Nick Schager
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Review: Whatever Works
Filed under: Comedy, Theatrical Reviews
Whatever Works' title is the mantra of inveterate curmudgeon Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), as well as that of Woody Allen, whose latest – and first to be set in his beloved Manhattan since 2004's Melinda and Melinda – hews as tightly to his trademark preoccupations as Of Mice and Men's Lenny clung to his rabbit. Casting David makes sense, as the Curb Your Enthusiasm star's crotchety on-screen persona more than slightly recalls that of Allen's. Yet rather than an inspired meeting of kindred minds, their collaboration does little except reinforce the notion that Allen's creative well has long since run dry, his films now split into either inert, heavy-handed, detached spectacles of pretty people doing naughty things in foreign locales (Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona), or leaden comedic larks in which notable names embody Allen's archetypal kvetching role.
An erudite string-theory professor and all-around misanthrope with suicidal tendencies and an extensive vocabulary, David's Boris grumps and grouches like countless other Allen protagonists, right down to his guiding philosophy that the world is a cold, random place full of regret and misery, and that any rare chances at happiness should be seized.
Review: Surveillance
Filed under: Thrillers, Mystery & Suspense, Magnolia, Theatrical Reviews
Surveillance may involve three separate interviews about the same event, but Rashomon it most certainly is not. Ascertaining the truth through multiple narratives is certainly central to Jennifer Lynch's long-delayed follow-up to 1993's polarizing Boxing Helena. The three accounts provided, however, aren't juxtaposed or in real conflict; rather, they coalesce to form a tale about the fateful affairs that led FBI agents Anderson (Julia Ormond) and Hallaway (Bill Pullman) to a middle-of-nowhere New Mexico police station to investigate a horrific crime. That offense is initially shrouded in mystery, with details elucidated slowly through the agents' briefing and subsequent interviews – conducted simultaneously by Anderson and local cops, and monitored via closed-circuit video feeds by Hallaway – of the surviving eyewitnesses: traumatized 12-year-old Stephanie (Ryan Simpkins), defiant junkie Bobbie (Pell James) and combative officer Bennet (Kent Harper). It's the set-up for a rather routine procedural. Yet in a development that will stun no one who's seen Boxing Helena or any of her father's films, Lynch isn't interested in straightforward genre mundanity, and even during Hallaway's first appearance – his face twitchy, his speech halting, his eyes nervous and his comportment slightly askew – there's an underlying sense that this ordinary reality is somehow off-kilter, corrupted.
Review: Tetro
Francis Ford Coppola may never again craft a classic like The Godfather, but after years spent toiling on bland studio fare – as well as 2007's ambitious, muddled Youth Without Youth – the director regains his mojo with Tetro, a saga of familial strife and Oedipal conflict equally indebted to '60s euro cinema and the theatrical traditions of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. An independently financed gem, Coppola's first self-penned film since 1974's The Conversation is shot in lustrous black and white and marked by an old-school formal proficiency that's highlighted by an endlessly intriguing and expressive frame. It's also rife with echoes of the past, in terms of its cinematic forbearers – including The Godfather, and its focus on the shadow cast by titanic father figures on sons – as well as its narrative proper, which concerns the reunion in Buenos Aires of 18-year-old Bennie (newcomer Alden Ehrenreich) and his older brother Tetro (Vincent Gallo), the latter of whom up and left home years prior on a writing sabbatical and was never heard from again. As is slowly revealed, his departure was spurred by both men's father Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a world-renowned symphony conductor whom Tetro disdainfully refers to as "The Great Man" and whose stature, and accompanying egomaniacal behavior, caused an unspecified rift that hasn't yet healed.
Review: Management
Filed under: New Releases, Theatrical Reviews
In a very minor way, Management attempts to freshen up the moribund romantic comedy genre, toning down the gleeful bounciness and upping the wry strangeness. Unfortunately, the weirdness employed by Stephen Belber's amorous fairy tale is of a decidedly limp, half-hearted sort, as the writer/director seems torn between wanting to make his film legitimately idiosyncratic, and fearing that going too far out on a limb will interfere with his rather traditional meet-cute tale – and alienate said material's formula-craving target audience. The result is a very mildly peculiar take on a stale opposites-attract premise, which in this case centers on Mike (Steve Zahn), a schlub who works as night manager at his parents' Arizona motel, and Sue (Jennifer Aniston), a chilly traveling saleswoman of corporate artwork who stays two nights at Mike's establishment and quickly catches his eye. Though Mike is a loser, he's an adorably earnest one, and though Sue is a cold fish, she's actually a caring, understanding one, and thus when Mike begins his courtship, it's already been made patently clear by Belber's contrived script that the two are destined to make googly-eyes at each other.
Review: Hannah Montana: The Movie
Filed under: Comedy, Music & Musicals, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Family Films
Googly-eyed Disney muppet Miley Cyrus makes her inevitable big-screen debut in Hannah Montana: The Movie, and the nicest thing one can say about the film is that at least it's not The Suite Life of Zack & Cody: The Movie. A tweener saga that's been crafted mainly with focus-group tests in mind, Hannah's maiden cinematic offering delivers a combination of romance, humor, music, glamour and yay-country-living blather that aims to satisfy the cross-platform franchise's myriad devotees. Given Hannah's roots on a Disney channel show whose primary claim to fame is schooling young television viewers in the finer nuances of sitcom pratfalls and laugh tracks, as well as the illustrious record of director Peter Chelsom, he of Town & Country and Shall We Dance? ignominy, it's hard to feign surprise at the dispiriting results of this movie-cum-brand-marketing-tool. Yet the lengths to which it goes to satisfy a wide array of interests is, even in the wake of its High School Musical kindred spirits, somewhat astonishing, pandering in so many directions that enduring the film is akin to being drawn and quartered.
Review: Duplicity
Filed under: Action, Comedy, Thrillers, Mystery & Suspense
For someone who made his name in Hollywood as a crackerjack screenwriter, Tony Gilroy seems, with Duplicity, far more adept with the camera than the written word. With his directorial follow-up to Michael Clayton, Gilroy returns to the world of corporate espionage, though this time he plays his spy-thriller material for fun, his characters' use of champagne corks to send secret signals proving apt for a film aimed at delivering fizzy thrills.
For all its intricate plot machinations, however, there's little here that hasn't been done before, and better, by the likes of David Mamet and even Steven Soderbergh, whose Ocean's Eleven capers are clearly an inspiration for Gilroy's jazzy-cool approach. Stylish to the hilt, it's a saga coated in sumptuously sleek hues that are in tune with the story's zippy verbal interplay. Yet for all its razzle-dazzle aesthetic flair, there's not much going on beneath the striking surface, as the writer/director's tale is an unnecessarily knotty one, masking its shallowness of theme and characterization with narrative loop-de-loops that, by the third act, are revealed to be insufficient window dressing for a rather pedestrian, hollow cat-and-mouse contest.
Review: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
Filed under: Action, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Games and Game Movies
If there's one video game franchise that most definitely does not cry out for the celluloid treatment, it's Capcom's Street Fighter, a series defined by cartoon action figures engaging in two-dimensional, one-on-one brawling. The games have no real story, no real levels, and no character depth, a fact that nonetheless didn't prevent the production of 1994's dreadful Jean-Claude Van Damme-headlined Street Fighter. Fifteen years later, and ostensibly timed to coincide with the release of the series' latest, surefire XBOX and PS3 hit Street Fighter 4, comes Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, a tie-in that focuses squarely on the titular female Asian martial artist with the hair buns and assortment of high-flying kicks. Unsurprising for an adaptation of narrative-free source material, what little plot exists here is of the embarrassingly shallow sort, though since the film is only truly targeted at fans of the interactive games, it's the action and inclusion of recognizable personalities that will likely matter most. In those areas as well, unfortunately, this genre throwaway proves equally inept.
Review: The Lodger
The modern serial killer thriller, as established in 1991 by Jonathan Demme's expert The Silence of the Lambs and then further in 1995 by David Fincher's superb Se7en, has deteriorated into an uninventive collection of familiar tricks, tropes and tiresomely murky cinematography. If regurgitation has become the genre's guiding principle, there are far worse sources to plagiarize than the canon of Alfred Hitchcock, which is more or less what first-time writer-director David Ondaatje does with The Lodger, a modern update of the 1913 Marie Belloc Lowndes-penned mystery that was the basis for Hitch's 1927 silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Predictably, the results aren't nearly as inspired when viewed in direct comparison. Worse still, they're also not inspired when viewed through the prism of the past two decades' worth of likeminded cinema (and the network-TV behemoth C.S.I.). Stolidly including every cliché in sight while failing to keep things tense or intriguing, it's a film that deviates not an inch from its rickety template and, consequently, disallows its sturdy cast from maneuvering in ways that might bring some novelty to the cat-and-mouse tale.
Review: Inkheart
Filed under: New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Family Films
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Inkheart is a scattered collection of ideas, most of them cavalierly mixed together and barely fleshed out. Director Iain Softley's adaptation of Cornelia Funke's 2004 best-seller is a fantasy film built from spare parts - deliberately so, as it involves a hero known as a "silvertongue" who, by reading aloud, can bring fictional characters and objects off the page and into the real world. Shortly after the birth of his daughter, bookbinder Mo Folchart (Brendan Fraser) unintentionally transports villains from the titular swords-and-sorcery novel into our universe, and sends back in their place - because this supernatural gift is of a tit-for-tat variety - his wife Resa (Sienna Guillory). Determined to set things right, he sets out to find a copy of the rare "Inkheart," a quest that years later leads him and pre-teen daughter Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett) to Europe. There, they discover not only the highly sought-after paperback but also trouble in the form of Dustfinger (Paul Bettany), a fire-dancer who, eager to return to his book world, hands Mo and Meggie over to chief "Inkheart" scoundrel Capricorn (Andy Serkis), who's using silvertongues to make himself rich, collect famous literary creatures (a tick-tocking crocodile, winged monkeys, a unicorn) and usher into our dimension the monstrous Shadow.
Review: Paul Blart: Mall Cop
Filed under: Comedy, Sony, Theatrical Reviews
Paul Blart (Kevin James) is fat, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop doesn't want you to forget it for a single second. Of course, it's hard to lose sight of this fact, given that portly star James is in every scene, and seems to have packed on even more poundage since his days on the late CBS sitcom The King of Queens. Yet more fundamentally, his girth is an issue because it's at the center of almost every joke in Steve Carr's film. During an obstacle course test for the New Jersey State Police department, Paul has gross sweat stains in the man-boob and belly button areas. Depressed over his widowed life and medicating his hypoglycemia with constant sugar fixes, Paul chows down on mom's blueberry pie slathered with peanut butter ("It fills the cracks of the heart"). Carrying out his workaday routine as a security "officer" at a West Orange, New Jersey mall, Paul clumsily smacks into a minivan while riding his job-issued Segway personal transporter, has a fistfight with an overweight shopper, crashes through ceilings, and fails to fully hoist himself into (and then causes to collapse) a store air duct. Then, in his off-hours, he drunkenly flails his enormous frame about a dance floor.
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