Latest Reviews

 

City of Men

Director Paulo Morelli’s companion piece to Fernando Meirelles’s 2003 Oscar nominee City of God lacks its progenitor’s freshness and urgent, passionate melding of style and story. In this less violent, more emotionally invested return to the horrid slums of Rio de Janeiro, absent fathers inform the lives of two protagonists on the edge of 18. Ace (Douglas Silva) never met his dad, who was gunned down years earlier. Wallace (Darlan Cunha) needs to track down his long-gone pop to secure a government ID card. The movie’s other main character is Dead-End Hill, a crime-riddled favela (slum), whose grim, sun-scorched conditions are given full flower by DP Adriano Goldman. The neighborhood is ruled by local gangster Midnight (Jonathan Haagensen), whose territorial supremacy is threatened by former right-hand hoodlum Nefasto (Eduardo BR). Before long, sides are chosen and guns are drawn, but, much like the City of God TV spinoff upon which the movie is based, the emphasis is on character. Still, when you remove the unique locale and flashy style, the story is pretty schematic. Wallace finds his estranged father too easily, and Ace’s brewing confrontation with Wallace bears the signs of forced drama. But the rich and detailed environment Meirelles created years ago still intrigues, especially with the same tragic combination of fatherless boys and inescapable violence happening right now off the 105. (Mark Keizer) (Pacific’s ArcLight, The Landmark West Los Angeles, Laemmle’s Playhouse 7)

 

 

 

The Lost

Swaggering small-town sociopath Ray Pye (Marc Senter) murders two campers just for the hell of it and then bullies needy girlfriend Jennifer (Shay Astar) and dim best friend Tim (Alex Frost) into helping him cover it up. Four years later, the event still simmers with explosive potential, while Ray’s alpha-dog personality binds the trio together. But Ray’s compulsion to bed down every mildly desirable girl he sees is a constant threat to Jennifer; and, meanwhile, the police detective (Michael Bowen) who originally investigated the double murder is hot on the trail again, convinced even more than before that Ray did it. Ray, perhaps genuinely smitten (for once) with rich girl Katherine (Robin Sydney), begins to get careless.

Chris Sivertson – who has since made the Lindsay Lohan vehicle I Know Who Killed Me – wrote and directed this 2005 adaptation of the novel by apparent cult favorite Jack Ketchum (The Girl Next Door). It’s creepy enough that the near-two-hour running time doesn’t drag, but it’s unpleasant enough that it’s questionable whether you want to put yourself through it. The whole thing revolves around Senter’s portrayal of an obnoxious, arrogant asshole with the seeds of full-on madness ready to blossom at any moment. Senter may look a bit like Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise mashed together, but Ray is so vile and, what’s more, so damned irritating, that it’s hard to believe all the younger townswomen want to boff him. There is, thank goodness, some catharsis near the end; and it’s weirdly nice to see veteran character actor Ed Lauter – trust me, you’d recognize him in a second – actually getting the girl for a change. (Andy Klein) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

 

Noah’s Ark

Elderly Stock (Dezsö Garas) lives in a tiny flat in a rundown Budapest housing complex. He’s a bitter, mean old guff, cranky to his neighbors and estranged from his young granddaughter, Kati (Angéla Stefanovics). However, he inexplicably dreams of owning his own Harley-Davidson – and, when a TV show broadcasts a casting call for a “Hungary’s Best Grandfather” contest, with a big-bucks prize, he forces Kati to enter the contest with him – in spite of the fact that Kati can’t bear him. Meanwhile, news of Stock’s plans circulates through the apartment complex – and soon all of Stock’s oddball neighbors are planning to get their cut of the winnings.

Director Sándor Pál’s frequently quirky Hungarian film could have been a maudlin situation comedy about the clash between generations and the fantasy of undeserved wealth, but screenwriter Zsuzsa Tóth’s script filters the goofy premise through a crisply sardonic Eastern European sensibility. The film crackles with irony, with both the grandfather’s and the granddaughter’s generations being presented as crooks and fools, living in a post-Soviet world gone mad. The comic sensibility is often strikingly sophisticated, particularly in the whimsical depiction of some of the incredibly goofy neighbors. Garas is powerful in his restrained turn: He has the perfectly expressive demeanor of a sad old clown – and his kindly expressions often bely the unexpected twistedness of his soul. Amusing performances are also offered by Ferenc Kállai, as Stock’s agoraphobic best friend, and by Mari Töröcsik as a besotted, elderly female neighbor who has the hots for the old man. (Paul Birchall) (Laemmle’s Grande 4)

 

Penelope

A precocious fairy tale made for and starring people too old for this sort of whimsy. Penelope (Christina Ricci) is an heiress cursed with a pig nose that will only turn pert when she is truly loved by a blueblood hottie. Naturally, her status-conscious parents (Catherine O’Hara, Richard E. Grant) lock her in their mansion and hire a series of scions for the job. Max (James McAvoy) has such crystalline blue eyes you know he’s fated to be her happy ending, but director Mark Palansky duly goes about setting up obstacles, like a money-grubbing tool (Simon Woods) and a barfly friend (Reese Witherspoon), who encourages Penelope to ditch the testosterone quest and embrace her porcine inner and outer beauty. As every page of this feels like we’ve read it before – save for Penelope’s ascension as a media darling – the only sense of wonder comes from grokking Ricci’s costume changes, a jewel-box of bohemian Donna Reed ensembles that I’d totally snog a frog for. (Amy Nicholson) (Citywide)

 

Romulus, My Father

For this week’s feel-bad epic, we have director Richard Roxburgh’s grim tale of family misery in the Australian outback. Based on Australian philosopher Raimond “Rai” Gaita’s autobiography, the film essentially depicts the ghastly life of Gaita’s loving, but ever-unhappy papa, Romulus (Eric Bana, looking every inch the dyspeptic, hollow-eyed scarecrow). Romulus, who emigrates from Romania to Australia in hopes of a new start, instead discovers much misery, as his German wife Christina (Franka Potente) dumps him for a mutual friend, with whom she has another child. Christina develops ever more severe emotional problems, which cause her to alternately cling to and then reject Romulus, and Rai often feels forced to act the adult in the family.

Roxburgh’s gloomy assessment of the human condition might have achieved its desired goal of being a genuine tearjerker if the film had contained some characters the audience could care about. Instead, it’s basically one long trudge, full of unpleasant people, who are all flaw, with few mitigating personality traits. It drags with ponderous pauses and aimless shots of characters staring morosely at each other. Screenwriter Nick Drake tells the story almost entirely from the powerless point of view of young Rai, as the boy plays in the fields or with his dog, incapable of understanding the hostility, despair, and madness that rage just beyond his sightlines. Bana plays his tightly wound Romulus with trademark grimace fully in place, looking more like he has a hemorrhoid than a crazy wife, while Potente is not able to find the core of her troubled female lead. (Paul Birchall) (Laemmle’s Monica 4)

 

Semi-Pro

Having already tackled soccer (Kicking and Screaming), NASCAR (Talladega Nights), and ice skating (Blades of Glory), Will Ferrell turns his penchant for sports parody on even bigger game in this willfully profane, characteristically careening spoof of B-league basketball in the early 1970s. Ferrell stars as Jackie Moon, an affable, Afro-ed schlub, who’s parlayed his status as a one-hit-wonder crooner into being both owner of, and player for, the Tropics, a struggling ABA team in economically depressed Flint, Michigan. Desperately needing to both win games and dramatically boost attendance in order to have a shot at being one of the two teams to survive a forthcoming merger with the NBA, Jackie brings in veteran Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson) and reluctantly takes a backseat to hotshot Clarence Withers (André Benjamin), all while cooking up outlandish promotional schemes to attract more of an audience.

 

There’s no word yet on whether Kent

Alterman’s film matches Michael Moore’s memories of his hometown. No matter, though, since the movie isn’t necessarily moored to period detail, apart from its admittedly wondrous, umm, form-fitting costumes. If the film’s success with riffs is never much in doubt, given the comedic timing and improvisational bona fides of its stars, its hit-miss ratio on setups is a bit more scattershot. A Deer Hunter-inspired roulette scene provides genuinely fresh laughs, but other story bits feel a bit herky-jerky or lopped off. Still, like basketball, comedy is a game of percentages, and Semi-Pro hits enough shots to be called a winner. (Brent Simon) (Citywide)

 

Vantage Point

Bunkered in a news van, Sigourney Weaver edits history. Her crew is in Spain covering an anti-terrorism meeting of allied world leaders, and the last thing the folks back stateside want to see is European protesters brandishing photos of President Ashton (William Hurt) labeled “#1 Terrorist.” It’s 12:23 p.m., and, without warning, the crowded town square is rocked by two bullets to the president’s chest and two giant explosions. At this tense peak, Pete Travis’s thriller rewinds to noon and continues replaying the chaos as seen through half a dozen people’s eyes, including a Spanish cop (Eduardo Noriega), a Secret Service bodyguard (Dennis Quaid), and a vacationer-turned-citizen-journalist (Forest Whitaker). Barry Levy’s script panders for comparisons to Rashomon but misses the point. Akira Kurosawa suggested that truth was slippery; Levy believes there is one answer, he just likes withholding it. Besides their political beliefs, no one in Vantage Point is in disagreement about the facts – they just don’t know all of them yet, and those who think they do are kidding themselves. It’s a zippy, if contrived, little flick that successfully establishes that the world is dangerously (but not morally) complicated, but then pacifies its audience with unsatisfying coincidences and a gone-commando hero turn by Quaid. I’m sure Quaid can accomplish great things. But resolving the War on Terrorism with a badass car chase? Not so much. (Amy Nicholson) (Citywide)

 

Vivere

Rashomon meets Run Lola Run in writer-director Angelina Maccarone’s fascinating feminist drama about a young German cabbie (Esther Zimmering) searching for her runaway sister (Kim Schnitzer) and encountering, coincidentally (or not so coincidentally), a mysterious older woman (Hannelore Elsner), who is seemingly the victim of a violent crash-and-run accident. The story is told three times, once from each woman’s point of view, so as to methodically fill in the blanks and create a complete portrait of life’s seemingly random (or not so random) intersections.

It’s easy to imagine an American company wanting to remake the picture, focusing almost exclusively on the tricky structure, which, in all likelihood, is what earned it an American release in the first place. What audiences will most remember, however, are three exceptional performances and a keenly observant script that wallows just enough in archetypal German existentialism to get its points across without veering into the pretentious. (Wade Major) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

 

Witless Protection

In the last nine months, Dan Whitney, alias Larry the Cable Guy, has belched all the way to the bank with two movies, a cartoon deal, a comedy tour, and a Christmas special. How do his fans – assuredly bitter, powerless men in dead-end jobs, who can’t afford a tent to stake on the lawn of Larry’s mansion – afford keeping him in Wild Turkey? It’s not just ticket money; it’s the cost of their souls. “I know these roads like the ingrown pimples on my ex-girlfriend’s front butt!” boasts Sheriff Larry to the uppity, easily repulsed state’s witness (Ivana Milicevic) under his protection. If you don’t find that quip hilarious, then you’re just part of the 98 percent of America Larry disdains. His (ahem) jokes target everyone from Michael Vick to Hillary Clinton to Angelina Jolie’s “jungle pygmies.” Do we laugh at our hero when he calls a mild-mannered Middle Eastern hotel clerk (played by east-Indian actor Gerry Bednob) “Pamper-head” and threatens to turn him in to Gitmo? Or do we laugh with vindication when said clerk’s eyes light up at Larry’s fake grenade? Correct answer: We don’t laugh at all. (Amy Nicholson) (Citywide)

 

Also Opening This Week:

The Duchess of Langeais. Great Nouvelle Vague director Jacques Rivette (Celine and Julie Go Boating, Va Savoir) does Honoré de Balzac, in this story of the flirtation, frustration, and payback between the titular noblewoman (Jeanne Balibar) and a general (Guillaume Depardieu). The cast also includes stalwarts Bulle Ogier and Michel Piccoli. (AK) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)

The Other Boleyn Girl. Who knew that Anne (Natalie Portman) had a sister who looked like Scarlett Johansson? Eric Bana is the young, pre-Laughtonized Henry VIII in this new version of Philippa Gregory’s novel, previously dramatized for the BBC in 2003. Television vet Justin Chadwick directed from a screenplay by Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland). The cast also includes Mark Rylance, Kristin Scott Thomas, and David Morrissey. (AK) (Citywide)

A Walk to Beautiful. Mary Olive Smith directed this documentary about five Ethiopian women, who suffer horrible injuries from obstructed labor during childbirth and are hence outcasts in their communities. (AK) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)