Anna Wintour, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue for the past 20 years, sits at the center of this mostly engaging documentary, which details a production cycle of the magazine’s annual, trend-setting, behemoth autumnal issue, this one featuring Sienna Miller as its cover gal. The inspiration for Meryl Streep’s imperious character in The Devil Wears Prada, Wintour is the most powerful and polarizing figure in fashion; her whims can make or break a new designer or an emergent trend.

So does director R.J. Cutler’s The September Issue melt the facade of its icy subject? Yes and no. There’s a moment of human frailty in an admission that her siblings are “amused” by what she does, and the film opens with a knowing rebuttal of those that look down on fashion, but there’s little sense of stark definition of the guiding principles that inform Wintour’s dictatorial snap-judgments. This means that for those for whom fashion is a tertiary consideration at best, Wintour remains distant and unknowable — just another snooty, smart-talking boss above any rational dissection or accountability.

The superb 1993 political documentary that Cutler produced, The War Room, made the frenetic particulars of a campaign for the presidency seem invigorating and relatable on a personal level, and The September Issue similarly locates a humanistic pulse. While nicely complemented with interviews, Cutler’s fly-on-the-wall observational tack smartly trusts viewers to track small non-verbal details, and he’s rewarded with the sort of carping and back-biting that almost any employee will recognize in their own corporate culture.

The film’s main drama is wrapped up in the two-decade relationship between “frenemies” Wintour (above center) and Grace Coddington, Vogue‘s creative director. It’s a case of the pretty and pedigreed versus a life tragically altered: Coddington’s often seemingly low-held ground in various arguments isn’t made easier by her frazzled, slightly frumpy demeanor, or the fact that she’s scarred by an auto accident that’s left her vaguely resembling a sister of Eric Stoltz’s character from Mask. It’s this contrast that helps the film succeed as a portrait of teeth-grinding workplace friction, though. An audience feels Coddington’s angst, even if they don’t know Manolo Blahniks from Sketchers. (Roadside Attractions, 88 minutes, unrated)

The new Ashton Kutcher-as-gigolo flick Spread, its title evoking images of splayed-open legs, wants to be taken seriously. If the actor-ly, urban cowboy growl that Kutcher affects didn’t clue you in, the movie itself lets you know this over and over with its forced narrative parallelism, its aping of iconic shots from The Graduate and its copious, pelvis-grinding nudity which, you know, is totally a sign of how modern and gritty and real and deep it is. Yes, it’s another sins-of-grind-you-down-Hollywood morality tale, except one in which director David Mackenzie (Mister Foe) and writer Jason Hall do little to advance a narrative that connects on more than a shimmery, physical level.

Kutcher plays Nikki, a twentysomething loafer who trades on his looks and has an aversion to all things untrimmed from seeing his mom’s giant mound of pubic hair as a kid. Nikki uses his prowling charisma and easygoing charm to get beautiful (and hopefully older, well-to-do) women to buy him things. He has a friend, Harry (Sebastian Stan), who stores his stuff for him, but Nikki otherwise lives like Nick Stahl’s character in Terminator: Rise of the Machines (“off the grid,” except for a cell phone, naturally), without an apartment or car, doling out sexual favors for ladies and depending on them to land couches and beds for the evening, and beyond.

After some requisite Hollywood-is-hell voiceover, Spread immediately throws together Nikki and Samantha (Anne Heche), a stunning, middle-aged lawyer with a great house offering stunning views of the Hollywood Hills. Some club-set smooth-talk wins him an evening at her place, which he quickly parlays into a credit card for some stay-in breakfast, shopping trips and a new pad. Nikki can’t stand too much of a good thing, though — continued dalliances with an ex-girlfriend, Emily (Rachel Blanchard), also speak to that, until she wises up — so when he meets waitress Heather (The Invisible‘s Margarita Levieva), Nikki tries to add her to his list of conquests, only to find out that she’s a gender-flipped, mirror image version of him. After catching him cheating, Samantha throws him out, so Nikki begins anew his chase of Heather. But will their similarities unite them, or doom any chance at a relationship?

In certain ways, Spread feels like the adaptation of some lost Bret Easton Ellis novel, before he got into drugs and wild, satiric hyperbole, crossed, perhaps, with a story-strand from The Real World. The film nominally succeeds in sketching out the on-the-grift underbelly of the City of Angels, but its young characters don’t ring true beyond two-dimensional kids looking for hot hook-ups, because we never see any other manifested ambition, artistic or otherwise. What brought them to Los Angeles, and are they really trying to make it as actors and actresses, writers or musicians? How are their sacrifices in body, dignity or time feeding and fueling their pursuits — or are they only pushing them further away? (We know the answer to this, of course, but, damningly, it’s not because the movie shows us.) Spread is a flesh-peddling fantasy, nothing more, nothing less.

Some of the gigolo detail here is at least passably intriguing — Nikki’s explication of creating relationship equity through a points system, for instance. But director Mackenzie is no Larry Clark, and all of the player-gets-played stuff that Hall and Mackenzie want to explore simply doesn’t play at all, either emotionally or just logically. Nikki and Heather are uninteresting characters individually, and doubly so when stuck together. It doesn’t help, either, that the movie expends much energy telling us what Nikki thinks of his surroundings and situation in general, but not Heather specifically. The sizzle that pays for all this dawdling, faux-philosophical voiceover comes in the form of much interstitial fucking, and nudity. Before the screening I attended began, I jokingly asked a colleague what the over/under was on Kutcher shirtlessness… 17 minutes? How close I was; perhaps I should investigate a second career as a Vegas oddsmaker.

Wearing skimpy bikinis and often a lot less, Heche goes to great lengths to napalm any lingering memories of her time spent with Ellen DeGeneres, and probably comes out of the movie in the best light, because she at least sketches a believable, fully embodied “cougar” — a successful career woman more than happy to open her home and wallet, but one also capable of rapaciousness. The script requires her character to do some stupid things, but she makes you at least feel the sting of her pain.

As for Kutcher, meanwhile, one could certainly make the argument that Nikki, since he depends on the largesse of women for his survival, is completely, and always, playing a character himself — hence the accent, hipster suspenders and what not. But the script never digs into the character deeply enough to make that assertion fly. Consequently, Kutcher’s performance feels like a breezy, not particularly well thought out thing — like he’s just trading, loosely and lazily, on a glad-handing, amiable image and public knowledge of the fact that he’s married to an older woman. Spread thin, there are no new insights here. (Anchor Bay, 98 minutes, R)

A colorful, noisy, slapstick romp very loosely in the mold of his imaginative, hugely commercially successful Spy Kids franchise, multi-hyphenate Robert Rodriguez’s Shorts robustly embodies an age-old principle familiar to many parents: that a certain slice of adolescent entertainment is primarily about an all-out assault on the senses. A chopped-up and shuffled selection of a half dozen episodic stories built around the havoc created by a magical wishing rock, the movie connects best when taken as a sort of a love-action cartoon, an exercise in kiddie wish fulfillment. This means, yes, a lazy, poorly edited ending that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but also crocodiles walking upright, giant dung beetles and a rampaging Booger Monster. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.

Forget the videogame — it’s a real-life version of Guitar Hero when Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White get together for the music documentary It Might Get Loud, an exploration of the electric guitar that spans, roughly, three different musical generations, and encompasses all sorts of different modes of expression. Director Davis Guggenheim’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, the film works as a sort of three-for-one biography, with just a handful of glancing, macro-analytical insights scattered and tossed in for good measure.

Guggenheim structures his film in discrete narrative strands, but doesn’t waste time with talking heads trying to frame or debate the importance of his subjects’ bands, or respective places in music history. In fact, even bandmates or other intimates don’t win any screen time; the only interviewees are the three men themselves, which helps give It Might Get Loud a well-groomed intimacy.

Page, of Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds, has probably the deepest reservoir of stories, and therefore the most fascinating back story, having started out as a session guitarist who laid down licks for commercial jingles on the side. For all the shit The Edge, of U2, takes for his zen-guitarist persona, it’s White — of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and whatever new side project he’s put together this week — who is the most interested and invested in artificial persona. He drafts a miniaturized version of himself for the movie’s biographical segment, and stages scenes where he teaches this younger “him” how to play the blues, and even kick down a piano stool for added effect. He also cops to the arthouse conceit of the White Stripes, and the fact that the costuming was all misdirection and window-dressing, all so that they (or he, really, since bandmate Meg White comes across as doing little more than what Jack tells her) could play earthy blues and folk music without facing a harsh, skeptical vox populi.

As I mentioned previously on the site, the movie is in sum never less than in-the-moment engaging, even if
there’s a lingering feeling that the roundtable
gathering that forms its spine — what Guggenheim called “The Summit,” and less a Charlie Rose-style chat than a meandering exploration of a couple of the gentleman’s big tunes, and adolescent breakthroughs — could perhaps have used a bit more
prodding or structure, to get at the marrow of exactly why and how sometimes even (or even especially) trite musical expressions achieve significant emotional lift-off. I know… it’s like dancing about architecture, this, especially since the movie quietly serves up contradictions (White talks about technology being “a big destroyer of emotion and truth,” even as he mounts a microphone into the carved-out body of a guitar, allowing for greater feedback and distortion) in a fashion that underscores how a lot of music, and indeed maybe art in general, is about learning and knowing the rules, and then consciously breaking or tearing them down.

There are some great song stories along the way, whether it’s Page recounting the drum set-up for “When the Levee Breaks” or the Edge stumbling across an early cassette recording of some “Where the Streets Have No Name” noodling, with Bono calling out time shifts in the background. What most pokes through, though, is the sheer joy attached to creative expression. “There was a thrill in doing, even if we were doing it badly,” says the Edge. Later, White (resembling a ghostly, slightly pudgy Johnny Depp) talks about the aggressive quality of music, and seemingly channels the spirit of a bullied-too-long sensitive soul who’s finally screwed his courage to the sticking place, saying, “It’s our chance to push you down now.” It’s a reminder that music matters so much because it has the capacity to make us feel other than what we perhaps are, and feelings so often can and do trump cold rationality. For the film’s trailer, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, 97 minutes, PG)

Partially a comedically inflected Agatha Christie conceit, and partially a money-grubbing farcical ensemble along the lines of Death at a Funeral or Daddy’s Dyin’ and Who’s Got the Will, British import Twelve in a Box is wholly a dreadful bore.

Written and directed by John McKenzie (Vol-au-vent), the movie brings together a dozen strangers for a school reunion lunch at a remote country estate. Once there, their host appears via videotape and offers them one million pounds sterling apiece if they can coexist on the grounds for 96 hours without anyone leaving. After a bit of arm-turning, an all-in democratic vote establishes everyone’s acquiescence and confirms the parameters of the contest, but from the start there are social frictions, and things only get more complicated when the eldest member of the group suffers a heart attack and dies. Throw in some standard-grade personal carping, a pair of would-be burglers, a staircase accident and an eventual visit by the police, and you have all the familiar ingredients for a souffle that doesn’t rise.

The explanation for this particular group of men and women — some classmates, many not — isn’t necessarily convincing (everyone who visited the school’s web site was logged, the eccentric benefactor explains, and he chose a dozen names at random), but Twelve in a Box stalls almost from the start owing chiefly to the fact that its characters are poorly delineated, and just not very interesting. The pacing is interminable, the banter not nearly as cute or witty as its makers fancy, and the nature and quality of the performances unsteady. Throw in pedestrian filmmaking, editing that doesn’t help whip the supposedly escalating narrative up into a dizzy tizzy, and the fact that the entire enterprise isn’t helped much by the fact that the movie features only one inarguable babe (that’d be Phoebe Sweeney), and the end result is grating, start to finish. Some of the plot twists are entirely expected (sexual dalliances, both attempted and realized), but an imaginative mind will easily outstrip the forced zaniness on display here. (Masses Entertainment, unrated, 93 minutes)

Unabashedly streamlined genre flicks get a bad rap — with critical indifference often seemingly being the best for which they can hope — because they’re so frequently made by hacks, or at least passed off to inexperienced filmmakers in the form of a less-than-totally-polished script. Writer-director David Twohy’s A Perfect Getaway, though, is a structurally solid B-movie, marked by smart casting and carefully modulated performances, that delivers high on the popcorn-munching entertainment scale.

The story revolves around newlyweds Cliff and Cydney (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich), who are honeymooning in Hawaii when they stumble across backpacking hippie couple Kale and Cleo (Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton) and, just a bit later, Nick (Timothy Olyphant) and Gina (Kiele Sanchez), an ex-special ops soldier and Southern debutante turned bad girl. With news of a gruesome murder on the main island, and word that authorities are looking for both a man and woman as suspects, Cliff and Cydney become understandably paranoid about their new acquaintances. Pig-hunting trips deep into the woods and stories of Nick’s past escapades and metal-plate-reinforced head don’t do much to quell Cliff and Cydney’s fears.

Oh, and did I mention that Cliff is a Hollywood screenwriter, so he starts trying gain the psychological upper hand on Nick by stringing him along, and making him think that there might be a potential movie to be written based on his life? The introduction of such a winking, Scream-like deconstructive element — scrupulously avoided in the movie’s marketing campaign — has the danger of making A Perfect Getaway collapse under the weight of its own smug self-satisfaction, but Twohy is such a deft juggler of form and entertainment, artifice and colorful flourish, that he pulls it off with aplomb.

Then there’s the casting. I’ve written before about how Olyphant oozes charisma, displays
crackerjack timing and knows how to sharpen a casual throwaway line into a dagger
with pointed subtext, and he again brings to bear all those qualities
in A Perfect Getaway, dancing merrily along a razor’s edge in
crafting a character who comes as equal parts affable, unhinged,
contrarian and dangerous. Zahn and Jovovich are smartly cast, too, and do a great job bringing their characters’ awkwardness and vulnerabilities to the surface in small ways.

Those with a working knowledge of the thriller genre and the stakes of identity reversal will perhaps gauge where this is all headed, but Twohy (Pitch Black), not unlike John Dahl (Red Rock West, Joy Ride), has a superb grasp of structure, combined with the knowledge of how and when to integrate specific, telling details — be it in the mocking of Nicolas Cage, the inclusion of a deeply personal story from Cydney, or a slippery, unforeseen moment of violence that results in what may most charitably be described as the world’s worst between-fingers paper cut — that elevate the material, and give it some bite, and punch. A Perfect Getaway isn’t perfect; post-twist, it enters a weird slipstream that plays out too long in flashback. But it’s effective even when you feel the strings being pulled because it makes you care about and have interest in its characters, and then ponder the changes in your degrees of relatability when those investments dip and swirl. As such, Twohy’s film slots alongside something like Jonathan Mostow’s Breakdown as a fun, engaging exercise in marionette cinema. “Use me so good,” you’ll likely be saying. (Rogue, R, 98 minutes)