Latest Reviews: July 3, 2008
Chris & Don: A Love Story
On the heels of the legalization of same-sex marriage in California comes this celebration of the decades-long relationship between British writer Christopher Isherwood, whose Berlin Stories inspired the various incarnations of Cabaret, and American portraitist Don Bachardy. Although Chris was in his late 40s when he first met teenager Don on a Malibu beach in the 1950s, the couple maintained an alternately sweet and tumultuous love affair until Isherwood’s death in 1986. As well as their age difference, Chris and Don were remarkable for living openly as a couple during a period when most homosexuals were closeted.
In addition to extensive interviews with Don, contextual insight from Isherwood scholars, and personal reminiscences from celebrities such as Cabaret star Liza Minnelli, the filmmakers draw from a wealth of material: Chris’s diaries, Don’s paintings, and rare home movies. The documentary falters when it strays from these authentic elements to Michael York’s dramatic voiceover and reenactments – with the exception of fanciful animation based on Kitty and Dobbin, the cat and horse alter egos with which Chris and Don illustrated their personal correspondence. But, overall, directors Tina Mascara and Guido Santi decidedly achieve that first and most significant goal: making the audience give a damn. (Annlee Ellingson) (Nuart)
Diminished Capacity
After suffering a concussion, Chicago newspaper editor Cooper (Matthew Broderick, low-key, as usual) is demoted to comics detail until he regains his short-term memory. When Cooper’s mother summons him to Missouri to care for his senile Uncle Rollie (the always underappreciated Alan Alda), who is suffering from the title affliction, the duo is christened “slow and slower.” Rollie’s dementia, though, is a strain only seen in movies, leading to eccentric behavior like tying baited fishing line around every key of his typewriter so nibbling fish can “write” poetry. Of all the interesting places Cooper and Rollie could go, a baseball memorabilia show is about last on the list. But when Rollie produces a rare, retirement-bankrolling baseball card, the pair hightail it to a card convention along with Cooper’s ex-girlfriend Charlotte (Virginia Madsen).
All this might’ve been funny, or whimsically melancholy, had director Terry Kinney shown a more confident style or kept the reins tighter on Sherwood Kiraly’s adaptation of his own novel. Rollie’s attempt to sell the valuable card before he loses it floats between limp slapstick and pale drama, although it does allow Dylan Baker to hijack the movie as an obsessive Cubs fan. Otherwise, Kinney and company rarely take their characters’ problems very seriously. So neither do we. (Mark Keizer) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
See Film feature.
Hancock
See Film feature.
The Last Mistress
See second Film feature.
The Unknown Woman
Recent flicks like Captivity and Funny Games have been derided as worthless excuses for torture, delivered with a wink. Giuseppe Tornatore, best known for the saccharine Cinema Paradiso, has made a prestige thriller that’s just as grating – a rape-revenge flick that swaggers in as though it deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Irena (Kseniya Rappoport) is a Ukrainian prostitute in a xenophobic Italian town. In lazy, interrupting flashbacks, we catch on that she’s out to settle a score that has something to do with a villainous bald man (Michele Placido) and the middle-class family of Valeria and Donato Adacher (Claudia Gerini and Pierfrancesco Favino) and their daughter Tea (amazing child actress Clara Dossena). We’re supposed to share her outrage, but with every gratuitous and titillating shot of Irena in bondage, Tornatore and co-writer Massimo De Rita’s feminism feels more like two mouth-breathing filmmakers trying to pass off their fantasies as empathy. Suspenseful but tiresomely withholding in hopes of a shock ending, Tornatore’s movie works to earn our tension and assumes our emotions are free. But there’s nothing brave about taking a stance against human trafficking. (Amy Nicholson) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, Laemmle’s Fallbrook 7, Laemmle’s One Colorado)
The Wackness
New York City, summer, 1994: Newly elected mayor Rudy Giuliani pledges to clean up Gotham by cracking down on “quality-of-life” offenses like loud boomboxes, public urination, and graffiti. Kurt Cobain is dead, while tracks from the Notorious B.I.G.’s as-yet-unreleased debut album circulate on mix tapes. And Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) has just graduated from high school. While his classmates bounce the city for Amsterdam, Luke deals weed from an ice cream cart, crushes on Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby, the thinking boy’s dream girl), and barters drugs for therapy from her stepfather, Dr. Squires (Sir Ben Kingsley).
By July, the trip loses focus, and one wonders less about what’s going to happen next than where all this is going. But Peck’s turn as a white kid who’s into hip-hop is endearing rather than annoying, and Sir Ben tears into his role as a very poor role model. Although there is the stock yearbook-photo masturbatory fantasy, there are also delightful whimsical moments, as when the city sidewalk lights up like a dance floor. And writer-director Jonathan Levine (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane) unsentimentally infuses a keen sense of nostalgia for a city whose grit has since been gentrified and a musical genre whose authenticity has been overproduced into slick pop. (Annlee Ellingson) (Landmark West Los Angeles, Pacific’s ArcLight, Laemmle’s Monica 4)
WALL•E
Five years after directing Finding Nemo to historic success, Pixar co-founder Andrew Stanton has managed to set an extraordinary new bar, not just for animated movies, but for the film industry at large. The astonishingly simple yet profoundly moving tale centers on a lonely maintenance robot, who has spent more than seven centuries cleaning, sorting, organizing, and collecting earth’s junk, leftovers from before mankind abandoned the increasingly uninhabitable planet. But the appearance of a new probe – and a fetching female robot named Eve – set WALL•E’s circuits aflutter, putting into motion an adventure that will determine the very future of mankind ... and the earth.
Though it’s become something of a cliché to declare each new Pixar effort “one of the greatest animated films in history,” it’s a shoe that, more often than not, fits. All but certain to become the breakaway hit of the summer, WALL•E is truly a film for the ages, a marvel as much for the audacity of its storytelling as for the expertise of its animation. A cautionary fable, an old-fashioned romance, a paean to the power of the movies, a poem to the magic of dreams, and an edge-of-your-seat adventure film, this is the kind of movie Hollywood was supposed to have long since forgotten how to make. We can thank our lucky stars that Stanton and Pixar haven’t. (Wade Major) (Citywide)
Also Opening This Week:
Holding Trevor. Rosser Goodman (Daddy-O) directed this story of a gay twentysomething (Brent Gorski, who also wrote the screenplay) searching for love. (AK) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)
Published: 07/02/2008
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