What begins as a grand concept full of unusual possibilities — twinned, touching planets with opposing gravitational fields — quickly succumbs to a frustrating mixture of pretentiousness and torpor in Upside Down, Argentinean-born writer-director Juan Solanas’ dystopian romance, starring Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess. A gussied-up, threadbare fairytale narrative that unfolds in perpetual pursuit of memorable images over narrative sensibility, this misfire illustrates the axiom that even if not all good ideas are original, all original ideas are certainly not good.



Unfolding against a backdrop of inter-world tension, the basic split on display in Upside Down tracks loosely along the same line as the recent Total Recall remake, except with contrasting gravities — the planet “up there” is a wealthy, business-oriented and exploitative one, while the one below it exists in poverty-stricken servitude. Despite this, Adam Kirk (Sturgess) and Eden Moore (Dunst) strike up an adolescent friendship when they meet at the mountain peaks that almost touch. As teens, it bends toward romance when Adam pulls her down into his world with a rope (visiting the other planet doesn’t release a person from the gravitational pull of their native planet). They canoodle, but when interplanetary border patrol agents attack them, Eden tumbles back into her world.

Flash forward a decade. Adam believes Eden to be dead, but it turns out that she was merely concussed, and has amnesia. In his desperate attempts to gain some face time with Eden, Adam gets a job at TransWorld working on an innovative face-lift cream based on a secret, gravity-neutralizing ingredient that’s been passed down for generations in his family. So begins Adam’s quest — with the assistance of disaffected co-worker Bob Boruchowicz (Timothy Spall) — to both devise a weighted suit to mask his innate gravitational pull and woo Eden all over again, all while maintaining a separate identity.

It all sounds outrageous, I realize, and it is, on a certain level. Yet for the uniqueness of its conceit, there’s a simplicity to the actual story at the movie’s core. The setting may be distinctive, but the narrative is anything but fanciful or unmoored. In fact, it’s kind of a yawn. (Various benchmarks include Another Earth, The Vow, Cloud Atlas, The Adjustment Bureau as well as pretty much the entire filmography of Andrew Niccol.) Solanas is clearly aiming for a sort of less-is-more lyricism. The problem is that Upside Down is loaded down by misstep after misstep.

First, and most crucially, is a lack of honest investment in the putative civil unrest between the worlds. Solanas’ simple little love story has a certain ceiling of intrigue, but what initially comes across as just piddling eventually comes to feel overwhelmingly insipid when the plot begins to revolve around Adam’s universe-revolutionizing formula. Upside Down then asks viewers to believe things beyond the pale — that an almighty and evil corporation like TransWorld can’t conduct a simple chemical analysis, or that they’d eventually be foiled by… having someone beat them to file a patent application (yes, seriously). Later, Solanas shoehorns in a ridiculous stepping-stone-type chase and shoot-out (you know, for “thrills”) that feels grafted on per some weird studio note.

I could go on (and on — don’t get me started on its stupid ending), but even the idea of further dissection wearies me, honestly. Terrible isn’t the right word to use to describe Upside Down, which suffers from a myopia that comes only with the indulgence of a Big Idea; it is a real, top-shelf mess, however. Dunst and Sturgess are fine, and have an OK chemistry together, but the film suffers from having so few supporting characters of note. While Spall brings a wry personality to Bob, he can’t breathe a convincing multi-dimensionality into his character. And, lacking characters, Solanas’ movie is just this strange, enervated mash-up of poorly sketched ideas tossed across an expensive canvas. It’s a tone poem of wobbly, inconsistent pitch. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Millennium Entertainment, PG-13, 103 minutes)

An odd little duck of a film, writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin’s If I Were You kicks around enjoyably for quite a while in the same sandbox as some of Woody Allen‘s mid-career farces, before eventually pivoting and skipping off into less rewarding territory. The story of a woman who accidentally learns of her husband’s infidelity and then enters into a strange friendship and pact with his unwitting mistress, this bouncy but meandering comedy would benefit from an editorial haircut that trims down some of its less inspired subplots.

It’s a shock for New York City focus group and marketing manager Madelyn Reid (Marcia Gay Harden) when she stumbles across her husband Paul (Joseph Kell) one afternoon in a restaurant, in a lover’s clinch with his mistress. When he gets nervous and scampers off after an exploratory phone call from her, the young woman, a would-be actress named Lucy (Leonor Watling), is despondent and hysterical. Madelyn follows her back to her apartment, where she foils a bungled suicide attempt.

When her unsuspecting rival opens up to her, Madelyn at first sees an opportunity to seize the upper hand. But Lucy, stressing their shared unhappiness, suggests that they start making choices for one another (“The way to fix our lives is to stop making our own decisions!”). Madelyn slowly accedes, and trips into a contemporized production of King Lear when she accompanies Lucy to an audition. Hijinks ensue, wouldn’t you know — with Madeyln lying to Paul about an affair she’s not having, Paul getting jealous about a co-worker of Madelyn’s whom he believes to be the offending cuckolder, and a handsome and affable stranger, Derek (Aidan Quinn, quite good), popping up at a moment of crisis.

It’s not merely the introduction of the King Lear gambit that makes If I Were You easy to imagine as a stageplay; it’s a fairly hermetic story, with lots of talky one-on-one or small couples scenes. This tack works for a while, but a sense of claustrophobia eventually sets in, aided by the movie’s lack of compelling visual vocabulary. It’s a low-budget offering, understandably, but Carr-Wiggin and cinematographer Bruce Worrall deliver a flat telling, and Aidan Leroux and Sean Breaugh’s spare production design offers little by way of distinguishing features.

If I Were You‘s abundant early charms are built largely around the amusing interplay of the distraught, distracted Harden and the deliciously flighty, simple-minded Watling. But several subplots — including one with married co-worker Keith (Gary Piquer), who’s enthusiastic about Paul’s infidelity, figuring it opens up the door for he and Madelyn to have a fling — aren’t as amusing as Carr-Wiggin imagines them to be. A far tighter focus, and re-imagination of the piece as basically a three-hander, would have given it greater punch and pay-off. As is, If I Were You is only worth a look for hardcore fans of the talent involved, or indie comedies of existential crisis more broadly. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. If I Were You opens in select theaters nationwide, and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall 3. (Kino Lorber, R, 115 minutes)