By Ray Pride

Long-distance relationships never work, and romantic comedies about long relationships?

Nanette Burstein ups the average with confident glee in the zippy romantic comedy “Going the Distance.” In the New York-set feature debut of the director of “American Teen,” Drew Barrymore is Erin, a would-be journalist six weeks away from moving to San Francisco, where her sister (Christina Applegate) and possibly more jobs await. She lays it out: “I’m 31, I’m an intern, I’m gonna get wasted.” Drinking in a local bar that night, trying to beat her own high score at Centipede, Garrett (Justin Long), who works at a record label, intrudes on a dare from his friends (Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day), leading to Erin’s explosion: “Fucker put his face in front of the game! Who does that?” But friendship, flirtation, more, develop. Tick-tick-tock… Read the rest of this entry »

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What on earth is “Machete”? More properly, what in Texas is it? Originally one of the fake coming attractions that was part of the “Grindhouse” package—”You fucked with the wrong Mexican”—Robert Rodriguez’s expansion of his pungent “Mexploitation” joke to feature length is, surprisingly, an urgent political polemic that still pays tribute to violent and sexual eyeball kicks. In this way, it’s probably the first full-on pastiche of Roger Corman’s subversive play at his 1970s New World Pictures label that anyone’s ever assembled. Read the rest of this entry »

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By Ray Pride

I went into Rob Reiner’s “Flipped” fearing a coming-of-age romantic comedy that would live up to Roger Ebert’s notorious pan of the director’s “North”: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it.” I love being wrong when foolish expectations get stamped out, and there are moments in “Flipped” to be loved, loved, loved.

An extended piece in the Los Angeles Times in July on the movie’s marketing left me fearful. “I wanted the story to feel timeless and pure, in a time before texting and Facebook,” Reiner told a columnist. “I thought it was important to strip away the technology so we could get at the true emotions and feelings and make it as innocent as possible. I guess you could say I wanted to make it closer to my own childhood.”

In a small town in Michigan along Bonnie Meadow Lane in the six years leading up to 1963, in the season before the murder of JFK, lives a boy, Bryce Loski (Callan McAuliffe) and across the street, a girl, Juli Baker (Madeline Carroll). The values of their respective families resonate through their behavior toward each other, from Bryce’s stodgy, frustrated father (Anthony Edwards, who throws away the line, “I hate cool”) to Juli’s (Aidan Quinn), whose strength and compassion comes from unexpected places. McAuliffe is Cera-esque in the ways that people who don’t like Michael Cera describe that actor: a milquetoast for Juli to invest her substantial imagination in. You wonder what this wonderful girl sees in him: hope, potential, pretty eyes? She’s a smart child, tomboy with pigtails: Carroll has a feline cast to her eyes, a little of the young Anna Paquin to her features. Read the rest of this entry »

Erik White directs Abdul Williams’ script retailing the comic plight of Kevin (Bow Wow) after learning on a Friday that his winning lottery ticket will pay $370 million. If only he can hold onto it over the long Fourth of July weekend. Wealth-stealing is a more popular notion than wealth-sharing in Kevin’s community. As a clerk at a Foot Locker outlet, he’s one of the few characters with a job, besides the clerk at the corner store who sold him the ticket. Williams feels no duty to populate the housing project with role models. Kevin can tell if young women are morally worthy by whether they want him to use a condom. His male elders are only effective when they use physical force. That’s true of the bad guys and the good guy, a secretive basement shut-in with a taste for beef jerky and Cherry Coke. Cracks about the greedy preacher are tired, but a line about Jesus’ birth-certificate driver’s license is pretty funny. Set on a holiday with roots in “the pursuit of happiness,” “Lottery Ticket” is a pennypincher about investing any screen time to satirize African-American traditions of playing the numbers. The do-the-right-thing coda, whose art direction includes a Spelman College sweatshirt, is hard to buy. In an audio file of a press conference that Warner Bros. Publicity Department posted, the makers of “Lottery Ticket” sounded blindsided by a softball question about how they’d “give back” to the community if they had won all that money. Unlike Kevin, they found that inconceivable. With Brandon T. Jackson, Naturi Naughton, Keith David, Charlie Murphy, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Terry Crews, Loretta Devine, Ice Cube. 99m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

“Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” is British director Edgar Wright’s third feature, his first on a studio budget as well his first without Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, his cohorts on “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz.”

Epically understated Michael Cera stars instead as the title character, drawn from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Canadian comic, a still-unformed Toronto layabout and musician who hasn’t learned to love so well, still smarting from his last dumping and spending platonic time with a high-school girl named Knives Chau (the insanely lovely, chipper and inappropriate Ellen Wong). Meeting one Ramona Flowers (ever-taciturn Mary Elizabeth Winstead) in a T.O. dive, Pilgrim unwittingly finds himself cast into a battle for her against “seven deadly exes.” The jokes and riffs and sight gags are relentless, and for the first half-hour or so, come as fast and furious as an old Warner Bros. cartoon. (There’s a large, lovingly cast crew of characters as well.) References to arcade games of twenty years ago are woven into the text, but there’s a generosity of comedic spirit that requires no footnoting. More daring is the lack of backstory: Pilgrim is hurled into battles royale at a running start.

The six volumes of the comic, Wright tells me in an interview along with Cera, explain things a little more, “but in quite a flippant way, in only a couple of little asides, like peanut gallery lines, literally, to explain the subspace a little bit more. They never really explain the fights. The only line is something like almost a sarcastic aside.” Pilgrim’s reaction grows into comic weariness at being cast into yet another pitched battle that’s part anime, part videogame and all kinetic annoyance. It’s “Speed Racer” brought down to earth, or Ontario at least. Read the rest of this entry »

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One of the richest surprises of the summer is the pungent “Peepli Live,” writer-director Anusha Rizvi’s vivid, bustling satire, in the vein of Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole,” or should we say, opening a vein as “Ace in the Hole” does. Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri) is a poor famer from the small town of Peepli, and if he can’t pay back a government loan, he’ll lose his land. Thoughtfully yet creepily enough, the government also offers aid to the survivors of farmers who commit suicide. Natha’s brother advocates this course of action, Natha tentatively agrees, and soon the big carnival of media and politicians swoop down on Peepli, sweeping Natha’s grave decision out of the way with their own goals and agendas. Rizvi wrestles with Indian village-versus-city issues with bawdy wit and ample charm. Talking to producer Aamir Khan recently, he told me that “Peepli Live,” the first Indian movie to play in competition at Sundance, is indeed atypical of modern Indian filmmaking, and its dark undercurrents make it atypical of much of what’s called independent filmmaking in this country. Read the rest of this entry »

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Filmmaker Paul Cotter has told film-festival audiences that his captivating directorial debut, “Bomber,” was made for “less than the cost of a Prius,” and it’s one of the most accomplished no-budget movies I’ve seen in months. The contours of the story—grown son hits the road with his aging father and mother to make amends with the father’s past—could make it sound like any number of movies, like “Little Miss Sunshine,” but it’s always in the details, isn’t it? As a writer and director, Cotter’s eye for humor and simple human behavior is assured. And the father’s compulsion to return to Germany sixty years later to “apologize” for bombing a village is an inspired taking-off point. He’s seen the damage from the sky, and now he wants to see what’s there on the ground. And what’s on the ground? A bickering family. The acting has a genial ensemble flavor, but Shane Taylor (“Band of Brothers”), playing the son, invests himself fully in the character. It’s the family’s self-knowledge that grows from the impulse to apologize, making “Bomber” all the richer. Cotter’s widescreen images are beautifully composed: any thought of his tiny budget will quickly disappear. It’s common for reviewers to say that you look forward to the second feature of a debut director; I look forward to seeing “Bomber” again, on the big screen. (Cotter cites the example of Abbas Kiarostami—”Taste of Cherry,” “Ten”—whom he met in a 2005 workshop, as his inspiration to go to Germany with three actors and a crew of seven.) With Benjamin Whitrow, Eileen Nicholas. 85m. HDCAM video. (Ray Pride)

“Bomber” plays Friday-Tuesday and Thursday at Siskel. A trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

Louis Ives (Paul Dano, “There Will Be Blood”) entertains notions of living in Manhattan as a novelist, but his fate is to live like a character in a novel, or a film based on a novel. The only novel he is ever seen reading in “The Extra Man” is “Washington Square” by Henry James. Never is he shown writing, or thinking or talking about writing. An indiscretion with a bra in front of the mirror in the faculty lounge cost him his position as a prep-school teacher. He moves into the apartment of Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline), a mannered Manhattanite who once knew prospects as a playwright. After squandering his inheritance abroad, he’s lived for decades as a freeloader and flatterer amidst society ladies in need of gentlemanly attention. “I can advance you socially,” Henry promises Louis. Neither character is little more than a fussy drawerful of quirks. Louis is curious about cross-dressing. He gets nowhere with co-worker Mary (Katie Holmes) at the environmental magazine where he ineffectually sells ads. A diverting guest at dinner parties, Henry spouts an opinion on the literary advantages of partitioning of men and women in society: “The Muslims might produce another [F. Scott] Fitzgerald.” Director-writers Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman (“The Nanny Diaries,” “American Splendor”) adapt a novel by Jonathan Ames for a mildly comic study of eccentric parasites. The screen, though, may not offer this pair the same comforts as the pages of James and Fitzgerald. “The Extra Man” is itself a tony hanger-on ill-suited to earn its keep. With John C. Reilly, Marian Seldes, Jason Butler Harner, Alex Burns, Cathy Moriarty. 108m. (Bill Stamets)

“The Extra Man” opens Friday at Landmark Century.

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Brit comedy group The Mighty Boosh are followed by filmmaker Oliver Ralfe through the ninety-nine dates of their Future Sailors Tour, crossing the UK and Ireland in a huge bus. Fans of their surreal 2004-2007 BBC series will get the most from the off-hours exposure of stars Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, which emphasizes, as any honest doc about touring will, the exhaustion, the grind, the mundane, but also their quiet professionalism in honing their work day-to-day, moment-to-moment. Grant Gee’s Radiohead tour doc, 1998′s “Meeting People Is Easy” remains the gold standard of the small genre, but “Journey” has its rewards, especially in its choice to follow process rather than rely on nothing but clips from the live presentation. 82m. (Ray Pride)

“Journey of the Childmen: The Mighty Boosh on Tour” plays Saturday and Wednesday at Siskel. Their feature “Bunny and the Bull” opens Friday for a week-long run.

While awaiting a conversation with Todd Solondz outside a boutique hotel room, a recording of urgent, furious songbirds echoes down the corridor. Another chorus awaits inside.

The 50-year-old writer-director’s latest movie is marbled through with his bleak, black humor, but there’s a shell-shocked character to the figures in his story. Living lives they can’t manage in a society they can’t reckon with, they all seek some manner of forgiveness. The words “forgive me” echo like the word “fuck” in a Judd Apatow movie. On one level, this newest film is a variation on his 1998 “Happiness,” where those figures are played now by other actors (such as Paul Reubens for Jon Lovitz). That carapace is readily shed even a few scenes in. Despite his penchant for shock, Solondz seems to have crafted an empathetic, if dark fable for “Life During Wartime.” The pedophile from “Happiness” is released from prison just as his youngest son, Timmy, anticipates his bar mitzvah. To be a man is to understand what happened to his father, what terrorists are, what 9/11 means. The shroud of the past decade cloaks all his characters like the Holocaust did an earlier generation (a linkage which the script does not shirk). Read the rest of this entry »