PHOTOS
Jeff Boam
Opening This Weekend
Saw VI
Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor
All Hallow’s Eve is nearly upon us again, dear readers, and you all know what that means — toilet paper streaming from the trees in your yard, eggs smashed upon the siding of your house, soap smeared on your car windows, and a generous helping of torture porn! Ahem. Please allow your reviewer to bring you up to speed on the R-rated Saw horror series: Finally, after being killed off three installments ago and STILL plotting tortures, homicidal maniac Jigsaw (Bell) has been succeeded by a rogue cop (Mandylor) who inflicts more grizzly life-and-death puzzles on poor souls with the FBI hot on his trail. The Plus: The franchise. Hey, kiddies, the franchise has survived this long (the last installment bled over $56 million out of U.S. moviegoers), so Saw away. The Minus: The material. Saw me once, shame on you. Saw me six times, shame on mankind. The movies have already become repetitious. What now?
Amelia
Hilary Swank, Richard Gere
It seems almost improbable that H’wood hasn’t tapped the life of famed flyer Amelia Earhart for a bio-pic before Amelia (Night at the Museum and TV movies notwithstanding). Though Howard Hughes got the big screen treatment from no less than Martin Scorsese in 2004 (The Aviator with Leonardo DiCario), Charles Lindbergh’s story, as written by Billy Wilder, hit theaters way back in 1957 (The Spirit of St. Louis with James Stewart). Better late than never, they say, especially when you consider the players, dear readers. From director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake) comes this PG-rated biopic of larger-than-life aviator Amelia Earhart (Swank), whose flights and loves (Gere, Ewan McGregor) made her a global phenomenon. The Plus: The players. Swank is a two-time Oscar winner (Boys Don’t Cry, Million Dollar Baby). Gere is a Golden Globe winner (Chicago). McGregor (Trainspotting, Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith) is certainly due recognition from either award. As director, Nair has amassed a respectable resume as well. The Minus: The rating. PG … really?! It doesn’t look like this will be much of a warts ’n’ all biopic.
Astro Boy
Voices of Nicolas Cage, Charlize Theron
Very recently, H’wood star Nicolas Cage went public regarding his financial woes. Thanks to a former business manager who allegedly made some bad deals (and whom the actor is now suing), Cage now owes the IRS more than $6 million. He has been forced to put several of his homes on the market and is now accepting more movie roles than ever before. Insiders speculate that the quality of some of these projects may be considered less than desirable. Though this doesn’t explain away his involvement in Ghost Rider or Bangkok Dangerous (which both wrapped well before 2009), this inside scoop hopefully doesn’t bode unwell for his latest, an adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s legendary English-dubbed ’60s cartoon, Astro Boy. In this PG-rated animated adventure, a young boy engineered with incredible powers (voiced by Freddie Highmore) embarks on a journey to learn what it takes to be a hero. The Plus: The talent. If it tanks, Cage isn’t going down alone. Here, he is joined by Theron, Donald Sutherland, Kristen Bell, Nathan Lane, Bill Nighy and Samuel L. Jackson. The Minus: The odds. It seems to be hit or miss with family friendly offerings lately. For every Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, there is an Aliens in the Attic.
Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant
John C. Reilly, Ken Watanabe
After the success of the sophomoric laugh-riot American Pie and the Hugh Grant comedy About a Boy, brothers Chris and Paul Weitz went their separate ways artistically. While Paul stayed pretty much in the same ballpark (In Good Company, American Dreamz), Chris was the brother who strayed toward more fantastical family fare (The Golden Compass, the forthcoming The Twilight Saga: New Moon) … until now. In this PG-13-rated adventure from Paul Weitz, a young man (Josh Hutcherson) finds his calling when a vampire (Reilly) and his traveling freak show comes to town. The Plus: The talent. Weitz’s In Good Company was underrated and he has a good eye for talent. While Reilly isn’t quite a marquee name, he has starred in a number of blockbuster movies (Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers) and been nominated for an Academy Award (Chicago). The Minus: The competition. For those teens who don’t sneak into Saw VI this Halloween, attention will be divided between two PG-rated flicks … and neither seems to have a lot of marketing dollars behind it.
Now Playing
Paranormal Activity
Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat
It has been 10 years since The Blair Witch Project broke box office records by pioneering faux documentary horror (and nine years since its awful sequel, which adopted a narrative structure, didn’t). Though Blair Witch doubtlessly spawned other flicks for better ([*Rec]), and worse ([*Rec]’s remake, Quarantine), the movie was never as good as its gimmick. The best that can be said for its style is that sci-fi took the gimmick to a better and bigger-budgeted level (Cloverfield, District 9) … until now. Brimming with scarily good material that matches the inventiveness of the gimmick, Paranormal Activity gives so many thrills with such little popcorn extravagance that it will scare the Bejesus out of moviegoers and H’wood itself.
In this R-rated doc-style thriller made for less than $15,000, a suburban couple (Featherston, Sloat) becomes increasingly disturbed by a presence that comes in the middle of the night, so they try to catch it on video as they sleep.
Your reviewer’s favorite horror movies prove to be the ones that skirt reality the closest (The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense and Let the Right One In chief among them). Writer/director Oren Peli more than just comes up with a winning premise — he truly sells it through. Thanks to a slow build-up, an ample investment in the characters, and a damn frightening payoff, the audience buys every frame crook, line and sinker. It helps that the performances of Featherston and Sloat prove chillingly authentic. Moviegoers get so caught up in the couple’s drama that they become every bloody bit as terrorized as those on-screen. Bottom line: Too cool for ghoul school.
Where the Wild Things Are
Catherine Keener, Max Records
The prospects of the offbeat visionary behind the off-kilter mindbender Being John Malkovich taking a 10-sentence piece of kid-lit and turning it into a feature film holds promise, but partly as a can’t-look-away potential car wreck scenario. It’d be like stuffing Cookie Monster into the Keebler Elf Tree — oh, it’d probably be damn entertaining, but also downright bloody. Thankfully, director Spike Jonze delivers more of the former, crafting a film so organically rich and ferociously imaginative that it feels like it could have been made in the ’70s when maverick filmmakers were given creative control from the studios with a keys-to-the-asylum kind of wild abandon.
In this PG-rated adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, a rambunctious and sensitive boy named Max (Records) escapes to a mysterious island full of strange creatures (voices of James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker) where he becomes king.
Your reviewer can’t remember a film in recent memory that better illustrated the thrills and spills of being a kid — and he means illustrated. From the frenetic opening shot, Jonze gives filmgoers a kids’-eye-view of the high emotions and feral energy that boils down to adolescence. This goes double for the island adventure, where The Jim Henson Creature Shop and some perfectly chosen players — especially Records and Gandolfini — give the audience monsters every bit as real as the film’s adults. As the fur flies when Max realizes the heavy burden of “parenting,” the grown-ups — more than the kids — will be transported back to the age when they first learned life’s greatest earliest lesson: Life isn’t fair. Bottom line: Makes your heart sing.
Capitalism: A Love Story
Michael Moore
In Moore’s latest R-rated documentary, the root causes of the global economic meltdown are examined via a comical look at the corporate and political shenanigans that allegedly kicked off the whole damn thing. When filmgoers finally realized that Moore is a humorist and not a documentarian (he paints with an almost satirical brush), a greater appreciation for his pointed and bittersweet video essays became possible. His being a humorist doesn’t change the fact that his facts are right, however, and Capitalism will strike a nerve with even the most discerning viewer. Though he smartly keeps off camera for most of the picture — letting the issue take focus — Moore seems to have humbled and uses his on-screen moments as a fourth wall-breaking call-to-action. Not his best, but very timely and telling. Bottom line: Much love.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Voices of Bill Hader, Anna Faris
In this PG-rated 3-D animated adaptation (also available in 2-D), an inventor (Hader) tries to solve a food shortage and inadvertently causes food to fall from the sky in abundance. It tries to pull a Pixar, making a smart cartoon that both kids and adults can enjoy, but misses the mark on both. The smart-alecky zingers are above kids’ heads but below the standards of their parents, meaning many of the jokes end up in the ether. The blame falls on a half-baked script. The screenwriters put together gags that hold promise but never fully deliver. For example, a monkey wears a device that audibly voices his simple thoughts, but, aside from saying his name, Steve, the punchline never comes. The end product is occasionally fun but never out-and-out funtastic. Bottom line: Bad weather report.
Couples Retreat
Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau
In this PG-13-rated comedy, four couples (Vaughn, Malin Akerman; Favreau, Kristin Davis; Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell; Faizon Love, Kali Hawk) embark on a journey to a tropical island resort only to find that their group-rate vacation comes at the high cost of therapy. While hungry younger actors, Vaughn and Favreau once wowed your reviewer as a modern-day Matthau and Lemmon in Swingers and (to a lesser degree) Made. Together again with less to prove, these now-established H’wood players give audiences a comedy that’s more Ritz Brothers than Marx Brothers — humorous, but far from their personal best. They stand and deliver standard fluff (she loves me, she loves me not) with tired gags (hi-jinks in a tropical paradise) and a tidy ending, coloring-by-numbers where once they colored outside of the lines. Bottom line: Beat a hasty retreat.
Halloween II
Tyler Mane, Malcolm McDowell
In this R-rated sequel masquerading as murder porn, Michael Myers’ (Mane) murderous rampage continues with his sister (Scout Taylor-Compton) seemingly dead in his sights. If John Carpenter directed Twin Peaks or David Lynch directed Halloween, it would probably look a lot like this indulgent mess. With Halloween II, moviegoers are left with a flick so laughably drenched in Karo syrup that it becomes downright silly, not scary. Worse, it puts viewers through dime store armchair psychology involving visions of the serial killer’s inner child, the director’s wife and an unfortunate white horse that must have wandered into the shot. This isn’t psycho-babble ,this is psycho-bubblegum and it plays out about as well as the first craptastic Halloween sequels did back in the day. Bottom line: Tainted trick-or-treat candy.
The Invention of Lying
Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner
In this PG-13-rated comedy set in an alternate reality where lying doesn’t exist, Gervais plays a down-on-his-luck loser who suddenly develops the ability to lie. Without its H’wood trappings, this movie’s high-minded but potentially winning concept feels like it would have made a brilliant import. Instead, the British humor ends up perfectly rounded … on all four sides. In cooking up his first-and-only liar comedy with a half-baked American formula (distracting star cameos, neat ’n’ tidy ending), Gervais seems to have had much of his Britishness neutered … which was why many audiences loved him in the first place. Granted, his script wrings some funny bits out of religion and sex, but they ultimately go nowhere. By end credits, he might as well lose the accent and give his Bollocks a full Yank. Bottom line: A lowdown Lying shame.
Zombieland
Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg
In this R-rated horror comedy, a ragtag group (Harrelson, Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, Emma Stone) joins forces to survive a worldwide zombie outbreak. Writer/director Ruben Fleischer drums a helluva lot of belly laughs out of this niche in the wake of other zombie comedies (even George Romero himself used a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor in his work). His piss and vinegar take comes off less pointedly farcical than Shaun of the Dead, however. As the title suggests, he just embraces horror comedy with an amusement park abandon — fun, wild and damn well worth the price of admission. With relish, Harrelson scarily wears undead-clobbering masochism like a glove. The rest of the performances work well, but mostly due to the Roman Circus decadence of the side-splitting script (three words: Bill Murray cameo). Bottom line: Bring on your dead.