At this past weekend’s Los Angeles press day for Henry Poole Is Here, Luke Wilson mentioned that — after wrapping up writer-director Mike Million’s Tenure, opposite Gretchen Mol — he’d like to jump back behind the camera.
“I’d like to try and get this movie made from a book that I’ve adapted into a script, [Jim Lehrer’s] White Widow,” says Wilson. “I’d really like to try to get that made. It’s about a bus driver in Texas in the 1950s who kind of falls in love with this unattainable woman. I figure it’s gonna be very easy to get the funding — a bus driver in the ’50s, a period piece? People say, ‘Yeah, great…'” Wilson says that he would also star in the film, but rope in his brother Andrew, with whom he previously collaborated on The Wendell Baker Story, to co-direct, because doing it by himself “is just too hard.”
Multi-hyphenate Stephen Chow’s CJ7 is a sweet, imaginatively told family fable — a movie that comes by its emotions and feelings of rooting identification sincerely, without clomping insistence or maudlin marionette-string pulling.
Co-written and directed by Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer), the movie centers around Ti (Chow again), a poor but loving single father who works such long hours that he barely has any time to spend with his young son Dicky (Jiao Xu, above right). Unable to afford the latest toy his boy desperately wants, Ti instead goes to the best place he knows to get “new” stuff for Dicky — the junk yard. There he finds a mysterious orb, and brings it home for his son to play with.
When the cuddly creature — which, it should be pointed out, looks at least a little bit like the creature Kristin Chenoweth portrays in the animated Space Chimps (or, more accurately, that creature looks like the one here, given their respective dates of creation and release) — turns out to be a friendly, fun-loving extraterrestrial able to perform miraculous deeds, both father and son experience some changes in their lives, and learn a few important lessons along the way. At first Dicky seizes this chance to overcome his poor background and shabby clothes, and impress his fellow schoolmates for the first time in his life. But CJ7 has other ideas, and chaos ensues when Dicky brings it to class.
A lot of the supplemental material here (more on this later) points up inspirational, point-of-origin comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s E.T., and it’s true that there are definitely some similarities, CJ7 is far from some mere Hollywood knock-off. The design and tone, first of all, is all vintage Chow — saturated in color, full of canted angles and hyper-stylized designs. Chow plays jokes and visual gags quickly, without an eye or ear for audience pandering. This touch helps give the movie a sense of forward-leaning momentum, almost all throughout its running time.
Sometimes — OK, at least half the time, actually — the special effects work isn’t quite up to par with what one has come to expect from mainstream Hollywood films, and one wishes a bit more had been done practically. There’s a simple, affecting, poetic quality to some of the early scenes of bonding — both between Dicky and Ti, killing cockroaches in their cramped home, and Dicky and CJ7 — that gets overwhelmed by later choices, when the creature helps Dicky score 100 on a school test, and then graces him with super sneakers that make him the envy of the schoolyard. That said, young Jiao has an appealing screen presence, and while this story may be subtitled the arc of his learning is a universally recognizable one.
Packaged in a regular plastic Amray case, CJ7 comes presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and Chinese Mandarin Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and a French language Dolby surround sound track. French and English subtitles are also available. Chow anchors a feature-length audio commentary track with cast and crew, and a 22-minute TV special, though subtitled, is a decent piece of promotional agitprop for the movie. Like many of the other special features, this segment includes a lot of talk about the inspiration for making a family film.
A 13-minute making-of featurette details the movie’s 2005 shoot in Ningbo, China, and Chow and co-writer Vincent Kok discuss the genesis of the script, as well as their desire to make the movie as broadly appealing as possible. Two other featurettes — “How to Bully a Bully” and “How to Make a Lollipop” — run four minutes apiece, and are fluffy filler, just a way to include some extra behind-the-scenes footage. Similarly lacking in repeat-play value is an easy, snooze-inducing “mission control” game, in which viewer-players see how far they can launch CJ7 into space. It’s too unwieldly for small kids, and older kids will find it a yawn. Finally, there’s a six-and-a-half-minute segment that chronicles the filming of a pivotal, effects-laden bathroom sequence. Preview trailers for The Water Horse: The Legend of the Deep and 14 other films round things out. It’s a quantitatively impressive slate, that’s for sure; the only downside of such a packed disc is that its navigation is quite slow-moving. For the film’s trailer, click here; to purchase the movie via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. B (Movie) B (Disc)
His life in shambles, despondent Henry Poole (Luke Wilson) buys a house in the same suburban Los Angeles neighborhood where he somewhat unhappily grew up. One of his new neighbors, the slightly nosy but well-meaning Esperanza (Babel‘s Adriana Barraza), happens upon a stain on his newly painted, outdoor stucco wall that she believes is the face of Christ, and imbued with special powers. Henry wants nothing to do with the silliness, but more interactions with those around him — including divorcée Dawn (Radha Mitchell), whose eight-year-old daughter has stopped speaking since her parents’ break-up — slowly draw him out of his insular shell.
A filmmaker with a deep music video catalogue (including Pearl Jam’s groundbreaking “Jeremy” clip), director Mark Pellington has always been a master of atmosphere and mood, most notably in The Mothman Prophecies. In Henry Poole Is Here, though, he rolls the dice on a much more personal story, and succeeds in crafting what is overall an affecting movie about emotional waywardness and quiet reflection. The target is smaller, but Pellington’s extraordinary skill at marrying artful image and emotional content help Henry Poole avoid a lot of treacly downward drag, and elevate the emotional punch of debut screenwriter Albert Torres’ script, which is enough of a blank canvas to allow one to project onto it their own feelings of forlornness. The only nagging demerit? There’s a plummy, surface quality to Wilson’s moroseness and sullenness; one thinks about the deeper reservoirs of swallowed sadness that someone like Ryan Gosling could have conveyed with this role, and how those extra pangs of despair would have provided an even greater catharsis. To visit the movie’s official site, click here. (Overture, PG, 100 minutes)
