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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After a larger, lesser movie with similar themes but grandiose goals toward empty-calorie travelogue opened last week, Ryan Murphy’s “Eat Pray Love,” Ruba Nadda’s “Cairo Time” arrives, a sweet rebuke to the infinitesimal show of spirit in the Julia Roberts vehicle. After fourteen shorts and an earlier feature, the Syrian-Canadian writer-director has fashioned a story for the ever-splendid Patricia Clarkson, who, at the age of 50, sweeps away with her first leading role. Happily married fashion editor Juliette (Clarkson), vacationing in Cairo with her longtime husband, Mark, a U.N. official (Tom McCamus), must find another escort when work calls on him again and again. Mark’s trusted friend and former security advisor Tareq (Alexander Siddig) offers to show her his city, a city of history and of 17 million residents. Friendship, only friendship. East and West gain in translation. Juliette and Tareq suit each other. Juliette swans through the city. The movie moves gently on the currents of their budding friendship, looks, smiles, gazes. Is Platonic the ideal? Triangles, even impossible ones, are faultless movie material in the right hands. Nadda is deft. Clarkson is impeccable. The movie doesn’t strain for effect, for greatness. Perhaps just for calm, contentment, contemplation. For Clarkson’s compelling understatement. Hello, stranger. In a year of spectacularly apt and satisfying endings, “Cairo Time” may have the emblematic topper: blunt yet enigmatic, lovely, lasting, exquisite. It ties the past hour-and-a-half into an image, a motion, a duplicated discovery. Two into three. Cryptic? There you go. But not when you see “Cairo Time.” For international co-production reasons, Irish production house Samson Films, which made “Once,” became part of the team: perfect. “Cairo Time,” too, is sweet music. 88m. (Ray Pride)

“Cairo Time” opens Friday at Landmark Century.

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 »

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 »

Charlie St. Cloud (Zac Efron, “High School Musical 3,” “Me and Orson Welles”) flatlines in an ambulance after a car accident. Paramedic Florio (Ray Liotta) calls it a miracle when the high-school senior revives. En route to the ER of their coastal Washington state town, Charlie sees the lifeless hand of his younger brother Sam (Charlie Tahan) dangle from another guerney. Five years later, Florio is dying of cancer and tells Charlie his second shot at life was a gift: “God doesn’t show off. There’s got to be a reason.” Before this decent romantic sniffler is over, Charlie will see another hand of a loved one hang over a hospital bed. In the meantime, he sacrifices his sailing scholarship to Stanford to work as the live-in caretaker at Seaside Cemetery, where he tosses around a baseball with dead Sam every day at sunset. Charlie also talks with a high-school pal who died in Iraq. Another classmate, Tess (Amanda Crew), rekindles Charlie’s love of the sea and life, even though at one point he finds her asleep on the grave of her late father. Writers Craig Pearce and Lewis Colick adapt the 2004 novel “The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud” by Ben Sherwood, relocating the setting from New England to the Pacific Northwest. Or rather, over the border, where British Columbia’s highway signs tout “Super, Natural B.C.” This afterlife is heartwarming, if over-frosted with sweet gooey CGI sunsets. There’s no bloodsucking or throat-slashing, as seen in this summer’s other young romance franchise set nearby. Director Burr Steers sails far from the brotherly love found in “Igby Goes Down” (2002), his far less teary writing and directing debut. Although there are elements shared with Nicholas Sparks films, Steers is less trite in this mildly gothic romance of undying love blessed by St. Jude. With Augustus Prew, Donal Logue, Kim Basinger. 100m. (Bill Stamets)

You’d hope a movie called “Mercy” about a novelist that opens with the no-longer-young, chain-smoking, drawn-to-drink writer named Johnny (Scott Caan) typing “MERCY” onto a sheet of paper and pulling it from the platen would have a modicum of self-consciousness. Which the modest, not quite timid “Mercy” has, in not necessarily the best way. Caan is a short, beefy, bull-shouldered man, who could be an uncommon force on screen in the right role, and his eyes have some of the dance moves of his father’s when he bruises through the dialogue of his own script. What could shake this writer from his well-remunerated platitudes? A Brit magazine critic (Wendy Glenn) who inspires him to make with the verbals and who conveniently is named… Mercy (joining “Summer” and “Autumn” as character names taken for the foreseeable future). Photographer-turned-director Patrick Hoelck appoints the sets with no small amount of chintz, but moves through the many implausiblities—this writer of romantic fiction is scarily rich and the dialogue runs to “You write about love, but you don’t know how to spell it”—getting to the meat of the movie, exchanges between Caan and his father, James Caan, that simmer rather than explode. Mercy says Johnny is “shallow”: Didn’t she read the script? With Troy Garity, Erika Christensen, Alexie Gilmore, John Boyd, Dylan McDermott. 87m. Widescreen. (Ray Pride)

“Mercy” opens Friday at Facets.

By Ray Pride

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream even bigger, darling,” a character says in “Inception” (and in its trailers), elevating an enormous weapon into frame and immediately blasting away his adversaries.

A lesson heeded over the course of a decade of writing and production on Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” a hall of mirrors of artistic allusions in the form of a heist thriller that takes place in the space of sleep. The intricate carpentry and lacquering of “The Dark Knight” director’s filmmaking shines when you see it a second time: craftsmanship has pleasures, if not limitless mystery. Putting plot synopsis aside—the story’s contours are so neatly delineated and dovetailed, describing them at length defines the word “Spoiler”—Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb assembles a dream team of experts, in the best tradition of heist thrillers, to commit an anti-heist in the dreams of a powerful man: inserting themselves into his subconscious and leaving behind a powerful suggestion.

Like Alain Resnais’ aggressive mind loop, “Last Year at Marienbad,” “Inception” revolves around memories of a past love, which may or may not be “true.” Memory is fallible, dreams are malleable. Charmingly, Nolan has said he’d only ever seen that feat of bold parallel editing after completing this James Bond-scaled movie, but he felt all the other films that had been influenced by “Marienbad” had influenced him. What other influences rest lightly on Nolan’s shoulders? Read the rest of this entry »

Niche, niche, niche. “Eclipse,” the third in the “Twilight” tetralogy of pre-teen-to-teen abstinence parables from the novels by Stephenie Meyer (eventually to be a film pentalogy), has heightened production values courtesy of music-video-teethed director David Slade (“Hard Candy,” “30 Days Of Night, ” right)—a man who’s never met a digital intermediate he didn’t like—but it’s alien territory for anyone not already an admirer or adept of the series’ peculiar, bloodless vampirism in the service of dubious subtext. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever walked in on anyone masturbating, witnessing suddenly wide eyes flicking up to reveal brow furrowed, gashed, in private distant transport. Many moments in “T:E” made me feel that way, as if I had walked into a secretly thrumming circle of private fetishes. I’m not entirely sure I want to fathom what emotional satisfactions the core “Twilight” audience gathers. Amid the indifferently paced set-pieces, soundtrack alternating between loud music and the sound of cricket and frog-crazed nights, drawing on a huge, chatty cast, here’s the lessons I take away: Fuck and you’re dead. Fuck before marriage, you’re dead. Read the rest of this entry »

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Life’s a grind, but it’s better than the other option, right? The lovingly bruised “Audrey the Trainwreck” is a melancholy meditation on early-onset adulthood, told through the interactions of two young depressives who may be tumbling toward a relationship,  characters adrift in their own ways, hoping for love, or perhaps just a little reassuring simplicity. Chicago writer-director-editor Frank V. Ross’ fifth feature is freighted with the heightened ordinary and his comedic and dramatic instincts are wrapped in a rare concern for the lowered expectations of the modern middle-class. “I can say I’m not afraid of anything, because there’s a lack of options,” one character says; the observation is dry, even though it’s coming from a resigned place in her heart. Ross’ most intriguing pattern is how the everydayness of the jobs and pursuits are interrupted by bits of conflict and violence or unexpectedly apt humor. (In life and in drama, inertia needs to be punctured.) The violence is, well, funny. Read the rest of this entry »

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In a period before Neil Jordan shifted his long-awaited epic about the murderous Borgia family to a forty-hour Showtime series, the Irish writer-director turned his pen to fairytales again, and the result is “Ondine.” We all should do so well with periods of enforced inactivity. Blunter than “The Company of Wolves” or “The Crying Game,” it’s still far superior to his epic misfires like “In Dreams.” The characters talk fairytales to each other; happenstance becomes lore, lore fuels hope. On a slate-to-blue overcast morn in a small Irish seaside time, Syracuse (Colin Farrell, an increasingly fine actor) the fisherman, a reformed alcoholic, makes an unlikely catch: a beautiful woman who may or may not be a selky: a seal from Scottish myth. She calls herself Ondine (Alicja Bachleda) while speaking halting English in an indeterminate accent. Read the rest of this entry »