Luc Besson presents a story he made up about two CIA agents making mayhem all around Paris. There’s some good dumb fun bloodshed, but then there are all the bad parts that are not funny bad, just bad. In this goofy romp, James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, “Mission: Impossible III,” Velvet Goldmine”) is the flunky to a U.S. Ambassador (Richard Durden) who tasks him with discovering which young aide a French colleague is “banging, the brunette or the blonde.” “Both,” reports Reese. “God, I love the French,” sighs his avuncular boss. Reese has another boss. Like Charles Townsend in “Charlie’s Angels,” this unseen CIA overseer assigns him covert errands by cell phone. Go to the airport and pick up senior CIA operative Charlie Wax (John Travolta). They stop off for egg fu yung at a Chinese restaurant where Wax shoots the waiter, cook and busboys. Then he perforates the ceiling where about a ton of cocaine is cached, and tells Reese to collect five or so kilos of the white powdery rain in a giant Chinese vase. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Where’s the novelty in Andrea Arnold’s storytelling?

It’s everywhere, is where it is. The odd critiques of “Red Road” and “Fish Tank” that have asserted Arnold tells familiar stories with familiar characters are off the mark. The live-through-this intensity of her storytelling is charged and fresh. The English director started her career relatively late, but her first two short films, “Dog” and “Milk” were screened at Cannes in 1998, and her third, the twenty-six minute “Wasp,” won the Oscar in 2005. Her 2006 feature debut, “Red Road,” shot on digital video, exploited a fresh, bold palette in the story of a policewoman whose job is to watch Glasgow’s banks of surveillance monitors. The modern paranoia and contemporary sexual violence that grows from Arnold’s unflinching film (and Kate Dickie’s intent, sere performance as the troubled, vengeful woman) are nightmarish yet haunting. The film began as a challenge by Lars von Trier’s company, that three directors with the same outline would go out and make a film with the same characters and actors, but in Arnold’s capable hands, it was so much more than a stunt. At the time of its Sundance debut, I asked Arnold how much two versions of the same script would be in the hands of any two difference directors. “I’ve always thought that; if you gave a director the same script, you’d get a completely different film,” she said, then laughed. “Okay, maybe the same story, but a completely different film.”

From its opening minutes of anger expressed by its teen protagonist with profane, “unladylike” suddenness and directness, director Andrea Arnold’s second feature, “Fish Tank,” is an electric slice of elevated everyday life. To our good fortune, Arnold amasses her own idiosyncratic observations, different sensations from other English filmmakers who trouble to traffic with class, more tender than Loach and Leigh, and also with a more kaleidoscopic eye than the Belgian brothers Dardenne. She manages to mingle the funny, the sorrowful, the sad, the melancholy and the intimate without a solitary note of false uplift. She’s a poet, really. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

What did Dame Helen Mirren and Christopher Walken get their Oscar nominations for in “The Last Station”? Why, ACTING, my dear boy, for ACTING, for fury and flair and splendid cussedness. A spirited melodrama adapted from Jay Parini’s 1990s novel about the last year of the life of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer, grand, grandiose), “The Last Station” is vivid and entertaining, largely for the spirited performances by the leads, but there’s delicate work by all the actors enacting the figures settling the affairs of the world’s most famous novelist of 1910. It’s also good to see another sort of romp from Michael Hoffman, who directed “Restoration” and “Soap Dish,” other semi-comic studies of the holding of court. The interlocking storylines demonstrate abiding faith in the power of love: young love, old love, desire, jealousy, pride… and especially old love. With James McAvoy, Paul Giamatti, Anne-Marie Duff, Kerry Condon, Patrick Kennedy, John Sessions, Tomas Spencer, David Masterson. 112m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

(Ce qu’il faut pour vivre) Based on an actual tuberculosis epidemic that swept the Far North of Canada in mid-century, “The Necessities of Life” is set in 1955, when Tivii, an Inuit hunter (Natar Ungalaaq, “The Fast Runner”) is diagnosed and taken from his village on remote Baffin Island for treatment at a hospital in Quebec City. Director Benoit Pilon, documentary-trained, tells the story gently, amusingly, capturing loneliness well, but also the culture clash with paternalistic but essentially clueless doctors and bureaucrats. There’s a quiet Canadian elegance to it all. “Necessities of Life” was Canada’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. With Éveline Gélinas, Paul-André Brasseur, Vincent-Guillaume Otis, Antoine Bertrand, Guy Thauvette, Louise Marleau. 102m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

Andrew Bujalski’s the closest thing to a writing-directing auteur among his American contemporaries, many of whom tend toward improvisational methods. His third feature, the brightly-colored “Beeswax,” like “Funny Ha Ha” (2002) and “Mutual Appreciation” (2006) is tightly, yet elusively scripted. The plotting is simple, yet the interactions of his characters fascinate even when the subject matter is the trials of running a small business, in this case a boutique run by Jeannie, one of two twin sisters (played by Tilly Hatcher, whose own twin Maggie plays her sister) who uses a wheelchair (as Tilly does in real life). Set in Austin, the boutique is called “Storyville,” which would hold lovely implication in life—objects with history extend into fresh lives—but onscreen nods toward Bujalski’s penchant for observation rather than overt plotting. Gentle and descriptive, rather than assertive and prescriptive, “Beeswax” is becalmed but mature work. It’s also idiosyncratic: after one viewing, I can’t define its lovely oddness. Beeswax: mind it. With Alex Karpovsky, Katy O’Connor, David Zellner, Kyle Henry, S.J. Anderson, Anne Dodge, Betty Blackwell, Bryan Poyser. 100m. (Ray Pride)

“Beeswax” opens Friday at Siskel. Bujalski will appear at these screenings: Friday 8pm, Saturday 5pm, 7:45pm, and 3pm Sunday.

Writer-director Adam Green’s “Frozen,” a Sundance 2010 entry, is a high-concept chiller trapping talkative post-teens atop a high-high-up ski-lift overnight with increasingly implausible but not quite risible complications. (Its programming at midnight in the ski resort of Park City is wittier than much of the film itself.) Call it “Open Water” with wolves, or “Lifeboat” with down jackets instead of lifejackets. The complications deliver on genre expectations, but “Frozen” doesn’t rise farther than that. The characters are paranormal chatterboxes. The sometimes-inventive cinematography is by Will Barratt. With Kevin Zegers, Shawn Ashmore, Emma Bell. 94m. (Ray Pride)

Special Forces soldier John (Channing Tatum, “G.I. Joe”) meets special-education major Savannah (Amanda Seyfried, “Jennifer’s Body”) on a South Carolina beach on spring break. She goes back to class; he goes back to war. Many letters and seven years later, their love makes for a sweetly weepy saga. This is the fifth novel by the prolific Nicholas Sparks to make the screen, preceded by “Message in a Bottle” (1999), “A Walk to Remember” (2002), “The Notebook” (2004) and “Nights in Rodanthe” (2008). And there is already a trailer at the multiplex for his next one, “The Last Song.” Screenwriter Jamie Linden changes John’s first-person voice in the novel to voice-overs for John’s letters. Fans of the 2006 bestseller may be pleased that one death is added to allow for a happier ending. But don’t look for the cinematic equivalents of Sparks’ lines by self-deprecating characters who originally said: “Yeah, I know, I’m a walking cliché” and “I know it sounds trite.” Producer Marty Bowen lauds his director Lasse Hallström: “He’s uniquely untroubled with the notion of trying to make things overly intellectualized, overly self-important, or overly melodramatic.” Nor is Hallström troubled with any of those ambitions, if that’s what was troubling Bowen. “Dear John” is a romance with more poise than impact. Full moons outnumber love scenes in this PG-13 product. Hospital visits, rather than trysts. Its topical nod is not to John’s overseas deployments, but to autistic secondary characters who ride horses and collect coins. With Richard Jenkins, Henry Thomas, Scott Porter and Keith Robinson. 102m. (Bill Stamets)

Chicago filmmaker Hurt McDermott’s feature follow-up to his Slamdance-premiered “Nightingale in A Music Box” (2002), filmed under the title “Silent E Squared,” is a latterday adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” centering around the farcical romantic failures of the owner of a Lincoln Avenue art-house (the late Three Penny Cinema, shot after its closing in 2007) and spiraling outward with extremely tepid results. Taylor Nichols (“Barcelona”) stars as the fired-film-critic-turned-theater-operator who programs double features like “Safe” and “Poison” and expects to make a living; McDermott is the type of writer-director-editor who shows the letterboard as “Safe Poison” and expects an audience to chortle. Bits by local theater veterans Jim Ortlieb and Andy Rothenberg are pleasing as they go through their paces. The DePaul-area locations, even beyond the Three Penny, are time-capsule material already. 100m. (Ray Pride)

Bereaved and aggrieved, Mel Gibson plays a hallucinating loner meting out Old Testament justice. Armed with a gun, a badge and a bottle of thallium-laced milk, Boston detective Thomas Craven (Gibson) tracks the killer of his 24-year-old daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic, “Drag Me to Hell”)–and the military contractor and the war-veteran senator who pay her killer and others to cover their tracks. “Welcome to hell,” are Craven’s last words to an evildoer. This mediocre action thriller opens at night with three bodies surfacing on a Massachusetts river. Cut to a 1990 home video of little Emma playing on a beach with a toy shovel. “Let me know if you strike oil, OK?” says her dad. Now Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is an entry-level employee at Northmoor in Northampton, where she digs up shoddy deals to build “jihadist dirty bombs.” Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale”) directs a screenplay by William Monahan (“The Departed”) and Andrew Bovell (“Lantana”) that’s adapted from a 1985 BBC miniseries originally written by Troy Kennedy Martin. Darius Jedburgh (Ray Winstone) is a fixer-for-hire with intriguing tastes and theories. His supporting character outstrips Gibson’s standard-issue role. Most tiresome is the double-barrelled endorsement of extrajudicial execution, although a few in a word-of-mouth audience cheered each and every one of these deaths. “Edge of Darkness” attacks Boston cop culture where cases tagged “officer involved” are handled with greater care. Another local dis is implied by depicting Emma, who earned a M.S. from MIT, as knowing no way to leak her Northmoor dirt to the media. With Danny Huston, Shawn Roberts, David Aaron Baker, Jay O. Sanders, Denis O’Hare, Damian Young. 117m. (Bill Stamets)

Specifying what is not working in this uncomic and unromantic film is what a constructive critic ought to do. But for this uninstructive film, it’s not worth the bother. “I wanted to make a comedy with romance, versus a ‘romantic comedy,” spins director Mark Steven Johnson (“Ghost Rider,” “Grumpy Old Men”), who claims he’s “blowing out a lot of the conventions of a traditional romantic comedy.” Yet writers David Diamond and David Weissman (“Old Dogs”) bring in the usual genre ingredients, including the unlikely coupling of secondary characters who kanoodle in a church pew at the end. Is any unmarried woman in an American romantic comedy not obsessed with work and skeptical of love? Enter Beth (Kristen Bell from “Couples Retreat,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”). This junior curator at the Guggenheim Museum jets off to Rome for her little sister’s nuptials. Beth clicks with best man Nick (Josh Duhamel from “Transformers,” “Turistas”), a New York Daily News sports writer. After committing myriad faux pas at the wedding, Beth plucks four coins and a poker chip from the Fountain of Love in the square outside the church. They were tossed there by wishers for lovers. Magic strikes like lightning. Beth unwittingly picks up five bewitched suitors. She figures Nick’s otherwise welcome attentions arise from the Roman spell and not from true love. Johnson moves through cliches mechanically, like a projectionist moving celluloid through a projector: there is a baffling lack of heartbeats and punchlines in “When in Rome.” With Kate Micucci, Will Arnett, Alexis Dziena, Jon Heder, Dax Shepard, Bobby Moynihan, Danny DeVito, Anjelica Huston. 91m. (Bill Stamets)