo music selections, including Cibo Matto
and covers of Bob Dylan tunes, Lady in
the Water wants very desperately to be both a tremendously plaintive and
capital-I important allegory, and yet Shyamalan clearly has only the most
threadbare story elements upon which to hang the movie, so he resorts to
cheaply ironic deconstruction — a form of hackery that suits neither him nor,
more importantly, the material. By winkingly acknowledging, say, rain and water
as a purification metaphor before indulging in the same tropes, or having Bob
Balaban’s joyless (but functionally necessary!) film critic decode a “horror
movie” moment as it unfolds before him, Shyamalan grinds the apparatus of his
moviemaking to a halt, pulling the audience further out of and away from the
story. The reason this is such an egregious slip is because you have a
moralizing story built around a complete lack of intra-narrative questioning; all
the characters blissfully fling themselves into the mission as it’s explained
to them. Undercutting this is then basically telling the audience, “You’re
stupid for buying this.”

I won’t even get into the narcissistic implications of
casting himself as a writer whose thoughts change the course of humanity — maybe
another day, another blog posting — but suffice to say that I think Shyamalan
would really find a new creative freedom in tackling some straight-up genre
pieces as a director for hire. If that means putting away the laptop and
delaying humankind’s betterment through his own writing for a number of years,
so be it. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 108 mins.)

Shrek-style, for the fences, cramming in enough winking pop
cultural references and visual gags to lure older teens and adult audiences to
the theater while still seeding their often simple, fable-esque narratives with
enough primary colors, boisterous supporting characters and flatulence jokes to
please young kids.

Monster House,
though, using the same motion-capture-based animation technique pioneered by
Robert Zemeckis (also a producer here) on The
Polar Express, represents a unique sort of risk. Rated PG, the movie is
easily scary enough to freak out 5- or 6-year-olds. Built around the old
chestnut of a haunted abode but powered by appealing tweener characters and
told with a slightly more adult sensibility — or at least one rooted more in
the traditional filmic angles of live action — Monster House plays legitimately and quite pleasingly to broad
audiences of almost any age, but it’s also a movie which could have trouble
wooing that broader segment of the movie-going public that turns out for the Shrek movies, unless word-of-mouth
catches fire.

The story centers around gangly, 12-year-old DJ (voiced by
Mitchel Musso) and his chubby best friend, Chowder (voiced by Sam Lerner). When
DJ’s parents head out of town on the eve of Halloween and leave him in the care
of disinterested babysitter Zee (voiced by Maggie Gyllenhaal), DJ and Chowder
run afoul of the former’s spindly, frightening, elderly neighbor, Nebbercracker
(voiced by Steve Buscemi). After a confrontation in which Nebbercracker suffers
a heart attack, the old man’s sinister, anthropomorphized house starts striking
out and taking all sorts of punitive action.

After an all-night stakeout by the boys, the next day spunky
young Jenny (voiced by Spencer Locke) wanders by selling candy door-to-door, and
the trio hatch a quick plan to lull the house to sleep — a humorous bit
involving a dummy crudely fashioned out of a vacuum cleaner filled with bottles
of cough syrup — and infiltrate it. They at first fail, waylaid by a pair of bumbling
Keystone cops (voiced by Kevin James and Nick Cannon), but as the house comes
to life and further snaps up unsuspecting passersby, DJ, Chowder and Jenny
uncover a series of astonishing secrets about both Nebbercracker and his home
that will eventually help them defeat the monstrous rampaging structure.

The film’s story is fairly simple and its characterizations
definitely hew closely to those of the Harry
Potter series, but what Monster House
most has going for it is a finely balanced sense of cheerfulness and plucky bonhomie
— courtesy of some great work by its young voice cast — and authentic chills. Younger
kids will respond to the movie’s foreboding and intermittent menace in a
genuine way, while teens and older adults can still chiefly enjoy its lively
patter and spunky asides (“My mom’s out at a movie with her personal trainer,”
notes Chowder blithely) while viewing the thrills through a more detached,
nostalgic lens.

Neophtye director Gil Kenan — who came to the attention of
producers Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg courtesy of The Lark, an undergraduate short blending animation and live action
— overdials the action of the finalé a bit, but deftly deploys a variety of
low-angle and deep focus shots that provide as a nice visual counterbalance to
the kid-friendly story. It certainly helps, too, that Dan Harmon & Rob
Schrab and Pamela Pettler’s screenplay — originally written as a live action
film and more straightforward thriller about a possessed house — is studded
with funny lines and an array of amusingly idiosyncratic details. A jostling
romantic rivalry between DJ and Chowder for Jenny’s attention is there for
slightly older kids to either take or leave, but it doesn’t infringe at all
upon the story’s momentum.

In an era of pleasant but frequently unsurprising sequels
and meticulously muggy, corporate-vetted movies designed to stoke the embers of
a possible franchise before the first film has even released, it’s not often
that animated films succeed on their own terms like Monster House does. (Columbia/Sony Pictures
Imageworks, PG, 89 mins.)