No, this PG-rated fantasy adventure is not about a high-school kid fronting a band of misfits for the variety show where he wins a music college scholarship. Someone stole Zeus’s lightning bolt, a less impressive old-school light saber, and Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) is wrongly fingered. Percy has no idea he’s a demigod, born of mortal Sally Jackson (Catherine Keener) and the full-blooded god Poseidon (Kevin McKidd). “I guess we all got daddy issues,” observes another kid with divinity in his genealogy. Soon our hero is secreted to Camp Half Blood where he meets Athena’s daughter Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario). For extra credit: what kind of kids are born of two demigods? Quarter deities? On what chromosome is the god gene? Percy learns his dyslexia is due to his “hardwired” literacy in Greek. That’s what made English on the chalkboard unreadable: “it’s Greek to him.” His attention disorder is really warrior-grade, battle-ready alertness. Chris Columbus (two “Harry Potter”s and two “Home Alone”s) directs a screenplay that Craig Titley adapted from Rick Riordan’s 2005 book, the first in a series of five by the middle-school teacher. The plot is a cross-country quest by Percy, Annabeth and a sidekick satyr Grover (Brandon T. Jackson) to find three green pearls that serve as “Get-Out-of-Hades” hall passes, so they can rescue Percy’s mom from Hades. Because saving your mom is always more important than averting a multi-god smackdown with the collateral damage of “the end of life as we know it.” To orient viewers who didn’t do their mythology homework, the screen teens cite “High School Musical” and “Extreme Makeover,” and use an iPod in a way Apple never anticipated. This places us life as we know it. Slightly inventive are updates for the Land of the Lotus-eaters and the “H” sign pointing to hell. Best line: “Hi, mom.” With Pierce Brosnan, Rosario Dawson, Steve Coogan, Joe Pantoliano, Uma Thurman, Joe Pantoliano. 119m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

(Bob le flambeur, 1956) A steel-haired, middle-aged, world-weary gambler (Roger Duchesne) comes up with the grandest con of his day while cruising the nightspots and fleshpots of backstreet Montmartre, but his moment of deepest melancholy comes from a single gaze upon the bare back of a young girl he’s sheltered as she sleeps with his young protégé. “Bob the Gambler,” shot on location in 1954 in gambling dens that were soon to be demolished for housing developments is, among other things, a refined variation on John Huston’s “Asphalt Jungle.” The clutch of Elia Kazan films showing at Siskel in January is exciting, as well as the film sidebar to the MCA’s Italics exhibition, but equally so are the weekend matinees at the Music Box, highlighting the luminous, bittersweet glories of French film noir, as showcased and distributed by Rialto Films. Melville, an unapologetic admirer and collector of Americana and American crime movies, took much of his ethos from the gangsters and brooding tough guys in Hollywood pictures of the 1930s and 1940s. Melville and his characters were wont to mutter sour-sweet epigrams about trust and loyalty, like “If there are two of you, one will betray.” But that’s nothing until you hear this film’s ending. Nobody’s perfect; this curtain line is. (Neil Jordan’s unsuccessful remake, “The Good Thief,” starring Nick Nolte, was released in 2002.)  98m. (Ray Pride)

“Bob the Gambler” plays the Music Box Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am.

By Ray Pride

Novelist Barry Hannah says it well:  “I really want stories that are rippers in the old sense. Tales of high danger, high adventure, and high exploration.”

And has that been what James Cameron’s been conjuring in his fevered imagination for as long as twenty years, a true ripper? Of all the things that can and will be said about “Avatar,” is that it’s the one 2009 feature drawing from the War in Iraq that could make a mint. While his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker” is the best American movie about war in movies this year, and is racking up year-end critics’ nods, it didn’t blow up at the box office.

Even if James Cameron had spent $200 million-plus on a trainwreck the equal of the Icelandic economy, that would have been gratifying, even at the cost of encouraging the wisenheimers who, without seeing the film, invoked the Smurfs, “Ferngully: the Last Rainforest” and something called “Delgo.” All the pessimistic early jabber made it seem like this would be the in-flight movie that you would see on the way to become part of the Matrix. Of course, virtually no one had seen the movie until its Thursday night premiere in London and its staggered press screenings in the U.K. and North America. Then the lights went down, time passed entertainingly, the lights came up, the Twittering began, and within hours an embargo against reviews before opening day was lifted. Read the rest of this entry »

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Is Roland Emmerich hoping to suggest a Fritz Lang fueled on Ecstasy and poppers?  The Teutonic apocalypticist has topped his customary grandiloquence with bursts of grandeur in the 158-minute “2012,” a bravura, breathtaking, ridiculous, assured, intermittently political, berserk masterpiece about the end of the world. As a director-producer-SFX-house-owning Euro-auteur, he has no parallel. (Timur Bekmambetov needs to notch a few more conflagrations in his belt.) The economic critique leveled against form-follows-function disjuncture in movies like “Fight Club” could escalate to Titanic scale against this pinnacle of Emmerich’s appetite for destruction. As lit and framed by Dean Semler and designed by ranks and ranks of designers, Emmerich’s provocations aren’t meant to capture the hushed, stoppled intake of breath upon encountering a finely ruined world. There’s gallery-drowned influence that’s only grown with time. Some of his images hope to sleep cheek-by-jowl with work like Maurizio Catellan’s “La Nona Ora” (The Night Hour), in which a Pope has been slain by a small, perfectly aimed bit of meteorite. Amusingly, Emmerich has shown off the yields of his profits: he’s made his London home into a gallery of boldly political art, some commissioned. He wears the galleristic influence with confident glee. He adds more and more politicized sarcasm to the kind of enterprise that was considered programmatic, say, “Gone in Sixty Wonders of the World.” Emmerich is a mephitic prankster and the perfume comes from a perfect nose, a perfect nose for what he does. With John Cusack, God bless ‘im, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Patrick Bachau. 158m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)

“2012″ opens Friday.

RECOMMENDED

“Batshit” is too seldom used as encomium and adjective, but there are renegade abstractions like Tony Jaa’s thirteenth-century martial-arts epic “Ong Bak 2: The Beginning,” which moves from senselessness to bewilderment from shot to shot, that demand its use. Jaa (nee Panom Yee-Run) co-directs (with stunt choreographer and actor star Panna Rittikrai) and stars as a prodigal prince. Muay Thai is the underpinning of most of the straightforward mayhem, but the sound-and-vision of hand-to-hand and sword-on-sword action is endlessly gratifying no matter how slapdash the editing may be. And batshit. “Natayuth” is reportedly the name of another style of fighting on display. CGI and other tricks appear to be in short supply. Elephant surfing is a modest bonus in this teeming tapestry. Co-starring Natdanai Kongthong. 110m. (Ray Pride)

“Ong Bak 2: The Beginning” opens Friday at the Music Box.

It’s grand that a physical, mindful force of 1960s American alternative cinema like Melvin Van Peebles can tell a story at the age of 75 about being an anti-Hollywood “maverick” with an epochal success like 1971’s “Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song.” With “Confessions of A Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha,” the grand old man and inveterate trickster figure becomes an unregenerate youth forever on the run.  Based on his 1982 Broadway production, “Waltz of the Stork,” this partly musical semi-autobiographical fantasia uses the lower rungs of digital-video imagery to compile Van Peeble’s imagination from boyhood to middle age to mixed result. “Ex-Doofus-Itchy” is a mass of hardly digested material about twentieth-century African-American cultural experience that rings both true and deadly. Peebles looks tired. He’s lived a life. Then he made this movie. 75m. DigiBeta video.  (Ray Pride)

Quentin Tarantino has a cold.

I get the call a couple hours before a scheduled interview. It’s past Newcity’s print deadline and only a couple days before “Inglourious Basterds” opens on thousands of screens. Tarantino will walk the “rope line” on the red carpet of the Chicago International Film Festival premiere, but a fistful of interviews are called off. His flight is late; he’s not feeling up to it.

Modestly refigured since its Cannes premiere, Tarantino’s World War II revenge fantasy has a large cast and an intricate, implausible plot that would take long paragraphs to recount. Here are two words: “Kill Schicklgruber.” A covert team of American soldiers, led by Brad Pitt, who tag themselves with the film’s title, are an integral part of a plot to kill Hitler and propaganda master and film producer Joseph Goebbels at a premiere at a Parisian cinema, joined by British soldiers and French Resistance fighters inspired by a Jewish woman, Shoshanna (the dreamily wet-eyed Mélanie Laurent) who owns the cinema and has a history with the film’s lead character, Hans Landa, known as “The Jew Hunter,” a multilingual interrogator who is not only everyone’s antagonist but a brutal yet suave killer who’s earned his name. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

The Music Box and IFC offer canny  counter-programming to this week’s wide release of Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” a historical revenge fantasy about World War II resistance in a mythical France, by offering “Flame & Citron,” Ole Christian Madsen’s crisp, efficient thriller, based on fact, about resistance to the Nazi invaders in Denmark in 1944.

“When your nation is invaded you have to make very important decisions. What do you chose?” is Madsen’s simplest declaration of what his film is about. The themes are timeless and painfully timely: think Tehran. “Flame” and “Citron” were the code names for two resistance fighters, 23-year-old Bent (Thure Lindhardt) and 33-year-old Jørgen (Mads Mikkelsen, seen previously in “Pusher” and “Casino Royale”). Flame, with notably fiery hair, wants to launch armed counterattacks against the occupying forces. Citron, Flame’s driver, and a family man, becomes more and more involved in the clandestine activities. Things go wrong, loyalties are questioned, deeper moral issues are sketched in. The script’s psychological observation is acute and Madsen’s command of dynamic action filmmaking is gratifying. Read the rest of this entry »

The Warner Brothers logo looms into view as a gray iron gate. Not quite like the “No Trespassing” sign outside Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu, but still, any unsuspecting soul who wanders into the sixth episode of this fantasy franchise without first reading the source novel by J.K. Rowling may need a wand to unveil throughlines of the ongoing mythology. Sooty aerial wraiths called Death Eaters—whose name suggests they ought to shit everlasting life—conspire to upset a school of kids learning how to wave their wands. There’s a new Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts on the faculty, and his horny charges are brewing the equivalent of date-rape potions. The title lad (Daniel Radcliffe) wins a vial of Liquid Luck by cheating in class. Teen make-out drama offers respite from a rote plot of good wizards versus bad wizards over ancient grudges and eternal dominion. Screenwriter Steve Kloves and director David Yates shortchange fans of the inventive grandeur that charmed early Potter product. All I look forward to in the seventh film is more screen time for the lovely weirdo Luna, played by Evanna Lynch. With Jim Broadbent, Helena Bonham Carter, Robbie Coltrane, Warwick Davis, Michael Gambon, Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Timothy Spall, David Thewlis, Julie Walters, and the expertise of weather consultant Dr. Richard Wild. 153m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

Saya (Gianna) passes for 16 but she’s pushing four centuries. One parent was a vampire, the other was human. That makes her an immortal with issues. She takes her nourishment from bottled blood, yet she has a soul. Outfitted in a navy blue sailor suit and white knee socks, this morose teen is sent undercover to a high school on a U.S. Air Force base in Japan. Her handlers work for a covert Council of Elders defending humanity from vampiredom. All she does is wield her samurai sword with superhuman skill to eviscerate horde after horde of ninja bloodsuckers. Director Chris Nahon (“Kiss of the Dragon,” 2001) always shifts to super-slow-motion in the middle of battles. As well as toward the beginnings and endings too. Presumably the payoff is allowing Saya and her fans to gorge on the sight of blood sprays. What’s new here is hemoglobin that congeals in midair into shiny red globules. Corey Yuen directs the Hong Kong-style action with his usual kinetic verve. Credit production designer Nathan Amondson for detailing the spectacle of genocidal sadism with its dubious beauty. Screenwriter Chris Chow adapts Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s 2000 anime, the story’s source, with little distinction. The one class Saya attends boasts a better than average discussion of “Frankenstein” by her English teacher and the one classmate, a daughter of the general, who befriends the strange new girl. Set during the Vietnam War, “Blood: The Last Vampire” includes gratuitous dialogue attacking the U.S. for treating the Vietcong and Native-Americans as subhuman, but the film fails to imply parallels between vampires and their victims, or between vampires and their exterminators. With Allison Miller, Liam Cunningham, JJ Field, Koyuki, and Yasuaki Kurata. 89m. (Bill Stamets)