All posts by Brent

Limitless

Film Reviews

No offense intended, seriously, but Bradley Cooper is just a great jerk. In his best films (The Hangover, Wedding Crashers), he plays guys defined by a rakish self-centeredness and/or insincerity, and he does so with a correlative breezy composure that makes it look all too easy. With his pin-up looks (that tan! that smirk!) and ineffable lack of gradation, he’s a performer who elicits from other guys almost equally divided feelings of idealized affinity and jealous dislike.

And that’s fine, really, because all of that actually makes him a solid fit for the new thriller Limitless, in which Cooper plays Eddie Mora, a burned-out, would-be novelist who gets slipped NZT, a designer pharmaceutical which unlocks the allegedly unused portions of his brain and turns him into an indefatigable, self-bettering genius. With an awakened appetite for science, the arts and broader knowledge in general, Eddie picks up foreign languages and musical instruments in 24 hours, and turns several thousand dollars into $2.3 million in under two weeks as a day trader. The good times roll — at least for a while, until Eddie gets cut off from his drug supply and some nasty side effects pop up, threatening his relationship with his new energy baron mentor, Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro). Paranoia, blackmail and worse naturally ensue.

A story like this pretty much lives or dies on its cocksure, inner biorhythms, and director Neil Burger (Interview with the Assassin, The Illusionist) makes sure Limitless doesn’t get too bogged down in wonky, scientific specifics. Cooper isn’t necessarily wildly convincing as the sad-sack, stringy-haired loser in Eddie’s first incarnation, but once the movie gets past its set-up and gathers a considerable downhill momentum — partially achieved by putting Eddie in physical harm’s way, pursued by an oafish underworld type who gets turned onto the same drug — things become infinitely more intriguing.

Since it’s based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn (a more abstruse title, no doubt), the movie has a fair amount of background detail, only some of which is gracefully integrated. As shoehorned within the parameters of a more conventional, big screen thriller narrative, Limitless‘ preoccupation with reintroducing Eddie’s estranged girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish), into the shenanigans is fairly misplaced — a diversion from what could be a much tauter, madcap character study. Despite both their shared past and her connection to Eddie’s drug source, Lindy doesn’t feel inherently wrapped up in his plight, but rather a tacked-on, “humanizing” sop for female audience members.

The movie’s wrap-up, too, only mildly satisfies, settling upon an end point which would have been an even more interesting third act pivot for further gamesmanship. Still, Cooper is a compelling anchor for this sort of material — you’re both rooting for him and weirdly, silently hoping for a bit of dark comeuppance, which makes for some intriguing inner tension. The key to enjoying Limitless is to just not take anything too seriously. (Relativity, PG-13, 106 minutes)

Silent Hill Sequel Gets Cast

Casting About

Davis Films producers Samuel Hadida and Don Carmody announced today that
three of the most notable stars of Silent Hill, Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean and Deborah Kara
Unger, will return to join Adelaide Clemens and Kit Harington on the sequel, Silent
Hill: Revelation 3D.

Filming is just underway in Toronto, and as the sequel to 2006’s near-$100 million-grossing hit, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is based on a screenplay by director Michael Bassett, who is joined by cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, production designer Alicia Keywan and costume designer Wendy Partridge. “It wouldn’t be the same without some of the original Silent Hill cast,” said Bassett. “Sean, Radha and Deborah’s return will certainly thrill fans of the franchise and compliment Revelation‘s stars, Adelaide and Kit.”

Added cinematographer Alexandre, who has made a career out of specializing in moody horror flicks and recently worked with Mitchell on The Crazies, “With the most advanced technology available — in particular the lighter, smaller and more flexible 3D Red Epic — we are able to take audiences deeper in the world of Silent Hill than they ever dreamed possible. Devotees will finally be able to enter this realm along side of Heather, Vincent, Harry and Rose, and experience the psychological horror and the fear of the unknown along with them.”

Elektra Luxx

Film Reviews

Ever since Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling Boogie Nights captured the attention and imaginations of would-be auteurs, and probably even before, the world of pornography has held a special hold on a certain subsection of aspirant directors, who’ve populated their movies with strippers and porn stars, looking to beguile and titillate open-minded film audiences before the first flickering frame of their film has even appeared on screen. Such subject matter can sometimes be a lazy choice, indicative of a filmmaker thinking the heavy lift of audience investment lies more in the setting alone than any particular combination of characters and story. All of which brings us to Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elektra Luxx, a comedy which tells the tale of an adult starlet who’s gotten out of the industry and turned to teaching an annex learning class on bedroom prowess, the better to fund her dreams of starting her new life as a single mother.



Carla Gugino stars as the title character, which goes a long way toward making the film engaging. Early on, she meets a distraught flight attendant, Cora (Marley Shelton), who approaches her with a proposition: in exchange for the purloined lyric sheets to the last album of Elektra’s recently deceased rock star lover, Cora wants Elektra to seduce her fiance, in order to “cancel out” her own cheating. Elektra reluctantly agrees, setting in motion a chain of screwed-up events and mistaken identities involving a private investigator, Dellwood Butterworth (Timothy Olyphant), and a passel of other largely fringe-dwelling types.

While such a plot condensation makes Elektra Luxx sound like a madcap farce, in truth it’s a much more character-oriented comedy, with a porn writer, Burt Rodriguez (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who loquaciously waxes nostalgic about Elektra’s career in his basement web-cam shows, even as he angrily discourages his younger sister Olive (Amy Rosoff) from doing a solo video, and uncomfortably deals with the advances of local checkout girl Trixie (Malin Akerman), who delivers a series of pictures of herself to him. What do these characters, or a couple others, really have to do with Elektra’s plight? Not much, although some are interwoven, here and there. Mainly, though, they’re used to provide a sort of tableau backdrop to the film, rendering it a sort of pornland Short Cuts.

The films and jumbled, referential style of Quentin Tarantino bear mentioning, too, since Gutierrez also seeds his movie with spun-off asides and backstories, not unlike Pulp Fiction. The chief problem is that these bits are not smoothly integrated into the final product, or made to have forward-reaching consequences. The Kill Bill films, of course, used the pregnancy of Uma Thurman’s character as the powder to spark a wild revenge ride, but Gutierrez here seems to have only loosely integrated the heady wonder of her condition — and the loss of her lover — into the proceedings. He gives us neither enough of Elektra’s backstory and life as a porn star for the pregnancy to stand in stark contrast as a life-changing event, nor evidences this richly in a major shift in her behavior, or sudden rush of manifested anxiety.

At its core, Elektra Luxx feels like it was designed around the conceit of an on-the-mend porn star, with a couple other characters and scenes thrown in. Things just kind of happen, and don’t always have lasting consequences. These moments can sometimes be fun (Adrianne Palicki and Emmanuelle Chriqui have a blast as Holly and Bambi, a pair of vacationing adult starlets, one of whose feelings give way to something unexpected), but just as often tedious, like a wayward improv sketch.

The strength of the movie is the game ensemble cast, who uniformly give lively, engaging performances — a testament to Gutierrez’s touch with actors, certainly. But when its endgame ropes in a novelist, Rebecca Lindbrook (Kathleen Quinlan), who wants to get into business with Elektra, and a book-signing that brings several characters together and ends with frantic sprint to a hospital, well… it all feels like a telenovela run amok. And no, not necessarily in a good way. For more information, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 100 minutes)

The Resident

Film Reviews

Gender-based clichés of fear get trotted out in The Resident, a goosing stalker thriller starring Hilary Swank that adds nothing new to the single-woman-in-peril subgenre. Swank by and large adequately conveys the juggled dual demands of steely, modern-day occupational professionalism and feminine vulnerability that such a genre exercise requires, but the script lacks any believable motivations, and additionally abandons too quickly any flirtation with significant misdirection. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Image, R, 91 minutes)

ExTerminators (Blu-ray)

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

I have a soft spot in my heart, I freely admit, for the wacky, New Age mania of Heather Graham, hence my interest in ExTerminators, a 2009 film starring her, Jennifer Coolidge and Amber Heard, and only now making its way to Blu-ray and DVD. A dark comedy of putative female empowerment, the movie dutifully winds up its laboriously colorful characters and sets its plot traps, and then pretty much charts a course of expected zaniness.

After an incident following a bad break-up with her
cheating boyfriend, Alex (Graham) is sentenced to 12 months of anger
management counseling, where she meets a group of small town Texas women
with similar stories of romantic woe, including Stella (Coolidge), the
owner of a financially troubled extermination business, and Nikki
(Heard), a dental technician with the face of an angel, the mind of a
sociopath and a big-time oral fixation. When the ladies band together to fight
back against the abusive lout husband of a friend (Joey Lauren Adams) from their counseling group, a deadly accident ensues. When their actions are subsequently taken as purposeful by their grateful friend, and rewarded with money, the women sense they may have stumbled across a niche business, even as Alex finds herself drawn to a handsome cop, Dan (Matthew Settle), investigating the case.

ExTerminators is the feature film debut of its chief collaborators, screenwriter Suzanne Weinert, who cut her teeth running Julia Roberts’ production company, and director John Inwood, who worked on Scrubs for many years, as both a cinematographer and director. There’s some measure of delight in a bit of the dialogue, but the tone feels a bit off, trying as it does to juggle a sunny optimism with a conceit that is darker, all under the banner of a visual style and scheme that is more or less straightforward and realistic. A lot of the smaller story details feel safe and cutesy (Alex hatches a cover-up plot based on her years of watching Law & Order), and there aren’t the sort of narrative surprises herein that are necessary to keep an audience invested in what is otherwise a fairly flat telling of a potentially raucous and/or subversive concept.

Housed in your typical Blu-ray case, the movie comes to the format in 1080p, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with a DTS HD master audio 5.1 track that more than adequately handles the fairly straightforward aural demands of the title, if just a bit tinnily in its higher registers. Somewhat surprisingly, there isn’t even a chapter menu, and apart from a clutch of trailers that automatically play upon start-up, bonus material consists only a 27-minute gag reel which affords the chance to see line reading flubs and some of Coolidge’s improvisational riffs, including one about having sex with a man in a cricket costume. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Every Day (Blu-ray)

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Every Day, a workaday domestic drama from writer-director Richard Levine, is loosely
(very loosely) of the same genus as films like Smart People,
The Squid and the Whale and Running with Scissors, though pretty much
vacuumed free of all the more colorful angst and conflict those films
peddle. It sketches its characters humanely, but comes across as
exceedingly polite and pedestrian, never particularly willing to take a
strong stand one way or another. As such, it’s a shrug.

While his wife Jeannie (Helen Hunt) struggles in her role as a reluctant caregiver to her ailing, formerly estranged dad Ernie (Brian Dennehy), New York TV scribe Ned (Liev Schreiber) tries to negotiate a narrow professional pass, satisfying the sensationalist urges of his boss Garrett (Eddie Izzard) on a sexy medical soap opera serial. Mandated script fixes find Ned paired with coworker Robin (Carla Gugino), who provides characteristic temptation.

A film of pleasantly half-sketched familial noodling, Every Day
fails to satisfyingly connect not so much because of what it bungles in
execution as what it just never really tries to do — namely bring
substantive conflict to the fore. Lacking in any major catharsis, the
film perhaps angles to be chiefly a snapshot of the accumulated burdens
of life’s quotidian responsibilities, but instead merely comes across as
inconsequential. There’s no payoff of deep, hidden pain or fire-born resilience; in fact, there is not much honest dysfunction at all.

Everything is instead played fairly bland, and middle-of-the-road. Ernie is dying, but his grandkids seem to have little investment in this revelation. Several pressing conversations between characters — like how to broach the subject of an assisted care facility — are started and never really finished, and even a subplot involving Ned and Jeannie’s homosexual teenage son Jonah (Ezra Miller), who wants to attend a “gay prom” but ends up getting inappropriately hit on by an older guy, fizzles out a bit strangely.

The lead performances are competent but not particularly stirring. Gugino again proves herself fetching, while Miller (City Island) brings an appealing, uncomplicated honesty to Jonah — refreshing in an era when so many teen characters are rendered as little more than attitudinal bundles. Overall, though, Every Day feels lacking in defined dramatic stakes. The exact opposite of the outlandish stories Ned is asked to write, it is polite and genteel, but also ultimately yawningly pointless.

Housed in a regular Blu-ray snap-shut case, Every Day comes to the format presented in 1080p high-definition 1.85:1 widescreen, with an English language DTS-HD master audio 5.1 track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Its picture is sharp and free of any grain or edge enhancement. Bonus features consist of around 15 minutes’ worth of cast and crew interviews, the movie’s trailer and a collection of seven deleted scenes — decent inclusions all, but nothing built for repeat viewing. Visit your favorite brick-and-mortar retailer if that’s still your thing, or to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Jane Eyre

Film Reviews

A spare, visually foreboding and well acted adaptation of one the mainstays of high school reading lists, the latest version of Jane Eyre nonetheless struggles to consistently or cathartically dramatically connect, and comes across as a well put together but effectively inessential addition to the considerable canon of works derived from Charlotte Brontë’s celebrated novel of 19th century conflicted English romance. The invested presence of rising stars Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, however, guarantee the movie a solid arthouse run with much additional holdover ancillary value, as their respective profiles continue to rise in the coming years. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 118 minutes)

The Sins of Madame Bovary

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

An Italian import from 1969, The Sins of Madame Bovary stands as one of the more famous offerings of star Edwige Fenech, whose flowing brunette locks, personable demeanor and large, expressive eyes made her a fairly natural screen presence in a string of romantic dramas, sex comedies and other erotic flicks from the 1960s and ’70s.

Gustave Flaubert’s often adapted 19th century novel provides the underpinning, and Fenech stars here as Emma Bovary, an aristocratic woman bored by her bourgeois life, and drifting out of love with her older physician husband, Charles (Gerhard Riedmann). As she daydreams of freedom and a grander life divorced from the formality of society life, a series of other lovers come into play.

Directed by Hans Schott-Schobinger, The Sins of Madame Bovary seems to take as inspiration for its production design template and visual scheme Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, so full of ornamentation is it. The scale isn’t the same, obviously, but it’s a signifier of Schott-Schobinger and cinematographer Klaus von Rautenfeld’s joint intent and efforts to play up the costume drama and play down the potential for sizzle, no matter the fame of their leading lady. For the most part  this works… at least in the theoretical sense. The problem is, for all its surface lushness and attendant focus on feelings and manners, The Sins of Madame Bovary is still burdened by stolid performances and fairly leaden chemistry between the major players.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Sins of Madame Bovary comes to DVD divided into 12 chapters and presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an Italian language Dolby digital 2.0 audio track and English subtitles. The transfer is fairly solid, free of any edge enhancement but marked by a bit of grain here and there. The DVD cover slaps an airbrushed brassiere on this relatively famous photo of Fenech, and its supplemental features consist solely of a self-scrolling two-minute-plus photo gallery of film stills and international poster images. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here, or check Half.com or your other online retailer of choice. C (Movie) C- (Disc)

Spooner

Film Reviews

A thinly imagined, stunted-guy, mumblecore-type love story starring Scream‘s Matthew Lillard, Spooner fritters away some charming low-budget production design and around-the-edges detail in service of a meandering narrative that doesn’t impart any meaningful lessons or engaging, smartly articulated revelations about the deeply held ambivalence of modern-day twentysomethings, for whom physical adulthood has brought no particular direction or clarity.

Lillard stars as the hapless title character, Herman Spooner, an introverted man-child and Monrovia, Calif., used car salesman who still lives at home with his mom (Kate Burton) and dad (Christopher McDonald). Seeking to shake their son from his routine, Herman’s parents set as a deadline his impending 30th birthday to finally get a place of his own. To top it off, Herman’s jerky boss (Shea Whigham) is putting pressure on him to up his poor sales numbers or face the chopping block.

Against this backdrop of looming doom, Herman happens upon Rose (Nora Zehetner), a girl whose car has broken down nearby. Forgoing all other priorities and commitments, Herman — an awkward wooer, to be sure — sets about trying to win Rose’s
heart, but by lying about his interests and station in life. To make matters worse, Rose breaks the news that she’s about
to leave for the Philippines, wrecking the seemingly one good thing in Herman’s life before it can even really get started.

If the word “pixie” didn’t exist, it would basically have to be created for Zehetner, who was delightful in the wicked, canted Brick, and here again exudes a guileless, kewpie doll prettiness that could find her easily cast as Audrey Tatou’s younger sister. Lillard, meanwhile, dials way back, and down, on his voluble swagger and charisma, showing intriguing flashes of beaten down vulnerability that belie his large, lanky frame. The beguiling chemistry between the pair is easily the film’s strongest selling point, though it sadly only arrives in fitful flashes.

The problem is that, kind of like the recent (but much more terrible) Waiting For Forever,
Spooner unfolds in an alternate, fantasy reality where girls swoon over de-masculinized awkwardness, and its makers additionally
assume this is will automatically tickle an audience pink. As directed by Drake Doremus — from a story by he and Lindsay Stidham, and a screenplay by Stidham — the movie never locates a convincing place of motivation for what is supposed to be Rose’s correlative ennui and emotional dislocation. Consequently, she comes across as two-dimensional, existing only in orbit and service to Herman’s narrative arc.

As written, she’s seemingly an idiot, too, though Zehetner admirably refuses to yield to this interpretation. When Herman shows Rose a picture of an apartment torn out of a magazine, and tells her it’s his place, she doesn’t blink an eye; later, he “flirts” by saying things like, “I could palm your head,” and, after she compliments his man-cave-type outdoor hangout, “I’ll build you [your own] fort, and put the plans in PDF format.” Rather than be creeped out by such disconnected, vaguely sociopathic chatter, Rose instead just accepts it blindly, at face value, with no comment or inkling that it might be unusual. Doremus and Stidham compound this mistake by having her acquiesce from the first moment of the pair’s meeting; Rose’s eyes always say yes to Herman, never no, so Spooner is devoid of much material drama, or even the quasi-emotional payoff of a sex scene, which would render Herman a more awakened adult character.

There’s a certain low, pulsing heartache in Herman’s swallowed, miserable loneliness, and how it’s warped his sociability, and the gangly Lillard actually has the chops to play something this depressive and inwardly directed. But neither the film’s writing nor its direction trust him enough to do so, and the nervous result is a blatantly false and pointless affair — a character-study dramedy that spends so much time trying to inject flickering positivity into the proceedings that it destroys any sincere chance at audience empathy with its lead character. For the film’s trailer, click here. (Moving Pictures, R, 83 minutes)

Scouts Honor: Badge to the Bone

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Scouts Honor: Badge to the Bone isn’t the worst film ever made — not by a long shot — but there’s something in particular about serially mirthless comedies that temporarily irradiates any working recollection of what arguably may be more technically inept and woefully misguided cinematic efforts, and this broad, broad affair falls into that former category. And so while watching it, the movie just feels like it might be that terrible.

Written by Jesse Bryan and David Schultz, who also each costar, Scouts Honor centers on two dimwitted camp counselor brothers, David and Tim Appleorchard (Schultz and BJ Bales), who must circumvent the evil machinations of fellow brother Brandon (Chris Kattan) in order to win the approval of their father (Kip King, Kattan’s real-life dad) and inherit the camp from him at the end of the summer, when he leaves to rejoin his wife/their mother with a traveling circus. Because, God bless him (and I know this from fairly close personal experience), Fred Willard will show up for scale on any job, and read expository asides or fulfill whatever perfunctory wonky cameo needs your production might have, well… Fred Willard shows up and reads a bunch of discretely shot announcements over a P.A. system, goading the brothers Appleorchard into action. Physical contests of strength and endurance ensue, along with parallel love interests for the hapless chaps.

PR press clippings for Scouts Honor try to position it, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, as a willfully, knowingly moronic comedy, something so “insane,” “wacky” and gleefully dumb that it somehow circles all the way back around again to all-out funny. It doesn’t, honestly. Nowhere close. This is a series of bad sketch comedy scenes, strung together loosely into a narrative.

Look, I don’t mind dumb comedy, I really don’t. But this movie never rises to, let alone past, the level of improv comedy you and your buddies mustered when making middle Super 8 videos. It’s just pointless, and made worse by the retread-quality nature of the narrative proper. Chris Kattan is actually capable of good work, but here he trades only in volume, and it grates mightily roughly 25 seconds into the proceedings. Granted, Kattan is given nothing of substance with which to work, but he’s playing such a screaming jackass that when the film, at its merciful conclusion, refuses even to give him some sort of shaming comeuppance, it makes you a bit angry, in addition to just being bored and pissed off.

I’m racking my brain here, but apart from chapter selections and a motion-enabled menu, I don’t believe there are any supplemental features to the DVD release. I can’t recall with 100% clarity though, because the pitch of Kattan’s histrionics are clouding my brain and impairing my memory. Nonetheless, if you still wish to inflict this travesty upon yourself, Scouts Honor may be purchased through Amazon by clicking here. F (Movie) D- (Disc)

Take Me Home Tonight

Film Reviews



The crushing ambivalence of young adulthood gets blended together to moderately winning effect with a colorful 1980s setting and a conventional tale of romantic pining set against the backdrop of a single evening of partying in Take Me Home Tonight, an energetic and smartly cast comedy. At times its outlandishness toes the line between the ribald and contrived, but lively interplay and a great, evocative soundtrack more or less consistently impose a mood of effervescent, if slight, amusement. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Relativity Media, R, 97 minutes)

Kings of Pastry

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Whether it’s sports, dancing or eating, if there’s something that Americans like more than recreational activities and hobbies, it’s watching other people being forced to compete in those arenas. When it comes specifically to baking and cooking there are, by my last count, 4,752 shows on the Food Network and other cable channels about culinary competitions and/or niche specialties, so it comes as no great surprise that a high-stakes dessert competition would get the full-fledged documentary treatment in the form of Kings of Pastry.

Co-directed by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the film focuses on the prestigious Meilleurs Ouvriers de France competition (Best Craftsmen in France), held, like the Olympics, only once every four years. The sixteen finalists, French-born pastry chefs all, gather in Lyon for three intense days of mixing, piping and sculpting everything from delicate chocolate confections to six-foot sugar sculptures in hopes of being declared one of the best by President Nicolas Sarkozy, and winning a coveted blue, white and red-striped collar — the culinary elite equivalent of a green Master’s jacket in golf, or an Academy Award in cinema.

The film predominantly charts Jacquy Pfeiffer (above), co-founder of Chicago’s French Pastry School, as he journeys back to his childhood home of Alsace more than a month before the event to practice for the contest. Two other finalists are profiled in the film — Regis Lazard, competing for the second time after a crucial drop of his sugar sculpture the first time, and Philippe Rigollot, a chef from Maison Pic, France’s only three-star restaurant owned by a woman. During the grueling final competition, the competing chefs work under constant scrutiny by a squad of master judges, and subject themselves to the critical palates of some of the world’s most renowned chefs, who evaluate their elaborate pastries. Finally, in a twist that will likely ring familiar to anyone who’s paused on the Food Network for more than five minutes, these pastry marathoners must complete their race against the clock by hand-carrying all their creations, including their fragile sugar sculptures, through a series of rooms to a final buffet staging area without shattering them.

Filmmakers Pennebaker (Monterey Pop, Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back) and Hegedus (Startup.com) are experienced “name” documentarians and established collaborators (The War Room, Down the Mountain), but they seem to coast a bit here on the exclusivity of their secured access to the never-before-filmed event, largely eschewing probing questioning of its subjects and their unique world in the name of an uninspired, point-and-shoot style that rivals Sarah Palin for its lack of inquisitiveness. The selection process for the finalists? Not addressed. Other competitors outside of the aforementioned trio? Not addressed. The number of designated winners? Not addressed. The specifics of the chefs’ job duties and backgrounds, and how that might either advantage or disadvantage them in certain areas of the competition? Not addressed.

So it’s a sign of the artistry on display that Kings of Pastry, after a slow start, eventually matures (ripens? comes to a boil?) into something not only engaging, but actually also kind of poignant. The film showcases the extraordinary level of skill and nerve required to tackle the competition, certainly (as well as practice: Pfeiffer sweats out time trials with his coach, while Lazard’s wife notes that his basement kitchen is his true home), but it also highlights how luck plays a part in things too. (Taste and artistic merit scores are still subjective, after all.) That makes the culmination of the competition, with its failures and inspirational elevations, something to which everyone can relate. The biggest tangential takeaway, however, is how and why European chefs will always remain, collectively, a cut above their American counterparts — the exactitude required is immense, and Stateside notions of masculinity don’t allow for this much attention to be paid to food of any sort, without much punishing derision for preparer and taster alike.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Kings of Pastry comes to DVD presented in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Its bonus features are anchored by a five-minute interview chat with the filmmakers, which is nice but really too short to dig into the story behind the production with much substantive insight. Biographies of the crew are also included, but the best supplemental extras are a segment which follows Pfeiffer as he constructs a chocolate sculpture (complete with film reels), and a chocolate fashion show in which pastry school students mix clothes and desert in intriguing fashion. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

George Clooney: Anti-Genocide Paparazzo

Ephemera, Politics

In an age of Twitter-shortened attention spans, George Clooney is helping shine a humanitarian spotlight on Sudan in an unusual way, according to Newsweek — with a privately funded, publicly accessible satellite. Money quote: “I’m not tied to the United Nations or the U.S. government, and so I don’t have the same constraints. I’m a guy with a camera from 480 miles up,” Clooney says. “I’m the anti-genocide paparazzi.” Good stuff. And you have to admit, too, no one rocks the grey quite like him.

Carbon Nation

Film Reviews

Enviro-friendly and energy-overhaul advocacy documentaries are almost numerous enough to comprise their own labeled video store sub-genre these days, and Carbon Nation, opening at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles this week, slots comfortably and unfusssily into this grouping. While thought-provoking on a macro level in some of its interviews, sloppy construction and focus makes for a sludgy viewing experience.

Directed by Peter Byck, the film bills itself as an optimistic, solutions-based, non-partisan nonfiction film, which is true but only half the story. In its aim to be so inclusive and positive-minded, the movie doesn’t put moneyed interests of the status quo in its cross-hairs, or much acknowledge the push-back against climate change/energy advancement legislation or innovation. As such, it comes across as kind of toothless, and existing in a vacuum.

It’s also terribly unfocused. In its own roundabout way, by cheerfully playing up American business ingenuity, Carbon
Nation makes a tripartite case for bold energy innovation, without clamorously depressing the usual keys of moral suasion — it’s good business and will make lots of money; it emboldens national and
energy security; and it improves individual and community health as well as the environment, the movie tells us. The problem is that, as the movie pinballs from solar energy advances to algae studies to stories of electric cars, with little in the way of connective tissue, it fails to use these assertions as a touchstone, and tie them to each topic or field of research.

An eclectic slate of interviewees includes Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, green jobs innovator Van Jones, Earth Day founder Denis Hayes and Bernie Karl, a geothermal
pioneer from Alaska. Most interesting might be Cliff Etheredge, a one-armed West Texas
cotton farmer and entrepreneur pioneering the use of small
landowner wind collectives. But the manner in which Byck sometimes introduces/tags these sources onscreen (former CIA director James Woolsey is revealed to be… a South Park fan?), comes across as curious, an overreaching stab at levity when one isn’t warranted.

Sometimes its facts and estimations are arresting (one billion gallons of fuel per year could be saved, for instance, merely if long-haul truckers were able to achieve utility-level power storage, and turn off their idling trucks while sleeping), but overall Carbon Nation doesn’t pivot its way past being anything more than a scrapbook collection of human-interest stories one might see as the last segment on the network evening news. It’s temperate, rah-rah cheerleading, when the world outside of its carefully manicured parameters feels like it’s calling out for something a bit more. For more information, visit the movie’s website. (Clayway Media, unrated, 82 minutes)

I Am Number Four

Film Reviews

An adaptation of the first of a proposed six-book series about an extraterrestrial prodigy hiding out on Earth from would-be rival alien killers, I Am Number Four is a technically polished but rather unexceptional thriller that never much sets its sights beyond satisfying the lowest-common-denominator expectations of its target teen demographic. Broken down to its component parts, it’s difficult to not look a bit cynically upon the film, since it feels a bit like an emo-action valentine mash-up of carefully cross-tabbed teen movie trends. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney/DreamWorks, PG-13, 109 minutes)

Mail Carrier Does Battle with Walking Dead Zombies

Amusements

Smart exterior packaging from the PR company for the forthcoming Blu-ray release of The Walking Dead, which arrived today in a bubble-wrapped mailer large enough to accommodate one-and-a-half smeared, bloody footprints on its exterior, and thus induce a momentary double-take… especially since driveway curbs at my apartment complex have just been repainted, in the same dark red hue. Well played, ladies and gentlemen. But was it the shoe-sole equivalent of an auto-pen, or did some intern get to have fun?

Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

Film Reviews

The third film in Martin Lawrence’s comedy series about a FBI agent who finds himself forced undercover as a tubby matriarch, Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a wearyingly unamusing affair. Devoid of ideas not reflected in its title, or even much in the way of sustained comedic effort, the movie is a meandering misfire that strangely somewhat skimps on laughs built around its guys-in-drag conceit in favor of wildly misguided stabs at adolescent love and familial bonding. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 107 minutes)

Adam Sandler Gets Whatever Music He Wants

Musings

There wasn’t really a place to get into this in any sort of legit review of Just Go With It, but one of the more interesting things about the movie — apart from Nicole Kidman‘s hula dancing, and Dave Matthews ostensibly picking up a coconut with his butt cheeks through his pants — lies in its use of music.

Excepting the occasional diversions and quasi-artistic noodling to be found in the likes of Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish and Reign Over Me, the comedies of Adam Sandler have provided some of the most reliable and consistent studio commercial returns of the past decade — and mostly for Sony, where Sandler’s production company is housed. But both because they’re comedies — ringing up ticket sales instead of racking up little gold statuettes — and because Sandler still pads around in T-shirts and cargo shorts and doesn’t yet have a kid old enough to pimp out in his or her own projects, his clout goes under-reported. He wields it softly, in other words.

The fact is, though, a small fortune has to be spent on the soundtracks for Sandler’s comedies — music is used in goosing fashion throughout his movies, and frequently to quickly summon up a nostalgic feeling when the terrible direction of Dennis Dugan has made for some awkward juxtaposition of scenes. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony were doling out a healthy seven figures on music clearances alone for of his films, even though there’s typically no obvious soundtrack tie-in as with something like The Wedding Singer. In Just Go With It, there are no fewer than three dozen pop music cues, including a couple Police songs and a lot of newfangled mash-ups, the most intriguing of which might be the commingling of “Every Breath You Take” and Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars,” an Internet sensation from a couple years back. That’s not the only way to measure Hollywood power — getting whatever tunes, in variety and amount, one wants. But it is a handy indicator.

Vidal Sassoon: The Movie

Film Reviews

Vidal Sassoon: The Movie is a quite fawning but nonetheless solidly engaging look at the iconic, same-named stylist, which benefits chiefly from its 83-year-old subject’s articulate and extremely personable nature. The movie doesn’t fully crack the nut of Sassoon’s ambition or connect it to his fractured youth, but eventually makes a fairly convincing argument that his eschewing of convention and groundbreaking “five-point” cut, associated with the mod revolution of the 1960s, helped revolutionize hair care, freeing women from both the cost and commitment of weekly appointments. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Phase 4, unrated, 93 minutes)

The Scourge of Modern Society

Irritations

Hey, serial spammers possessing of a dubious grasp of the English language — do you see any of your solicitations and/or weird, tangential, template flattery? No, no you don’t. Your hyperlink-saturated comments aren’t getting posted. So go bomb someone else, please. Or, by all means, continue to do your worst in idiotic fashion, and for no gain. But this is a battle you will lose, because I can control the board.

Game of Death

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

After the creative and commercial highs of films like New Jack City, Jungle Fever, White Men Can’t Jump, The Waterdance and even the original Blade, it didn’t seem like the most plausible career path for Wesley Snipes — a string of anonymous, C-grade, mostly internationally-lensed action flicks, followed by incarceration for tax evasion. That’s how it shook out, however. And it’s those long-lingering legal/financial woes, which for years prior to his 2010 sentencing hung over Snipes’ head like a comic strip’s black rain cloud, that most likely explain the existence of something like Game of Death, another yawning, paycheck-inspired action programmer in which, you know, a CIA hit man is caught up between shady underworld-types and those at his agency that would double-cross him.

Snipes stars as Marcus Jones, a special agent tasked with cozying up next to a mobster named Smith (Robert Davi). A pair of rogue agents, Zander (Gary Daniels) and Floria (Zoë Bell, of Kill Bill stunt double
and later Grindhouse fame), try to frame Jones and kill him to boot, and escape and other on-the-fly, name-clearing shenanigans then ensue.

Director Giorgio Serafini does the material no great favors of elevation by ladling on stylistic excess and gimmickry in orgiastic fashion. A straighter, simpler, grittier visual scheme and emotional template would have worked far better here. Snipes, too, seems (perhaps understandably) depressed and bored — just going through the motions. There’s no real pop or excitement here, either in execution or narrative adventurousness. Additionally, just in passing, the DVD front and back cover art does Bell no favors, featuring some terrible airbrushing that makes her look like Jeremy Renner. Yikes!

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Game of Death comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 soundtrack, and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Special features consist of a half dozen very short behind-the-scenes featurettes that explore the movie’s Detroit location shoot and other various aspects of the production, interspersing film clips with rah-rah, back-slapping interview footage. A small collection of trailers for other Sony DVD releases rounds out the material. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) C+ (Disc)