Schizo review

March 11th, 2010

They are the directing-writing team behind “Hoosiers” and “Rudy,” two
movies so ingrained in the jock culture that merely saying the words “You’re
five foot nothin’, a hundred and nothin’, without a speck of athletic talent”
or “Boys, don’t get caught watching the paint dry” will reflexively turn the
manliest of men into a whimpering puddle of tears.

“The Game of Their Lives,” the latest motivational speech of a movie from
the pair, is a deserving account of the underdog United States soccer team’s
match versus powerhouse England in the 1950 World Cup. But even though the
film includes many of the elements that make Anspaugh and Pizzo’s previous
collaborations great, funding problems and casting miscues render the finished
product disappointingly mediocre.

The treacly dialogue that fills “The Game of Their Lives” was equally
thick in “Hoosiers” and “Rudy.” Those who remember the “Rudy” soliloquy about
playing Notre Dame football instead of working in the steel mill will
experience a deja vu moment in “Game” when one player insists: “Momma, how
many times do I have to tell you? I’m not going to embalming school. I don’t
want to be an undertaker!”

So why is one movie great and one not so good? Sean Astin as Rudy was
impossible to forget, while the actor who made the undertaker comment is, at
this moment, impossible to recall. In casting the “Game” leads, someone
appeared to be looking for the 11 most identical-looking brown-haired actors,
with only team captains Wes Bentley and Gerard Butler distinguishing
themselves before the film is over.

The nonplayer characters are even harder to watch. John Rhys-Davies, well-
shorn after his work as Gimli the Dwarf in the “Lord of the Rings” movies, is
not only less engaging than Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers,” but a notch below Gene
Hackman in “The Replacements.” Equally forgettable is Patrick Stewart, who
narrates the film with the same patronizing tone one might use to read
“Goodnight Moon” at bedtime to a 4-year-old.

That’s the bad news. Thankfully, Anspaugh and Pizzo stick to what works
in the script, providing several genuinely moving scenes. Anspaugh also
deserves credit for insisting on location shoots in St. Louis — where many
of the players on the 1950 team lived — and Brazil. The result is a great
sense of time and place, making the protagonists easier to root for.

And while there are signs of limited cash flow in the copious game
footage (after the most pivotal play, the spectators don’t bother to get out
of their seats), the soccer scenes are well-filmed, without the quick jump-
cuts that ruin most modern sports movies.

“The Game of Their Lives” delivers its share of rousing moments. But the
first tears don’t flow at the 77-minute mark, when a military official gives
the David-and-Goliath pep talk that was handled by the preacher in “Hoosiers”
and Charles S. Dutton in “Rudy.”

Yes, large men in the audience will weep before the end of “The Game of
Their Lives.” But they can shed twice as many tears — and spend no money –

watching the Hickory basketball team run the old picket fence one more time
on TV.

– Advisory: This film contains some adult themes, drinking and one
instance of drug use.

– Peter Hartlaub



‘Winter Solstice’

SNOOZING VIEWER

Drama. Starring Anthony LaPaglia, Allison Janney, Aaron Stanford and Mark
Webber. Directed by Josh Sternfeld. (R. 85 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)



Because everyone in “Winter Solstice” is miserable, because everyone is
sensitive, because nothing happens, because people smile through tears and
tear through smiles, and because there isn’t a single explosion or car chase,
there will be people who’ll insist that this film is a searing examination of
the human soul. In fact, it’s dreadful, but it’s a special kind of dreadful –

the kind designed to appeal to intelligent people on principle.

A distinction must be made: Just because a movie is about sensitive
people doesn’t mean that it’s a sensitive movie. “Raging Bull,” for example,
is a very sensitive movie about a completely insensitive person. “Winter
Solstice,” by contrast, is a completely boring, counterfeit movie about a guy
who’s feeling some things. He’s feeling it. We’re not.

Anthony LaPaglia, a good actor, plays Winters, the father of two sons,
who works as a gardener and makes enough money to live in a comfy home in
suburban New Jersey. (He must be charging a thousand a pop to mow lawns.) A
widower for five years, he has to deal with a younger son (Mark Webber) who is
screwing up in school and an older son (Aaron Stanford), who, quite reasonably,
wants to leave home and start a new life. Winters has trouble communicating
with his kids — everything he says turns into an argument — and he’s
still busted up about the loss of his wife. He is the walking wounded.

That’s the setup. That’s also, in a sense, the whole story, except for
the entrance of Allison Janney as Molly, an unmarried woman who moves into the
neighborhood. Janney is a dynamic actress, with lots of humor, but Molly is a
cipher, a gentle, careful, innocuous, mild, lonely, smiling presence, who is
too much of a drip to make any man forget his high school prom date, much less
a deceased spouse. She and Winters talk a few times, and he seems to get
marginally better. The film’s depiction of middle-aged grief is antiseptic and
uninformed, and its depiction of middle-aged bonding is trite and unreal.

“Winter Solstice” is the feature debut of writer-director Josh Sternfeld,
whose screenplay was developed at the Sundance Film Festival Screenwriter’s
Lab. It’s hard to imagine what the Lab did for him, as the film is scene after
scene in which little or nothing happens. In between scenes, there’s the
Sundance signature — acoustic guitar interludes that try to artificially
generate a sense of something mournful and magical moving through the lives of
the characters.

– Advisory: This film contains strong language and sex talk.

– Mick LaSalle



‘Schizo’

POLITE APPLAUSE

Drama. Starring Olzhas Nussuppaev, Eduard Tabyschev and Olga Landina.
Directed by Guka Omarova. (In Russian with English subtitles. Not rated. 86 minutes. At
Bay Area theaters.)



“Schizo” offers not just the proverbial window into village life in
Kazakhstan, but a panoramic view. Guka Omarova, an imaginative and keenly
observant director who grew up in Kazakhstan when it was still under Soviet
rule, sets her first film in the 1990s. So she’s able to show the awkward
attempts of locals to mesh their new freedoms with the more familiar Communist
system, complicated by the fact that there are no jobs to be found.

From the oddly humorous opening scene, the practice of medicine appears
to be suffering. A concerned mother brings her teenage son Mustafa (Olzhas
Nussuppaev) to a village doctor because the boy is slow to learn. His
classmates mock him by calling him Schizo. The doctor ceremoniously unfurls an
arm cuff. But instead of wrapping it around Mustafa’s bicep, the physician
takes his own blood pressure — an act so bizarre it couldn’t be made up.
The doc receives sour cream and eggs from the family farm as payment, and
crams them into a refrigerator already packed with jars of pickles and other
goodies bartered in return for questionable medical treatment.

Rudimentary gangster activity gains an immediate foothold in the town and
flourishes under capitalism. Sakura (Eduard Tabyschev), one of the small-time
operators, lives with Mustafa’s mother, and he hires the teen to help arrange
bare-knuckle boxing matches performed outdoors under the crudest conditions.
When one fighter is brutally beaten and on the brink of death, his last wish
is that Mustafa bring his winnings to his girlfriend, Zinka (Olga Landina).

The boy develops a crush on her. His inherent sweetness gets to Zinka,
and an unlikely romance unfolds culminating in his first sexual experience.
This scene is right out of “Tea and Sympathy,” proving that in at least one
area there’s not much difference between cultures.

With bangs down to his eyebrows, Nussuppaev looks like the fifth Beatle.
He’s an instinctive actor, and he plays the title role as far from a simpleton.
His Mustafa is a watcher, his dark eyes taking in everything around him and
struggling to figure out what it all means. The only time everything falls
into place is when he is with Zinka. Landina is enormously appealing in the
role, lively and indefatigable despite Zinka’s dire poverty. Tabyschev
displays a Russell Crowe-like bravado as a hood with aspirations to be a
contender. They’re all characters who stay with you long after this perceptive
film ends.

– Advisory: This film contains scenes of violence.

– Ruthe Stein

Fired Up review

March 10th, 2010

Shawn (Nicholas D’Agosto) and Jail (Eric Christian Olsen) are lop scorers on the Ford High School football team - on and off the filed. When they overhear the girls planning a cheerleader bivouac, they decide to join up, attracted by being in the midst of 300 hotties. Their lark turns into competitive block up when the group they’ve joined has another craze at success in the championship, and Shawn falls for force leader Carly (Sarah Roemer) - whose suspicions and egotistic boyfriend ‘Dr’ Rick (David Walton) stand in the crumble.

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The Princess and the Pirate (1944)

March 7th, 2010

In 1944 wit Bob Hope was at the meridian of his game. Decades away from his cue card-driven TV specials and hopelessly elsewhere of manner movies like Boy, Did I Annoy a Terrible Compute! (1966) and Eliminate My Reservation (1972), Bob Hope’s pictures then were close on and funny. Along with be and frequent co-star Bing Crosby, Prospect was in the midst of a dozen years run on Quigley’s annual Top Ten list of Box Employment Champions. The Princess and the Pirate (1944), a specific of Hope’s finest comedies, is a meditating of that popularity, and a film that’s still great production seeing that the whole family.

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A spoof of swashbucklers that had seen a major revival since Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood (1935), The Princess and the Pirate stars Hope as Sylvester Crosby (yep, Crosby), a quick-change artist billing himself as “Sylvester the Great - The Man of Seven Faces.” As with nearly every Hope comedy, his character is an inept and unpopular entertainer, outrageously cowardly and lecherous. Aboard the The Mary Ann en route to the New World (”My act is known all over Europe! That’s why I’m going to America”), Sylvester rehearses in his cabin, across the hall from Miss Warbrook (Virginia Mayo), actually the Princess Margaret who, having run out on an arranged marriage, is traveling incognito.

The Mary Ann is attacked and burned by pirates, led by treacherous Captain Barrett (Victor McLaglen), known throughout the seven seas as The Hook. Disguising himself as an old gypsy, Sylvester is spared walking the plank after one of Hook’s men, goony and toothless sailor Featherhead (Walter Brennan) expresses an interest in the wench. Actually, Featherhead is after Hook’s buried treasure, and conspires with Sylvester to deliver the map to Casarouge. That night, Sylvester and Princess Margaret escape with Featherhead’s aid, and the two make their way to Casarouge.

Dismissing Margaret’s claim to be “of royal blood,” Sylvester lands a job for them both at the Bucket of Blood, a hilariously intimidating joint. Sylvester is nearly shot dead on stage, but beautiful, sexy Margaret is a big hit with the tough crowd of thugs and murderers. However, that very night Margaret is kidnapped by corrupt Governor La Roche (Walter Slezak), and Sylvester, by now madly in lust with her, conspires to rescue the princess.

The Princess and the Pirate was a Samuel Goldwyn production originally released through RKO. The picture cost $2.985 million according to RKO’s records, extremely lavish for a comedy in 1944. Shot in Technicolor, the film was made with the kind of money and obvious care most comedians of the era could only dream of. By contrast, Abbott and Costello, also in Quigley’s Top Ten, made In Society at Universal that same year for $660,000, about average. The result is a picture with high production values and colorful to the point that it closely resembles Disneyland’s archetypal Pirates of the Caribbean (the ride, not the movie) or something straight out of the pages of Treasure Island. The film has an inviting air of unreality, with most of the exteriors shot on soundstage sets with painted sky cycloramas (whose wrinkles are occasionally visible). The film offers extraordinarily good miniature work, as good as anything in The Sea Hawk. It’s also populated with tough- and mean-looking mugs, from Mike Mazurki to Harry Wilson, with even the infamous Rondo Hatton putting in a fleeting appearance, glimpsed menacing a young lass through an upstairs window. Brennan is a real treat uncharacteristically cast as a grinning, cackling half-wit, very amusing. Marc Lawrence, better known for his gangster roles, is in fine form as The Hook’s first mate, while Hugo Haas, the Czech actor who later directed a string of sleazy low-budget features, is quite funny as the Bucket of Blood’s proprietor.

In the film’s funniest sequence, Sylvester and Princess Margaret arrive in Casarouge, a port so tough its citizens are robbed and murdered in broad daylight. When Sylvester demands the local constable take action against two such murderers, the lawman petulantly replies, “They have a permit.” After checking into an inn run by a crafty, pyromaniac of a landlady (Maude Eburne), Sylvester auditions for Haas’ cafe owner, who forces Sylvester to drink ludicrously huge draughts of beer, one after another, or get his throat slit.

This being a Bob Hope movie, there are a lot of topical references (to Sinatra, Gypsy Rose Lee, Southern Democrats), anachronistic slang, scenes where Hope looks straight into the camera and addresses the audience (firing a gag pistol that reads “Bang!” Hope exclaims, “Wrong pistol! That’s for silent pictures!”), and endless flirting (”Have you no backbone?” Margaret asks. “Yeah,” Sylvester replies, “But it’s nothing like yours!”). But The Princess and the Pirate’s period setting make it seem less dated than most of Hope’s contemporary comedies, and it holds up well today. Kids will enjoy the wild slapstick, but adults will either love or become bored with Hope’s rapid-fire joke machine style.

Virginia Mayo, in her first starring part, is quite beautiful and isn’t lost amid all of Hope’s wisecracks. Slezak wisely underplays his scenes with Hope, making an effective villain, while McLaglen, who would have made a great Long John Silver, is close to perfection.

One curious slip-up in the film’s scripting or its execution: a major character is shot dead in the back, only to wake up later with no gunshot wound but a bump on the head. How’d they miss that one?

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005)

March 5th, 2010

Aptly described by its creator as “more of a remix… than a remake,” David Lee Fisher’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” exerts fascination mostly as a digitized what’s-its-name. The endow with-winning vidgame designer scanned a restored type of Robert Wiene’s 1920 original, then used it as the backdrop over the extent of actors shot on blue-screen. Issue: An undeniably quick-witted commingling of a new cast (and spoken dialogue) with a silent classic. But pic fails to retain faithfully on its own terms, and begins to sea-coast on novelty value around the midway place emphasis on. After attracting curiosity-seekers through a smattering of theatrical bookings, pic could transform into a staple on what’s left of the midnight movie circuit.

Admirers of Wiene’s masterwork may be amused to see how closely Fisher adheres to the original scenario by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer (with contributions from an uncredited Fritz Lang).

Once again, the plot appears to focus on the heroic efforts by an increasingly agitated young man (Judson Pearce Morgan) to protect his radiantly pale sweetie (Lauren Birkell) from Dr. Caligari (Daamen Krall), a sideshow charlatan, and Cesare (Doug Jones), a homicidal somnambulist. “Appears,” that is, because, as in the original, the “surprise ending” reveals the nominal hero really is a patient in an insane asylum, and his narrative nothing more than a paranoid fantasy.

The new “Caligari” is best appreciated as a visually intriguing mix of images influenced by German Expressionism, shadow-streaked film noir and, occasionally, David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.” (As a police inspector, Randy Mulkey looks like he could be the younger brother of the latter pic’s title character.) Seamless editing and crisp B&W HD-video lensing greatly enhance the illusion that contemporary actors have somehow inserted themselves into a classic pic.

Fisher’s “Caligari” is most striking when it showcases razor-sharp restorations of backdrops and production designs from Wiene’s original. Characters appear adrift in a phantasmagorical fantasyland of distorted perspectives, asymmetrical doorways, crooked windows, sloping chimneys — and streaks of light and shadow painted across tilted walls. It’s a mondo-bizarro world where officious bureaucrats sit atop enormously high stools, frowning down upon fawning supplicants, and sleepwalkers stagger across impossibly slanting rooftops, then race through forebodingly twisted forests.

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Although Fisher makes an admirable effort to avoid campy excess, the actors are all over the map. As Francis, the delusional protagonist, Morgan pitches his performance at a level somewhere between stylization and self-parody. Birkell conveys a hint of ripe sensuality as Jane, Francis’ fiancee, but she never gets a firm grip on her character. Krall fares best with shrewdly muted B-movie theatrics.

It’s worth noting that the presence of Doug Jones in the cast could ensure brisk DVD sales to fantasy and sci-fi geeks, since the actor has been signed to play The Silver Surfer in the upcoming “Fantastic Four” sequel, and plays Pan in Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

The Kingdom - Series One review

March 3rd, 2010

Danish helmer Lars von Trier’s first film since “Zentropa” (1990) is a lunatic, “Twin Peaks”-like meld of black-comedy soap and Z-gradation fear flick that looks like an minute cult item among auds delighted to go the stretch. Granted the 4 1/2-hour tournament time places it beyond the pale for anything but ultra-specialized camp distribution, this strikingly realized form is a natural during festivals and specialized TV sales private the U.S.

Shot on video for Danish TV, pic unspooled at Venice in a 35mm transfer divided into two parts, each containing two episodes. Though pic’s vid origins remain obvious, the quirky nature of the material (mostly printed in orange-sepia tones, recalling von Trier’s first feature, “The Element of Crime“) lends itself to such a look, and von Trier’s impressive use of Dolby translates into a thoroughly theatrical experience.

Tone is set from the very beginning with a mock-lugubrious voiceover detailing the history of a giant Copenhagen hospital known as the Kingdom, built on ancient marshland once used as bleaching ponds. Over murky shots of chlorine vapors and a hand groping upward, audience is told that “cracks are starting to appear in the edifice,” with the broader message that the spirit world is ready to do battle with the arrogance of 20th-century science. Blood bursting through a wall, followed by rock ‘n’ roll-backed main titles, kicks the yarn off in punchy style.

Episode one (”The Unheavenly Host,” 66 minutes) starts slowly, with intimations that the labyrinthine building is haunted by a dead child as the large cast is intro’d in mock-soap style.

Characters include an arrogant Swedish neurosurgeon, Helmer, who loathes Danes and has turned a young girl, Mona, into a vegetable through a bungled brain operation; his lover, anesthetist Rigmor, who’s into Haitian voodooism; Mrs. Drusse, an old spiritualist who fakes illnesses to stay in the hospital and solve the haunting; a doctor, Hook, who runs a black market in medical supplies from the basement; Bondo, an obsessed head of pathology; Moesgaard, hopeless head of the whole place; and Mogge, jilted in his love for a sexy doctor. Two retarded dishwashers in the kitchen function as a kind of Greek chorus.

With an eye on the pic’s epic length, von Trier lets the black comedy seep out slowly, but some 30 minutes in, it’s clear something is rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark. Despite its high-tech facade, the hospital is peopled by obsessives: Mogge saws a head off a corpse and presents it to his inamorata, senior staff are bound together by some kind of obscure Masonic brotherhood, Helmer is covering his tracks over the mismanaged op, and the sidewalk is cracking as the spirit world forces its way up.

By episode two (”Thy Kingdom Come,” 67 minutes), Mona’s alter ego is haunting the building in a major way, the severed head has gone AWOL, and the Masonic group is planning an illegal organ transplant from a dying patient. Most of episode three (”A Foreign Body,” 70 minutes) revolves round various parties secretly raiding the hospital archives for incriminating documents. Meanwhile, a doctor, Judith, is suddenly heavily pregnant with a strange fetus, and old Mrs. Drusse has made contact with the ghost, a young girl murdered in 1919 by her father (Udo Kier), one of the original building’s founders.

Pic’s grand finale (”The Living Dead,” 76 minutes) has Helmer jetting off to Haiti to practice voodoo on his enemy, Moesgaard; Mrs. Drusse exorcising the dead girl’s spirit in the basement; and Judith giving birth to a huge alien form while a group of politicians tour the building.

Shooting in a semi-docu, hand-held style, with antsy cutting, von Trier lets the lunacy slowly grow out of the complex web of escalating events, all played in straight-faced manner by the excellent cast. As the corrupt, overweening Swede, Ernst Hugo Jaregard carries the pic in grand style; veteran actress Ghita Norby hits just the right note as his quietly loony lover; and, as Mrs. Drusse, Kirsten Rolffes trots steadily through the pic like some spiritualist Miss Marple. All other players are on the button. Most of the filming took place in the actual hospital of the title.

Lucky Break (2002)

March 1st, 2010

Director Cattaneo’s follow-up to The Full Monty is set in a slender jail where the inmates are preparing a show as a smoke screen for an escape: a palatable excuse suitable another blokey bonding period, less so concerning the tasteless heterosexual amour at the film’s heart. It’s a tale of love across the divide, with cocky upstart Jimmy (Nesbitt) rightly accusing support officer Annabel (Williams) of talking crap before falling for her in rehearsals. What is surprising is how little dramatic pull surrounds even the escape; the film aims for ineffectual pitch, but limps, each character either following a predictable trajectory or remaining in total stasis. The clichés are strictly televisual: pompous governor, camp fraudster, clueless bleeding-heart drama dominie - it’s pre-empted we have knowledge of and appreciate these people from the TV stir sitcom Porridge. There’s a inclusive laziness and complacency in the air, and the gags are offending as charged.

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Big Wednesday (1978)

February 27th, 2010

With the transaction aperture of time, both the strengths and flaws of Milius’ ‘coming of age’ epic are calm more right now conspicuous than sneakily in ‘78. The take charts the changes wreaked by ageing, families, reputation and Vietnam, on the lives and friendship of three stopper Californian surfers - irresponsible Matt (Vincent), sensitive, steady Jack (Katt) and loony Leroy the Masochist (Busey). It’s easy to mock the rowdy machismo, stereotypical situations and characters, romantic tenderness and overblown mythologising, such as,‘Who knows where the wind comes from? Is it the astonish of God?’ At the same time, manner, it’s nearly impossible to imagine anyone even attempting such an eager, poetic and genuinely personal movie in today’s Hollywood. At its roots, it’s merely a mixed-style piece: area soap opera, have the quality of beach motion picture, shard American Graffiti-tone wallow in nostalgia. But thanks to its seasonal design (the four acts mid-point on oceanic movementss, opening with the South Swell of the summer of ‘62, and culminating in the Awful Swell of spring ‘74), the effectiveness not only reflects many changes in the Californian Zeitgeist, but is lifted into the palatinate of folk tale. Matt, Jack and Leroy - kings of a dying race, and themselves in thrall to Surfing History as represented by their now bemused, widely neglected mentor, The Bear - virtually suit one with creation, their moods echoing those of the restless sea. All this, along with the tremulous romanticism, power seem unbearably portentous were it not as a remedy for some lovely comic moments - notably, Busey in the draft-dodging scenes - and the unmixed exhilaration of the surfing footage.

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A Walk to Remember (2002)

February 26th, 2010

Novels by Nicholas Sparks are written with a restricted characteristic of audience in mind. Satisfied, I suppose he’d ardour suitable his books to be adored by all, but he is clearly lobbing them straight at one clear target, hoping that they’ll plop gooily into the hands of the women over 40 crowd. He says as much on the commentary chase included on this DVD, vocation A Hike to Remember a novel aimed pre-eminently at “middle-aged women.” So why is the talkie version clearly tailor-made for tweeners and teens, what with the “starring pop sensation Mandy Moore and Once & Again hottie Nab Stahl?” That’s simple. Kids these days, figure the studios, have a a load of discretionary income, and teenaged girls love a satisfactory whoop.

The book was keep back b annul in the 1950s, Sparks’ ode to his punitively departed sister, who died at a young seniority. The talking picture is set in the nineties. The generational replacement has very petite impact on the core story. Landon (West) is your signature “bad kid,” what with the indifference towards authority and the getting one of his friends paralyzed during a prank gone awry in the opening moments of the big. As punishment, he has to do community service and recoup convoluted with the kind play. Whoa, atonal. If the now crippled kid could stirring a get moving his arms, I’m firm he’d be wiping away tears of sorrow object of poor Landon. Luckily payment our hero (who, we all be aware, truly yearns to be good), Jamie (Moore) is in the play too, and she’s willing to overlook his faults and be his backer, even after he shuns her in Mrs Average.

Jamie, you see, is another stock character—the Angel On Turf whose mission in life is to lessen joy to Harry she meets, even Troubled Rebels like Landon. Her father is a inflexible wait on, and she humbly lives for the Be overbearing, even if it makes her unpopular at school. We know she’s scrupulous because she wears clothes from the sensible aisle at Sears. As Jamie helps Landon with his acting, the two slowly sink inwards join for each other. Who saw that coming? They’re so different! All of this cardinal up to Landon’s discovery of Jamie’s Funereal Petite Secret, unified that will Change Him Forever. Yes, it’s that movie, complete with a day-dreaming, three-hanky dénouement, Love Story-style.

That 1970s blockbuster was seldom original when it debuted, and A Walk to Recognize is simply the latest in a long course of remakes (they even did another teen version recently, the dismal Chris Klein/Leelee Sobieski starrer Here on Earth). Adding to the project’s curmudgeonly mojo was the casting of Moore, whose only old experience was a younger-fiddle role in Disney’s The Princess Diaries. Casting Moore felt same a gimmick, and her untested talents seemed sure to topple what was obviously going to be a mediocre film anyway.

Shock, then, because it’s pretty paraphernalia. Granted, the plot is as unceremonious and carefree as an dated shoe, the story beats falling into state one by one with no pretense of surprise or indefiniteness. But Karen Janszen, in updating the continuity for the ’90s, manages to jettison some of Sparks’ more overt sentiment, stuff that plays fine on the page but would’ve exploded into melodrama on-interview. We’re communistic with a simple story about two teens who find love in unexpected places (though not unexpected to the audience). Moore is really good; what she lacks in nuance she makes up for in charisma, and she plays a teen more naturally than many actresses her age, even in the somewhat contrived scenes in which she’s required to sing (you knew the pop star was universal to be singing, lawful?). West has done fine work playing similarly troubled teens on TV, and he does no different here.

Adam Shankman, who directed another singer-turned-actress (or is it the other way around?) in The Wedding Planner, also carefully avoids schmaltz, establishing a serious timbre without at any point veering into body (I’m looking at you, Britney Spears). The end come to pass is an diverting teen flick that manages not to insult the intelligence of any adults in the audience. See it for the middle-schooler lurking somewhere reversed you, and have a good cry.

Junebug is a real film, real …

February 23rd, 2010

Junebug is a real film, real in the detail scarcely any films are. The story it tells, the characters it concerns, and the events it depicts are remarkable in that they are so unremarkable. This is a film about families, about the way they work and don’t work, the unsaid resentments and placid and shifting alliances and old understandings. It has a very much “movie” premise—city boy brings his cultured wife home to North Carolina to join the folks—but it’s about people, not characters or one-note caricatures. Few films are as grounded in genuineness and however as entertaining, funny, tender, and sad.

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George (Alessandro Nivola) is the golden brat of his relations; he moved away from Winston-Salem and on no account looked following. A big success in Chicago, he met and impetuously married Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), curator of an “outsider art” gallery that specializes in self-taught folk artists. It is her desire to exhibit the work of a Winston-Salem hereditary (an obviously mentally unpropitious man who paints Civil War battles with phalluses subbing in in the interest swords and rifles) that finally brings George home; the brace stays with his parents while Madeleine tries to nuts about talk the artist.

George’s call brings up old issues and resentments, and Madeleine’s polished, cultured composure raises more. Mother Peg (Celia Weston) resents the immigrant creature that has ensnared her number only son; Eugene (Scott Wilson), his father, is suspicious and affable, wanting to stand by his wife and nail with his daughter-in-law at the same time. George’s fellow-creature Johnny (The O.C.’s Ben McKenzie, as soon as a brooder, always a brooder) has moved back home and, perfectly content with his factory job, could do without his hotshot buddy showing him up. If all of these characters thrash their emotions and thoughts with politeness or insignificance, then Johnny’s wife Ashley (Amy Adams) is an open book. Sweet, eager to want and enormously fruitful, Ashley, loved but not shown much screw by her emotionally distant husband, latches onto Madeleine right away, peppering her with endless questions about her comparably exotic life.

Many movies would (and many have) find little more in these contrasting characters and lifestyles than broad humor, stereotypes, and slapstick. Screenwriter Angus Maclachlan and director Phil Morrison find truth. Admitting that they may seem cognate with “types” at the start, all of the characters are shown to have measure and nuance beyond your first satire. Johnny is dour at haunt, but a chatterbox at ahead; we marvel at why he stays with Ashley when he never seems to possess any tenderness as far as something her, but then we see his one heartbreaking, failed attempt to do something gentlemanly as her, and we realize why he acts the in work he does. Madeleine comes across as degree condescending, but she doesn’t mean to, and in reclusive moments, we foresee someone steamed up and caring, even if George’s family doesn’t see it. Secure and Eugene comport oneself like a real couple, two people who take been married so long, the word love ceases to induce any meaning to save them—their relationship is full of unspoken meaning, revealed in subtle unseemly. Even Madeleine discovers a new side to her husband, watching him go to church with his family, inexplicably beseech before meals, and sing hymns during a potluck dinner. This is not a complex movie, but I love that it shows us these characters without letting the cat out of the bag us what to over with reference to them.

The plot doesn’t cover much ground, but this isn’t really a flick picture show about happenings, but people. Up to now it isn’t boring, nor only for the independent covering circle, despite some exceptional touches from Morrison (including a number of long silences that feature static shots of unoccupied rooms and scenery that I’m not certain I understand). There is genuine humor to be found, and heart that anyone with a ancestry will be proficient to relate to. The cast is pretty remarkable, but Amy Adams, who won a special award due to the fact that her performance at the Sundance Skin Gala day, is the light at the center of everything. Every feeling, every insecurity and unhappiness is discoverable on her presumption regardless of Ashley’s till doomsday-remaining major-mouthed grin, and she plays the character’s motor-mouthed nervousness and remaining sadness in marvellous ways. Few movies, some actresses, are blessed by a screwball this loveable, and Adams plays it to the hilt.

In broad terms, Junebug is about small city life versus big city living, Red Position values versus Blue State reasonableness, but exceedingly, it’s encircling something much more infinite than that—the reality that everybody under the sun comes from somewhere, and that sometimes, dealing with that can be a striving, and a blessing. Junebug is one of the year’s best films.

Clerks review

February 20th, 2010

Shot in a New Jersey convenience hoard for $27,575, this talky, scabrous and very funny first feature is a bargain-evaluate comedy. Store clerk Dante (O’Halloran) and his pal Randal (Anderson), who minds the adjacent video seek, use the gaps between awkward customers to discuss their career trajectories, the ending of Reappearance of the Jedi, the vocalized excesses of Dante’s ongoing girlfriend, and the close nuptials of his high-school ex. If it’s fancy packaging you want, dismiss from one’s mind it; if scuzzy talk and go into hysterics-out-flashy humour are your bag, counterfoil this out.