A full review will follow on Friday, but it’s worth noting that even with reasonably decreased expectation bracing one for the
inevitable chipmunk flatulence, Alvin and the Chipmunks is fairly dispiriting. “They can make us so much money if you just let me use them!” says David
Cross’ gleefully conniving music industry executive about midway through the film, a CGI/live-action hybrid based on the old cartoon series of the same name. He’s
supposed to be addressing the marketability of the title characters, but one
gets the feeling they might have stumbled across the distilled pitch session
for this lazy, low-grade family flick, based on the strange, enduring creation
of 1950s singer/songwriter Ross Bagdasarian — three chipmunks who lay waste to their
human host’s surroundings and sing in high-pitched, three-part harmonies. After
all, with characters Garfield, Underdog, et al,
hitting the big screen, why specifically not Alvin and
the Chipmunks too, the thinking seems to go.

A full review will soon follow, but Denzel Washington‘s sophomore directorial effort, The Great Debaters (The Weinstein Company, December 25) is about precisely the film that you’d expect, yet a little bit better. And there’s nothing wrong with that, actually. There’s something comforting about its classical construction, meat-and-potatoes straightforwardness and pull-strings drama. Formula is formula for a reason; it works if it’s well done, and The Great Debaters is, and thus does. Based on the true story of the trials and tribulations of a small, all-black college’s debate team in the 1930s, the movie is an audience-pleaser — solidly told, and anchored with for the most part inviting performances.

Forest Whitaker, as the college’s dean, and Washington himself, as Melvin Tolson, the group’s inspirational “oh captain, my captain,” give nice supporting turns. Jurnee Smollet’s drawl yo-yos from subdued to overly affected and grating, but Nate Parker and the young Denzel Whitaker (yes, seriously, that’s his name) are most responsible for the film’s hold of one’s attention. Parker in particular proves possessing of “it,” flat out — the smile, the charisma, the emotion… the total package. He was quite good in Pride, and reminds me of a slightly younger Taye Diggs, except even less concerned with where the camera is placed.

I’ve been kicking around some soundtracks over the past week or so, in advance of seasonal awards voting, and I’m really digging, all over again, Marco Beltrami’s score for 3:10 to Yuma. It has a certain classic structure that conjures up the movie’s dusty underbelly, but when it gets going at a good downhill gallop, it’s all on-a-steel-horse-I-ride swagger — big, yes, but also notable for the manner in which it trades in withholding notes.

Atonement early yesterday evening in Hollywood, squeezed in before a late screening of Denzel Washington‘s The Great Debaters. In attendance were James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Vanessa Redgrave et al, and while niceties were exchanged and sincere appreciation for the film aired, there was also a good bit of chatter about the prospects of awards for other movies, particularly in advance of the respective year-end votes from the Los Angeles and Boston film critics tomorrow, and New York’s group on Monday. This left me feeling that a lot of Atonement‘s support is of the soft variety, like Iowa caucus poll numbers — enough juice to secure a Best Picture nod, probably, but not necessarily the stuff of a surefire front-runner.

In the interest of serious big screen metrics, we’ve previously assayed the impact of Brittany Snow’s scantily clad cavorting about on the opening weekend grosses of John Tucker Must Die, and also analyzed the net worth of Jessica Alba’s penguin panties. It seems an entirely reasonable question to ask, then, the financial net effect of the “restricted” Internet trailer for Beowulf, and various topless and come-hither shots of Angelina Jolie, like the one below, on the $27.5 million weekend debut of the PG-13 rated motion-capture flick?

randy 15-year-olds and obsessive Tomb Raider fans (well, of the videogame) out there getting tired of the same old Photoshopped pictures, right?

A full review is done and in the chamber, hopefully to be posted this weekend, but it’s worth noting that Enchanted, which opens next Wednesday, November 21, is a very pleasant surprise, especially when stacked up against Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. The film’s opening animated segment, which runs maybe eight minutes or so, will spark a certain nostalgia in fans of pre-CGI movies like The Little Mermaid, and Pip, the little chipmunk who also makes the jump from the animated realm to the real world is, if purposefully not photo-realistic, a lot better looking than the stuff on display in the trailer for Alvin and the Chipmunks.

The real story, however, is Amy Adams, who — as naïve princess-in-waiting Giselle, hailing from “just beyond the meadows of joy and the valley of contentment” — stakes a convincing claim to being the next big thing by way of Girls Next Door. Now she just needs a top-shelf romantic comedy, that’s all.

There Will Be Blood is the fifth film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, and there’s no doubt that it’s a masterfully constructed piece of work from an immensely talented filmmaker — and a sprawling period piece departure to boot from a director whose work, Boogie Nights nominally excepted, has heretofore been rooted in latter-century modernity. And yet there’s still a sense — from some head-feint intrigue involving a pair of twin brothers to its title, which seems designed as a marketing scheme — that the film is an educated, elongated put-on. A great and entertaining put-on for cineastes, but still a put-on nonetheless.

An expansive epic of power, family and faith both conjured and misplaced, There Will Be Blood unfolds against the incendiary frontier of California’s
turn-of-the-century petroleum boom. The story chronicles the life and times of
Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a silver miner who transforms himself into a self-made oil tycoon. When Plainview
gets a mysterious tip-off that there’s a little town out west where an ocean of
oil is oozing out of the ground, he heads with his son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier),
to take their chances in dust-worn Little Boston. In this hardscrabble
town, where the main excitement centers around the holy-roller church of
charismatic preacher Eli Sunday (Little Miss Sunshine‘s Paul Dano), Plainview
and H.W. make their lucky strike. But even as the well raises all of
their fortunes, nothing will remain the same as conflicts escalate and every
human value — love, hope, community, belief, ambition and even the bond between
father and son — is imperiled by corruption, deception and the flow of that black gold.

Working from the first third, or half, of Upton Sinclair’s 1920s muck-raking novel Oil!, Anderson’s
screenplay easily draws comparisons to The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane, just in terms of setting and themes — the manner in which it assays rising paranoia and competition. What Anderson
expertly conveys is a deceptive sense of epic scope — we scarcely leave
Planeview’s side, but paradoxically have a keen sense of his place in the industry, and the industry’s burgeoning importance to the country. Jonny Greenwood’s score, meanwhile, sounds like a THX test — a taut, menacing
string stretched to just before its breaking point; it’s a love-it or hate-it proposition. Still, for all the skill evident in its construction, you can feel There Will Be Blood lose most of an educated audience in its third act, as I did at a special screening Wednesday night, followed by a Q&A with Anderson — bad news since this ain’t a populist crowd-pleaser to begin with. Most of the laughter itself is appropriate, but unlike No Country for Old Men, they’re not laughing in shared, clenched tension, but in a weirdly diffused bewilderment. This stems chiefly from problems in the text. More on this closer to release.

I caught Frank Darabont’s The Mist this past week, and while a full review will follow closer to its release, it’s a misfire — too long and mock-cerebral to qualify as a thrill ride for genre audiences, and too riddled with low-grade histrionics and other moments that give one pause to carry the day as a piece of apocalyptic theater-in-the-round.

Infamous‘ Toby Jones, Chris Owen, Alexa Davalos (much more fetching in Feast of Love), Nathan Gamble and Sam Witwer, who has absolutely ridiculous eyebrows. (Seriously, it matters — Witwer is supposed to play a conflicted Army kid, but looks like he stepped out of a Lindsay Lohan movie or Chad Michael Murray impression contest.)

The Mist is supposed to be about the slowly dawning horror of mob rule — how public masks are discarded when the thin veneer of civilization is stripped away. The problem is that you consistently figure things out before characters, some of the dialogue goes clang! and the juxtaposition of other bits is unintentionally hilarious. (In one scene, Jane earnestly reassures his son he’ll be fine despite a planned venture outside, then, still hugging him, turns directly to another adult and says, “If anything happens to me, take care of Billy…”) Additionally, Harden’s crazed prophet — meant to be a mixture of religious proselytizing and flat-out whack-job craziness — never takes root as anything more than irritating, chiefly due to an extremely broad, grating performance. The movie earns points for assaying its premise with a difficult ending, but if/when The Mist under-performs at the box office, it decidedly won’t be because of that choice, though less intelligent box office gurus (and studio executives) may ascribe blame thusly.

For more information on the film, visit its web site by clicking here. A co-production from MGM and Dimension Films, The Mist opens nationwide November 21.

I recently caught Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the winner
of the Best Director’s award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and liked it a good bit — almost as much for its modes of conveyance, surprisingly, as its story.

Based on a true story and the highly lauded book of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the film tells the story of the successful and charismatic
editor-in-chief of French Elle (Mathieu Amalric, above right), who suffers a sudden stroke that leaves him in a life-altered state. Beset by physical challenges and left with little hope for a normal future, he discovers escape in memories and
a rekindled imagination. The film is the very definition of a tough
sell, but still an evocative and rather subtly moving portrait of a castaway
soul. It’s a movie that highlights and plays up elements of shared humanity rather than
just differences, what’s been robbed from Jean-Dominique. The first 12 to 15
minutes or so are a fascinating exercise in subjectivity, told from his warped point-of-view; particularly amazing is a scene in which Jean-Dominique gets one of his eyes stitched shut, to ward off sepsis. It doesn’t yet have a live web site, but The Diving Bell and the Butterfly releases from Miramax on December 19 in New York and Los Angeles, followed by a national rollout later that month, into the first of the year; for those in Los Angeles, it also screens twice at the upcoming AFI Fest, with cast and crew in attendance.

Good news on Fred Claus, the re-teaming of Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin and star Vince Vaughn, releasing November 9 from Warner Bros.

the first trailer for the film really underwhelms, what with its rather rote slapstick and ninja elves, the movie is actually a lot… well, at least a good bit smarter than those clips indicate, providing a vehicle for Vaughn’s goosed-up, passive-aggressive, chatterbox patter, yes, but also some genuine and pleasant surprises in narrative direction, including a cameo from Frank Stallone. (Yes, seriously…) I was skeptical about Vaughn’s charms being able to sustain this movie, but Dobkin is a gifted, intuitive comedic director, and not just for spurning I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.