Last year’s Stranger
Than Fiction, in which the world of Will Ferrell’s unimaginative,
fuddy-duddy accountant got turned upside down when he discovered he was the
serial fictional character of an English novelist set on finally killing him
off, drew mostly positive notices for screenwriter Zach Helm, in his feature
film debut. In Helm’s first foray behind the camera, it’s the world of Jason
Bateman’s unimaginative, fuddy-duddy accountant that gets turned upside down
when he’s drafted to bring into line the financial affairs of the 243-year-old
owner of a magical toy shop.

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder
Emporium simply plays like some meandering, bastard love child of Toys, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland.
Its twee, self-satisfied colorfulness outstripped only by its sloppy form and
thin characterizations, the film does the unthinkable — it delivers a boring
trip to the toy store, making one yearn for the rigid strictures of adulthood
over the unbridled imagination of adolescence.

Dustin Hoffman stars as Edward Magorium, a bushy-browed
oddball who lives with a zebra and is the proprietor of an extraordinary shop
which houses all manner of fantastical playthings. Children love it, obviously, especially the personable,
pint-sized Eric Applebaum (Zach Mills), an avid collector of hats who has no
friends, and hangs around like he’s Norm from Cheers. A couple centuries old, and for no other reason than he’s on
his last pair of shoes, Magorium decides it’s finally time to hand off the
reins to the store to his manager, Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman), a
23-year-old piano aficionado who feels adrift and listless. To that end,
Magorium begins planning for his chosen date of terminal exit by bringing in
Henry Weston (Bateman), a straight-laced accountant with a creativity deficit.
The store itself, meanwhile, doesn’t spark to Magorium’s departure, and starts
exhibiting signs of petulance and noncompliance, namely through a slow drain of
color and decreased whimsicality.

The film’s list of confounding elements is a long one. First
off, we don’t learn enough about Mr. Magorium to really identify with Molly’s
distress about his planned departure. Similarly, Molly’s own “crossroads moment” is puzzling (does
she really want to be a concert pianist, or are her musical noodlings merely a
generic creative placeholder for early-twentysomething ennui?) and young Eric
is an outcast only because the script dictates it. None of these characters are
particularly deeply sketched, and consequently we don’t feel any fire in their
decisions and dilemmas, or attachment to their plights.

Most damningly, though, apart from some of the production
design and sets, neither is Mr.
Magorium’s Wonder Emporium infused with enough of a sense of
wide-eyed wonderment to make one forget about all these pesky, nagging
questions of back story and such. It sounds downright silly to say about a film
like this that nothing makes sense, but the logic on display here is of
come-what-may lackadaisicalness. Even if Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — another movie about an arrested-development eccentric
seeking out an informal inheritor — felt a bit emotionally isolated, it at
least had an undeniable authorial authenticity. Helm’s leaden directorial touch
is so passive and yawningly uninvolved — it’s pure by-the-numbers cute and faux-magical — that you’d be hard-pressed to believe Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
was written and directed by the same person. That said, its problems extend
from screen to page, and back again. (Walden Media/20th Century Fox, G, 96 minutes)
For the slightly longer full review, from Reelz, click here.

A superb performance by Frank Langella anchors the exceedingly literate, engrossing Starting Out in the Evening, a richly drawn and for the most part artfully understated portrait of an aged novelist struggling with the flickering flame of creativity’s muse.

the standard analogue man in an increasingly digital world. His books long out-of-print, Leonard doesn’t take a freelance gig writing advertising copy because he deems it an objectionable compromise; he instead pecks away at a novel he’s been working on for more than a decade, and enjoys get-togethers with his adult daughter, yoga instructor Ariel (Lili Taylor). Despite having suffered a heart attack the previous year, Leonard still doesn’t have much use for self-reflection until Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious grad student defined by an obscure hunger for self-definition, enters his life. Leonard’s early novels had an electrifying impact on Heather, and she now wants to use her thesis project to spur a rediscovery of his work.

At once shaken and emboldened by their challenging interview sessions, Leonard’s staid, respectful tolerance for Heather slowly melts into consideration. An indefinable and precarious intimacy develops between them, but the stars in Heather’s eyes dim when she slowly comes to the conclusion that Leonard is too closed-off from certain unacknowledged traumas of his past to ever again write a truly great book. This cooling coincides, meanwhile, with an unexpected turn in Ariel’s life when she rekindles a relationship with ex-boyfriend Casey (Adrian Lester), a matter that greatly worries Leonard given their differing priorities (she wants kids, Casey avowedly doesn’t) in life.

Langella is well known for his stage portrayals of larger-than-life characters — including Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, among others — but his perfectly modulated performance here is one of managed disappointment. Leonard is an emotionally imploded man, able, in his great intellect, to parse and justify his self-interested behaviors. In his stillness and the consistency of his proper actions (both in movement and diction), Langella captures the character’s regret in evocative fashion before the story even spells out the particulars.

Adapted by Fred Parnes and director Wagner from Brian Morton’s novel of the same name, Starting Out in the Evening is characterized by a great and involving sense of character detail; the movie grapples in an intellectually honest fashion with notions of aging, responsibility and reinvention, and how they intersect with creative fire. Through it all, Wagner (the 2005 Sundance entry The Talent Given Us) trades in an unfussy style that keeps the focus firmly on his characters. The one big knock on the movie is that it has such a strong sense of Leonard that Heather is a bit recklessly sketched. While intelligently written — she’s certainly no bubbled-headed ditz — the manner in which she, and the movie, eventually address the inevitable elephant in the room, the potential of romantic connection, rings false. Heather’s occasional lack of recognition at how others perceive her actions also seems implausible, and after a while, her pluck becomes a bit irksome. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Roadside Attractions, PG-13, 111 minutes)

In addition to its requisite genre offerings, the fall is a
crowded marketplace for prestige pictures — mostly dramas and thrillers with
familiar faces, all making a play for little gold trophies. For every
occasional exception to the rule (The
Silence of the Lambs, which swept the top-shelf Oscar prizes in 1992 after
being released in February of the previous year), there is a harsh reminder
that releasing too soon can create a memory gap, and potentially cost studios
significant awards victories, and thus all the cachet that comes with it. Saving Private Ryan, for instance, released
in the summer months of 1998 and grossed over $200 million domestically, but
was perceived to have lost the battle for buzz, and thus the Best Picture
Academy Award, to a more traditional December entry, Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love.

studio executives, their publicity departments and
personal publicists alike are always looking for both innovative new strategies
and ways to copy approaches that have worked in the past. For their political
thriller Lions for Lambs, distributor
United Artists, looking to make a big splash since Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner
took over, need only cast their recollections back two years for a good idea.

James Mangold, a respected filmmaker who had never had a
real breakout hit to his credit — barely cracking the $50 million mark in
domestic gate with his previous release, the extremely marketable ensemble
thriller Identity — saw his Johnny
Cash biopic, Walk the Line, benefit
from a gala opening night presentation at the AFI Fest. Held annually in
November in Hollywood, and for the past several years at the attractive
ArcLight Theatre, the festival comes late in the calendar year, and with many
pictures having already debuted at Sundance, Cannes or Toronto, finds itself in
the position of looking for a few commercial touchstones to help anchor its
many other worthwhile international presentations, coffee talks, and
independent and documentary offerings.

Positioned just a week and change in advance of its national
opening, the red carpet walk for Walk the
Line’s premiere generated big, national entertainment news coverage from Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, USA
Today and the like. A $22 million opening weekend soon followed, and the
movie went on to gross just under $120 million domestically, play for over five
months, and pick up five Academy Award nominations, including a Best Actress
win for Reese Witherspoon.

While it’s hardly lacking for star power or embedded respectability,
Lions for Lambs looks to be following
the Walk the Line playbook. Directed
by Robert Redford, and starring him, Cruise and Meryl Streep, the movie saw its
North American premiere on November 1 in two theaters at the ArcLight, with a
simultaneous overflow presentation at the adjacent Cinerama Dome. Time will
tell if this strategy works as well for Lions
for Lambs as it did for Walk the Line,
but one thing appears certain: a new pre-release tactic for glossy Hollywood
dramas has emerged, one that has all the inherent advantages of being an
in-town production.

Lions for Lambs takes
place on three equally tense and emotional fronts, each with considerable
personal stakes. In a Congressional office, up-and-coming Republican Senator Jasper
Irving (Cruise), a possible presidential hopeful somewhere down the line, is
about to feed a bombshell scoop about a new war strategy in Afghanistan to a
probing, liberal-leaning TV journalist (Streep) as the two carry out a fierce,
cat-and-mouse game of wit, charm and evasion during an hour-long, one-on-one
interview. At a west coast university, meanwhile, a once idealistic professor,
Dr. Malley (Redford) confronts a privileged but blasé
student (Andrew Garfield) in danger of never fulfilling his enormous potential.
At the same time, across the globe, two of Dr. Malley’s former students, Army
enlistees Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Peña), lay bare the debates
and arguments of mentors and politicians in a stark fight for sheer survival,
the heart-wrenching consequences of which will reverberate through all of their
lives.

Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan — and perhaps joined by
Cruise as pittance for tying up his brother, Joe Carnahan, so long in Mission: Impossible III pre-production,
only to eventually part ways with him — Lions for Lambs is a movie that’s destined to be noted in two-thirds of all
reviews as “having it heart in the right place.” Alternately invigoratingly
topical and frustratingly didactic, the movie assays the flickering flame of
idealism with a contempt that’s ultimately less rousing than depressing.

There are several pieces of clip-worthy acting here,
particularly from Streep — both in her circuitous grappling with Cruise’s
character, and in a meeting with her editor after the fact, where she, in a
panicked but clear and shrewdly comprehensible fashion, asserts a hearty
apportioning of self-blame for the media’s complicity in spoon-feeding the
public the chirping rhetoric of an administration gone astray. And the film has
the courage to let its characters fully embrace their roles. There’s no
pussyfooting around the differences of opinion on display, and there’s no
resisting the clarion call truth of one of its essential themes: that troubled
times are a call to action.

Still, Lions for Lambs
is essentially a film as op-ed piece, and only the circling-jackals segment
between Cruise and Streep really catches fire in one’s imagination, pulling
them forward to the edge of their seat. The other strands — like this one
well-written in that they’re articulate and reasoned, no matter the
point-of-view being espoused — don’t have enough natural pull, and even though
things are eventually wrapped together, catharsis is forestalled in the name of
entreaty. And films that ask rather than tell elicit strange feelings indeed; to borrow a song title from the more cinematically fortunate Cash, this flick is a “Ragged Old Flag.” For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Oscar season can remind one a bit of a Rotary Club bake-off.
There, there’s generally a lot of talk about new recipes, and everyone
excitedly looks forward to trying something new and perhaps a bit exotic. Yet
when it comes time to hand out the blue ribbons, it’s often the most tried and
true recipes, or at least some slight iteration upon an old favorite, that
carries the day.

Awards voters have proven time and again their
love for epic-scale productions (Titanic, The Lord of the Rings: The
Return of the King… errr, The
English Patient?), and Oscar and Golden Globe history is littered
with easily identifiable trends, hence the annual entertainment editorials that
start trickling out about this time of year regarding actors and actresses gaining
weight, or playing “ugly” or disabled. More to the point, though, once a performer
scores their first nomination, it begets them extra opportunities, certainly,
but also just more looks from critics and audiences, meaning that the
nomination process becomes somewhat cyclical, with previous honorees typically
(if not undeservedly) getting more and more acclaim.

Reservation
Road, then, has many if not most of the basic ingredients of a
traditional Oscar bait film. It stars Joaquin Phoenix — twice nominated for an
Academy Award, most recently in 2006 for his turn as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line — and Mark
Ruffalo (above left), a habitual awards season flirter, and the winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics’ New Generation Award in 2000 for his performance in You Can Count on Me. Its
female lead is Jennifer Connelly, 2002’s Best Supporting Actress winner for her
role in A Beautiful Mind.
The second female lead? Mira Sorvino, 1996’s Best Supporting Actress winner for
her turn in Woody Allen’s Mighty
Aphrodite. The film is directed, meanwhile, by the respected
writer and filmmaker Terry George, himself twice Oscar nominated, and coming
off of a critical hit with important political overtones in the form of 2004’s Hotel Rwanda.

Then there’s the Oscar-bait subject matter itself — a
grief-saturated drama with plenty of big emotional scenes, the movie is adapted
from John Burnham Schwartz’s novel about the accidental death of a child, and
how the adults closest to the situation variously deal with the heartache,
anguish, misery and guilt. Reservation Road‘s main problem, diagnosed in macro fashion, is that the seams of its oh-so-cutely constructed Oscar inducement show a little too obviously; the film recalls, in its own tangential and component ways, Miramax’s
late-millennium run of Lasse Hallström movies (The Cider House Rules, Chocolat and The Shipping News), each progressively more treacly and inert than the one before it.

The movie’s score, from composer Mark Isham (A River Runs Through It, Quiz Show, Crash),
swells in all the appropriate places, but George’s direction and the
film’s script are so busy telling us what to feel — and when to feel it — that a certain contrarian resistance develops. Phoenix’s performance is the single real standout thing about Reservation Road,
which otherwise hits all the standard aggrieved dramatic beats in
elongated fashion, and lacks any satisfying, stalking thrill that would
qualify it as a cousin of Neil Jordan and Jodie Foster’s recent The Brave One.

So why the half-hearted sales job by distributor Focus Features? It’s
called playing the odds. After sticking a finger to the wind with
critics — both in advance of its bow and just after its limited release — plans to take the movie wider, and give it a deep and sustained
theatrical release across the country, were basically scrapped. Focus
also had Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution and Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright’s buzz-heavy Atonement
on their holiday season slate. With advance notices on each of those
films — and in particular the latter, considered an early Oscar
frontrunner — trending markedly better, it was easy for Focus to turn
its focus elsewhere, away from Reservation Road. For the slightly more fleshed out review and awards season assessment, from FilmStew, click here.

A full-on Vince Vaughn charm offensive gives loose-limbed holiday
tale Fred Claus its own successful,
charismatic personality and appeal. Re-teaming Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin and Vaughn for the third
time, the movie wraps Vaughn’s trademark quasi-improvisational runs of
passive-aggressive patter around two wan storylines — of fraternal tension and
Christmas under siege — making for a pleasant, form-fitted vehicle of
engagingly manic buoyance, if also one that pays inconsistent attention to its
own through lines.

Though he’s had many hits, Vaughn has yet to prove himself
as a stand-alone box office draw, and Fred
Claus represents the biggest challenge in that regard to date. Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up all opened to the tune of $30 million-plus, but had the advantage
of high-profile costars. While staffed with capable, recognizable supporting
players, Fred Claus is being sold on Vaughn’s
name alone. Still, a big opening for the movie seems guaranteed. The question is whether Warner
Bros. can make inroads with the same audience that made Will Ferrell’s Elf a PG-rated smash four years ago in the same frame; this will
depend on whether fans of Vaughn’s edgier fare return for encore servings.

Fred became the polar opposite: a
fast-talking, rakishly self-centered repo man whose daydream schemes and serial
absentmindedness leave his girlfriend, traffic cop Wanda (Rachel Weisz),
perpetually exasperated.

Needing a sum of cash to close on an investment deal, Fred
turns to impersonating a Salvation Army Santa Claus, which lands him in jail.
He then calls his brother. Nicholas agrees to help Fred on one condition: that he come to the
North Pole for a long-delayed visit, and “earn” the money he needs by helping
out in Santa’s workshop. Old fraternal tensions, mostly of the one-sided
variety, come bubbling to the surface, and matters are further put at risk when
stern “efficiency expert” Clyde Northcut (Kevin Spacey) arrives to audit
Nicholas’ enterprise, putting the future of the jolliest holiday of the
year in jeopardy.

Fred Claus works
first and foremost as a vehicle for Vaughn’s goosed-up, chatterbox patter; key
to the entire enterprise is an appreciation of the actor as verbose, besieged
and aggrieved. This means there’s little for Mama and in particular Papa Claus (Kathy
Bates and Trevor Peacock, respectively) to do, and there are a few laid-track
story strands that don’t bring much to the movie. The movie’s mandate is clearly broad appeal, which also
leads to the somewhat sigh-inducing inclusion of goosed-up, slide-scale sound
effects during a chase sequence involving multiple Santas. A couple of these impromptu
slapstick bits, like a snowball fight between Fred and Nick, don’t rise above the
level of distractible interjections, but others (a finger-snapping dance
montage set to “Rubberneckin’”) get one’s blood pumping even though their
narrative inessentiality is completely transparent.

Instead of answering genuine questions born of the narrative
(Are the Claus family immortal, and if so how would that affect Fred’s
relationship with Wanda? Exactly who has discretionary approval over Christmas?),
Dan Fogelman’s script wastes an awful lot of time dawdling on petty, and less
interesting, matters. Still, there are also some genuine and pleasant surprises
in the narrative, including a “Siblings Anonymous” meeting with cameos from the
brothers of Sylvester Stallone, Alec Baldwin and former President Bill Clinton. In case there were still doubts, meanwhile, Dobkin proves himself a
gifted, intuitive comedic director. Even if one has qualms with the story
choices, it’s easy to recognize the effective manner in which he stages a scene
and draws out naturalistic performances and reactions.

Vaughn, as previously mentioned, is innately charming, a
fact of which Fred Claus serves as
the umpteenth example. Always a savvy professional, Giamatti injects a few
small, smart notes of stress and vexation into his performance as the
beleaguered Nicholas. Other actors aren’t given as much to do, though Spacey
does subtly channel some Lex Luthor villainy, all of which pays off in a scene
that amusingly touches on Superman. The film also makes hearty use of motion capture digital head
replacement, in similar fashion to the Wayans brothers’ movie Little Man. While not without its
occasional seams, visual effects supervisor Alex Bicknell’s work with John
Michael Higgins and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges — the former as Santa’s
second-in-command, the latter as an elf workshop deejay — will surely delight
younger viewers. For the complete original review, from Screen International, click here.

Femme-centric Korean thriller 7 Days, not to be confused with the recent Mexican film of the same translation, presents an intriguing if slightly overlong mixture of the crime
and procedural genres, with a very personally motivated ticking-clock element
thrown in for good measure. While trading in a bit of grisly imagery, the film
for the most part eschews the gore of recent like-minded films about a killer’s
manipulations, and doesn’t embrace the supernatural elements of contemporary
Korean thrillers like Arang, Silk and Apartment 1303 either. Instead, 7 Days sticks to grim, human-fueled
mayhem and panicked investigative maneuverings, bogging down a bit in the
second act before saving itself with a big, enormously satisfying hook in its
final reel.

hyper-charged design, slick commercial moves and end twist. Key to the
film’s much more modest chances overseas — either theatrically, with urban crime
pic fans who picked up on OldBoy’s
scent, or more likely on DVD, where Asian imports have carved out a nice niche
— will be its efforts to try to capitalize on the burgeoning recognizability of
front-and-center star Yunjin Kim (above), an integral cast member on ABC’s hit show Lost.

Single mother Jiyeon Lee (Kim) is a brilliant and successful
attorney who’s never lost a case. After her latest victory, her 8-year-old daughter
Eunyoung is kidnapped from a mother-child relay race at school. In lieu of
ransom, the kidnapper phones Jiyeon and instructs her that he wants her to legally
represent, and free from prison a drug peddler and habitual sexual offender, the accused in a heinous rape and murder case — a
trial coming up for capital punishment in less than a week. With her daughter convincingly threatened harm if she goes
to the police, Jiyeon throws herself into the case. For assistance she relies only
on old friend Sung-yeol Kim (Hee-soon Park), an independent-minded cop under internal
investigation for his own appetite for excesses, and even then doesn’t tell him
the entire truth. Jiyeon at first suspects a willfully botched
investigation or police cover-up, but then focuses in on a club-scene drug addict who seems to have suffered a psychotic split,
but nonetheless may have an important connection to the deceased. Meanwhile, Jiyeon sees her own despondency
paralleled by Sooki Han (Misook Kim), the mother of the victim, and works desperately
to please her daughter’s kidnapper and thus keep alive hope for her safe
return.

Ignoring the somewhat necessary absurdity of its
halfheartedly explained accelerated legal timeline — something the thriller Fracture, starring Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins, also recently deployed — 7 Days packs a breathless amount of investigative findings and head
feints into its two-hour running time. There at first glance seem a few too
many red herrings and/or loose, extraneous threads — including a bitter
prosecutor aiming for professional payback against Jiyeon, a party promoter
involved in a car accident on the night of the murder, and the reemergence of a
gangster acquitted by Jiyeon — but 7 Days
eventually winds its way to a conclusion of some shared complicity, so the vast
sprawl of its story is somewhat mitigated.

The chief problem is that the movie’s meticulously chaotic shooting
and editing style works against this expansive tapestry for a decent portion of
its middle, with willful freneticism obscuring key narrative details. Director Won Shin-Yeon and cinematographer Young-Hwan Choi give 7 Days a very modern, shimmering,
kinetic feeling — albeit too frequently also a somewhat juvenile restless one. They
seemingly draw inspiration from both small screen American serials like CSI and Cold Case and the quick-cut, quasi-impressionistic style of director
Michael Bay,
using crime scenes and car chases alike as an excuse to showcase flashes of the
same setting from all sorts of angles. These
modes of storytelling have the damning paradoxical effect of making 7 Days drag and seem longer, especially
in sequences with long dialogue exchanges. A more restrained focus on the
characters themselves would have increased the movie’s tension and intrigue.
For the slightly longer, original full review, from Screen International, click here.