Alvin, Simon and Theodore deal with the pressures of high school and fluctuations in popularity in this modest, agreeably family-friendly upgrade over the singing-and-dancing chipmunks’ muddled franchise debut. Featuring CGI critters who interact raucously with their live-action human custodians, this movie, akin to bouncy family adventures like the Stuart Little and Garfield franchises before it, heartily aims itself at and mostly successfully connects with a pre-teen demographic.
It’s hard to swallow some of the narrative plot points here, like the fact that hugely popular entertainers — which the chipmunks are supposed to be — could be instantaneously humbled by a couple doofus teenagers. Small swatches of dialogue, too (most notably including pointlessly empty movie references by Alvin to Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver and The Silence of the Lambs), come across as awkward attempts at hipster posturing. Forgetting for a moment how he would know about them, would Alvin be saying these things because he thought they were funny? And would modern teens even find them at all amusing?
The chief difference between this movie and its predecessor is the former’s unfussy confidence, though. Whereas the first film was full of pat set-ups and unimaginative staging, director Betty Thomas provides the brightly colored sequel with more zip and focus. Chase sequences or other action scenes are shorter, and more tightly choreographed. She’s aided, too, by a story that takes aim at low-hanging fruit. Pared down and mostly stripped free of clumsy attempts at exposition and emotional string-pulling, this sequel presents a story with a simple end point: a $25,000 competition to save a high school’s music program, and possibly restore the chipmunks’ luster. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 89 minutes)
Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmesarrives with the bristling, cocksure, indefatigable force of a film that’s been preordained as a franchise-in-waiting. And why not, really? This film has certain attractive “elements” — a rejuvenated, box office-minted Robert Downey, Jr., the hook of a conceit that toys with modernity while also haphazardly exploiting its period piece roots — and style to boot, in the form of burnished, photo-snap action. And for distributor Warner Bros., a fan of tentpole releases to be sure, those factors were enough to get all the checks signed during production. They’re just hoping audiences will feel the same way.
For the bulk of its running time, Sherlock Holmes breezily swings along on the charisma of its lead, and the unlikely but very real appeal of the movie as a sort of costumed “bro-mance.” The fact that his friend and partner in sleuthing, Dr. John Watson (Jude Law), is getting engaged and moving out of his residence has Holmes alternating between fits and depression. But when an aristocratic peddler of dark arts mayhem, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), escapes his sentenced hanging and sets about on a course of murderous, political power-consolidating mayhem, Holmes is able to lure his colleague back into the fold in an attempt to validate logic and reason over magic, and again bring Blackwood to justice. Adding additional (if nominal) intrigue to the proceedings is the fact that Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), an old flame of Holmes and spitfire in her own right, is somehow tied up in the affair, tasked by a mysterious boss with hiring Holmes to track down a piece of unusual information.
As ex-lovers, Downey and McAdams evince no great romantic chemistry, but then again the movie isn’t really concerned with sincere libidinal heat, just the added layer of air-quote tension and the ready-made excuse for double entendres that it provides to the story. If anything, this film is basically the big-budget action-adventure version of Superbad, a loose-limbed flick in which coy, often partially deflected masculine crisis and uncertainty drive and inform one’s affection for what’s unfolding on screen as much as the actual plot. Downey’s Holmes is a rakish, irascible Lothario, and he delivers his lines in snappish fashion, sometimes like he’s running sides with an assistant while simultaneously playing a game of ping-pong. Law is a suitable foil, exasperated and dapper, but not to a degree that it upstages Downey’s performance.
The action, shot by Ritchie with a punchy, characteristic flair for the over-the-top, is wildly improbable; one doesn’t really feel the characters, no matter their slippery intellect and lithe frames, are capable of either taking or dispensing some of the physical beatings and action that the story demands. A lot of the dialogue is also silly (Blackwood intones to Holmes that they bound together on “a journey that will twist the very fabric of nature,” which is liable to make one either titter, or convulse with pained memories of 2002’s The Time Machine… possibly both), and the villain sketched so perfunctorily that one will wonder why he’s going to all this trouble when he could be living a much easier, and equally villainous, life.
Downey, chiefly, and also Law, to a certain degree, make Sherlock Holmes certainly tolerable throughout, and even quite fun in a few good stretches. At the end, however, the movie threatens to teeter over into complete nonsense. A scaffolding-set sword fight finale elicits no particular tension, or rooting interest, which is never a good sign for your big emotional pay-off. Truth be told, I can already feel this film receding into the recesses of my mind; there isn’t anything particularly vital or lasting about Sherlock Holmes. That’s far from the most damning criticism, I realize. This is pop Hollywood filmmaking, but not something anyone should feel the need to think about, or see more than once. That it reportedly already has a sequel in the works says a lot about the modern Hollywood machine. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 129 minutes)
Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie offers up a sizably portioned helping of adolescent-friendly supernatural adventure as it tracks the Russos, the family of wizards-in-training at the center of the same-named Disney Channel small screen hit, on a quest full of heart-stopping action and magical mishaps. While on an island vacation, Alex (Selena Gomez) accidentally casts a spell that threatens her family’s existence. Young Max (Jake T. Austin) tries to keep his parents (Maria Canals-Barrera and David DeLuise, son of Dom) together while Alex and older brother Justin (David Henrie) use every trick they know as they try to search out the legendary “Stone of Dreams” in order to reverse the spell and save their family.
Running just over 95 minutes, Wizards of Waverly Place doesn’t put a spin that’s new or particularly interesting — for older, more sophisticated audiences — on the old magic-gone-awry tropes of its narrative conceit. Yet neither does the movie overstay its welcome. Well-timed and warmly acted, its mild slapstick comedy, rib-nudging rejoinders and inoffensive sibling bickering and conflict resoultion are all whipped up into a colorful melange, and the movie has the additional benefit of not trying to reach outside its comfort zone (read: budget) with respect to the special effects. Tween fans of the TV show will certainly spark to this title, and for those unfamiliar but in the same proper demographic who get sucked into watching it, they’ll find it a solid introduction to the characters and same themes explored in the show. Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie arrives on DVD packaged with a color-changing wish stone keychain clip included on the release, which is in a vacuum-sealed cardboard cover. Presented in 1.78:1 widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, the movie comes with English, Spanish and French language audio tracks in Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound, as well as optional French and Spanish subtitles. Bonus features include a clutch of extended scenes, as well as a wide variety of on-location interview snippets that make up a solid behind-the-scenes featurette, covering the film’s special effects, stunt work, props, animal actors and more. Director Lev Spiro, special effects coordinator Craig Tex Barnett, visual effects supervisor Dan Schmit and other off-camera talent all get face time here, but not too wonkish in their descriptions to bore kids, the more naturally inquisitive of whom will spark to these moviemaking explanations. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B (Disc)
As I’d noted several times previously in writing about both Murphy and her films — most recently in the new-to-DVD Deadline, not one of her better vehicles — she undeniably possessed a certain crazy-girl appeal, that sense that you were in the company of someone who could show you immense highs, but also perhaps leave you broken. On a certain level guys like women like that, even if only from afar, because they remind us of the unattainable girls from high school who moved with a deadly, unearned confidence, and seemed to exist on some other social stratum.
How quote-unquote damaged was Murphy, by life, illicit substances or some combination thereof? I’m not sure. There were rumors here and there, and obviously the coming days will provide a clearer picture of her medical history, for those interested in diving into the details. Without getting into specifics, though, it was clear from fairly early on that Murphy was someone who felt deeply, offscreen as much as on. If there are screen personalities who essentially play only slight variations of themselves (and that wasn’t Murphy), there are also actors and actresses whose greatest gift is a direct line to the telepathic — their own private connection to a deep reservoir of swirling, intense emotion, which they are then free to tap into and pour into whatever roles they tackle. They paint in bold, insistent, impulsive strokes, not the mannered accoutrements of accents or other learned pieces of the craft of acting.
That was Murphy, to me. With her large, expressive eyes, she could do manic and fearful with ease (e.g., Don’t Say a Word), but she was a pip with comedy (e.g., Clueless) and also had a gift at slipping into melancholic quiet (e.g., 8 Mile) in a manner that silently telegraphed a character’s unspoken hopes, fears and regrets. I will say this definitively, too: it’s a shame that Murphy’s starring role in a Janis Joplin biopic never went off. That, I believe, would have been a very solid vehicle for her talents, so adept was she — heartbreakingly, it turns out — at channeling doomed and troubled women.
One wouldn’t have necessarily been able to predict it based on his rakish, smirky turn in Barry Levinson’s 1999 coming-of-age dramedy Liberty Heights, but courtesy of roles in films like 3:10 to Yuma, Hostage, Alpha Dog and 30 Days of Night, Ben Foster has evolved into his generation’s go-to guy for brooding, disarmingly packaged menace. Meeting him in person, it’s easy to see why; though he stands only 5”’9″, he has the same piercing eyes, and not much of a need to please. Foster, who just recently moved to New York, has a well-chronicled affinity for meditation and a perhaps less well known appreciation of tattoos, which he characterizes as “body mapping.”
He also has a moving new film, Oren Moverman’s The Messenger, underscores the fact that the psychological tolls of war don’t expire at our borders. On loan from filming a remake of Charles Bronson’s The Mechanic, which he describes as “good, old-fashioned assassin entertainment,” opposite Jason Statham, Foster is an uncommonly thoughtful and intelligent, if reserved, interview subject. We chatted at a Beverly Hills hotel suite recently; for an excerpt of the conversation, from H Magazine, click here.
It won’t be for this pleasant bauble — and there’s no way to tell exactly for what it will be, given his varied filmography — but Richard Linklaterwill eventually win an Academy Award. The Texas-born indie auteur brings to bear his characteristically spry touch to yet another very different sort of movie than he’s done before in the lively Me and Orson Welles, a romantic coming-of-age story set in 1937.
Rooted in real theatrical history, the film is about a fictionalized teenage actor, Richard (Zac Efron, a bit out of his element), who lucks into a small role in a re-imagined Julius Caesar being helmed by a brilliant, impetuous young director named Orson Welles at his newly founded Mercury Theater in New York City. The rollercoaster week leading up to opening night has the charismatic but frequently cruel Welles (an amazing Christian McKay, above) staking his career on this risky production, while Richard mixes with everyone from starlets to stagehands in behind-the-scenes adventures bound to change him. Caught up in an unlikely love triangle is Sonja (Claire Danes), the unapologetically ambitious assistant to Welles whom Richard tries to woo.
The fast-moving screenplay is adapted from Robert Kaplow’s meticulously researched novel of the same name, and it offers up plenty of towel-snapping dialogue and amusing details, like Welles using ambulances as taxis, just because they’re able to navigate through traffic faster. Meanwhile, McKay nails Welles’ sonorous voice, as well as his seductive charm, humor and ego. When he first appears on screen you’re struck by the feeling that he’s too actively playing a capital-C character, in forward-leaning fashion. Then one comes to slowly realize, well… that’s exactly what Welles was doing, for much of his public career, and certainly here, in his early days. So that’s part of the genius of McKay’s performance — the sense that he’s an actor playing another actor who’s playing always another character, and then sometimes also a role in his own staged play. The only nagging problem is that the film’s Richard-Sonja romance utterly doesn’t play. Much more intriguing is Zoe Kazan as an aspirant writer whom Richard haphazardly befriends; you wish she’d wander into the Mercury Theater and boot Danes’ character to the side.
Welles at one point delivers a soliloquy in which he comments on someone’s “bone-deep understanding that existence is so without meaning that one must reinvent self,” and while Linklater’s canon is anything but nihilistic, his credits are so diverse as to seemingly underscore an offscreen appreciation of that sentiment. (Freestyle Releasing, PG-13, 113 minutes)
Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel forms the basis of fashion designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut, an exactingly constructed, mostly well acted period piece drama about a broken man who, in the wake of his longtime companion’s death, can scarcely see any sort of future on the horizon.
Set in Los Angeles in 1962, A Single Man, centers on George Falconer (Colin Firth), a 52-year-old British college professor struggling to find meaning after the sudden death of his boyfriend Jim (Matthew Goode). George is consoled, if rather brusquely, by his closest friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a 48-year-old Tanqueray depository wrestling with her own questions about the future. As George ponders suicide, a young student coming to terms with his own true nature, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), feels in George a kindred spirit, and makes it a point to reach out to him.
On a certain level, A Single Man seems to posit that isolation and loneliness is an inescapable and inherent part of the human condition, which makes the performance of Hoult (About a Boy), who communicates in batted eyelashes and seems a little too cutesy-pinup to pull off the necessary emotional maturity required in his increasing flirtations with his teacher, additionally problematic. Kenny comes across as an idealized angel ripped from the pages of some Calvin Klein ad, and not someone that George would be interested in, particularly given what we see of his relationship with Jim.
There’s also a bit of fussiness in some of the art direction, and by the time the third symbolic underwater sequence comes along, it feels a bit much. Still, Firth is absolutely excellent, and deserving of a Best Actor Oscar nomination, which should be a mortal lock. In almost single-handed fashion, he makes A Single Man worth seeing. (The Weinstein Company, R, 99 minutes)
It’s rare, the film so perfectly bittersweet that it can put a smile on your face even as it simultaneously puts a lump in your throat or a pang of wincing recognition on your face, but that’s the case with Up in the Air, which exists at the perfect intersection of snappy fun, modulated gravity and sociocultural relevance, in addition to being anchored by three of the year’s best performances. A terrifically funny and poignant work that arrives at all its emotional moments honestly, director Jason Reitman’s third film is a shoo-in for a Best Picture nod and many other Oscar nominations, and should solidify his position in the industry as one of the most sought after young directors working today.
Up in the Air stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a corporate hatchetman who flies from city to city handling layoffs for other companies. Ryan loves his road-warrior business life, and the massive accumulation of airline miles and hotel rewards program points that it affords him. When his company downsizes its travel budget and makes plans to switch over to a computer conference-call firing system, however, Ryan is forced to take upstart protégé Natalie (Anna Kendrick) under his wing and on the road for one last demonstration of how things work in person, just after he’s seemingly met his perfect mirror-image love match, Alex (Vera Farmiga). Also looming on the horizon for Ryan is the wedding of his younger sister Julie (Melanie Lynskey), to a groom (Danny McBride) he has yet to meet.
Up in the Air most readily recalls two Alexander Payne films, Sideways and Election, in that those movies dealt with, broadlyspeaking, male midlife crises in love and lust, as well as the at-odds interaction of a teacher and pupil. The barbed, sometimes dark humor that marked Reitman’s previous work in Thank You For Smoking and Juno is also seeded into the movie, and the banter, adapted by Reitman and Sheldon Turner from Thumbsucker author Walter Kim’s novel, is top notch. Clooney, Farmiga and Kendrick (the latter so fantastic in the underrated Rocket Science) make for a wildly appealing trio, and the film as a whole leaves marks both light and dark. Book your ticket now. (Paramount, R, 109 minutes)
With two of his last three narrative movies setting records for production costs, director James Cameron has, professionally speaking, danced around the edges of volcanoes for most of his career. It’s just where he seems most at home. Apart from a pair of deep-sea documentaries, though, Cameron, now 55, hasn’t seen release of a theatrical film since 1997’s Titanic. The highly anticipated Avatar represents his play at return to king-of-the-world status, and it bears all the trademarks of a Cameron production — a reported price tag of around $230 million, and a brawny storyline that again pushes the boundaries of special effects and myriad other big screen technologies.
Like Cameron, Avatar is a rare breed. “With this film we havesimultaneously a blessing and a curse, which is the uniqueness of it,”says producer Jon Landau, just back from a quick jaunt to Hong Kong.“We don’t have a sequel to Batman or something based on anotherunderlying intellectual property. So the challenge is how to tellpeople in 30-second sound or video bites what this movie is about.”
Landau has somewhat of a unique perspective on Cameron, having workedwith him on Titanic, and having a relationship that dates back evenfarther than that. To him, Cameron’s relative absence from the bigscreen doesn’t represent any trepidation at following up Titanic‘sunparalleled success. “Jim has never been the most prolific ofdirectors,” says Landau. “What it takes for Jim to jump into a movie isa burning passion, because when he does jump in it’s 110 percent ofhimself, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Jim had that passion for theexploration that he did with both Aliens of the Deep and Ghosts of theAbyss, and no movie sparked that in him in that term. There was stuffwe put into development, but it never fully ignited that flame.” For the full read, from H Magazine, click here.
Well… so there’s that pesky fact above, fiscal conservatives who’ve suddenly found Jesus. Plus a couple credit card wars, and a $1.2 trillion prescription drug entitlement that ranks up there with the best oral sex ever delivered unto Big Pharma. But this Obama guy? I don’t like the cut of his jib. Or the color of his skin. Whaaaat? I mean… um, the content of his “socialist ideas.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Leonard Maltin has up some cool thoughts and pictures from behind the velvet rope of Monday’s hand- and footprint enshrinement of Robert Downey, Jr. at Grauman’s Chinese Theater — the 200th such induction to take place in the famous theater’s Hollywood Boulevard forecourt since 1927. And now I’ll likely be going dark for a while, trying to figure out how to cram 96 hours of work and other commitments into about 32 waking hours.
A piece of melodramatic agitprop meant to alarm citizens and bolster post-war nationalistic pride, The House on 92nd Street is one of those square-jawed mid-century movies that serves as a recruiting tool for the FBI. It’s not for nothing, after all, that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover put his weight behind this film, working with producer Louis de Rochemont to craft a stolid spy thriller in which the investigative might and technique of the federal crime-fighting agency are held up for celebration.
Though directed by Henry Hathaway, de Rochemont was the driving creative force behind the 1946 film, which claims to work in some documentary surveillance footage, and also be safe for release only “after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.” (The movie was also originally titled Now It Can Be Told, in a further bit of exaggeration.) After about eight minutes of flag-waving backstory narration, the story finally kicks in, centering around William Dietrich (William Eythe), a recent college graduate who gets cruised in laughably direct fashion by German contacts, reports it to authorities, and then becomes a double agent in order to infiltrate a cell of German spies gathering information about the construction of the atom bomb. Lloyd Nolan plays his contact, FBI counter-terrorist chief George Briggs, and Swedish-born Signe Hasso portrays Elsa Gebhardt, his main German preceptor.
There’s a bit of nice detail — and certainly something that would have played as new and entertaining at the time of release — in the manner in which spy instructions are passed to and fro, in microfiche stored in watch faces. Damningly, however, there’s not enough of an injection of a subjective point-of-view to make an audience member feel caught up in this narrative. The movie is concerned, chiefly and probably secondarily as well, with showcasing air-quote elements, like the FBI’s massive records warehouse (approved for shooting by Hoover), as well as state-of-the-art American technique, like steaming open letters and subtly changing the directives of intercepted communiques. All drama or skulking intrigue is drained, chucked out the window, given the heave-ho.
Housed in a regular plastic Amray case with a snap-in spindle, The House on 92nd Street comes to DVD presented in 1.33:1 full frame, with English and Spanish language mono audio tracks and an English language stereo track. (Optional subtitles in each language are also available.) Apart from a scant photo gallery and small recreation of the movie’s press booklet, its only substantive bonus feature is at least a superlative one — an in-depth audio commentary track with noir historian Eddie Muller, who shines a light on some of the movie’s claims of self-importance, noting that while true it was based in fact, its story was mostly taken from the Hans Ritter and Frederick Duquesne spy rings that, while serious, were fairly mundane, and did not involve any atomic bomb secrets. Muller also shows great amusement in rightly pointing out that the parade of freshly scrubbed FBI workers who served as background extras in the movie (men and women alike) all evidence no discernible ethnicity. That — along with Hoover’s insistence that they “switch” the biography of the real mole hero in the Duquesne case, from a German to a natural-born American with parents of German ancestry — provide a compelling snapshot of what The House on 92nd Street is really all about. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Since Fox’s embargo for Avatar is already shattered, maybe I’ll go ahead and post a review this weekend, prior to its December 18 opening. Actually, who am I kidding, with the volume of work I have? It’ll probably be early next week before I get around to it, sadly.
Coming on the heels of the superlative Food, Inc., awkwardly titled fellow documentary Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution makes a similar case for biodiversity and sustainable, safe food production, using a locally sourced children’s diet program in France as the prism through which to cast this issue as the most important moral health struggle of our time.
The movie opens in a small village in France, where the town’s mayor has decided to alter the school’s lunch menu so it is entirely organic and locally grown. Interspersed with various interviews with these children, their parents and teachers, French health care workers, farmers, elected
officials, scientists, researchers and the victims of food-borne illnesses is footage from a November 2006 ARTAC conference on occupational and environmental causes of cancer. While common ground on a multinational or even regional level is sometimes difficult to come by given the competing interests of agribusiness and public health, the detailed abuses of the food industry show that the same phenomena observed in Food, Inc. aren’t entirely uniquely American after all. Oscar-winning composer Gabriel Yared, meanwhile, contributes some original music that hammers home the encroaching menace the filmmakers mean you to feel.
Director Jean-Paul Jaud seeds his movie with some ominous facts (sperm counts are down 50 percent over the last five decades, and European cancer rates in children have risen an average of 1.1 percent per year for the past 30 years), but doesn’t always properly source them right away. He also has a somewhat hamfisted editorial instinct, for the manner in which he juxtaposes personal stories and talking head conference footage is sometimes jarring. Almost despite himself, though, Jaud’s film succeeds in making a convincing case that for the first time ever, an entire generation of the world’s children are growing up less healthy than their parents. He also tries to lay out practical solutions that can help reduce cancer and infertility rates, as well as other illnesses linked
to environmental factors. In this manner the movie is practical, and not a jeremiad. While still a bit clunky, owing to both its subtitles and awkward construction, Food Beware is still at the very least food for thought — part of an emerging scientific consensus about the damage we’re doing to our Earth and, just a bit more slowly, ourselves.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Food Beware comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, sadly bereft of supplemental bonus material. It has a static menu screen, and is divided into 11 chapters. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) D (Disc)
A sensitively told remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s same-named 1991 Italian film, Everybody’s Fine slots in respectably as the holiday season’s obligatory commercial drama of familial reconciliation, something for casual fans of About Schmidt and The Bucket List.
Robert De Niro
stars as Frank Goode, a blue-collar retiree and recent widower from a
small, south-central suburban New York burgh who, in the wake of a
sudden rash of visit cancellations by his adult children, embarks on an
impromptu road trip to individually reconnect with his four kids. Repeatedly
unable to link up with his youngest son Robert, a painter, Frank then
cycles through advertising executive Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and her
family, orchestral percussionist Robert (Sam Rockwell) and Las Vegas
dancer Rosie (Drew Barrymore), slowly coming to realize there may be
significant elements of their lives to which he is not privy.
A straightforward description of the movie’s plot is fairly pedestrian, and there exists the possibility of it slipping into something much more maudlin in the wrong hands. But the material benefits greatly from the elevating direction of adapter Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine), who imbues the film with the rootedness of smart, small details (Frank’s brown Member’s Only jacket and 35mm camera, a wine stocker’s cheery ignorance about product) and winning supporting characters. If the metaphorical subtext is sometimes writ large, one doesn’t hold it against the film too heartily.
Mostly vacuumed free of agitation, De Niro also gets a chance to work in a more purely reactive mode than he has in a long time. There’s a quiet patina of regret to the proceedings, particularly in a notable, reflective conversation with Rosie, and a more mannered dream sequence in which Frank queries his children about their dissembling as he remembers them — as shifty elementary school age kids. The themes of empty nest parental disconnection totally mark this as a boomer-specific story, but Everybody’s Fine is also about the secrets we keep in families — sometimes unwittingly at first, to safeguard delicate or overly fretful loved ones — that then snowball into bigger and bigger deals. If that’s not emotionally resonant fodder for the holiday season, I don’t know what is. (Miramax, PG-13, 100 minutes)
I tried, I really did. After hearing many things about Charlene Yi’s twee, Sundance-minted, is-she-really-going-out-with-him? valentine to costar Michael Cera (and not all of them good), I dove in with an open heart and mind. Alas, part documentary, part mockumentary, part traditional romantic comedy and part grad student research project, Paper Heart tilts over into insufferable cuteness fairly early on, and never really regains its footing.
In the movie, deadpan comedienne/actress/emo pin-up Yi does not believe in love. Or so she says. At the very least, she doesn’t believe in fairy-tale love or the Hollywood mythology of love; her own experiences have turned her into a modern day skeptic, so she sets out on a road trip to make a documentary about America’s attitudes toward affection, sex, romance and all that stuff. Melding together different elements of storytelling, reality and fantasy, Paper Heart is partially that project, and partially its own cheeky commentary on cinematic romantic virtue.
Co-written by Yi and director Nicholas Jasenovec (portrayed in the movie by Jake Johnson… are you following?), Paper Heart has an inquisitive spirit, that’s for sure. So: points there. But it gets so up inside its own head, and is so gratified with its own cheeky inventiveness, that it smothers what sense of burgeoning discovery and sunny identification one might have with it. There is a reason that the tritest expressions can soar when sung, just as there is a reason that people locate satisfaction and emotional catharsis in hokey cinematic expressions of love. Paper Heart isn’t interested in exploring this dichotomy, however; it just wants to cleverly spitball and slag, from a distance. So it becomes tedious (even at 88 minutes), and a slave to its own winsome arthouse instincts.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Paper Heart comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. DVD bonus features include a making-of featurette, live musical performances by Yi, a music video of “Heaven” featuring Yi and Cera, plus a clutch of interviews and deleted scenes. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B- (Disc)
The name may scream down-market drivel, but Evilution stands as a credible low-budget, mixed-genre DVD entry, a horror-infused tale of mutant military engineering that metes out appropriate levels of gore and thrill while also rooting its story in actual characters.
The plot? On the battlefields of Iraq, a microscopic alien life form has been discovered that has the ability to both possess the living and resurrect the dead. The drawback? Rampaging, zombie-type rage. With visions of practical battlefield application dancing in their minds, however, the military works to genetically alter the creature. But the alien fights back, turning soldier against soldier. Back Stateside, scientist Darren Hall (Eric Peter-Kaiser) goes AWOL with the last pure specimen of the alien, holing up in an old hospital turned rundown apartment complex to continue his off-the-book experiments and try to learn the secrets of life.
There, Darren crosses paths with a group of thinly sketched Latino gang-bangers, led by Curtis, aka Random (Noel Gugliemi, showing rich evidence of his Masters Degree in Scowling), but also potential love interest Maddie Gilbert (Sandra Ramirez), who’s thankfully much easier on the eyes. The military is slowly closing in on Darren. But when Curtis gets shot and Darren treats his wound, it sets in motion a chain of events in which infected tenants attack their unsuspecting peers, imperiling Darren and a small group of survivors.
Evilution is the directorial debut of Chris Conlee, an industry veteran with a hearty list of editing credits. His steady sense of story order generally serves this narrative well, whether in the brisk effectiveness of the movie’s square-jawed military sequences, or in intercutting an otherwise somewhat out-of-place love scene with a desperate junkie unknowingly shooting up with Darren’s alien-infected virus (sex and death, don’tcha know). In the military-science-run-amok department, there’s a bit of thematic
overlap with fellow (albeit higher-profile) straight-to-video flick The Devil’s Tomb, which is ironic considering that Conlee served as editor on that picture. This isn’t reinventing the wheel, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s rendered with more attention to detail than many like-minded flicks.
A fairly inauspicious opening (your stock Biblical quote, a sequence ending with an even more familiar bloody handprint smear across a glass windowpane) thankfully soon gives way to a bit more nuance and shading. It’s obvious that the available space which serves as much of the film’s setting (an abandoned hospital) is tweaked and dressed at times to fairly awkward degrees. But in addition to fairly well modulated lead performances, what most helps elevate and separate Evilution from much of its genre brethren is its snatches of superlative cinematography. While true that the film is shot in generic close-up to a dispiriting degree, cinematographer Mathew Rudenberg’s work is certainly a nice upgrade over typical horror-thriller fare, with a smartly chosen color palette and nice capture of streaming sunlight.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Evilution comes to DVD presented in anamorphic widescreen, split into 16 chapters, with a 5.1 surround sound audio mix. A two-minute theatrical trailer is included, but the main bonus features consist of a feature-length audio commentary track with Conlee, Peter-Kaiser and Ramirez, as well as a surprisingly comprehensive 27-minute making-of featurette, in which Conlee talks of his professional relationship with writer-producer Brian Patrick O’Toole, and how he came to be drafted into the movie. Interview snippets with a wide variety of cast and crew also provide a nice behind-the-scenes snapshot of budget filmmaking. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B (Disc)
Adapted by Joe Penhall from Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, desperately bleak and heartbreaking novel of the same name, The Road is a post-apocalyptic tale of the survival of an unnamed father (Viggo Mortensen) and his 11-year-old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they journey toward the coast across a barren United States which has been destroyed by a mysterious cataclysm.
Unfolding against this unforgiving, elemental backdrop in which survivors are pushed to the best and worst (but mostly just the worst) of what humans are capable of, The Road is essentially about a parent’s calcified hardheartedness in a vicious, nasty world, when circumstances prevent any “bright side” reading, and a child is introduced to intolerable cruelty far too young. The problem is that, as directed by John Hillcoat, the film is hopelessly muddled narratively, with one foot trapped in a more conventional American Hollywood narrative and the other rooted in a more esoteric European arthouse aesthetic.
Hillcoat and Penhall never commit in nervy enough fashion to a structure that would make audiences feel the same doomed isolation of the movie’s protagonists — snippets of solemn voiceover from Mortensen never particularly coalesce in any meaningful way — while leaden flashbacks to Mortensen’s post-incident life with his increasingly frantic and estranged wife (Charlize Theron) add precious little to the unfolding narrative, and various run-ins with drooling hillbilly cannibals give off the vibe of a slightly tony zombie movie.
Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe delivers a gorgeously depressive backdrop that allows one to sink into the movie and experience it as a sauna of hopelessness, but the more one reflects upon the film following its conclusion, the dimmer its achievements and hold become. Mortensen gives a committed performance, but Smit-McPhee lacks the acting chops to register as a stand-in for the scared child in all of us. The end result is basically, in the crudest shorthand possible, despair porn, a la Requiem for a Dream, only without any legitimately earned cathartic emotional release. Who knows, that may be how the world really ends. But most moviegoers will clearly prefer Roland Emmerich’s doomsday visions. (The Weinstein Company, R, 111 minutes)
Interesting news from India, where Helen Mirren is in talks to reprise her role as Queen Elizabeth II from The Queen, and Tom Hanks and Tommy Lee Jones might be cast as Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, respectively, in director Krishna Shah’s sprawling, two-part biopic of assassinated Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi. The starring role in the $60-million-plus production will be played by Madhuri Dixit.
