Whatever the institution, college is, as anyone who’s matriculated will attest, almost always as much about the social experience as the educational value. It’s the intermediate weigh station between the silly, insular, sewing-circle politics of high school and the crushing, rat-race actuality of real life, and who hasn’t entertained a prolongation of that experience? Moreover, what if there were no institutional controls in place, and you could while away your time with classes that consisted of skateboarding, daydreaming, rock ’n’ roll posing, “Wingman-ing 101” and girl-watching?

Jonah Hill), actually gets into a nearby school as a legacy, but helps his pal by convincing his burnout uncle, Ben (Lewis Black), to pose as the college’s dean in a meet and greet with B’s parents.

In an amusingly capricious twist, though, Sherman has accidentally activated a chirpy “Acceptance is only one click away!” link on the aforementioned Web site, and soon, dozens of other college rejects from out of town show up for classes. Naturally, because there has to be a girl, B falls for Monica (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’ Blake Lively), and naturally, because there has to be a villainous dean of a nearby competing college who is angling for a consolidation of space in a land grab, there’s the sneering Dean Van Horne (The Silence of the Lambs’ Anthony Heald). Against considerable odds, B and his friends forge ahead with maintaining a fake but quasi-functional university, one that operates by their own set of liberal rules.

As the co-screenwriter of deeply loved cult comedic baubles Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, Steve Pink helped locate the unique humor in both violently clashing cultures and slacker ethos, and you’ll see some of that same idiosyncratic stamp of personality on this, his directorial debut. Still, despite Pink’s best efforts, the movie’s narrative track is not a particularly well-oiled one. Adults are generally either sternly hectoring or oblivious (sometimes a scene calls for both), and the character of Uncle Ben never codifies into something more than a one-note counterpoint to these cardboard types.

Still, if audiences turn off their brains, they can have some fun. Adam Cooper & Bill Collage and Mark Perez’s script is all synthetic, but what Accepted most has going for it is a few pockets of genuine energy. These are provided chiefly by Long — a gifted young comedic actor who also astutely locates the frustrated rectitude in his character — and Hill, who conveys the antsy anxiety of bottled-up adolescence through a collection of pithy one-liners (“This place is great, because I can finally get hepatitis,” he says of scouting the abandoned mental facility that becomes South Harmon) and constipated physicality. He’s the friend you had in high school that always considered the after-effects of your latest harebrained scheme — a reluctant voice of conscience by virtue of indoctrination. (For an interview with Steve Pink, meanwhile, click here.) (Universal, PG-13, 93 minutes)

From
Woody Allen to Whit Stillman to Edward Burns, New York-set relationship
dramedies have a long and storied tradition, enough so that they could
almost certainly comprise their own sub-genre at your local video
store. Winsome, wheedling and certain of nothing more than its own
serial ambivalence, Trust the Man represents The Myth of Fingerprints
writer-director Bart Freundlich’s entry into the canon, and if not
quite for all tastes it at least provides a winning showcase for the
underutilized comedic charms of star David Duchovny.

Former
advertising exec Tom (Duchovny) and his actress wife Rebecca (Julianne
Moore) have two kids and a virtually non-existent sex life. Tom’s
serial randiness manifests itself in cajoling, awkward attempts at
sideways seduction. At one point he asks, “Hey, did I tell you I had a
dream about you giving me a blowjob last night?” after they leave from
their once-a-year appointment with a marriage counselor; at another
point he tries to close his eyes and have her narrate the events of a
porno tape. Rebecca’s younger brother and Tom’s best friend Tobey
(Billy Crudup, sporting a pubic tuft of a beard), meanwhile,
perpetually tests the outer limits of his longtime girlfriend Elaine’s
(Maggie Gyllenhaal) patience. After eight years together, she wants to
get married and have a baby, but Tobey is too emotionally arrested (he
has a Sportscenter cell phone ring) and freaked out by the
vague notion that “everyone dies someday” to entertain a serious
conversation period, much less one involving a discussion about
commitment. Both collectively and individually, however, each couples’
status quo is given a jolt when various temptations of infidelity pop
up and ultimatums are issued.

Trust the Man plays as a sort of mainstream-pitched, desperately pitched upbeat companion piece to Freundlich’s previous (and almost wholly unseen) film World Traveler,
which starred Crudup as a reticent man who sets off on a road trip of
indeterminate length and hazy motivation, leaving behind a wife and
small child. If that film was at its core about how intrapersonal
confusion and (in particular, masculine) psychological uneasiness are
never truly defeated, but rather appeased and beaten back into the
recesses of one’s mind, Trust the Man is the more externalized
and optimistic side of that same angst-ridden coin. Househusband Tom is
also a proxy for Freundlich, who in real life is married to Moore
(their two children together are also Tom and Rebecca’s son and
daughter), and in this regard too the movie is an interesting
exploration of subjugated masculinity.

The leading performances here are a breezy delight, but best movies
of this ilk — and, indeed, all comedies — find at least some of their
humor in cracked supporting players and the world at large, and
Freundlich falters a good bit when stepping outside of his main
quartet. James Le Gros is overly broad as a kooky, old
singer-songwriter fling of Rebecca’s, with whom she tries to set Elaine
up during the latter’s break from Tobey, not to mention the fact that
it stretches credulity that any sister would so boldly enable her
brother’s ex in romantic pursuit, no matter how close of friends they
were. Similarly, Eva Mendes is woefully undersketched as a former
college girlfriend of Tobey’s who wanders back into his life. One
minute she’s married and introducing him to her husband, later she’s
nonchalantly waving off their relationship and throwing herself at
Tobey.

Of all of the leads, Duchovny connects the most consistently and
heartily, conveying the depths of panic, disaffection and nervousness
inherent in male maturation without ever sacrificing or shortchanging
the movie’s somewhat broad comedic strokes. Trust the Man’s
wintry snow is fake and its narrative arcs of temptation relatively
predestined, but the film’s idiosyncratic delight is rather real, with
Freundlich finding charm and humor in quotidian struggles. (Fox Searchlight, R, 100 mins.)

Even
in a world where the flash and razzle-dazzle of CGI has supplanted the
rather pedestrian fascination of magic, first-hand conjuring and
sleight-of-hand still holds a lure because there’s a part of all of us
that wants to believe in something bigger than and beyond “just” us,
even if it’s only a diversionary bafflement. Adapted from a short story
penned by Steven Millhauser, the period-piece drama The Illusionist delves into this world, wrapping its doomed love narrative around a dogged, cat-and-mouse pursuit.

I’ve
been a bit remiss in properly getting to it in print form, but I like
to think that my indolence has been at least somewhat counterbalanced
by sincere word-of-mouth. Over the past couple weeks, whenever anyone
asked me about an off-the-beaten-path film or just the best of what I’d
recently seen and what was forthcoming, one film as much as any other
came tumbling from my lips.

Written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, that film is Quinceañera, a little curio that starts out as what seems like a bit of a cultural jerk-off, an awkward mash-up of teen melodrama and Larry Clark’s predilections for minority youth culture and shirtless young boys. It quickly blossoms, though, into something better, richer and deeper —
a movie marked by a rarely glimpsed authenticity with respect to its
specificity of setting, fully-dimensional young characters and ethnic
particularization.

Set in Los Angeles’ Echo Park area, where actors who can’t afford
the Hollywood Hills’ rents and other arty types live alongside a
cross-section of blue-collar Latino families, Quinceañera
centers on Magdalena (Emily Rios, above left), the teenage daughter of
a storefront preacher who is just a few months away from her 15th
birthday, a cultural touchstone. She frets about her parents being
unable to afford the comparative extravagances of her cousin’s party,
but soon another problem rears it head. Magdalena is pregnant, though
she swears to her mother — and we’re inclined to believe her —
that she and her boyfriend, Ernesto (Jesus Castanos), haven’t had sex.
Eventually, though, Magdalena is bounced out of her home by her angry,
disgraced father.

Champion “black sheep” status, however, won’t come easily for
Magdalena, as her hotheaded cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia, above right)
wears that crown in the family. Carlos lives with his
great-great-uncle, Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez), a weathered but unbowed old
man who makes his living selling champurrado on the street from a
little pushcart. In a development that takes a bit of getting used to
because, you realize, it feels so intimately ripped from real life,
Carlos falls into a relationship with a nearby affluent, white gay
couple — comprised of Londoner Gary (David Ross) and the slightly older
and less sensitive James (Jason Wood) — who are pioneers of
gentrification in the neighborhood. Is Carlos gay? Feeling the first
pangs of such a realization? Submitting to so-called “gay-for-pay”?
Answers are a bit slow developing, but pleasingly so — not rushed or
artificial.

As Magdalena’s pregnancy grows more visible, she and Carlos find
refuge with Tomas, and pull together as a sort of family within a
family. But with the economics of the neighborhood turning against them
and James’ jealousy spurring a vindictive eviction, a crisis blooms.
Glatzer (America’s Next Top Model) and Westmoreland (Gay Republicans)
are a somewhat unlikely pair, but they elicit from Rios and Garcia two
fantastic, beautifully rooted performances, and Gonzalez also exudes a
suitably well-worn charisma. Poetically real, Quinceañera
is alternately rich, heartbreaking and full of the sort of dramatic
tension — the peaks and valleys — one finds in real life. In release
now in New York and Los Angeles, and
expanding to other cities throughout the month, this is one of the
summer’s best independent films; for more information, visit its Web site by clicking here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 90 mins.)

“What happened?” says one character at the end of Pulse. “I
don’t know,” the other replies. They’re presumably talking, in the most
immediate sense, about an attack on their persons, but any movie that
includes that sort of exchange in its climax runs the risk of looking
like it’s attempting to wrap dialogue-as-masking-tape around a gaping,
mortal, narrative wound. And that’s certainly just the case with Pulse,
as that breathless banter will actually just about adequately sum up an
audience’s feeling about this noisy, melodramatic and ultimately
anonymous thriller, destined to find its way to bargain bins posthaste.

Part of the ongoing Stateside trend of remakes of more elliptical, psychologically rooted J-horror pictures, Pulse takes its basic premise from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s recent import Kairo, but presses it into much more of a standardized template. The movie centers on college student Mattie Webber (Veronica Mars’
Kristen Bell) and her friends (a group that includes Christina Milian,
Rick Gonzalez and Samm Levine), who must collectively cope with the
sudden suicide of their friend Josh (Jonathan Tucker), who is also
Mattie’s recent ex.

When Mattie receives a series of posthumous e-mails from Josh asking
for help, she’s understandably freaked. She unplugs her computer, but
her printer starts spitting out pages too. At first it’s hypothesized
that Josh’s computer is still logged on and auto-generating messages,
but Mattie finds out it’s already been sold to Dexter (Ian
Somerhalder), a mechanic who in turn gets sucked into the proceedings
after witnessing and sharing with Mattie a morbid video loop of lost
souls on said unit. Soon, the wireless technologies to which Mattie and
her friends are so tethered — cell phones, the Internet — all become
perpetually open connections to a world beyond our own. Ghastly
apparitions pop up, draining from those who encounter them their very
will to live. This then somehow all morphs into a quasi-apocalyptic
steeplechase, with Mattie and Dexter trying to make contact with a
hermetic computer guru in order to prevent this hazy army of the evil
dead from taking over the world.

Regardless of what you make of the recent influx of Americanized
J-horror films, the fact is that they remain beholden to rhythms and
mood, since the notion of a ghostly presence as chief cinematic menace
— visions literally scaring people to death, and the like — has much
deeper cultural roots in Japan and the far east. While such “low-fi,”
emotionally rooted concepts can come off as a refreshing antidote to
the orgiastic gore of genre films more entrenched in stalking — both
psychological and literal — it requires an extraordinarily high degree
of technical competence and atmospheric tightrope-walking, attributes Pulse does not have.

Sure, the movie does a few interesting things cinematographically,
with director of photography Mark Plummer offering up a small sampler
pack of different palettes; one eerie scene, purposefully evocative of
hell, takes place in a room masked completely by red tape, while the
silver frames of another panicked escape sequence seem almost like a
mercury-dipped lithograph. But director Jim Sonzero’s framing and
overall work with actors is dreadful enough to make the anonymity of Dark Water
look positively artful by comparison. There’s no tonal consistency
here, and Wes Craven’s screenplay adaptation is jaw-droppingly bad,
full of paper-thin characterizations and even worse dialogue.

The chief problem is that Pulse is devoid of any unified and
clearly delineated menace. As these ghosts flicker to and fro, we have
no sense of their purpose or scale, only that a “portal” has been
opened. Thus Pulse quickly devolves into a rather silly and
feigned series of random jolts — one that’s moderately stylized in fits
and starts, but still wholly emotionally hollow. (Weinstein Company, PG-13, 86 mins.)

In the storied Hollywood history of career colonics, there’s never quite been as distinctively psychologically premonitory a movie as World Trade Center, or at least not recently. As directed by Oliver Stone, it’s a repudiation of all that the filmmaker has most come to embody over the last two decades — his swaggering anti-authoritarianism, his distended style, his cynical (I won’t bow to the reductive, desultory tag of “conspiracy”) perspectives and overtly masculinized frames; honestly, it feels like a mea culpa filed from the set of Alexander. Lacking angles, lacking controversy, lacking context — surprising for a man who so loves tangled background — World Trade Center is an unerringly conscientious, professional and emotionally engaging film, if also never a particular uniquely enlightening one.

Universal’s United 93 earlier this year. Part of this is due to the latter film being the first major studio project out of the gate, certainly, but is the true measure of healing really an extra four months? (We also have the added distraction of Mel Gibson’s drunken slurs, a benefit only insomuch as the fact that only so much reprimanding entertainment news can be foregrounded in the first 12 minutes of any given regular newscast.) But World Trade Center is also by design a movie of much more comfort, a movie of easy affirmation. It doesn’t confront us with any of the hijackers themselves, or ask us to consider the distressing choices of those Americans aboard a doomed jetliner. It instead delivers a flipside portrait of the unbelievable courage and resolve found in those reacting — purely and instinctively — to correspondingly incredible tragedy.

Reduced to a pair of eyes and covered visage for much of the film, Cage delivers a performance rooted in palpable regret. As they stave off death — jointly trapped but out of sight from one another — John and Will’s mutual urgings and conversations cover a range of topics, but center plaintively around their families. “I married the right one, you know?” says John at one point to a similar affirmation by Will, even though the film doesn’t shy away from showing us the former’s uncommunicative marriage, beset by problems of withdrawal. Using a variety of time-tested, low-fi means (fade-ins and -outs wherein John imagines alternate scenarios), World Trade Center slowly makes us believe what our eyes at first can’t confirm, the weight of these words. It also makes deft use of all sorts of small details — pebbles and dust being literally vacuumed out of the mouths of those pulled from rubble, for instance — to bring home the horror of that living hell.

The character of Dave Karnes, though, is problematic as rendered here, in that he embodies most robustly an emotion — laser-focused vengeance — that predominates the days and weeks after September 11, but not its swirling eye center. Swooping down from… where, exactly?, Karnes is given to steely-eyed glares and sanctimonious statements like, “I don’t know if you all know this, but we’re at war,” and, “We’re gonna need some good men to avenge this,” delivered to himself more than anyone else. Dave is first shown glimpsing the attacks on television. Then he goes to get a haircut (a “jarhead” job, he asks for), consult tersely with his priest and slip back into his old military fatigues before reporting for self-activated duty at ground zero. All of this, including the haircut, may be true (in fact, I almost assume it is), but it rings false in its juxtaposition to the rest of this narrative.

For a movie so baldly emotive — I’m not being flip when I say that World Trade Center is Stone’s most feminine work — overt flag-waving of this nature comes across as goading, perfunctory patriotism. We don’t need someone to remind us that we hate the terrorists — we hate those who take the lives of more than 2,750 innocent civilians, citizens from over 80 different countries — because we certainly do. What makes memories of that day so quickly summon a lump in the throat is the utter disbelief we recall, and the surging sympathies it brings forward. While a quality dramatization in many respects, World Trade Center lacks a bit in that department. (Paramount, PG-13, 123 minutes)

Barnyard,
a colorful animated showcase that sacrifices a bit of narrative cogency for frenzied
jamborees, pratfalls and musical montage-fed poignancy. With neither a broad television advertising campaign nor
top-shelf star voice talent, Barnyard
will face a tough go of things in theaters. With the number of
computer-animated movies increasing seemingly fivefold, it takes more than
merely anthropomorphized critters to turn out audiences, and Barnyard — a simple, throwback story of
family, fraternity and learned responsibility — lacks the immediacy of a big,
bold narrative hook.

The movie has an enjoyably manic pace and satisfying message
for kids, but it’s doubtful that it can make substantial commercial inroads.
Opening on a comparable number of screens, Barnyard
could conceivably match or possibly best The
Ant Bully’s $8 million bow, benefiting from both the film’s strong
Nickelodeon brand marketing connection and potential audience runoff from Talladega Nights, but anything in the
range of co-producer Nickelodeon’s previously successful Rugrats films seems doubtful. With little chance to break out to a
wider constituency, Barnyard should
find better returns in ancillary markets, where the movie’s voluble charisma
will offer repeated charm for the under-10 set.

Ben the Cow (voiced by Sam Elliott) is the patriarch of the
barnyard, and for him the farm’s fence defines their space. He lovingly but
sternly enforces its borders, warning all against the dangers of attack from a
pack of marauding coyotes, who are led by the beady-eyed Dag (voiced by David
Koechner). Ben’s carefree son Otis (voiced by Kevin James), on the
other hand, happily indulges his state of arrested development, even though he
feels the first tinge of a care-giving impulse upon the arrival of pregnant cow
Daisy (voiced by Courteney Cox). When Ben is no longer able to lead the
animals, Otis must learn to heed his father’s mantra: “A strong man stands up
for himself, but a stronger man stands up for others.”

Though Oedekerk is best known for live-action comedies like Bruce Almighty and the Ace Ventura films, Barnyard is hardly his first foray into animation (he co-wrote Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and created
and executive produced Santa Vs. The
Snowman), so the film doesn’t lack a cohesive style. While nitpickers will
question biographically correct details like the cow’s udders (girl cows are
differentiated by longer eyelashes and bows on their heads) and the consistency
in movement of quadrupeds on two legs, these elements are obviously of far less
concern to Oedekerk, who aims for a more emotive truth than a practical one.
Either you happily buy into the conceit — the joke of animals walking, talking
and even playing music when humans aren’t looking — or you don’t, and suffer a
grumpy ride.

Barnyard’s
animation is comparatively simple and clean when compared to the deeper frames
of Pixar’s efforts, with cows having big, boxy faces, and other animals being
marked by a similarly rounded straightforwardness. Lively, light and airy is
the focus, in both word and deed. As Otis, meanwhile, Kevin James’ playful
voice performance perfectly captures the blithe bounciness of a good-hearted
but self-involved adolescent.

Several fleeting bits are tossed in for adults, from a “Lord
of the Hoof” bit and animals enjoying a “mechanical man” ride to jokes about
lactose intolerance, but Barnyard is
by and large pitched to a younger crowd, and thus driven by Otis’ manic energy. In an inversion of the rural American ritual of “cow
tipping,” Otis and some of his wild friends seek revenge on a snotty boy
(voiced by Oedekerk) who tips a sleeping cow; they steal a car (!), sneak into
his bedroom and “tip” him out of bed, then flee in a sequence that turns into a
protracted police chase.

John Debney’s score, several songs by the North Mississippi
Allstars and the movie’s amped-up sound design all combine
to give the movie an aural propulsion tailor-made for kids. Similarly, while Dag is a relatively menacing figure and
several of the brief coyote attacks might be a bit intense for very small children,
the movie’s action is bloodless. (Paramount, PG, 87 mins.)

including this item on Swimming Pool, but Time to Leave
represents a return to his least stylized mode of work, as well as
being perhaps his most personal movie. The film centers on gay
photographer Romain (Le Divorce’s Melvil Poupaud, a sort of
Gaelic Matthew Fox), a standoffish and secular Parisian in his early
30s, who finds out that he has inoperable cancer and only a few months
to live. From there, Romain begins to act up. He breaks up with his
boyfriend Sasha (Christian Sengewald), spitting, “Like with all
couples, routine is killing desire.” And he lashes out at his sister
Sophie (Louise-Anne Hippeau), nastily assessing her fragile marriage
and asserting he has no desire to ever photograph her children. He’s
acting out of pure instinct, but showing all these emotions to come
from a selfish, self-centered place.

Romain’s deepest connection is with his grandmother Laura (Jeanne
Moreau), and it’s only to her that he can disclose the news of his
sickness. And then, just as Romain’s world is getting smaller and
turning inexorably inward, he’s happened upon by Jany (Valeria
Bruni-Tedeschi), a waitress who has had trouble conceiving a child with
her sterile husband. She makes Romain a proposition which he initially
refuses, but then — as illness and emaciation sets in — he comes to
more deeply consider.

Short (83 minutes), tightly shot and anchored by Poupaud’s excellent performance, Time to Leave
is essentially a melodrama drained of any florid touches. When tears
finally occur we don’t see them prominently featured, but rather only
the in-profile tracts of where they’ve already rolled. Ozon (top left,
with Poupaud) builds to an elegiac finale that doesn’t beseech you with
its lamentations. We all have a Time to Leave, the film reminds us, though for some that time is cruelly too soon. Distributed by Strand Releasing, Time to Leave is in limited release now, expanding throughout the month.

Leslie Bibb), and two sociable, foul-mouthed sons, Walker
and Texas Ranger. Yes, life is good for Ricky, and his win-at-all-costs
approach has made him a national hero in short order.

A frightening crash, however, sends him to the hospital and robs him
of his nerve, and Ricky falls on hard times. Booted from his racing
team and left by his wife, Ricky returns to his small hometown and gets
a job delivering pizzas. Cal and Lucius (Michael Clarke Duncan), his
ex-crew chief, try to coax him back into action, but it takes
reconnecting with his father and mother (Jane Lynch) and former
assistant Susan (Amy Adams) to put Ricky back on the winning track.

On a more than subliminal but hardly politicized level, Talladega Nights plays as a filmic extension of the trademark man-child obliviousness Ferrell brought to his Saturday Night Live
interpretation of President George W. Bush. Squinty and possessing of
an unerring confidence — he describes himself as a big, hairy American
winning machine — Ricky’s mantra is, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”
He’s funny, yes, but he works as a character at least partly because
he’s such a product of the current zeitgeist — a swaggering cowboy
brought down to Earth. It’s no particular coincidence, either, that the
movie’s “villain” is a gay Frenchman, Formula One racecar driver Jean
Girard (an amusing Sacha Baron Cohen), who shows up to challenge Ricky
for NASCAR superiority and expedites his fall from grace.

As a film, Talladega Nights evinces much more of a sense of rootedness than Anchorman; cinematographer Oliver Wood (The Bourne Identity)
captures the pulse-pounding reality of the racing sequences in
poker-faced fashion, and director Adam McKay and Ferrell’s script has a
more finely attuned and (nominally) realistic trajectory. While still
seeded with whiplash reversals, the underlying impulses and motivations
are all real, and part of the difference between the two collaborations
is that Talladega Nights drags the audience in on the
characters’ pop-psychological evaluations. Ergo, dim bulb Cal is
subconsciously aware that he holds jealousy over Ricky always finishing
first and refusing to share the spoils (“I’ll just bury it deeper down
inside!” he exclaims agreeably after Ricky declines to let him win),
just as Reese is aware of his primal urge to sabotage things when he
gets a belated chance at some semblance of familial normalcy. The old
adage is “if you can’t fix it, feature it,” and Talladega Nights
does this to wryly winning effect, even going so far as to tweak the
movie’s sponsor and product placement deals, of which Ricky is
obviously a proxy holder.

While not without a small handful of dry spells, the laugh factor in Talladega Nights
is certainly as high as if not higher than anything else this summer. Possessing pitch
perfect timing and finely honed improv instincts, Reilly and Cole are
excellent additions to the cast, and really flesh out their characters.
Ferrell, meanwhile, delivers another indelible and hilarious character
— deserving, indeed, of his own ballad. (Columbia, PG-13, 108 mins.)

Swimming Pool, Mulholland Drive or even Identity,
there’s neither a strongly rooted and compulsively sympathetic central
character, nor an engaging, swirling elusiveness to the movie that
keeps it dancing ahead of total cognition until after the final reel.
Gabriel in and of himself is a well sketched and fully
three-dimensional character, and decently embodied by Williams, but his
obsession here with Pete seems arbitrary (the result of heretofore
obscured paternal instincts?), leaving the actor to fall back on that
trademark look of intestinal discomfort that substitutes, variously,
for pained worry, pained compassion and pained disappointment. As it
moves forward, the film, too, becomes rife with implausibilities. Joe
Morton plays Gabriel’s agent in a few scenes and Sandra Oh wanders in
as a friend of his, and while they feed and agree with Gabriel’s
doubts, none of these ostensibly bright people seems to have any good
ideas about how to discern the truth in non-dangerous and non-creepy
ways. Without stronger connective tissue to the factitious disorder on display, The Night Listener is an exercise in moody obligations. (Miramax, R, 82 mins.)

I’m not sure what intelligent-design proponents would make of Neil Marshall’s horror spelunking picture The Descent,
in which slimy, bug-eyed humanoid creatures stalk a group of female
explorers whose internal strife poses almost as much of a combined
threat as these rampaging carnivores. Regardless, the movie is ample
proof that “different” and “bad” need not be mutually exclusive
descriptors. While Stateside distributor Lions Gate is aggressively
pumping this film — which has already enjoyed a successful run abroad —
as the late summer horror entry from “the studio that brought you Saw and Hostel,” they’d be wise to hope for a quick commercial cash-in and cash-out, lest aficionados recall primarily this sloppy, unengaging film during the studio’s next cycle on the genre merry-go-round.

Filmed in Scotland but set in North Carolina, The Descent
centers on a half dozen women who reunite, a year after the tragic
death of Sarah’s (Shauna Macdonald) husband and daughter, for a sort of
athletic retreat of good, old-fashioned unmapped cave exploring. When
their entranceway collapses and traps them all underground, the
controlling instincts of hotheaded daredevil Juno (Natalie Mendoza,
above, rocking the Michelle Rodriguez part) rub some of the ladies the wrong
way. Of course, that’s not all with which they have to grapple. As they
negotiate plunging gulfs and narrow passages, it comes to their
attention that a group of carnivorous creatures is on their trail.
Split up from one another, graphic attrition ensues.

The most interesting thing about the The Descent is the
manner in which old individual grudges, rancor and guilt warp the
women’s collective survival efforts. There is no gung-ho collective. In
fact, one heat-of-the-moment death (an accident or murder?) fuels
reprisal, and turns part of the action inwards. (Here I was reminded of
The Rock’s character of Sarge from Doom, for whom the siege
becomes a blanket excuse for unfettered vengeance.) But this is
ultimately a false emotional arc, as the women’s motivations seem
whimsical and unclear; Juno in particular fluctuates between
earnestness and disingenuousness, and Sarah’s catharsis — however
inventive in a piece like this — is not ours.

For a movie that attaches so much significance to inter-party
bickering and subtle power plays, the dialogue is also often
stultifyingly wrongheaded. “If there’s someone down here, maybe they
can help get us out!” exclaims a character at one point early on. Yes…
if there’s anyone else trapped hundreds of feet underground, they surely have been merely waiting for the right moment to step forward and lead others out to safety.

This is a slightly different point of comparison, but some folks blasted 1999’s The Blair Witch Project
— and decried it, a little too loudly, as not scary — because of the
jittery camerawork. I’d suggest, though, that while at times admittedly
disorienting, it certainly fit within the prescribed narrative confines
of the story. The Descent, on the other hand, is a dark and
stressed-out mess. The movie is effectively claustrophobic at times,
but wholly incidentally so. Marshall fails in consistently defining the
spatial relationships of his frames, none of the action cuts together
well and the final five to 10 minutes — most of what is being touted in
the trailer, not coincidentally — devolves into an orgy of eye-gouging,
skull-cracking, blood-spewing, flash-cut violence.

That finale notwithstanding, The Descent is actually fairly
restrained and mannered for much of its running time — almost too much
so. Heartening, this deep focus on character in such a genre piece.
Still, it doesn’t change the fact that none of these characters are
particularly sympathetic, leaving the audience to root for their
demise, if only they could distinguish the action. (Lions Gate, R, 99 mins.)

The Ant Bully, an
intermittently sweetly moralizing but rather lackluster and ramshackle animated
tale of shifted perspective in which an adolescent in shrunken to the same size
as the ants in his front yard.

Visually, the movie recalls a bit the angular precision of Antz, though a duplication of that 1998 film’s
$91 million domestic box office seems farfetched, particularly coming on the
heels of the well received, fellow animated offering Monster House, which will enjoy better word-of-mouth and engage a
broader potential audience. A more likely final domestic tally for The Ant Bully seems to rest in the $45
to $70 million range, as the film isn’t of the type that will markedly cross
over to the same young adults who partially comprise the audience for Pixar’s
successful efforts. The Ant Bully’s
simultaneous opening in the 3-D IMAX format will certainly offer niche moviegoers
a uniquely immersive perspective on its titular protagonist’s journey and help
Warner Bros. achieve additional replay value at those outlets, while a well
recognized voice cast should likewise help the film establish more credible
commercial inroads internationally.

The film’s story centers on Lucas Nickle (well voiced by Zach Tyler
Eisen), a bullied, diminutive 10-year-old who turns his aggression on the ant
hill in his front yard. To these ants, including wizard ant Zoc (voiced by
Nicolas Cage) and his kindly girlfriend Hova (voiced by Julia Roberts), Lucas is
known simply as “the Destroyer,” and his wanton devastation of their home environment
must stop. To this end, Zoc concocts a special potion.

Shrunken down to the ants’ size after his parents leave for
the obligatory vacation, Lucas fitfully joins their world, and is sentenced by
the Ant Queen (voiced by Meryl Streep) to live and work in the colony as one of
them. There he finds a landscape teeming with heretofore unseen perils, and Lucas
slowly comes to appreciate the value of teamwork before, as in the recent
DreamWorks hit Over the Hedge, having
to wage war against an overbearing exterminator (Paul Giamatti), who in this
case previously conned Lucas into signing a contract with him.

A few adventure set pieces — including a dragonfly siege of
the ants and a foray into Lucas’ house in an attempt to cancel exterminator’s
appointment — offer up some excitement in their canted perspective. Young Eisen, meanwhile, gives able voice to Lucas’ frustrations and
petulant mood swings, proving — as with the cast of Monster House — that age appropriate voices are often better
anchors for animated fare than a high-profile name merely for name’s sake. Cage, too, has a blast, injecting a few mild trademark
eccentricities into his role as Zoc.

Overall, though, The Ant Bully lacks the sort of smart,
whimsical, freewheeling, grand-scale collision of worlds that its premise might
on the surface suggest. Its story is actually fairly insular. The movie sets up and then
drops the ball on any number of details, including the differences in
personality between scouts and foragers in the ant world, which might make for
rich comedic fodder, relying instead on a few broadly sketched character types.

The real problem, though, boils down to The Ant Bully’s rather indistinct mix of logic in the action on
display. This includes some real and practical elements, some fantastical bits (ants
hang-gliding on flower petals) and some wholly magical fragments, all of which commingle
haphazardly depending on whatever is convenient for a particular scene. Zoc’s
magic — which includes the potion that shrinks Lucas and a staff from which he
fires a resin-type material — is never adequately explained.

Myriad other details, too — like the full-size Lucas losing
his glasses, to no repercussion, when shrunk, and the exterminator Stan being reduced
only half-size in the climactic showdown — seem off, and the rather off-putting
character of kooky, alien-obsessed grandmother Mommo (voiced by Lily Tomlin) is
puzzlingly rendered. She figures out two-thirds of the way through the movie
that Lucas has been shrunk, but neither abets his return to human size nor has
a shared moment with him at film’s end.

Visually, The Ant
Bully is pitched toward a young-skewing audience, and generally engaging
and successful on this level, but hardly revolutionary. Director John A. Davis
places an emphasis on retaining a broader color palette, but the film’s
backgrounds aren’t as deep and chock full of detail as similar outdoors efforts
like Antz, A Bug’s Life or Over the
Hedge, and the angles likewise aren’t frequently as provocative in their
elicitation of scale and perspective. (Warner Bros., PG, 87 mins.)

Regardless of what you ultimately thought of it, part of — scratch that, most of — the buzz surrounding last year’s Match Point
was undeniably a result of writer-director Woody Allen abandoning the
comfortable terrain of New York and lighting out for across the pond,
where he delivered a much darker film than that for which he has been
previously, or at least recently, known. It was the very stark contrast
to the rest of his work that had people outside of his most hardcore
devotees jazzed about seeing an Allen film again. The similarly
London-set Scoop, unfortunately, plays as the lesser film in a
double bill with that thriller, a ramshackle and laboriously whimsical
comedic trifle that falls back on the filmmaker’s increasingly tired
penchant for nattering faux-realism.

Scarlett Johansson), in town visiting friends, gets plucked
from the audience for a trick. She’s then visited by an apparition of
Strombel, who feeds her a series of cryptic clues pointing to British
aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), and urges her to pursue the
story.

Taking a phony name and introducing Sid as her father, Sondra poses
as an actress and romantically snuggles up to Peter. She discovers a
deck of tarot cards in his tucked-away music room, as well as
additional secretive behavior, but has her share of doubts, even as
further visits from Strombel provide more information. Sid wants no
part of the investigation, but feels caught up in it by a need to
protect Sondra.

Allen clearly wants to use Lyman’s positioning within posh English
society as a contrasting backdrop for the movie’s two American
characters — one intrepid, one spineless — and he sets Scoop’s
light narrative gallop to an array of mischievously inquisitive
classical music, including Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake Ballet Suite” and
Johan Strauss’ “Annen-Polka.” But there are a clutch of small
inconsistencies and incongruities within the story, including one scene
in which a newspaper editor relates a piece of secondhand information
that he claims Peter’s father told him, a piece of information that
would directly contradict Sondra’s “front” to the Lyman family. One’s
pulse quickens here, expecting a fresh twist. Instead, it appears to be
merely a narrative flub.

Problems like this — and the manner in which Allen cuts quickly on
certain scenes, obviously trimming lead and trailing dialogue — give
the movie and its headlong dash toward conclusion the feeling of a
series of dopey vignettes. This certainly isn’t enhanced when a smitten
Peter suddenly leaves town on Sondra’s birthday after giving her a
gift, freeing her to dine with Sid. This and other moments like it defy
reasonable plausibility.

If its narrative isn’t one to hook audiences, Scoop at least
allows Johansson a chance to nicely subvert her burgeoning sexpot
image. With her round specs and a somewhat golly-gee persona, Sondra is
part Nancy Drew, part smitten bobbysoxer — and Johansson plays her with
a sunny and believably adolescent mix of aplomb and self-doubt. Even
if, that is, the story early on undermines this by setting Sondra up as
a bit of a floozy. In what is a somewhat uncomfortable window into
Allen’s imagination, Sondra — in an attempt to get an interview —
beds, off-camera, a film director. I’m not quite sure what
Allen’s trying to say about journalism here, and I’m not sure he knows
either. The big scoop on Scoop is that there really isn’t one. (Focus Features, PG-13, 95 mins.)

With its big-budget flash and style, Miami Vice charted new
ground for episodic television dramas in the 1980s, changing the way
such shows were conceived and staged, and no doubt laying the
groundwork for the directorial careers of folks like, let’s say, Charlie’s Angels’
McG. The big screen re-imagining then, starring Colin Farrell and Jamie
Foxx in the roles made famous by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas,
had many folks atwitter with anticipation. In reality, though, Miami Vice
is an incidentally titled, gritty travelogue and skillfully crafted but
surprisingly insular tale of parallel love stories — in other words, a
film dressed up and masquerading as a summer movie.

At its
center are Sonny Crockett (Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Foxx), and their
faithful band of ever-ready back-up (an underwritten group which
includes Justin Theroux, Elizabeth Rodriguez and Domenick Lombardozzi).
After the identity of an informant (John Hawkes) is leaked and his wife
killed, Crockett and Tubbs go undercover as courier specialists to
assist a high-up FBI agent (Ciaran Hinds) and determine the source of
the leak. This leads them to a shadowy Colombian drug and illicit
merchandise kingpin named Arcángel Jésus de Montoya (Luis Tosar) and —
perhaps to racially balance out the villainy — a homegrown Aryan group
that, for reasons never quite fully illuminated, eventually conspires
with Montoya’s quietly menacing middleman, José Yero (John Ortiz), to
kidnap Tubbs’ girlfriend, Trudy (Naomie Harris). Crockett, meanwhile,
falls for Montoya’s second-in-command, the poker-faced yet still sultry
Isabella (Gong Li), taking her up on her offer, mid-deal, to dash away
to Havana for mojitos. From here the petty incidents of gamesmanship
mount, with José’s perceptive distrust of Crockett and Tubbs eventually
culminating in bloodshed.

Mann’s world here is one of dark maneuvering and clenched, stubbled
jaws. He’s not interested in crafting a pop masterpiece, and there are
several types of truth with which he is wholly unconcerned — the
comfortable emotional track of narrative movie truth, certainly, but
also the truth of the mundanities of law enforcement. In Mann’s
idealized, stylized world of alpha male wolves on the prowl, police
work isn’t constrained by the necessity of paperwork, logistics or even
sleep — it’s a 24/7, multi-national hall-crawl, captured by
cinematographer Dion Beebe’s inscrutable, dirty frames and powered by
the lightly throbbing pulse of John Murphy’s score and lowly mixed
sonic offerings from Audioslave, Moby and Mogwai.

But for whom is Miami Vice made, precisely? Certainly not
hardcore devotees of the television show who have some nostalgic jones
for pastel blazers and Phil Collins tunes. (But then again, what sort
of these in-name-only adaptations of old small screen product typically
are?) Neither does it have the moral clarity of Saving Private Ryan, Seabiscuit or Cinderella Man, other adult-skewing films of recent summers. And Miami Vice
isn’t suffuse enough with staged conflict to sate the appetite of
general action audiences. An exciting and exactingly staged final
shootout punctures the movie’s mostly languid mood, but as the hearty
grosses of the mindless Pirates of the Caribbean sequel prove, casual summer audiences don’t go to the movies for
ruminative parables on violence and the difficulties inherent in
balancing dangerous, undercover investigative work with romance. Collateral,
which two years ago crawled across the $100 million mark only due to
Tom Cruise’s pre-couch jumping star power, had at its core the hook of
an Everyman thrown into a violent world with which he has no
familiarity or ease. If that film was Mann’s concessionary power play
in the direction of commercial relevance, Miami Vice comes
across on several important levels as a flippant clutch of the balls,
so densely atmospheric and deeply plotted is the film.

Ever since Heat, Mann’s films of the past decade — even a finely charted biopic like Ali — have been as much about the creation and sustenance of mood as anything else. (Maybe this is why he abandoned The Aviator, which in its hermetic subject didn’t have the inherent, sustained, hypnotic allure of Muhammad Ali.) Miami Vice
is no exception. While Mann’s visual and aural mastery of the cinematic
form and in particular Farrell’s laser-eyed intensity get you engaged,
one keeps waiting for a deeper sense of intrigue to set in — my mind
kicked around several interesting twists or narrative avenues that
never came to fruition or were explored.

I like that the film doesn’t conform to hackneyed clichés in service
of an attempted franchise launch, but can’t help feeling a bit
disappointed at Miami Vice’s deliberate murkiness, and the fact
that Farrell and Foxx are so divided and free of the bristling
masculine chemistry we want to see from them for much of the movie.
Drained of the juice that first made it such a visceral, cathartic
thrill, this film is Miami Vice in name only. Perhaps some deep undercover work is needed to find its mojo. (Universal, R, 132 mins.)

Paul Dano), who has
taken an oath of silence until he achieves his goal of entering the Air
Force Academy. Living with them is Richard’s irascible father (Alan
Arkin), a foul-mouthed heroin junkie who heartily advises Dwayne to
bang all the chicks that he can.

When we first meet the dysfunctional Hoover clan, Sheryl’s suicidal
brother Frank (Steve Carell), a gay Proust scholar despondent over a
recent breakup, has joined them as well, only further upping the
awkwardness quotient of dinner-table conversation. A call about the
titular California beauty pageant sends Olive into an ecstatic tizzy —
she’s a last-minute replacement — and so the Hoovers, unable to afford
airfare or leave Frank alone, all pile into an untrustworthy,
rusted-out VW Bus to head west. The bulk of the film then charts their
bickering misadventures on the road before arriving at the garish and
creepy but not too overplayed beauty pageant finale.

Penned by debut screenwriter Michael Arndt, the film is funny in
piecemeal fashion, charting various cathartic highs and crushing lows
enjoyed by its characters, but if only these bits felt more strongly
tethered to something emotionally substantive. Perhaps I’m a bit too
inured by hegemonic comedic formula, but Little Miss Sunshine’s
characters almost all feel like willfully colorful responses to the
sort of stale, cardboard characters we see in many broadly pitched,
mainstream comedies — atypical, therefore, but just as flatly
two-dimensional and in blind service to the contrivances of plot as
their less original contemporaries. Sheryl, for instance, has to go
from beleagueredly supportive to a harridan at a moment’s notice, all
in order to generate momentary drama, and Dwayne’s eventual breakdown
similarly leaves a sour taste of fleeting — and thus false — pathos.
The seams of this story all show.

Dayton and Faris — an experienced husband-and-wife team making the
leap from commercials and music videos to features with this, their
film debut — coax terrifically enthusiastic performances out of their
cast, and it’s here that Little Miss Sunshine most succeeds.
Arkin tears into his role with glee. Carell gets to showcase another
side of his talents. Dano is a gifted young actor with impeccable
instincts, and Breslin, meanwhile, is a smart choice upon which to hang
the film. In a story that’s rooted somewhat in the real world but
requires big gestures and acting out from a lot of its cast, she is the
underplayed nexus of what marginal, to-scale poignancy the movie does
achieve, for in her wide, blinking eyes and boldly indifferent Little
Miss Sunshine final performance one can clearly recall the tension of
adolescent realization at being judged, and how that judgment will
continue into perpetuity in adulthood.

Little Miss Sunshine isn’t for everyone — its R rating,
albeit a “light” one, assures us of that — but one can appreciate, in
fits and starts, the chord that it strikes in highlighting familial
extremes. Ultimately the Hoover clan achieves that pinch of momentary
togetherness that assures us all these characters really love one
another and belong together, but it feels synthetically attained in my
opinion. (Fox Searchlight, R, 101 mins.)

Kevin Smith’s sequel. Affection for the first film and its overly demonstrative and episodic charms is a fair prerequisite for Clerks II, a movie that eventually and a bit surprisingly arrives, somewhat (and I can’t stress that word enough) sweetly, at a place of plaintive nostalgia. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

As I’ve commented on before, there’s a lot of bad
independent cinema these days that just sort of floats by hazily, its attempts
at courting more overt commerciality ironically rendering it indistinct. Then
there’s something like Shadowboxer,
the directorial debut of Lee Daniels — producer of the Academy Award-winning Monster’s Ball — and a movie that makes
you appreciate independent films, if in no doubt wholly unintended ways. Yes,
if you’re going to do bad, you might as well close your eyes and swing for the
fences like Shadowboxer, in the hopes
that someone mistakes all that effort and intensity for insightfulness.

An emotionally over-dialed drama, Shadowboxer centers on the warped, intertwined lives of a pair of
live-in assassins — preternaturally quiet Mikey (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his
mentor/lover, Rose (Helen Mirren), who years ago rescued him from an abusive
household as a child. Theirs is a relationship that recalls a pet and pet
owner as much as anything else — Rose bathes Mikey, and he sleeps curled up at
her feet. To add, though, to the… intrigue? well, let’s say convolution, Rose
has now been diagnosed with terminal cancer, leading to a bit of a shift in
their traditional caregiver arrangement.

The pair’s latest assignment finds them carrying out a
contract, sight unseen, for crime boss Clayton (Stephen Dorff), an out-there
club owner whose villainous motivations are less recondite than purely
baffling. After offing a lippy subordinate himself, Clayton includes his
pregnant wife Vickie (Vanessa Ferlito) in a series of in-house hits just on the
off chance that she may be cheating on him (“We’ll never know,” he says with a
shrug and a smirk). Rose and Mikey coldly dispatch a group of Clayton’s
henchmen, but Rose has a change of heart when she sees a panicked Vickie’s
water break. So begins a harrowing life on the run for this ultimate odd
quartet — Rose, Mikey, a bewigged Vickie and baby. A year passes, and while Rose
looks to redeem their tragic past in her remaining time on Earth, a reticent Mikey
dutifully if dispassionately protects their new adopted family.

Penned by William Lipz (perhaps a pseudonym?) and credited
with 15 producers on the project, Shadowboxer
keeps you guessing, all right, but never in a really good way. Though one
hardly ever knows what is about to follow, the accrued litany of garish,
puzzling and/or silly elements reads like a random grab-bag of stylized clichés
and truncated impov exercises, from Rose and Mikey’s wheelchair-bound contact
and bizarrely operatic and baroque score by Mario Grigorov to a zonked-out
supporting turn by Macy Gray and not one, but two sex scenes between Gooding
and Mirren — one preceded by a striptease set to rapper Nas’ “The Cross,”
allowing this reviewer to unfortunately spend an inordinate amount of time
contemplating just how deep-set Gooding’s ass crack is.

Independent of its execution the film scores a few, scant
points for its off-kilter, multi-ethnic casting and blind eye toward
conventionality. But eccentricity in place of substance and psychological
perspicacity in the end doesn’t fly any more than rote formula. Directorially,
Daniels substitutes slow-motion for meaning, and the performances are wildly
uneven (Ferlito in particular is awful), sometimes seemingly cobbled together
from tonally different films. Only Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as a shady doctor who
aids Rose and Mikey but then must deal with Clayton as well, escapes with his
dignity more or less intact.

Shadowboxer is
ostensibly a picture about colliding damaged souls, the legacy of sadism and
the toll and endless cycle of psychological abuse. But A History of Violence this ain’t. Lacking any natural flow or
cohesion, it instead becomes an unintentional comedy of unfortunate choices,
not the least of which is on the part of erstwhile Oscar winner Gooding, to
whom Chill Factor 2 must now be
looking pretty good. (Teton Films, R, 91 mins.)

When Robert De Niro speaks, people listen. Well, unless he’s
starring in The Adventures of Rocky &
Bullwinkle. Then, not so much — then they snicker, or shake their head. But
when a couple years ago De Niro put the word out that, specifically, he wanted
for his young Tribeca Film Festival, which just celebrated its fifth
anniversary, submissions dealing with the aftermath of Sept. 11, well, people
listened, particularly young filmmakers. A 2005 entry in the festival, The Great New Wonderful feels like the
perfectly mannered indie response to such an entreaty.

Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle also to his credit), The Great New Wonderful is set in 2002,
in the omnipresent but unmentioned aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
It’s a movie that’s all about rage — bottled, transmuted and otherwise refracted.
To this end, its characters are a disparate collection of somewhat inscrutable
folks.

There’s Emme Keeler (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a tightly wound,
high-end party pastry peddler who lives in a parallel material-emotional cocoon
alongside her husband Danny (Will Arnett). There’s Sandie (Jim Gaffigan), a genial
office drone who suffers a series of work-mandated meetings with a psychologist
(pricelessly played by Tony Shalhoub) who attempts to bait him into acting out
by prodding him with dispassionate professional “observations” like, “You’re
full of rage. Is that the little man inside your head?” There’s also David and
Allison Burbage (Tom McCarthy and Judy Greer, respectively), a young married
couple who try to cope with the aggressive acting out of their elementary
school aged son, Charlie (Bill Donner). Other strands center around an elderly
lady (Olympia Dukakis) who reconnects with an old high school classmate, and two
security guards, Avi and Satish (Naseeruddin Shah and Sharat Saxena,
respectively), one of whom is stricken with misplaced aggression.

The film is sharp in its detail and dialogue, with a few angular
laughs popping up from unexpected places — in young Charlie’s surly behavior at
a school geography bee, or when one character holds forth in rambling fashion about
“blousy, Emma Thompson-y dresses.” But Leiner too often pauses to ironically
frame the movie’s quirks, and the music flits from off-kilter incongruous (Bob
Seger’s “Night Moves” pops up on the radio) to heartbreakingly plaintive (The
Wrens’ “This Is Not What You Had Planned”). All of this combines to make the
film feel overly self-conscious — keeping the audience at arms’ length from
these characters, just as they in turn do with their emotions and feelings.
There are some prosaic charms to be found in The Great New Wonderful, but it frequently feels willfully vague
and indistinct, reaching wanly for a fuzzy, blanket profundity while not bothering
to color within the lines of its own cozy narrative. (First
Independent, R, 86 mins.)

The Village at least still had gripping sequences, Lady in the Water has only comparative
shots — and the careening sense of a lost auteur’s bike on a downhill “ghost
ride.”

Indulging a nonsensical “bedtime story” narrative stretched
treacherously thin, Lady in the Water
is an at-odds, slapdash collection of the literal and symbolic, a colorfully
unconventional work that comes off as simultaneously silly, indulgent and undernourished.
Scant passages of the film click and really engage you due to Shyamalan’s sheer
nervy aplomb — something never in short supply — but not so much as they were
probably originally intended. The connective tissue here is all flim-flam, something
Shyamalan himself probably knows because of the manner he so laboriously avoids
addressing basic questions within the narrative.

An animated passage of simplistic cave drawings somberly
narrated by David Ogden Stiers (“Man does not listen well…”) gives way to stuttering
building superintendent Cleveland Heep (a game Paul Giamatti), who oversees the
Cove apartment complex of suburban Philadelphia. That Cleveland
is a sad sack you can guess from the get-go, but Giamatti imbues in him a
certain wounded humanity that rises above the trite explanation of Shyamalan’s
script. Yes, names say a lot in Shyamalan’s world, so it’s unfortunate that the
object of Cleveland’s investigation
and protection for most of the rest of the movie is in fact named, in
bull’s-eye fashion, Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), a mythical “narf” who makes
her home under the complex’s dark swimming pool.

When Story is trapped above ground and stalked by a vicious “scrunt,”
a sort of wolf-like beast with grass on its back that is no longer observing
the labyrinthine rules of engagement laid out by Young-Soon Choi (Cindy Cheung)
in her recounting of the epic bedtime tale relayed to her by her Korean mother
(June Kyoko Lu), Cleveland must aid Story in her quest to find her “vessel,” a
writer whose work will bring change, peace, prosperity, enlightenment and slim
thighs and washboard stomachs to all humankind. (Or something like that.) That
writer is… Vick Ran (Shyamalan, triple-dipping), a genial loafer who lives with
his sister Anna (Sarita Choudhury). Vick and Anna fall in lockstep with Cleveland’s
quest, and soon help recruit from an eccentric assortment of fellow residents a
collection of coded explicators known as “the symbolist,” “the healer” and “the
guild” who will unlock their guest’s pathway to freedom. See, it’s all about
saving Story. Get it? If you don’t, it’s probably because you’re a mindless
lemming sell-out who needs Hollywood porridge spoon-fed
to you. Jeez. Stupid lemming.

While Lady in the Water’s problems are myriad, at least part of the
chorus of critical boos you’re likely to hear — the lesser reasoned portion,
perhaps, but still part — will have to do with as much with the movie’s desperately
un-hip mode of storytelling as its actual tonal and narrative fumblings. The
film is not a thriller, but small portions of it are directed (and sound foleyed)
with such furious energy that one will be easily forgiven for a few jumps.

Still (and I don’t know if anyone ever actually pointed this
out to Shyamalan) but as driven as it is by fairytale motivations, Lady in the Water is far from whimsical.
In fact, it’s often downright leaden. First there’s all the exposition from
Young-Soon Choi. Shyamalan also goes the extra step of awkwardly cramming in
visual and dialogue references to his other films, including a line that’s a
nod to Unbreakable when Cleveland
asks Story, apropos of nothing, “Do you get sick when you tell me things?” I
didn’t catch the Wide Awake and Praying with Anger homages, but
something tells me Shyamalan didn’t exclude them.

Driven by down-tempo music selections, including Cibo Matto
and covers of Bob Dylan tunes, Lady in
the Water wants very desperately to be both a tremendously plaintive and
capital-I important allegory, and yet Shyamalan clearly has only the most
threadbare story elements upon which to hang the movie, so he resorts to
cheaply ironic deconstruction — a form of hackery that suits neither him nor,
more importantly, the material. By winkingly acknowledging, say, rain and water
as a purification metaphor before indulging in the same tropes, or having Bob
Balaban’s joyless (but functionally necessary!) film critic decode a “horror
movie” moment as it unfolds before him, Shyamalan grinds the apparatus of his
moviemaking to a halt, pulling the audience further out of and away from the
story. The reason this is such an egregious slip is because you have a
moralizing story built around a complete lack of intra-narrative questioning; all
the characters blissfully fling themselves into the mission as it’s explained
to them. Undercutting this is then basically telling the audience, “You’re
stupid for buying this.”

I won’t even get into the narcissistic implications of
casting himself as a writer whose thoughts change the course of humanity — maybe
another day, another blog posting — but suffice to say that I think Shyamalan
would really find a new creative freedom in tackling some straight-up genre
pieces as a director for hire. If that means putting away the laptop and
delaying humankind’s betterment through his own writing for a number of years,
so be it. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 108 mins.)

Shrek-style, for the fences, cramming in enough winking pop
cultural references and visual gags to lure older teens and adult audiences to
the theater while still seeding their often simple, fable-esque narratives with
enough primary colors, boisterous supporting characters and flatulence jokes to
please young kids.

Monster House,
though, using the same motion-capture-based animation technique pioneered by
Robert Zemeckis (also a producer here) on The
Polar Express, represents a unique sort of risk. Rated PG, the movie is
easily scary enough to freak out 5- or 6-year-olds. Built around the old
chestnut of a haunted abode but powered by appealing tweener characters and
told with a slightly more adult sensibility — or at least one rooted more in
the traditional filmic angles of live action — Monster House plays legitimately and quite pleasingly to broad
audiences of almost any age, but it’s also a movie which could have trouble
wooing that broader segment of the movie-going public that turns out for the Shrek movies, unless word-of-mouth
catches fire.

The story centers around gangly, 12-year-old DJ (voiced by
Mitchel Musso) and his chubby best friend, Chowder (voiced by Sam Lerner). When
DJ’s parents head out of town on the eve of Halloween and leave him in the care
of disinterested babysitter Zee (voiced by Maggie Gyllenhaal), DJ and Chowder
run afoul of the former’s spindly, frightening, elderly neighbor, Nebbercracker
(voiced by Steve Buscemi). After a confrontation in which Nebbercracker suffers
a heart attack, the old man’s sinister, anthropomorphized house starts striking
out and taking all sorts of punitive action.

After an all-night stakeout by the boys, the next day spunky
young Jenny (voiced by Spencer Locke) wanders by selling candy door-to-door, and
the trio hatch a quick plan to lull the house to sleep — a humorous bit
involving a dummy crudely fashioned out of a vacuum cleaner filled with bottles
of cough syrup — and infiltrate it. They at first fail, waylaid by a pair of bumbling
Keystone cops (voiced by Kevin James and Nick Cannon), but as the house comes
to life and further snaps up unsuspecting passersby, DJ, Chowder and Jenny
uncover a series of astonishing secrets about both Nebbercracker and his home
that will eventually help them defeat the monstrous rampaging structure.

The film’s story is fairly simple and its characterizations
definitely hew closely to those of the Harry
Potter series, but what Monster House
most has going for it is a finely balanced sense of cheerfulness and plucky bonhomie
— courtesy of some great work by its young voice cast — and authentic chills. Younger
kids will respond to the movie’s foreboding and intermittent menace in a
genuine way, while teens and older adults can still chiefly enjoy its lively
patter and spunky asides (“My mom’s out at a movie with her personal trainer,”
notes Chowder blithely) while viewing the thrills through a more detached,
nostalgic lens.

Neophtye director Gil Kenan — who came to the attention of
producers Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg courtesy of The Lark, an undergraduate short blending animation and live action
— overdials the action of the finalé a bit, but deftly deploys a variety of
low-angle and deep focus shots that provide as a nice visual counterbalance to
the kid-friendly story. It certainly helps, too, that Dan Harmon & Rob
Schrab and Pamela Pettler’s screenplay — originally written as a live action
film and more straightforward thriller about a possessed house — is studded
with funny lines and an array of amusingly idiosyncratic details. A jostling
romantic rivalry between DJ and Chowder for Jenny’s attention is there for
slightly older kids to either take or leave, but it doesn’t infringe at all
upon the story’s momentum.

In an era of pleasant but frequently unsurprising sequels
and meticulously muggy, corporate-vetted movies designed to stoke the embers of
a possible franchise before the first film has even released, it’s not often
that animated films succeed on their own terms like Monster House does. (Columbia/Sony Pictures
Imageworks, PG, 89 mins.)

Edward Burns burst onto the scene in 1995 with
The Brothers McMullen, a genuine Sundance success story that was shot on
a budget of $25,000 with cameras on surreptitious loan, as the story goes, from
his day gig at Entertainment Tonight or another one of those syndicated
tele-mag shows. He subsequently landed Cameron
Diaz, Jennifer Aniston, Heather Graham and Brittany Murphy for other early movies, then segued into
acting in studio projects, including Saving Private Ryan and, gulp,
Life or Something Like It. Burns’ bread and butter, though, has always
remained flitting tales of romantic nervousness and blue collar ennui set
amongst beer-swilling Irish Catholics, and so it continues with The
Groomsmen, his latest film.

The movie tells the story of a reunited group of lifelong suburban New York
pals — Paulie (Burns), older brother Jimbo (Donal
Logue), irrepressible cousin Mike (Jay Mohr), family man bar owner Dez
(Matthew Lillard) and T.C. (John Leguizamo) — who all gather in advance of
Paulie’s impending marriage to his pregnant fiancée, Sue (the aforementioned Murphy). All manner of would-coulda-shoulda
secrets, frustrations and resentments are trotted out and dissected, with each
character searching for their own sort of settlement.

If blithely tossed about $20 bills are the currency of early John Grisham (and anyone
who’s read The Firm knows what I’m talking about), tall cold ones are the
narrative crutch of Burns’ oeuvre; there’s never been a substantive male
conversation that didn’t revolve around and/or involve beer in his screen world.
In The Groomsmen we have to wait all the way until the second
scene of the movie, but then, soon enough, characters are swigging whilst
picking up one another from the airport, fishing, eating, reminiscing… you get
the picture.

A snapshot of thirtysomething reticence, the movie is all very familiar,
both in general and when placed up against Burns’ other work. But it’s also
decently acted, giving most of its male cast against-type roles to play around
with, and Mohr plenty of scenery to chew. Burns further indulges this with
longer set-piece takes and wide shots, providing an easy-to-swallow answer for viewers who’ve
wondered where The Brothers McMullen’s neo-masculine ambivalence has gone
in the past decade. (Bauer Martinez, R, 98 mins.)

raison d’être for their
individual works, they seem largely to be aping convention in an effort solely
to land their next gig. If you think about it, this trend is in some ways
actually more craven than broadly pitched, mindless Hollywood
fare, which at least usually has the good sense and decency not to try to
present itself as thoughtful, and certainly not as art. All of which brings us
to Mini’s First Time, an empty
vehicle of flattened emotional affect from screenwriter and debut feature
director Nick Guthe.

Born — as its breathless over-narration more than adequately
informs us — to an embittered, gold-digging mother (Carrie-Anne Moss), teenaged
Mini (Thirteen’s Nikki Reed) lives
life in the Hollywood fast lane. Estranged from said
alcoholic, philandering mother, Diane, and her equally emotionally isolated
stepfather, executive publicist Martin (Alec Baldwin), Mini lives her life as a
mission to collect as many behavioral cherry pops — as many original
experiences — as possible. (Not to nitpick, but wouldn’t the more apt and
interesting title then be Mini’s First
Times, plural?) To that end, she takes a job at a high-end escort service,
and who should one of Mini’s first clients be except… Martin.

Instead of running nauseously from the room, however, Mini
rationalizes that it’s OK since they’re not really related, and thus coaxes an
unaware Martin into a shadowy but satisfying sexual encounter. When he finds
out what’s happened, Martin is momentarily thrown, but — his reasoning perhaps
impaired by a loveless marriage — he pursues a continuation of their
relationship, and soon finds himself amenable to Mini’s suggestion that they
conspire to have Diane committed to a mental institution by eliciting further
outrageous and zonked-out behavior through meting out a combination of drugs,
alcohol and psychological intimidation. Mini eventually arouses the suspicion
(and possibly more) of her hornball television producer neighbor (Jeff
Goldblum), and this and other events lead to continuing inquiries from a dogged
beat cop (Luke Wilson).

Like similarly sour-cheeked adolescent tales of manipulation
and emotional disconnection Pretty Persuasion and The Chumscrubber, Mini’s First Time attempts to walk a
tightrope between sly, dark and/or tongue-in-cheek comedy and somewhat shadowy
menace, but comes across as smirky, contrived and unconvincing. Here the adult
characters are at least a bit less buffoonish and a bit more rooted in the real
world, if no less wholly irresponsible in their parental duties and adult
oversight. But while the character of Mini somewhat recalls, in her lack of
altruism and coldly intellectual honesty, Linda Fiorentino’s turn as Bridget
Gregory in director John Dahl masterful slice of ’90s noir, The Last Seduction, there’s neither the
shock nor the heft of that unapologetic opportunism here.

While dealing with his unlikable protagonist and having her
do nasty and scabrous things, Guthe also wants to imply that Mini acts the way
she does because she’s a wounded bird or somehow fighting for survival, even
though the film’s ludicrous ending realistically completely undercuts this
suggestion. From a purely practical and entertaining point-of-view, though,
there’s no palpable warmth to Martin and Mini’s relationship past the first
sexual bloom, so you know long in advance the two twists that are inevitably
coming. What one is left with is a triple-smug picture that enjoys flaunting
its “inappropriateness” and then trying to convince you that in doing so it’s
revealing some significant anthropological or sociological truths. I’m sure
someone will indulge these, Mini’s First’s
lies, but it won’t be mainstream audiences, or even most desirously agreeable
independent film fans. (First Independent, R, 91 mins.)

You can clearly chart the arc of ambitious ascendancy in the careers
of many movie stars, generally based on an examination of their
selection of scripts when they arrive at a place that affords them more
choosiness. But Owen Wilson has, ever since bursting onto the scene in
the 1994 indie Bottle Rocket, followed not so much a path less taken as one artfully obscured by brambles.

Behind Enemy Lines,
which represented an obvious if still earnest and good-natured attempt
at crossing over into another genre — been the quietest of any
consistently steady movie star, probably because his inimitable brand
of comedy comes from a place of cud-chewing informality and
relaxedness. There’s no guile, but neither is there a hard sell. Wilson
just does what he does, and allows you to take it or leave it. Cast
again as an affable, shaggy-haired, loosey-goosey man-child, Wilson is
the marginal saving grace of You, Me and Dupree, a familiarly
plotted, three’s-a-crowd comedy which suffers a slow start and trades
too frequently in broad, garish strokes before rallying with some late
atypical turns.

Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo (Welcome to Collinwood),
the movie opens with the Hawaiian nuptials of Carl Peterson (Matt
Dillon) and his new wife, Molly Thompson (Kate Hudson). Carl works for
Molly’s well-to-do architect father (Michael Douglas), an
overprotective single parent whose passive-aggressive distaste for his
son-in-law (which is to say any son-in-law) eventually tips
wholeheartedly into the latter, leading him to suggest a vasectomy to
Carl. So there’s stress on the work front for Carl, and soon on the
home front as well.

Dupree is Carl’s best friend and best man, and as such Carl offers
to let him stay with he and Molly when Dupree gets bounced from his job
and apartment in the same day. Dupree promptly sets about violating
boundaries both tangible (he orders cable TV, changes the answering
machine message and bursts into their bedroom without knocking as
they’re about to have sex) and more ambiguous (“You’re newlyweds,”
intones Dupree in Wilson’s friendly drawl, “and a big part of that is
making love. You’re gonna explore each other — I get that”). Things
culminate with Dupree accidentally burning down the living room, the
result of an overly candlelit romantic encounter with a Mormon
co-worker Molly attempts to set him up with. As the parallel frictions
of work and a chastised Dupree — who the couple bounce but later take
back in — drive Carl to distraction and create real conflict between he
and Molly, it’s the unlikely Dupree who rides to the rescue of the
relationship.

You, Me and Dupree is actually three movies mashed somewhat
clumsily into one. The first third to half of the film is actually the
most familiar and least interesting — the story of Dupree the loveable
screw-up, and his transmutation into the houseguest from hell. While
Wilson’s skill with an offbeat line reading provides a few fleeting
moments of bemused charm, what doesn’t wash here is the alternating
obliviousness, sensitive-guy charm and wide-eyed raconteur spirit of
the character.

The second (and most interesting) portion of the film involves Molly
bonding with Dupree after getting to know him in ways that Carl has
never bothered to; the pair cook a meal together for Carl and, in a
somewhat clever twist upon expected gender roles, dish about the
uncommunicativeness of the man they share in their lives. It’s only
here, in fitful bits, that You, Me and Dupree feels really
fresh and new. The final act of the movie dissolves into an obstacle
course of steeplechase silliness, set off by Carl — painted into a
psychological corner by Mr. Thompson’s mental abuse and Molly’s new
closeness with Dupree — finally boiling over and leaping across the
dinner table at his best friend. Naturally, this alienates Molly,
laying the groundwork for an implausible and wholly contrived, but
still emotionally successful grand-gesture finalé in which Carl, with
an assist from Dupree, stands up to his father-in-law and tries to win
back his wife.

Debut screenwriter Mike LeSieur’s screenplay is a fairly
unconvincing, cobbled together mixture of winkingly broad elements
(it’s the type of movie in which Dupree arrives at Carl and Molly’s
house with a moose head and mandolin, just because) and familiar set
pieces, but just when you’re ready to write it off, along comes a
weirdly pleasant scene like Dupree sincerely guest-speaking at an
elementary school career day, attempting in somewhat plaintive fashion
to reach the kids who might not know what they want to do in life.
While Dillon is a serviceable actor, he mostly goes over like a lead
balloon here; Hudson, meanwhile, crinkles her nose in too-cute fashion,
and shows off an impressive post-pregnancy figure in another scene, a
fantasy sequence. Mostly, though, it’s again Wilson’s show… though he
surely wouldn’t have you believe it. (Universal, PG-13, 105 mins.)

Elizabeth Berkley’s turn in Showgirls,
though that was surely less intentional than a result of Paul
Verhoeven’s satirical puppet-mastery. More than that, though, the
original Pirates of the Caribbean seemed able — in its
devil-may-care differentiation from other summer product — to shrewdly
parcel out just the right amount of humor, supernatural horror,
period-piece adventure, character detail and swashbuckling thrill. Dead Man’s Chest, the first of two massive Pirates of the Caribbean
sequels filmed back-to-back, unfortunately wastes all of this capital
and accrued goodwill. While gorgeously lensed, sporadically rousing and
driven by an undeniable technical virtuosity, the film is bloated
beyond all recognition and has absolutely no flow or consistency —
there’s nary a human heartbeat here in its two-and-a-half-hour-plus
running time.

Picking up from the first movie, the pretzel-twist story finds
erstwhile blacksmith Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and aristocratic
Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) torn apart before they can wed,
punished by the British crown for abetting a criminal’s escape. As Will
sets forth to retrieve from Jack Sparrow a compass that will help
activate pardons for he and Elizabeth, Jack tries to squirm out of a
similarly undesirable fate. Having granted him a captaincy for 13
years, squid-faced villain Davey Jones (an enhanced Bill Nighy, above) figures
Jack owes him his soul, as initially agreed upon, and he’s out to lay
claim to his debt. After a protracted island escape which reintroduces
to one another Will and a washed-up Jack — who has fled the dangers of
the sea and, naturally, been taken as a god by the natives — familiar
gamesmanship and good-natured double-crosses begin.

Jack agrees to give Will his compass if Will boards Davey Jones’
ship, the Flying Dutchman, and retrieves for him a special key. Once
onboard, Will meets his long-lost father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan
Skarsgard), now a member of Davey Jones’ accursed crew. Jack is given a
three-day extension to round up a bunch of souls in exchange for his,
and soon Elizabeth enters the fray as well, in assertive form,
searching for Will. Intertwined in a fashion more than a bit
overcomplicated, all of these story strands eventually dovetail — along
with the legend of Davey Jones’ locked-up heart and a massive,
tentacled undersea beast called the Cracken that apparently does his
bidding — in a maritime showdown.

First, a note about what’s right with Dead Man’s Chest, which
is to say primarily Davey Jones. The computer imagery-effected
character is a Gollum-type achievement — literally, one could merely
watch him for half the movie’s running time, so fascinating is he in
his squishy detail — and Nighy gives him a malevolent pomposity. He’s a
worthy and worthwhile villain in the truest senses of the phrase, and
if the stakes between he and Jack never feel intensely personal it’s
only because of the rest of the movie’s distension.

Speaking of which, Depp gamely goes back to the same well of
theatrically prancing tics, and though he’s not given much concrete
with which to work, the character of Jack Sparrow remains a roguish
charmer because you’re slightly mesmerized by his buoyant
unflappability and dogged determination, even as he continually
undercuts, manipulates and otherwise sells out all those around him.
He’s at his best when he’s outmanned and down and out, which is
something the besieged American Everyman can certainly relate to as
wish fulfillment.

Still, though it seems ridiculous to say given the first film’s $140 million budget, Dead Man’s Chest feels like a meticulously artificial, shuck-and-jive Hollywood recapitulation of The Curse of the Black Pearl.
It’s natural that some of the winds of surprise would be let out of
this sequel’s sails, but what was once fresh feels here co-opted, what
was enjoyable feels thrice-overbaked in its elaborate duplication. In
fact, everything about Dead Man’s Chest feels so
emphatically overproduced — from Hans Zimmer’s ridiculously pounding
score, telling audiences what to think, to digressive supporting
character bits like Naomie Harris’ indecipherable shaman priestess and
the forced reintroduction of spurned love interest Commandant
Norrington (Jack Davenport) — as to induce audience fatigue.

As conceived by writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, Dead Man’s Chest
may be the first half of one massive redux, chopped in two. While
perhaps born of economic necessity, this tack triggers a certain
creative stillbirth. This approach worked in the Lord of the Rings franchise because there was a more or less natural mooring to be found in the source material; it didn’t work for The Matrix
sequels because their mode of production seemed to promote an agenda
wherein huge action set pieces were used as counterbalancing ballast
rather than flowing naturally from the story. The latter is true of Dead Man’s Chest too.

The pressures of crafting a sequel double-dip yields to wild overcompensation. Oh, sure, everything looks great, courtesy of production design that spares no expense. But Dead Man’s Chest is an empty vessel — colorful and well stocked, but too long and unfocused to truly thrill, at any price. (Touchstone, PG-13, 150 mins.)