Self-styled “spoof” filmmakers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer hit
rock bottom in the creatively bankrupt Disaster Movie, a poorly staged,
entirely laugh-free big screen exercise that, despite its name, is not
really a genre spoof at all, but rather merely an excuse to (attempt
to) poke fun at Hollywood movies from this calendar year. Even by the
most forgiving standards of clamorous adolescent distraction, this film
fails hugely. Not screened for critics prior to its release, Disaster
Movie opened in seventh place this weekend, grossing an estimated
$6.2 million.

After a dream sequence in which the movie’s release date is (perhaps somewhat appropriately) established as the end of the world, a birthday party brings Will (Matt Lanter, above), who is fresh from a break-up with girlfriend Amy (Vanessa Minnillo), together with his best friend Calvin (Gary Johnson) and Calvin’s girlfriend Lisa (Kim Kardashian), among others. When disaster strikes, a group sets out to rescue Amy, who is trapped across town. They encounter all sorts of weird characters along the way, with both cows and meteors occasionally raining down around them.

The originating writers on 2000’s Scary Movie, Friedberg and Seltzer aren’t parodists, they’re juvenile recyclers. This would be fine if they were slick packagers of such needling, but their touch with structure is so inartful as to leave one constantly imagining better, more amusing interactions and juxtapositions. Date Movie at least had a story that made some nominal sense. Here characters exist and move from scene to scene solely to engage in another sketch-comedy bit.

One accepts the litany of “spoof” characters with the conceit of the movie, but it’s problematic for the undertaking that two of them (Juno, portrayed by Crista Flanagan, and a demented princess straight from Enchanted, played by Nicole Parker) are afforded such prominent roles, alongside the “regular” characters. This undercuts any sense of intended identification, when one outlandish character is confronted by another outlandish character. Similarly, battle sequences with animals (Kung Fu Panda, Alvin and the Chipmunks) are staged with no nod or wink of acknowledgment regarding the characters’ animated or CGI roots, and there’s no comedic pay-off or explanation of the disaster element.

Disaster Movie is lazy writing, through and through. The two moments approximating any sort of energetic punch are musical numbers that send up High School Musical and Step Up 2 the Streets. The early inclusion of a joke seemingly at the expense of Heath Ledger’s fatal overdose on Ambien, meanwhile, is both tasteless and tonally jarring, as it’s the sole moment of true edginess present in the entire film.

Of the actors, only Nicole Parker acquits herself, bringing a pinch of chirpy insanity to her Princess, and also offering up impressions of singers Amy Winehouse and Jessica Simpson. Ike Barinholtz is the production’s jack-of-all-trades, playing no fewer than seven characters. Production values are noticeably meager, in costumes, special effects and background detail. The latter shortcoming is particularly instrumental in the movie coming across as flat and uninspired. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 87 minutes)

After a winding, checkered career, the pseudonymous novels of Jack Ketchum have provided the blueprint for a couple solid screen adaptations in recent years, including The Lost and The Girl Next Door. The latest, and best, is Red, a layered, well acted tale of escalating revenge, a Walking Tall-type scenario filtered through the rubric of quiet atonement and reparation.

A widowed Korean War vet, Avery Ludlow (Brian Cox) lives alone in a dusty rural town, where he runs the local hardware store. Avery’s best friend and faithful companion is a 14-year-old ginger-haired dog. One day, an idyllic fishing trip at a remote spot in the woods is interrupted by three teenagers, and a senseless act of cruelty: at point-blank range, Red is shot and killed. Devastated, Avery sets out to find the boys, and quickly tracks down ringleader Danny (Noel Fisher, resembling a younger version of Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong), a hotheaded punk whose redneck-made-good father, Michael McCormack (Tom Sizemore), has enabled his misbehavior over the years by covering up for him and buying his way out of his mistakes.

Wanting only to extract an apology and some promise of private punishment, Avery is stonewalled. When Michael then uses his influence to block Avery’s legal recourse, Avery responds to each grievance with further legitimate attempts to mete out justice in modulated fashion. Eventually things come to a head, however, with upward-spiraling consequences for all involved.

There’s some awkwardness at blending into the narrative a reporter, Carrie Donnel (Kim Dickens), who wants to use her pulpit to play advocate to Avery’s story, but co-directors Lucky McKee (May) and Trygve Allister Diesen succeed in transposing the authenticity of setting from the novel, which further roots the movie in convincing fashion. Red feels sure-footed, properly scaled and inherently knowable; all its interactions and plot advancements make sense, which is a bit of a rarity in modern thrillers. Its modest budget requires some off-screen concessions for bigger moments in the story (including an act of arson and a car crash), though for the most part this works OK — the notable exception being some climactic gunplay that’s confusingly staged, and shot in the dark woods.

Red is at its best in the slow-building set-up that finds Avery doing the legwork of expiation. The killing of his beloved dog, while it carries its own significant emotional weight, is also a powerful symbol for the injustices and inequities of life, as we’re later reminded by a dark monologue about his tragic past. Brian Cox is just the right sort of quiet, steadying presence for this movie. His Avery Ludlow, who could be a distant cousin of Tommy Lee Jones‘ lawman from No Country For Old Men, is a quintessentially American character — decent, stoic and perhaps privately bewildered by wanton malice, but unbowed in the pursuit of justice. (Magnolia, R, 96 minutes)

Anna Faris is a rarity in young Hollywood — a fairly known
commodity and proven performer to boot, but still an undervalued stock.
Collectively, the four Scary Movie films in which she has starred have taken in over $430 million domestically, and Faris’ supporting turns in movies like The Hot Chick, Waiting, Just Friends, My Super Ex-Girlfriend and, of course, Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation have shown her to be an inspired comic performer, equally adept at blank-faced satire, unhinged farce and physical slapstick.

Thus far true breakout stardom has eluded Faris (consigned to a token, single-theater release, Gregg Araki’s showcase vehicle Smiley Face failed to do the trick), but the new movie The House Bunny, along with costarring roles with Topher Grace and Seth Rogen in forthcoming films, may help finally do the trick.

The
first film from executive producer Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison
production company to fully give itself over to a mostly female ensemble, The House Bunny
is an utterly predictable and formulaic comedy given a huge kick in the
keester courtesy of its effervescent star. The movie’s
inner-beauty/empowerment arc is consignment-shop thin, and handled with
little élan by Fred Wolf, a former Saturday Night Live writer and Team Sandler veteran who stumbled through his directorial debut in the form of this year’s quietly dumped Strange Wilderness. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter, because every moment Faris is on screen is a moment in which something delightful could happen, and that’s as good a reason as any these days to go to the movies.

Faris
(above left, with Emma Stone) stars as Shelley Darlingson, a third-tier
Playboy bunny (she of the “Girls of the Midwest” and “Girls with GEDs”
pictorials) who aspires to print centerfold-dom (“It’s like the highest honor — it says, ‘I’m naked in the middle of a magazine… unfold me’”).
When a misunderstanding facilitated by a conniving housemate leads to
Shelley getting the boot from the Playboy mansion, though, she sets out
on her own, and stumbles across a small college with a sorority house
in need. Unless they can sign a robust new pledge class, the seven
socially clueless women of Zeta Alpha Zeta will lose their house. Needing a place to stay, Shelley talks her way into becoming their new house mother, and a cracked, colorful alliance is formed.
Throw in a few token love interests (including Colin Hanks for Faris’
character) and some scheming counterparts — in the form of the girls
of Phi Iota Mu, led by Sarah Wright — and one doesn’t need their own
GED to figure out where this is all headed.

Owing to the fact that it’s penned by the same screenwriters, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, The House Bunny at times feels like a tailor-made companion piece to 2001’s Legally Blonde, both in color (pink, everywhere!) and bouncy tone. Though there are moderately well integrated cameos from Hugh Hefner and his real-life Aryan princesses,
there are also more than a few narrative bumps along the way, and gears
sometimes grind for a scene or two when characters are forced to more
nakedly advance the story. (It’s best, for instance, not to think about
the logistics of Shelley teaching the gals all about what boys like,
when American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee plays a very
pregnant coed.) Speaking generally, though, there’s actually some
amusement to the gender inversion of Greek-clash college flick clichés,
and the value of the ditzy quips (“Eyes are like the nipples of the face,” advises Shelley) and some other banter are certainly above average.

Faris’ breathy essence, though, is both the engine and the gasoline that makes this movie run.
(She also nabs a producer credit, her first.) With her in the driver’s
seat, the sturdy Oldsmobile-feel of this plot earns its racing stripes.
Faris has the savvy comic timing and inherent appeal of a new millennial Carole Lombard or Lucille Ball,
and the casting dilemmas she presents — clearly too talented and
naturally charismatic for eye-batting girlfriend roles, and such a
force of potential personality that she would eclipse a lot of drippy
rom-com leading men, like Edward Burns or Luke Wilson — summon to mind a similar problem faced by Téa Leoni,
another under-appreciated comedic performer. Whatever its final
commercial haul, one thinks, however, that the skimpy pink bikinis on
display in The House Bunny might finally help Faris get Hollywood’s lasting attention. (Sony/Columbia, PG-13, 98 minutes)

Starring Kiefer Sutherland as an ex-police officer locked in a battle
of wills with an evil spirit that does its lashing out through
reflective surfaces, Mirrors tries to blend conventional horror with
dark, allegorically-tinged investigation, and ends up pulling off
neither to much effect. French-born filmmaker Alexandre Aja, quickly
becoming the go-to director for down-and-dirty horror remakes, hits all
the keys hard, but there’s not the tune of a smooth, unified vision
here, just the jangly, discordant tones of set-piece mayhem, as
occasionally run through an amplifier.

Not screened in advance for critics by distributor 20th Century Fox, Mirrors opened this past Friday to $11.1 million, besting Fox’s own Shutter, which was similarly held from reviewers and bowed to $10.4 million earlier this spring. The familiar face of Sutherland, the film’s narrative familial roots and relatively restrained gore (or at least the sellable appearance of such) will help separate it, internationally, from the pack of teen-centric horror films, and the movie should additionally be a tidy earner on DVD, wooing both genre aficionados and a cross section of fans of Sutherland’s small screen hit, 24.

Recovering alcoholic and NYPD vet Ben Carson (Sutherland) is still recovering from a shooting that’s left him dazed, a shell of his former self. Living with his sister Angela (Amy Smart) until he can get back on the force and convince his wife Amy (Paula Patton) into letting him rejoin her and their two kids, Ben takes a carry-over job as a nightwatchman at the Mayflower, a sprawling, burned-out department store awaiting demolition. Almost immediately, he begins seeing grotesque reflections, and experiencing intense hallucinations. When tragedy strikes, Ben becomes convinced that mirrors everywhere, not just in the Mayflower, hold menace, so he sets out to get to the bottom of the story, and protect his family. A package sent by the previous nightwatchman gives him a clue in the form of a surname, Esseker.

Aja and multi-hyphenate partner Gregory Levasseur, who is his co-writer, producer and second unit director, know how to bring multiple influences to bear on a scene. While there are some desultory jump-scares, Aja also has a keen sense of aural manipulation that hasn’t always been noticed in his previous work. Mirrors‘ baroquely ornate setting (with Romania substituting for New York) also offers the opportunity for some dusty, moody production design, though conversely some of the movie’s exteriors suffer in this regard.

Tamping down on the sort of grim sadism that made The Hills Have Eyes and High Tension mostly popular with diehard genre fans leaves Aja with less arrows in his quiver, though. In Mirrors, Aja, foremost a stylist, gets tripped up with a complicated narrative at cross purposes with his strengths as a filmmaker. He clearly yearns for the mirrors to reflect “something beyond reality,” as Ben hypothesizes, but the script’s tangled back story doesn’t reflect much thought about the particulars of its stalking menace. Why the evil chooses to target certain people (Ben, say, but not one of his security guard colleagues) is a mystery.

Lacking clear motive, the screenplay can’t convincingly sell Mirrors‘ hard-charging investigatory plot strand of the second and third acts, in which a jumble of expository clues are provided, alternately, by the deceased previous nightwatchman and a police officer colleague (Jason Flemyng) only present to feed Ben information, but neither act on it himself or ask why it’s needed. Late attempts to layer in an element of spirituality only further muddy the waters, leading to a paradoxically yawning climax that is stylistically out of step with the rest of the movie, and a gimmicky ending that means absolutely nothing, except the chance for Aja to pompously marry some dizzying orchestral music to a sweeping crane shot. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, R, 111 minutes)

I first caught Ben Stilller’s Tropic Thunder a couple months ago, at a long-lead screening where the multi-hyphenate was showing it to costar Jack Black, as well as ancillary income-boosting business-types who were being asked to view it for potential ring-tones. (Yes, seriously.) I was bowled over by the very funny performances and all-around great execution, and a second viewing hasn’t dimmed my enthusiasm. It’s the funniest laffer of the year so far, and the best, most fully realized American studio comedy since Wedding Crashers.



The film is a sprawling, inspired action comedy about a group of self-absorbed actors who set out to make the most expensive war film in Hollywood history, based on a book by a grizzled Vietnam veteran (Nick Nolte). Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an award-winning Australian bad-boy known for his intense, “method” commitment to his roles; here he’s undergone a controversial pigmentation process to play an African-American character. Lazarus is paired with both Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a comedy star whose latex-laden, lowest-common-denominator flicks (e.g., The Fatties: Fart II) fuel an illicit drug habit, and a fading, dim-bulb action star, Tugg Speedman (Stiller), whose agent (Matthew McConaughey) keeps calling to see if his TiVo has been installed in his on-location hotel suite.

Speedman has a lot riding on Tropic Thunder. He’s fresh off a bid for respectability, Simple Jack, that has crashed and burned, critically and commercially; Lazarus points out that Speedman didn’t heed the rule of “never going full retard” when searching for awards-baiting material. They’re all joined by Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), a rapper-turned-actor who peddles his own namesake brand of “Booty Juice,” and Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), a fresh-faced actor looking for his big break. As ballooning costs and out-of-control egos edge the studio toward the brink of having to shut down the movie, frustrated novice director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) decides to try to pull a slick one. Embracing the improvisational whimsies of guerrilla-style filmmaking, he leads his cast deep into the jungles of Southeast Asia for “increased realism,” where they inadvertently encounter real, drug-running bad guys who think the actors are an elite American force from the CIA or DEA. Mayhem ensues, Speedman stubbornly goes his own way (thinking everything is a brilliant ruse, and they’re still filming), and the rest of the cast is forced to eventually try to come to his rescue.

Scripted by Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, Tropic Thunder has a great main-hook concept of course, and it works decently and most immediately as a spoof on Vietnam War flicks and their many clichés. But the film is also very much — indeed, mostly — an attack on actors and their quirks, vanities and insecurities, hence the bold casting of Downey, Jr., who delivers on so many levels (when his affected, grits-and-fatback Southern drawl slips, grace notes of an Australian accent poke through) that it’s almost not to be believed. Tropic Thunder is that rare, heartening comedy that doesn’t just stop at the “first” level of the joke. Without revealing too many specifics, much to its benefit, the movie continues to make bold choices throughout — relating to fakery, sexual identity, and even death — and this wholehearted fleshing out of character and plot lets the film retain its edge, and spark.

Apart from Downey, Jr., the cast is uniformly fantastic, particularly a few relatively new additions to the usual slate of Stiller regulars — McConaughey, Baruchel and Danny McBride, who also appeared with Stiller in The Heartbreak Kid. The quips are great, too. Late in the film, when Speedman, in Hearts of Darkness-style, develops Stockholm Syndrome for his captors, and doesn’t want to leave, the intense Lazarus can empathize with his near-catatonic character devotion. “The same thing happened to me when I played Neil Armstrong in Moonshot,” he says. “They found me in an alley in Burbank trying to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere in a refrigerator box…”

Finally, the movie is also perhaps most surprisingly notable for the complete rejuvenation of Tom Cruise’s career that it provides. After the under-performance of Mission: Impossible III, the implosion of Lions for Lambs, the nutty Scientology stuff, and the whole messy split/boot-to-the-ass from Paramount, the longtime home of his production shingle, Cruise needed something to just remind audiences of the urgent, fiercely mesmeric qualities of his total screen commitment, and Tropic Thunder provides that in spades. As hairy-armed, pot-bellied, wildly foul-mouthed studio head Les Grossman, Cruise totally owns his scenes, obliterating brought-to-the-table preconceptions of him in a way that few actors with a filmography of his length effectively can in cameo form. (DreamWorks/Paramount, R, 107 minutes)

Plumber by day and student by night, Jack Brooks (Trevor Matthews, below right) is an angry, wound-up guy. He has a girlfriend he doesn’t really seem to like, a therapist whose advise he can’t fully embrace, and a scarred past that leaves him prone to irrational outbursts. When his community college professor (Robert Englund) becomes overtaken by an awakened ancient evil and is reanimated in belching, vomiting, meat-craving form, Jack finally realizes he can’t run from his Batman-esque back story (the brutal murder of his parents, though here via a nasty beast), so he grabs his socket wrench and decides to kick a little monster ass.

Lean, thinly sketched and, as the title aptly indicates, unapologetically populist in tone, Jack Brooks channels Slither and particularly early Sam Raimi, all by way of Tales From the Crypt. There isn’t much in the way of frills or production design (the movie is seemingly budgeted only for its bookends and final act), but director Jon Knautz makes up for it by keeping things moving fairly briskly. If there’s a problem, it’s that the script withholds its protagonist’s transformation for too long, and could additionally use a bit of an upgrade in swaggering archness. Otherwise, though, grading on a curve, it’s easy to glimpse the potential franchise cult appeal here; all that awaits is the hearty blurb of endorsement from Bruce Campbell. For more, from the movie’s official web site, click here. (Brookstreet, R, 85 minutes)

His life in shambles, despondent Henry Poole (Luke Wilson) buys a house in the same suburban Los Angeles neighborhood where he somewhat unhappily grew up. One of his new neighbors, the slightly nosy but well-meaning Esperanza (Babel‘s Adriana Barraza), happens upon a stain on his newly painted, outdoor stucco wall that she believes is the face of Christ, and imbued with special powers. Henry wants nothing to do with the silliness, but more interactions with those around him — including divorcée Dawn (Radha Mitchell), whose eight-year-old daughter has stopped speaking since her parents’ break-up — slowly draw him out of his insular shell.

A filmmaker with a deep music video catalogue (including Pearl Jam’s groundbreaking “Jeremy” clip), director Mark Pellington has always been a master of atmosphere and mood, most notably in The Mothman Prophecies. In Henry Poole Is Here, though, he rolls the dice on a much more personal story, and succeeds in crafting what is overall an affecting movie about emotional waywardness and quiet reflection. The target is smaller, but Pellington’s extraordinary skill at marrying artful image and emotional content help Henry Poole avoid a lot of treacly downward drag, and elevate the emotional punch of debut screenwriter Albert Torres’ script, which is enough of a blank canvas to allow one to project onto it their own feelings of forlornness. The only nagging demerit? There’s a plummy, surface quality to Wilson’s moroseness and sullenness; one thinks about the deeper reservoirs of swallowed sadness that someone like Ryan Gosling could have conveyed with this role, and how those extra pangs of despair would have provided an even greater catharsis. To visit the movie’s official site, click here. (Overture, PG, 100 minutes)

The first computer-generated animated feature conceived and produced
exclusively for a 3-D release, Fly Me to the Moon also represents one
of the strangest misfires in recent animation history. The story
of three young flies who stow away on the Apollo 11 space flight, the
movie displays an earnestly old-fashioned attitude toward outer space
and adolescent exploration in general, but is a case of mode of
delivery completely overwhelming substance.

Set in 1969, the movie centers around headstrong, naturally inquisitive fly Nat (voiced by Trevor Gagnon), and his two pals, Scooter (voiced by David Gore) and I.Q. (voiced by Philip Bolden). Inspired by his Grandpa’s oft-told tale of stowing away on Amelia Earhart’s plane during her famed transatlantic solo flight, Nat hatches an impetuous plan to go to space by hiding out on the Apollo 11, not knowing that — unlike other rocket launches they’ve witnessed — this trip will last not minutes but almost a week.

As three NASA scientists on the ground grapple with a United States senator set to de-fund the space program based on the success of this mission, Nat’s family anxiously awaits his return. An old flame of Grandpa’s then arrives to tell him that the Russians are angry over losing the insect space race, and have sent mercenary Yegor (voiced by Tim Curry) to sabotage Apollo 11’s computer plans for re-entry. Against this backdrop, crises in space and on the ground must be averted in order for Nat, Scooter and I.Q. to return home safely.

In both execution (a lisp from Scooter renders his dialogue frequently difficult to understand) and conception, Fly Me to the Moon seems awkward and poorly thought out. Flatly drawn, the main characters seem nipped from Alvin and the Chipmunks (the intrepid explorer, the fat and fretful sidekick, and the one with glasses), and apart from the strangely integrated Cold War clash, the script is terribly unimaginative, peppering many scenes with tired, space-filling bits like female flies fainting. It also never resolves simple but important issues of narrative underpinning, like whether there is to be any human/fly interaction.

Most problematically, the character design is confusing, incongruous and unappealing. The creatures don’t really look like flies (in fact, they resemble modified Snorks, from the mid-’80s Hanna-Barbera animated series), and some are different colors, which is never explained. The humans within the film aren’t similarly stylized, however, which makes for a bit of clash. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Summit Entertainment, G, 85 minutes)

If you’ve sensed a certain weird, low-fi ubiquitousness in theaters this summer, you might not be alone. It’s been a Ben Kingsley type of year, with the 64-year-old Oscar-winning actor appearing in a quintet of movies: Mike Myers’ The Love Guru, John Cusack’s War, Inc., Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness, Isabel Coixet’s Elegy, and now director Brad Anderson’s Transsiberian — the latter a slow-boil, humanistic thriller about an American couple who get sucked into a downward spiraling drug investigation while traveling by train in a foreign land.

For all the positive notices Kingsley is receiving for Elegy, which features his least affected performance — as a brilliant, British-born college professor who falls for Penelope Cruz’s much younger student, and spends a lot of time coming up with reasons to push her away — it may be Transsiberian that he most controls, in a gut-level sense. And it’s no surprise why. An Englishman who’s portrayed the unlikely trio of Gandhi, Lenin and Moses, Kingsley is famously adept at accents, and in the wintry Transsiberian he slips into a convincing Russian dialect as a quietly intimidating investigator who may have his own dark set of rules.

Co-written by Anderson (The Machinist, Session 9) with previous collaborator Will Conroy, Transsiberian unfolds on the legendary, same-named train. Iowa hardware store owner Roy (Woody Harrelson, operating in his charming goofball mode) and his wife Jessie (Emily Mortimer) decide to take the long way home after a church-outreach sojourn to China. En route from Beijing to Moscow, the pair meet up with another young couple, Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and Abby (Kate Mara), and bond over booze for the guys and cigarettes for the gals.

Roy gets separated from the group at a stop, and complications ensue when the trio disembark to wait for him to catch the next train, which ends up taking a day and a half. When Roy and Jessie are reunited, the former is accompanied by Ilya Grinko (Kingsley), a Russian narcotics detective who’s trying to track down some missing heroin, which he believes may be being smuggled in novel form.

On its own deliberately plotted terms, Transsiberian more or less works, though chiefly as a drama instead of a thriller. As with Session 9, Anderson convincingly establishes a place that serves as a compelling anchor of mood for his film as a whole; here, though, it’s not plumbed for creepy effect so much as it is for general detail. The movie turns on a couple shocking acts of violence that complicate the story in interesting ways, with the intrigue really thickening at the 50-minute mark, and again with a second story bump at the 80-minute mark.

Not entirely coincidentally, after an early introduction, these moments loosely align with Kingsley’s reintroduction to the narrative. As Grinko, a veteran cop who’s suffered the socioeconomic disadvantages of the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kingsley displays a certain darkly chameleonic charm; partly solicitous, partly menacing, he slips into the movie, skulks around and stalks off with its soul, mostly because we never seem to get a firm grasp of what exactly he wants. Far from coming off as irresolute, though, Kingsley just deftly plays the undertones of sometimes conflicting motivations. Even after fates are decided in relatively stark terms for other characters, we’re left to wonder a bit about Grinko, which seems in every way appropriate, given Kingsley’s performance.

Transsiberian seems to fit in nicely with Kingsley’s latter-day career arc, in which nothing is too precious. After his Academy Award victory for Gandhi, Kingsley spent almost a decade in high-tone exile, tackling important dramas that didn’t really reach the same sort of audience, commercially or critically. A Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for 1991’s Bugsy put him back in play for Hollywood filmmakers, and then Kingsley seemed to loosen up a bit. Every Searching for Bobby Fischer or Death and the Maiden was counterbalanced with a Species or Alice in Wonderland. Academy Award nominations in two out of three consecutive years (for Sexy Beast and House of Sand and Fog) just after the turn of the century opened the door to more studio and genre offers, and Kingsley leaped — gleefully slumming it up in Thunderbirds, A Sound of Thunder, Suspect Zero and Uwe Boll’s BloodRayne, for which he was paid seven figures for several days’ work.

Nowadays, Kingsley is a bit like the English version of Morgan Freeman — an actor with a seemingly inherent reservoir of gravitas, yet no qualms about glossy paycheck gigs. Though his personal preference may be literate, hard-hitting dramas, Kingsley will just as gladly jump into satire, broad comedy or other genres. This summer’s rush of Kingsley flicks offers up a snapshot of wide variety. Unfortunately, the common thread of the three films that have thus far enjoyed wide release has been a commercial under-performance. Despite his strong supporting turn, Transsiberian may be too muted and slow-developing to reverse that trend. (First Look, R, 111 minutes)

Billed as a raucous throwback to the days of the Sergio Leone spaghetti
western, with a heaping helping of testosterone-fueled motorcycle
action thrown into the mix, Hell Ride is a big, masturbatory exercise
in stylistic affectation. Occasionally fun, wildly self-indulgent but
never less than baffling, it’s a solid-gold riddle — a
busted-structure, B-movie chopper opera that seemingly exists for no
other reason than to feed a couple credit lists and keep nudging you to
point out how “cool” it is.

Written, directed by and costarring Larry Bishop (son of Joey, oddly, and surely mistaken by some autograph hound at some point for Tom Savini), the movie, in the loosest sense, centers around a group of badass bikers out to avenge the murder of one of their members. Pistolero (Bishop) is head honcho of the Victors, who have recently lost one of their own. Along with his cohorts, the Gent (Michael Madsen) and the mysterious Comanche (Eric Balfour), Pistolero aims to take down the Deuce (David Carradine) and his psychotic second-in-command Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones), the menacing leaders of the 666ers. A potential mutiny looms on the horizon, though, when Pistolero’s commitment to profit is questioned by a few of his fellow bikers; all of this is tied into a woman from the shared past of Pistolero and the recently murdered Victor, and that flashback back story naturally also figures into the proceedings when Comanche’s (very obvious) true identity finally comes to the surface.

Hell Ride‘s story is wafer-thin, and scenes often unfold with little or no sensible set-up, including a seriocomic bar brawl between Madsen and Balfour and numerous opportunities for Bishop to grind on some naked ladies, including Leonor Varela and Julia Jones. (That’s infrequently the sign of high art, when a writer-director puts himself in a movie as the guy hooking up with multiple naked chicks.) The heavy influences of executive producer Quentin Tarantino are obvious, and the script reads as if designed by checklist: surf guitars, sun-weathered faces, florid language, occasionally digressive monologues (including one about dirt in this case), shit-shack bars where women oil-wrestle topless, and slow-motion walk-aways with things blowing up in the background.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the movie is told with such an abundance of mood as to largely hold one’s attention. The cinematography, by Scott Kevan, is gorgeous and surprisingly artistic; music is well used; and the colorful biker extras and old-time kids here — a group which also includes Dennis Hopper in a bit role — mesh with the relatively younger faces. Everything about the movie feels realistically grimy, dusty and beat-up. (Indeed, watching Hell Ride, one thinks, “Where are Mickey Rourke and Danny Trejo — shouldn’t they be in this?”) There’s an undeniable tonal authenticity here, in other words, just as in something like Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. Even if you don’t care for it (and this film, though much less disagreeable on the surface than the example cited above, also dawdles and drags a lot more), one has to cede that the movie conveys a singular vision, in both look and feel.

A shame, then, that so much of the movie reads as so basically empty. Characters speak in willfully coded vagaries that are mock-poetic stand-in for tuff-guy chatter; Bishop would seemingly rather delight in saying a lot of nothing colorfully instead of anything directly, simply. Many of the movie’s key events are also rendered off-screen or in piecemeal flashback, decisions which neuter potentially cathartic sequences (a kidnapping of the Deuce, say) and make what should be active or edgy scenes just as talky. Diehard grindhouse aficionados — and I’m talking about folks who remember and cherish some of those dusty old biker pictures from the 1970s, and other hippie-tinged, fringe exploitation flicks — will spark to Hell Ride‘s all-out machismo, and the upped sex quotient will make this a nice, naughty little rental for 16-year-olds who can sneak it past their parents on the Netflix list as just another low-budget actioner. Mostly, though, Hell Ride is an oddball misfire — nutty, strident and cocksure, but with not much in the tank. (The Weinstein Company/Dimension, R, 85 minutes)

Based on a true story, and set in 1976, ensemble dramedy Bottle Shock weaves together the stories of a novice California vintner, Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman), his unfocused son Bo (Chris Pine, below right, laboring under a ridiculous wig that marks him a cousin of Garth Algar), and struggling Parisian wine seller Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman). Seeking a way to boost his business and reputation, Spurrier strikes upon the notion of a blind taste test for the French cognoscenti, and heads to California’s then-nascent vineyards, whose purveyors he regards as dilettantes, as a mere formality, to round out his offerings. What he discovers alters the history of wine-making forever.

There’s a deeper, more interesting movie to be made here about the Napa Valley boom, but co-writer-director Randall Miller (Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School) seems happy to aim lower, and play for lightweight delights and diversions. This is most embodied in Jim and Bo’s penchant for sparring in a homemade outdoor boxing ring — an easy, air-quote funny externalization of conflict that masks a great deficiency in storytelling. Miller also stupidly foists a love triangle upon the proceedings, and burns a lot of screen time on scenes that drag on well past the point at which they’ve stopped serving the greater narrative.

That said, the movie looks gorgeous — even on a budget, Mike Ozier’s cinematography captures the caramel-dipped hues of the Golden State’s great outdoors — and for every utterly frustrating or stillborn scene, there are one or two good ones, particularly involving Rickman, as a snobby Englishman in an even snobbier French game. He’s at home in neither world, and watching him explore the mysteries of first encounters with Kentucky Fried Chicken, or guacamole, offers its own amusement. Would that the movie just followed him, and cut out Rachael Taylor’s sassy intern and/or Freddy Rodriguez’s noble, but underwritten Mexican hired hand, who “knows” the grapes because he’s, you know, of the land. For more information, click here. (Freestyle Releasing, PG-13, 108 minutes)

A carefully observed autumnal character study loosely in the vein of last year’s Starting Out in the Evening, Elegy is based on Philip Roth’s novel, and directed by Isabel Coixet (My Life Without Me). The film charts the relationship between a celebrated college professor, David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), and Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz), a gorgeous student who punctures his wry, protective veneer. As their affair ignites, frays and recommences, Kepesh must come to grips with the possibility of a deeper love.

As adapted by Nicholas Meyer, Elegy alternately gallops and yawns. Even at 112 minutes it doesn’t feel built to cover quite this much ground, to fully keep up with the ambition of its narrative roots, which include assaying the loss of a good friend and Kepesh’s estranged relationship with his married son (Peter Sarsgaard), who feels compelled to act out in the same ways that his father did years before. The leg up that Elegy has on a lot of thematically similar tales of power-imbalanced romance is that Kepesh is of course a very literate and self-aware figure, so we enjoy an articulated sense of how one no-strings-attached lover (Patricia Clarkson) is merely a comfortable point of contact with past self-confidence while a similar arrangement with Consuela scares him so. The performances here are committed and quietly engaging, and Coixet, serving as her own camera operator, beautifully captures the lingering, jangled spaces between all parties, and how even the most intelligent among us can build up a justification for walls of isolation. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 112 minutes)

A stylishly photographed but woefully thinly characterized slice of stalking terror, The Midnight Meat Train is a grim, bloody genre offering purely for hardcore horror fans. An adaptation of Clive Barker’s same-named short story, the movie can’t hold up in comparison to The Strangers, a far more skillful evocation of dread from earlier this summer, but it does possess a passably intriguing blend of artfulness and intensity, courtesy chiefly of director Ryuhei Kitamura.

Though they have the fifth installment in the lucrative Saw franchise not too far around the corner, distributor Lionsgate seems to be looking to distance themselves a bit from the horror game by fulfilling the contractual obligation of a theatrical release for this film, but dumping it in a scattered assortment of discount to mid-range theaters nationwide, including no single major venue within the greater Los Angeles area.

The English language debut of Japanese filmmaker Kitamura, The Midnight Meat Train finds a way to tweak and enliven standard-issue genre visuals much better than did fellow Japanese director Masayuki Ochiai in Shutter. The film’s cinematography and creative framing mitigates, or at least masks, much of the depravity of the narrative, which is the difference between this and mental rot like last summer’s Captivity, which was merely the nasty playing out of a string, a series of strung-together, artificially flavored torture sequences. There’s still a good bit of that grim sadism here, but The Midnight Meat Train has a certain tonal authenticity, not unlike Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.

On August 7, 1974, a wiry, 24-year-old Frenchman named Philippe Petit climbed out on a cable extended between the as-yet-unfinished, 110-story World Trade Center towers, 1350 feet above the ground. With no harness or safety net, he pranced about for 45 minutes, crossing back and forth across the chasm eight times, even pausing to lie down on the wire and feign a nap.



In chronicling this audacious sociological art prank, the thrillingly engaging documentary Man on Wire pulses with the brio and whimsical bravado of misspent-weekend adolescence, when outrageous things were attempted “just because.” Powered by Petit’s sly charm — a strange, mischievous mixture of caginess and circus clown showmanship — the movie has the spirit and soul of a noir-soaked, flashback thriller, in which much is already given, and the roughly five percent mystery is chewed over in tantalizing fashion.

Director James Marsh — an eclectic filmmaker who’s given audiences both the trippy, non-fiction Wisconsin Death Trip and The King, a Southwestern American pastoral of dormant menace, starring Gael Garcia Bernal — interweaves dramatic reenactments with both amazing home video footage from the era and present-day interviews. Even these latter bits aren’t straightforward, though; a high emphasis is placed on image (a la Errol Morris‘ moody, artistic recreations), and even the recruited crew member who flees the scene has a theatrical recounting of Petit’s feat.

Winner of both the Audience Award and Grand Jury documentary prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Man on Wire (not to be confused with Man on Fire) is structured like a heist film, and that to a certain degree we know the outcome — because here’s Petit talking to us, quite alive — paradoxically only colors and deepens the experience. The scene set, a bit of early biography gives way to an introduction to all the players, and several of Petit’s other feats of high-wire derring-do, like walks between towers at the Notre Dame Cathedral and Sydney Harbor Bridge. In New York, Petit and a few acquaintances — one good friend, really, and a haphazardly recruited bunch of pot-smoking loafers — began conducting reconnaissance and surveillance work that would of course these days be taken as terrorist advance scouting. Figuring out a way to game the site’s security measures was only the beginning, though; there were also mathematical calculations to account for wind variables, for which exacting replica models helped.

With these and all sorts of other outrageous details, Man on Wire‘s tale somehow becomes even more jaw-droppingly unlikely. Forget about the act itself. Between the years-spanning research, hiding quietly from guards for hours on end, and using a bow and arrow to launch a mono-filament wire across the 200-foot chasm between buildings, so that the cable could then be reeled across… well, it’s downright tiring, and makes you appreciate the view from the ground even more. For more information, click here. (Magnolia, unrated, 94 minutes)

A sequel to the 2005 big screen adaptation of Ann Brashares’ novel about a quartet of young girls who discover a pair of jeans that mysteriously fits each of them perfectly, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is a painted-within-the-lines drama that skates innocently by on its charisma, color and solid casting. Even more so than the original film, which was about the girls’ first, fretful summer apart, this movie plays out, though not unpleasantly, as a quartered anthology about the awkward bridge between adolescence and adulthood.

Interweaving the jeans as a symbolic chit, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is basically four mini-movies taped together, with a fair bit of connective tissue. On soccer scholarship at Brown, Bridget (Blake Lively, of Accepted and Gossip Girl) goes on a summer archaeological dig to Turkey, then reconnects with her grandmother in Alabama. An NYU film school student who works part time in a video store, Tibby (Amber Tamblyn) suffers a pregnancy scare with her boyfriend. Carmen (America Ferrera) heads to Vermont with a Yale drama department friend, and finds herself cast, in unlikely fashion, as Perdita in a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Lena (Alexis Bledel), meanwhile, attends art school. Caught up with new friends and problems, and flames both old (Michael Rady, Leonardo Nam) and new (Jesse Williams, Tom Wisdom), the girls find their commitment to keeping in touch, and mailing the jeans off after one-week shifts, tested.

In trying to peddle the discrete stories of each character, the movie loses the major throughline that would tie this all together — that of trusted old friendships fraying, and slipping apart. Screenwriter Elizabeth Chandler, working solo after receiving shared credit on the first film, succeeds early on in capturing some of the “can’t-go-home-again” feeling of college-age kids — of trying to share new experiences with people who have moved on in their own way. A big part of the problem, though, lies in the compression of three novels (there are four books in all, chronicling successive summers) into a single tale. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 118 minutes)

Ample evidence of studio largesse arrives in the form of Step Brothers, a stumble-drunk, quarter-sketched, comedy of
beta-competitiveness centering around a pair of doubly emotionally stunted,
live-at-home 40-year-olds forced to share a room when their single
parents marry. The last line of the film? “It’s OK that mine’s not
movie quality,” which could very well describe this entire, wobbly-legged affair, a
weird and not very funny concoction obviously greenlit solely on the basis of its concept and the combined star power wattage of its co-writers and producers. In fact, if my surname were Apatow, Ferrell or McKay, I’d likely just go ahead and send my credit card statement to every studio in town, with a Post-It claiming it as an expense report; odds are it would be paid by week’s end.

Hatched by Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly and director Adam McKay immediately following the shoot for Talladega Nights, and produced by comedy everywhere-man-of-the-moment Judd Apatow, Step Brothers tells the story of Brennan Huff (Ferrell), a laid-off Pet Smart employee who lives with his mother Nancy (Mary Steenburgen). A quickie courtship between Nancy and Robert Doback (Richard Jenkins) leads to marriage, and soon Nancy and Brennan are moving in with Robert and his adult son Dale (Reilly), a layabout who fancies himself a drummer, and little else. As their narcissism and downright laziness threaten to tear the new family apart, these two middle-aged, immature, overgrown boys at first butt heads, then are forced to try to find jobs, then team up to form some sort of loosely defined entertainment company — all before going their bickering separate ways and then coming together again, in forced fashion.

It’s easy to see why Step Brothers sold, as a concept. Mirroring each other, in both curly locks, vintage T-shirts and apparent lack of ambition (Dale is a single child whose sense of entitlement has calcified into obstinance; Brennan is henpecked by a younger brother who’s a master overachiever and bully to boot), Ferrell and Reilly are a pleasant, engaging comedy duo. They each have an ability to remain likable, even when doing nasty things to one another.

A funny thing happens on the way to hilarity, though: namely, it just doesn’t happen. Ferrell and McKay, fashioning a screenplay out of chicken-wire and a few loose notions, fail to give us any real insight into these characters that prop them up as anything more than sketch-length ideas. The movie is an odd combination of silliness and foulness. Other bits just don’t follow — Dale has no problem asserting himself against Brennan, yet, in a bit seemingly nipped from Drillbit Taylor, he inexplicably cowers when bullied by neighborhood school kids?

There’s not a consistent tonal throughline here, and so moments that do score (like Dale registering his objection to a woman moving into the house thusly: “Dad, we take riverboat gambling trips, we shit with the door open, talk about pussy, make our own beef jerky — we’re men, that’s what we do!”) are of the self-made, stand-alone variety, and few and far between. Other bits (a prosthetic nut-sack cameo, say) just seem tacked on for effect. The film’s press notes tout “an insane, elaborate plan to bring their parents back together,” but that’s hardly an appropriate description of the plot, which basically amounts to a whole lot of screamed obscenity, with even Steenburgen getting in on the act.

As potentially gratingly one-note as it might have been, Step Brothers would likely have worked better as a straight-up, damn-the-consequences, territorial pissing match between two oblivious man-children. As is, the hate-love-détente arc between Brennan and Dale, while it affords a chance to work Ferrell singing “Por Ti Volaré” into the final product, just isn’t enough to sell the meager delights of this stretched-thin premise, nor are the cobbled together, supporting player familial bits (unctuous yuppie guy, sexually rapacious female) nipped from Wedding Crashers. Stick with your own family, or only hang out with these Step Brothers on a rainy weekend. (Columbia/Sony, R, 95 minutes)

The press notes bill the carefully guarded plot of The X-Files: I Want to Believe as being in “the grand tradition” of the groundbreaking television series. In reality, it’s notably of a more recent tradition — of distributor 20th Century Fox’s increasing penchant for secretiveness with respect to almost all of its releases.

In a way, though, this curiously conservative, risk-averse strategy is understandable. For a stretch in the mid-1990s, The X-Files was the Lost of its era — a moody, popular TV show with a cool-factor off the charts and a sprawling, conspiracy-saturated mystery arc that rewarded multiple viewings and deep readings, and kept fans debating its many twists and turns. When stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson tired somewhat of duty, though, new cast members failed to provide much of a dramatic infusion, and the show’s grasp on the nation’s collective consciousness slowly loosened.



A big summer theatrical offering released in the middle of its run, to decent reviews and grosses, but it’s been a decade since that film, and five long years since the show went off the air. To that end, protecting the truth about I Want to Believe — that it’s leaner (20 minutes shorter than the ’98 film) and more straightforwardly rooted in character than its predecessor, and actually just like a self-contained episode of the series, and a fairly pedestrian one, at that — may be a safe bet by 20th Century Fox, if also, at the end of the day, a self-limiting one.

Set in West Virginia in the present day, the film finds both Fox Mulder (Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Anderson) out of the FBI. The latter has returned to medicine; she works as a doctor in a children’s hospital. Mulder, on the other hand, seems to be training hard in the unique triathlon of newspaper clipping, disaffected beard-growing and sardonic quipping. Together, they’re lured back into the fold by a case involving a missing FBI agent.

Father Joe (Billy Connolly), a scraggly-haired priest and convicted pedophile, claims to have visions of said agent, but when he leads the FBI to a severed arm buried in the snow — an arm that shares in common a blood type found at the crime scene — the plot thickens. Before you know it, you have a movie about gay Russian émigré organ harvesters. Yeah, seriously.

From almost the start, I Want to Believe feels like a flimsy excuse for a reunion. Psychic visions and communication, of course, figured prominently in the series, from early episodes like “Beyond the Sea” and “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” all throughout its small-screen run. And this storyline would be perfectly serviceable somewhere further down the line in a theoretical, modestly-budgeted series of purely investigatory tales — The Mulder & Scully Chronicles, if you will. But it doesn’t rise to the level of getting-the-band-back-together drama, nor does it match the sort of chaste, intellectual romance — wonderfully embodied by Duchovny and Anderson, who still evince a nice rapport — necessary in a tale that brings these two characters back to a profession that cost them so much, individually and collectively.

It’s all a bit frustrating, really. Clearly, the characters of Mulder and Scully have greater potential than this vehicle allows. It’s not that The X-Files: I Want to Believe is flat-out terrible; it’s absolutely not. It’s just the sort of movie one desperately keeps waiting to get better, and it never does. Hardcore fans will spin this fact, and embrace the movie; others, however, will bear witness to its false promise, and be left only wanting to believe. Ironic, then, that 20th Century Fox’s quiescent sales job may ultimately cost the film the sort of first-weekend box office splash that would have set up a franchise more firmly, and allowed director Chris Carter and co-writer Frank Spotnitz the chance to rectify these problems. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 104 minutes)

A wondrous, affecting snapshot of a most unlikely real-life Edward Scissorhands, this documentary centers around Pearl Fryar, a 66-year-old retired factory worker with no sculptural topiary training except a cursory three-minute demonstration. Filling his three-acre plot with plants cast off by a local nursery, and turning an abstract eye on them, Fryar has created a sprawling, personal garden that baffles plant pathologists and enthralls neighbors and art critics alike.

Co-directed by Brent Pierson and Scott Galloway, A Man Named Pearl is a simple tale of pay-it-forward positivism that swells the heart
without ever coming across as manipulative. The son of a hard-working
sharecropper, Fryar oozes basic decency, and it’s easy to see why his work — born of a simple remark, that “black people don’t keep up their yards,” while he and his wife were looking for a home many years ago — has had a
transformative effect on the small, rural town of Bishopville, in
dirt-poor Lee County, South Carolina. While there is plenty of footage of him at work, and discussing the methods that inform his craft, much of the movie is about Fryar’s faith, and affinity for children and service. Featuring beautiful, jazz-inflected original
compositions from Fred Story, this is an honest, feel-good story of
communal embrace, and outwardly expanding ripples of American-style goodwill. For more information, click here. (Shadow Distribution, unrated, 78 minutes)

The success of 2001’s Dogtown and Z-Boys, about the rise of the 1970s
skateboarding culture, and the colorful characters who populated it,
kicked off a string of alt-sports documentaries that shone a spotlight
on the new favorite outdoor pastimes of all those X-treme kids glimpsed in
Mountain Dew commercials. Telling a bit more specifically focused story
than the Oscar-shortlisted surf-boom doc Riding Giants, debut
director Jeremy Gosch’s engaging yet somewhat myopic film chronicles a
half dozen golden-skinned kids, Aussies and South Africans, who in the
mid-70s crashed the North Shore of Oahu and, through headstrong force
of will, dragged the more laidback surf culture toward the
multi-billion dollar industry that it is today.

Narrated by Edward Norton, Bustin’ Down the Door features an abundance of prodigious wipe-outs and other amazing footage from the era — shimmering mountains of wave that amply back up the legendary birth-of-a-sport stories from Wayne Bartholomew, Shaun Tomson, Ian Cairns, Mark Richards (above) and others. For water-soaked beachheads, this narrowcast movie is an easy sell. Yet Gosch exhibits precious little skill at or interest in framing this story for outsiders (what with talk of “backsiders dropping into the temple going the wrong way”), and so consequently the movie is a bit of a slow seduction for landlubbers. It takes a while, but the personalities of the various subjects eventually take hold, and win you over. It’s not until two-thirds of the way in, though, that the movie catches its biggest wave, when delving more explicitly into the tension, fisticuffs and even death threats suffered by some of the Aussies at the hands of the “Da Hui,” a native Hawaiian group that felt it had been dissed in cocky media interviews used to inflate the reputations of the outsiders. For more information, click here. (Screen Media Films, unrated, 96 minutes)

A shruggingly amiable animated tale in which a group of chimpanzees sent to a faraway planet to test its viability for life end up helping to free an enslaved alien populace, Space Chimps is, in terms of plotting, a throwback to the animation of two decades ago, when storytelling lapses could be colorfully papered over and excused as merely part of medium.

After an unmanned American space probe gets sucked into a wormhole and lands on a faraway planet, NASA prepares to send a group of chimpanzees into outer space to try to re-establish contact with it. Engaging the arguable need for greater publicity and a sort of bloodline patriotism, rascally, carefree circus performer Ham III (voiced by Andy Samberg), the grandson of the first chimpanzee astronaut, is recruited to join the mission. Initially indifferent to the assignment, Ham joins up with Titan (voiced by Patrick Warburton) and Luna (voiced by Cheryl Hines), the latter of whom he quickly develops a crush on.

When the chimps land on said planet, they discover Zartog (voiced by Jeff Daniels), who has appropriated the powers of the crashed space rover, and enslaved his peers. Titan is captured, and so with 24 hours until their craft automatically relaunches back for Earth, Ham and Luna must work to thwart Zartog’s plans.

The directorial debut of co-writer Kirk De Micco, Space Chimps feels sketched out in very arbitrary fashion. After a brief bit showing Ham hamming it up in his circus surroundings, notably strange and jarring is the presentation of Zartog and the colorful aliens, which precedes any introduction of the rest of the chimpanzees, or the NASA crew responsible for the wayward probe. It also makes little sense that the space probe becomes a sort of catch-all instrument of torture and harassment — one that Zartog sometimes fully commands, and other times struggles with.

The main stories coalesce sooner rather than later, but the script centralizes conflict, funneling it in awkward fashion through a single Senator, who even school-age children grasp realistically wouldn’t be able to make good on his threats to immediately close down all space exploration. These narrative pendulum swings — at once grand, and totally empty — illustrate, in contrasting fashion, the care, depth and shading given storylines by Pixar, and the creators of other top-shelf animated fare.

In design, some of the color schemes and shading of the movie don’t seem to totally match. Even if there is great inconsistency with regards to opposable thumbs, the chimpanzees are rendered in more or less realistic, slightly cuddly form, with soft shading and rounded lines. Space Chimps‘ aliens are a bit more angular, and rendered in translucent blues, greens and purples; the result feels not merely like a different world, but of a wholly different tone, and film. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, G, 81 minutes)

Expanding on the darker moods and true-crime instincts of 2005’s Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight cleverly balances its action with an exploration of optimism and decency’s combined power and potential fallibility in a world gone mad, and thus stands poised to leave a substantial summer footprint, both commercially and critically. While anticipation of the late Heath Ledger’s tongue-wagging, lip-smacking turn as the villainous Joker will draw in some new interest, it’s the novelistic density and moral complexity on display here that will drive repeat viewings and help The Dark Knight outstrip its predecessor’s $205 million domestic tally.



Picking up within a year of the events in Batman Begins, the film finds Batman (Christian Bale) and his police department counterpart and ally, Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), having some success in stemming the tide of crime in Gotham City. As the bold, hard-driving new district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), works to dismantle the all-powerful criminal syndicates that have long had a stranglehold on the city, Batman and Gordon must determine whether or not they can trust the charismatic idealist.

Proceeding with caution, their partnership proves effective, especially after Batman trips to Hong Kong to make a dazzling extrication of businessman Lau (Chin Han), the accountant to all the criminal sects. Dent ties all the crime bosses together in a 2,500-count conspiracy indictment, and Batman, in the form of billionaire daytime alter ego Bruce Wayne, throws his support behind the district attorney with a dazzling fundraiser, convinced that Dent is the new public face of decency and order. The Joker, though, has other plans, unleashing a reign of terror built on shifting motivations. At first he offers to kill Batman for the city’s crime bosses; later he threatens serial deaths until Batman reveals his true identity. In the end, of course, it’s all a guise for his own games of anarchic indulgence.

Scripted by Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, from a story devised with David Goyer, a co-writer on Batman Begins, The Dark Knight may be the first movie of its kind, or at least the most persistent, to substantively, intellectually address the mythos of classic comic book action in something vaguely resembling the real world. There is a lot of discussion about, and actual action driven by, the symbolic value of Batman, and the limits of what he can accomplish versus the publicly empowered Dent.

In fact, it’s the depth of the latter storyline, of the tragically doomed district attorney, that is perhaps the most surprisingly effective part of the film, thematically speaking. His soul-of-the-city struggle parallels Batman’s quest, and has important implications when vigilantism and law-bending later creeps into play, in an effort to defeat the Joker. The film’s quibbling weak point is that a shift involving Dent’s personality, after he is wounded, is handled in mad-dash fashion, undercutting the sensitivity and care of all this set-up.

Nolan shows a much more refined hand with action here than he did in the first film, though these movies will never compete with the whiz-bang, state-of-the-art thrills of something like the Matrix films, or Wanted. There’s an emphasis on functionality over showsmanship with respect to the action scenes, and Nolan doesn’t pad these sequences with the sort of affected angles, stuffed shots or orgiastic CGI found in something like Transformers.

Bale delivers another solid, brooding performance as Wayne/Batman, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is a definite upgrade over Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, the childhood crush of Bruce Wayne, now romantically involved with Dent. Finally, while there is undeniably a bit of a pall cast over the proceedings by the tragic passing of Ledger, it doesn’t last long, so starkly defined is his portrayal. There’s no cackling buffoonery here, just a grimness to match the material.

Other technical credits are superb across the board. The editing is slickly effective, crosscutting storylines and more clearly delineating the action than in Batman Begins. Also, Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s score for the film again eschews hammy signature tones, instead trading in moods and rhythms; most striking is the theme for the Joker, a processed string arrangement which evokes dread in much the same manner as Jonny Greenwood’s lauded score for There Will Be Blood. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 152 minutes)

Small business owner Wade Porter (Stephen Dorff) lives a modest life with his fiancée Laura (Marisol Nichols) and their three-year-old son. Everything changes in an instant, though, when he’s convicted of killing a man who breaks into his home. Sentenced to state prison, Wade ends up in a hellish facility overseen by a guard (Harold Perrineau) who encourages gladiatorial fights among the inmates. Though wanting to neither “fight or fornicate” (the two delightful options given by one inmate, in slightly saltier terms), Wade eventually yields to the former activity, in a paradoxical attempt to protect himself. When trouble mounts, his new cell-mate, John Smith, (Val Kilmer), a burly, goateed “lifer” with his own dark devastation, provides important guidance, all while ruminatively stroking his own tattoos.

Shot on location in New Mexico State Penitentiary, in hand-held, super-confessional close-up, and on color-saturated Super16 blown up to 35mm, Felon doesn’t have much of revelatory value to say about the nature of violence — indeed, its closing narration seems to endorse whatever-you-gotta-do means. The flimsy, cardboard-thin set-up is meant to only get Wade into prison (he cops to a murder charge since the fleeing culprit was technically no longer on his property?), and the setting is meant to only serve as an excuse for heavily tatted muscle-heads to use gang slang, prison acronyms and flip each other around in gritty, bare-knuckle fashion. See how that works? Still, in this regard, writer-director Ric Roman Waugh’s heavy background in stuntwork certainly pays off, as Felon, with its many boxers-and-sneakers brawls, rivals Eastern Promises in padding-free fisticuffs.

The chief problem is that, despite invested performances by Dorff and Kilmer, and after going to significant lengths to both establish a sense of claustrophobic realism and depict Wade as being punished by an unjust system, for not wanting to stoop to its calibrated levels of further dehumanization, Waugh chucks all this for a contrived, mad-dash finale that requires his protagonist bash in the brains of an “innocent” (a relative term here, I realize) guy to get the proper attention of higher-ups, and secure his release. Part cop-out, part simply bizarre, seemingly concessional flourish, it’s a weird ending for a film that otherwise decently captures the grimness of prison life, and how it corrodes even those ostensibly in charge. One hopes, at least, the stuntmen were well compensated. To view the film’s trailer, click here. (Stage 6 Films, R, 104 minutes)

Stop me if you’ve heard the one about a 14-year-old (Spencer Breslin), suffering from early-onset male-pattern baldness and bunions, who moves to a new town with his single mom (Ally Sheedy) and older sister; befriends a strange janitor, Cromer (Cuba Gooding, Jr.); faces down a bullying nemesis and needlessly cruel gym teacher; gets arrested for buying high school kids beer; and enters a go-kart race for revenge, glory and the heart of a girl. Yes, teen movie boilerplate gets skewed plenty good in Harold, co-written and directed by T. Sean Shannon, a Saturday Night Live veteran who manages to even work in a fantasy sequence highlighting his longstanding predilection for bears.

It’s intriguing for a movie built around hair that one of its wig works so well (Breslin’s chrome dome is sleek and realistic) and one doesn’t (Gooding’s asymmetrical ‘fro renders him a most curious Chia Pet). No mind, though. An assortment of cameos (Chris Parnell, Rachel Dratch, Dave Attell, Fred Willard and Colin Quinn — the latter the funniest) ups the intrigue factor here, but it’s Breslin who really carries the day, showcasing crackerjack comic timing throughout. There isn’t a lot of explanation as to why Harold is a crotchety fan of Murder, She Wrote if, in fact, the small town in which he originally lives is so accepting of his condition, other than it makes for simple visual amusement — a kid reading a newspaper in a Barcalounger, and hassling other, younger kids about their baseballs in his yard, messing up his vegetables. There’s also the lingering question of audience — for most of its running time, Harold isn’t quite barbed enough to truly be a film about adolescence yet aimed mainly at adults, though several late plot twists and double entendres up the ante. Sometimes, though, strange is just good, and the players here are good enough to sell the premise and milk some easygoing laughs, even if Harold is just an elongated comedy sketch. For more information on the movie, click here. (City Lights Pictures, PG-13, 93 minutes)

Another sprawling ensemble tale about the hearty, equal portions of
hard knocks and moral nondiscrimination that Los Angeles dishes out, Garden Party centers on a bunch of dreamers and schemers looking for
their next fix — which is sometimes emotional, and sometimes illicit.
Among others, there’s 15-year-old runaway April (Willa Holland), who
poses nude for the Internet; sexy, pot-dealing realtor Sally (Vinessa Shaw, below right), and her dense, live-in assistant, Nathan (Alexander Cendese);
Todd (Richard Gunn, below left), a well-off, porn-addicted painter; and Sammy (Erik
Smith), a just-off-the-bus aspiring rocker who isn’t above trading his
way up to get his talents recognized. Naturally, their stories all
intertwine in kinky, twisted fashion.

Writer-director
Jason Freeland (who gave good crime in his last screen credit, a
little-seen, criminally under-regarded 1998 adaptation of James
Ellroy’s Brown’s Requiem) here seems to be reaching for early Paul Thomas Anderson by way of Tom DiCillo. Garden Party
never really strikes you as real, per se, and neither is it some
fantastically canted satire. The metaphorical perspicacity of the title
is a real stretch, to say the least, and there are plenty of moments
where one is laughing (albeit silently) for reasons probably
unintended. And yet, oddly, it doesn’t totally matter. Garden Party
may have the diverse colors and tonalities of a bank of wildflowers by
the side of the road (there’s an impromptu gay club dance-off here, a
ball-gagged home invasion there), but there are discrete pleasures to
be found, especially in Shaw’s wry, devilishly alluring performance.
She steals the film, in bewitching fashion — though one gets the feeling
she’d leave you saddled with a mortgage you couldn’t begin to afford. For more information on the film, click here. (Roadside Attractions, R, 89 minutes)