First unfurled in March 1941 by Timely Comics, Captain America goes from that ten-cent comic to the big screen in a summer action adventure built for ten-year-old boys. In 1943, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) lies five times to recruiters before Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), an Austrian scientist in exile in Brooklyn, reclassifies the asthmatic “4F” runt as “IA,” and recruits him into the Strategic Scientific Reserve for a “super-soldier” experiment. Steve is the sort of Brooklynite who gets beat up for chastising a jerk in a movie theater who heckles a patriotic newsreel. A massive injection of blue serum, followed by a blinding zap of Vita-Ray that taps half of Brooklyn’s electricity, “amplifies” Steve’s muscles, stature and righteousness. His homefront handlers brand him Captain America and put him on the road with show girls to hype war bonds. Read the rest of this entry »

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There was a Sunday night back in mid-2010 when intermittent aphorist Errol Morris took to his Twitter account and sounded surprised, saying something like, Wow, I think I just finished a new movie, as if it had dropped fully formed in his lab. "Tabloid" was the result and it's a quirky quickie, as he turns a single-day interview with the bizarre, emphatic Joyce McKinney, into another meditation on storytelling and truth, with 1960s-tabloid style storytelling, alleged sex kidnappings, obsession, alleged Mormon conspiracies and Korean dog-cloning thrown into the mix. More recently, Morris' appearances with the film have been shadowed by McKinney, who doesn't love the giddy romp that her life's become on screen, and Morris marvels that these Q&As, with McKinney joining him on stage, are often longer than the film's taut eighty-eight-minute running time.  Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“How long have you been in the forest?”

A small, tight fistful of blunt lines like that in Joe Wright’s outlandish, determined art-house action thriller, “Hanna,” quickly set the heart of the casual admirer of Bruno Bettelheim’s fairytale study “The Uses of Enchantment” to racing. Wright is also bolder than ever with visual flourish.

A motherless child grows up in a rude cabin in far snowy reaches, taught by her father (Eric Bana) to be a ruthless mind, a calculating creature. She’s not amnesiac, she just knows no experience of the larger world: it’s “The Newbourne identity.” “Where do you come from?” “The forest.” The swamp, the primordial ooze, the soup, the shadows: from which all life and fear emerge. Outside the forest, a spy agency in the person of a Texas-twanging Cate Blanchett beckons, threatens.

There aren’t many high-functioning Asperger’s, tongue-in-cheek, Jesus-girl, killer-child thrillers in the market, which makes even the wooziest and blowziest moments of “Hanna” startling. A jarring mix of tones prevails, at one moment in settings that suggest Fassbinder making a “Modesty Blaise” and others, the Euro-oddness of the more gregarious films by Fatih Akin, like “Im Juli” or “Soul Kitchen.” As shot by the gifted Alwin Küchler (“Ratcatcher,” “Sunshine,” “Morvern Callar”) and tethered to the serene, slightly sinister percolation of a score by the Chemical Brothers, the world outside is otherworldly, as if we, the audience, were pitched into as much strangeness as bright young Hanna. Read the rest of this entry »

(Ha Evangerion shin gekijôban, 2009) Hideaki Anno’s sequel to 2007′s “Evangelion 1:0,” and the second installment of four planned anime re-imaginings of the 1990s Japanese TV series “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” places huge, destructive angels battling humanoid robots called Evangelions at the center of a saga about an apocalypse striking Japan. Yikes, the timing of the release. (Japanese exhibitors pulled Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter,” which opens with the destruction and deaths after a tsunami, from release.) On one level, the furious pace of the story of teen-geek heroes and heroines battling to save their nation and the world is dazzling and visually kaleidoscopic, if confounding for a non-aficionado of the source material. In the context of the tragic events of the past week, it gains painful resonance. Then again, any Japanese viewer who knows the history of earthquakes, atom bombs and other forms of destruction loosed upon the islands of their country would have felt the same pull, even before tsunamis and nuclear plant meltdowns. If memory serves, “Evangelion: 2.0″ is more pungent and ever so slightly less daffy than its predecessor. 109m. (Ray Pride)

“Evangelion: 2.0 – You Can (Not) Advance” opens Friday at the Music Box.The trailer below offers a brisk slice of “Evangelion: 2.0″‘s style and pace.

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Resist guessing this deadly cave-diving adventure is a rebreathing of “Descent.” There are no lost tribes of gilled albinos, nor leftover aliens from “Abyss,” or nasty indigenous species from “The Ruins” inhabiting “The Mother of All Caves” in Papua, New Guinea. That’s where producer-co-writer Andrew Wight, and co-writer (and dive coordinator) John Garvin set their “Sanctum.” Australian diver Wight draws on the 1988 escape of his twenty-two-member team from Pannikin Cave in Nullarbor Plain, which lead him to produce the documentary “Nullarbor Dreaming.” Shooting off the Queensland coast, Alister Grierson (“Kokoda”) directs this fictional version spiked with six deaths. The 3-D technology is the same that James Cameron deployed on “Avatar.” Wight earlier worked with Cameron, one of “Sanctum”‘s executive producers, on four underwater documentaries. Here some over-the-shoulder shots in above-ground scenes jar with extreme foregrounding. In the press notes, Garvin and Wight say they don’t want us to see them using 3-D, which seems to make it useless. On day thirty-four of an underwater speleological expedition, a big rain floods a big cave. The only way out is an underground river flowing into the Pacific Ocean, if only the survivors can find it before they run out of oxygen, suffer blood “fizz” from nitrogen narcosis, panic in tight passages, or get back-stabbed by a billionaire with stalagmites. The story is less eventful than “Touching the Void” or “The Way Out,” two other nature escape narratives. 17-year-old Josh (Rhys Wakefield) will discover his dad, master diver Frank (Richard Roxburgh), is not just “an emotionally shut-down Nazi asshole.” The old man has a life-and-death skill set to pass along. With Alice Parkinson, Dan Wyllie, Ioan Gruffudd, Christopher Baker, Nicole Downs, Allison Cratchley. 103m. (Bill Stamets)

Screenwriters Joe Stillman and Nicholas Stoller contemporize “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jonathan Swift’s 1726 account of the fantastic travels of a ship’s surgeon to three islands and the land of the Yahoos. Nearly none of the political satire of England and Europe survives this abridgement. Swift’s attack on his time’s oratory turns into characters quoting rock lyrics. This “Gulliver’s Travels” bowdlerizes the bodily waste comedy in the original, but at least that Swiftian motif tracks with the casting of Jack Black. In no way stretching his branded persona, he plays Lemuel Gulliver, a ten-year employee in the mailroom of the New York Tribune with a five-year crush on travel editor Darcy Silverman (Amanda Peet). She assigns him to write about a tour to the Bermuda Triangle, where an inter-dimensional vortex transports him to the kingdom of Liliput. The locals are quite little and Lemuel is a big deal in court politics, a hero for putting out a fire with his piss. Lemuel coaches the commoner Horatio (Jason Segel) to do what he himself has yet to do, which is get up the nerve to do a “valiant” deed to get the out-of-his-league gal. “Gulliver’s Travels” is directed by Rob Letterman (“Monsters vs. Aliens”), who is totally outdone by the fourth “Ice Age” cartoon, featuring Scat and his epic acorn, that precedes this “3D family comedy.” With Emily Blunt, Chris O’Dowd, Billy Connolly, Catherine Tate. 87m. (Bill Stamets)

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A simple Western festooned with wicked comic vernacular, Joel and Ethan Coen’s “True Grit” honors its source, the best-selling novel by the great novelist Charles Portis. Directorial sarcasm seems at a rare minimum for the brothers, as they trust the actors to capture the rich lingo and fierce illusions of its characters. Jeff Bridges’ U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn is dubbed the one with “true grit” by 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld). Steinfeld is a torrential force of nature as the one with the truest grit, wrangling majestic swathes of dialogue but also simple statements like “There is no clock on my business.” Steinfeld’s precocity brings high flush to her cheeks, making her more imposing than vulnerable in the face of dullard mankind. Mattie’s range of polymathic knowledge startles and stumps the denizens of Fort Smith, Arkansas, “fugitives and malefactors” alike, who would stand in the way of avenging the shooting death of her father. But she’s got cash, which leads to wary, provisional collaboration with both the trigger-happy-if-one-eyed Cogburn and run-at-the-mouth Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon, relishing his role as a dapper and slightly simple dandy). Read the rest of this entry »

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Gorgeous imagery and restrained use of 3-D mark Zack Snyder’s hoot of a foray into children’s animation. “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’Hoole” is adapted from the first three of fifteen young adult novels by Kathryn Lasky, with a story that seems likely to frighten the short pants off any kids who see it: a rank of good owls versus bad owls, the good owls battling genocide and the bad ones wreaking all manner of militaristic mayhem. There’s a full nest of voice talent, drawing largely from a who’s-who of Australian actors—the film received Australian film production credits—including Geoffrey Rush, David Wenham, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Helen Mirren, Anthony LaPaglia, Joel Edgerton, Richard Roxburgh, Deborra-Lee Furness and Abbie Cornish. Snyder’s knack for painstaking production design, seen in earlier movies like “300″ and “Watchmen,” enlivens a story that eventually becomes near-impossible to follow, with feathery fiends with myth-heavy names being hard to tell apart. Talking to Snyder last week, he told me the style of filmmaking wasn’t so different, requiring about the same amount of preparation as his live action-CGI hybrid filmmaking. But, exposition of the book series’ invented backstory thunders instead of flutters. The Lisa Gerrard song that accompanies a key montage sounds weirdly like The Postal Service, but the score does all it should do in the intense action sequences. And the owls’ flight through storms at sea soar. A new Road Runner cartoon precedes; it’s awful in every possible way, dull, unimaginative, unfunny and with an unappealingly stylized Wile E. (Ray Pride)

Almost three days and I still feel like a python that hopes to digest some large creature wrapped up in a thick Turkish carpet. If “Eat Pray Love,” Ryan Murphy’s inert adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s beloved, best-selling memoir of spiritual exploration (adapted by himself and Jennifer Salt) could wring out the weight of tears that have stained its pages in thousands of copies, it will make a fine fortune. Reportedly, the book’s epiphanies of a fortysomething seeker with a moneyed life hitting the road evoke spiritual qualities that a raft of readers found moving. Unfortunately, Murphy’s movie is ethnographic tourism of a low order. Julia Roberts makes an ideal embodiment of an entitled narcissist—me me me—who learns almost nothing other than a couple of words in Italian that she lords over others. The extensive narration is a model of tell-don’t-show. Sound effects are Mickey-Moused: the line “everybody needs a husband” would be accompanied by the loud burst of a cock crowing. It’s the aural equivalent of the aphorisms narrating her life lessons. To make a satire-cum-pastiche of the latterday “women’s picture” this accomplished requires a cruel and uncommon sensibility, and you can only assume that the producer of “Nip/Tuck” and “Glee” is putting on. Right? Really. C’mon. Read the rest of this entry »