By Ray Pride

“These bitches suck” was Creem magazine’s timeless takedown of The Runaways when the teenage girl band bobbed to the surface of the 1970s.

In Floria Sigismondi’s writing-directing debut, the making-of-the-band, life-on-the-road, taking-of-the-drugs telling of 1970s teen rockers who made it right to the middle (despite mostly sucking, musically) has the right attitude if not a fully fleshed story. It satisfies in bursts, like an erratically track-sequenced album. Based on Cherie Currie’s slim memoir, “Neon Angel,” “The Runaways” is episodic, and Currie’s decline isn’t as interesting as 15-year-old Dakota Fanning’s embodiment of her rapid slip-slide into neurasthenia and diva-dom. (Fanning’s turn-on-a-dime from sullen to sneering as the band assembles the song “Cherry Bomb” is one of her best moments: “Ch. Ch. Ch. CHERRY BOMB!”) Joan Jett’s survival instincts are more indicated than dramatized, and Kristen Stewart, while as watchable as ever, brings more spark than fire. Michael Shannon, playing oddball Svengali Kim Fowley, is bright and funny as a leering loon, but he’s a man we ought to be fearful of as much as mesmerized by. (Shannon’s memorably theatrical styling of lines like “I am the luckiest dogfucker in space!” are more Walkenesque than truly loony.) Read the rest of this entry »

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Julio DePietro sought fortune in the financial markets to escape an Ivy League student-loan load. Having found it here in Chicago with The Citadel Group, where he was an early player in what became one of the world’s largest hedge funds, he left to get into film. But unlike other moneyed movie makers who simply produce, he literally sent himself back to school for a crash course in directing. With his debut as writer-director, “The Good Guy,” set amidst the world of the young masters of the universe who trade millions and billions in the blink of a day, DiePietro crafts an accomplished romantic drama with a knowing eye for the nuances of Wall Street, thriving in its most cocky state before the recent humblings of financial crisis. Tommy (Scott Porter, television’s “Friday Night Lights”), the rising star at the firm, has a super-sweet girlfriend Beth (Alexis Bledel of “Gilmore Girls” fame) and a compelling earnestness; he seems like a good guy. He takes on the clumsy office gopher, Daniel (Bryan Greenberg, “One Tree Hill”), as a Pygmalion project, and a fondness soon develops between the project and his could-be paramour, Beth. But the romcom conventions that seem to be fully engaged soon give way to more complex literary devices, as Beth’s book group thoughfully outlines it for us—they’re reading Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier,” and that work resonates in more ways than one. The story curves in some big and nicely small ways, carried along by an able young cast seasoned beyond its age by an abundance of youth-acting experience (a list that even includes Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy and Anna Chlumsky, Macaulay Culkin’s first kisser in “My Girl,” in what seems to be a carefully considered obsession by the filmmaker). Unlike the cartoonish characterizations of Wall Street players in most pictures as overwrought  yuppie neandrathals, “The Good Guy” captures the high-octane boys club spot on: really smart, charismatic guys unenecumbered by “adult” supervision, making fortunes and drunk on their own self-worth Kool-Aid. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Unmade Beds” twines together two journeys of pretty young drifters, Axl (Fernando Tielve) and Vera (Déborah François), gone to ground in modern-day East London. He’s a towheaded, bright-eyed little Spanish twink; she’s a Frenchwoman tentatively abandoning one love for another whose name she refuses to learn. He’s come to London to find his English father, he claims, and couch surf-safaris his way into an immense squat the bright chaos of which looks like a Redmoon Theater production hit by a bomb, so sprawling the pair don’t realize they’re both living there. They’re artists who haven’t found their art, unless you count their wanderings. Hipster quirk, yes, but Argentinean director Alexis Dos Santos’ exquisitely shot second feature is a genuine charmer, moving in and out of focus like emotional liqueur. These characters are made of real stuff. Like Jonás Cuarón’s little-seen coming-of-age “Year of the Nail,” “Unmade Beds” makes cost-effective, poetry-heightened use of montages of still photographs, and like two still unreleased American movies, Ry Russo-Young’s “You Wont Miss Me” and Bradley Rust Grey’s “The Exploding Girl,” Dos Santos uses a heightened digital palette to brighten and heighten and to stay very, very close to characters who don’t yet understand that the bleary, febrile moments they’re finding and feeling will define themselves. The sexy bits are tense, vulnerable, believable and sometimes lightly surreal. It’s playful, grotty Utopia. 98m. (Ray Pride)

“Unmade Beds” opens Friday at Facets.

Movies are from Earth, “Valentine’s Day” is from Mars. “Valentine’s Day” is a strained romcom drawn from disparate strands, like hair in the drain after a shower, or spaghetti in the sink strainer the morning after pasta. “Valentine’s Day” is a delivery vehicle for the coming attractions for “Sex and the City 2.” “Valentine’s Day” stars Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts, Taylor Swift, Larry Miller, Serena Poon, Paul Williams, Tracy Reiner, Hannah Storm, Rance Howard and Kiko Kiko. “Valentine’s Day” has so many roles for nondescript actors with only a single line, you know the director has lots of friends who need to renew their SAG qualifications to keep their health insurance. “Valentine’s Day” is a feat of production management: all those actors show up for only a few hours and their scenes are intercut and you’ve got “Grand Hotel.” “Valentine’s Day” is so teemingly unfunny, it’s more like “Roach Motel.” “Valentine’s Day” makes kissing look unpleasant, desire mechanical, saccharine a kind of soma. “Valentine’s Day,” its director brags, was made quickly, cheaply, for “under $50 million.” “Valentine’s Day” demonstrates that “cheap” is a set of mind, not a price tag. “Valentine’s Day” was co-written by the team behind “He’s Just Not That Into You.” “Valentine’s Day” shows that “He’s Just Not That Into You” had a real director behind the camera. “Valentine’s Day” is directed by Garry Marshall, known for “Laverne and Shirley,” “Pretty Woman,” “The Princess Diaries” and the Dan Aykroyd-Rosie O’Donnell S&M comedy “Exit to Eden.” Wait, Garry Marshall is still alive? In the inevitable, inexorable blooper reel under the credits, Taylor Swift has an affectedly unaffected riff with Taylor Lautner that would charm the socks off an old man. “Valentine’s Day,” to paraphrase 1980s power-punk group Gang Of Four, is like V.D., you wouldn’t want to catch that. 125m. (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)

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)

By Ray Pride

Sunday night pitted two powerful action directors in what seems the journalists’ favorite subject of the season: what’s the difference between a movie made by a man and a movie made by a woman?

Wrathful winter rain fell on Hollywood as James Cameron won Golden Globes for the number two highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, “Avatar,” and he once more rolled out his public persona as King Of The World Of Self-Infatuated Windbags. (His speech surely shared the same writer as the one credited for dialogue in “Avatar.”) His key competition was another tall director, a woman named Kathryn Bigelow, whose formal control in “The Hurt Locker” approaches both mathematics and poetry while functioning as action film and critique of the action film, as embrace of masculine manias while suggesting they are both mysterious and eternal. The two were once married: Bigelow captures one central figure’s physicality, all swagger and smirk, and Cameron creates another of his mixed-message “chick flicks,” an eco-fable part “Aliens,” part “My Little Blue Flying Pony.” Where’s the gender divide there?

In the advance toward the Oscars on March 7, there’ll be even more journalistic comparison-and-contrast. The binary aggravations will intensify, neglecting to embrace the humanity of filmmaking, of faces and fears and hopes. I found myself reaching for B. Ruby Rich’s essential “Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement,” but what I found on the epigraph page was all I needed, a quotation from French cine-essayist Chris Marker: “Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.”

With “35 Shots of Rum” (35 Rhums), French filmmaker Claire Denis throws a lot of things out the window, including her own fascination with the weaknesses of men and women, to embrace a story about happiness, about community and small joys. There are traits you can identify in a director’s style and themes. But are they quintessentially matters of gender or simply of temperament? Read the rest of this entry »

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Another stalker story, no, not about you or your neighbor, or a Hollywood meet-rude, but a small, scruffy minimalist comedy from Uruguay, which also won in the 2009 Chicago International Film Festival’s New Director’s competition. In writer-director Adrián Biniez’s debut feature, he follows Jara (Horacio Camandule), a shy, portly supermarket security guard who works overnight in a Montevideo suburb as he discovers dorky 25-year-old cleaning woman Julia (Leonor Svarcas) and begins to spy on her and then follow her. While classical Hollywood comedies often deal with similar plot devices, in front of a bank of monitors, there’s an instant queasiness. Yet Biniez is astute enough to realize the story he’s telling in his deadpan comedy; as he puts it, “This film is not about the beginning of a relationship, but about what precedes it. A stage where what he knows about her is little more than an image: a big question mark he wishes to decipher.” Camandule’s portrayal of sheer boredom is memorable, too. Biniez acted with Svarcas in “Whiskey” (2004). 84m. (Ray Pride)

Amy Adams was savorable in the likeable “Julie & Julia.” She’s almost insufferable in “Leap Year.” This awful romantic comedy is scripted by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, who also take credit for “Made of Honor” and “Surviving Christmas.” Anna (Adams) makes a living in Boston “staging apartments.” Clients pay her to bait prospective buyers with irresistible temporary furnishings that include the smell of chocolate-chip cookies baking in the kitchen oven. After four years together she notices her cardiologist boyfriend Jeremy (Adam Scott) has yet to ask for her hand and place a ring on her finger. Off he goes to Dublin for a medical convention. She hears there’s a tradition of women proposing to men in Ireland on leap year, so she decides to surprise him there. Travel troubles plop her in an Irish village where further troubles link her with pub proprietor Declan (Matthew Goode) as her traveling companion to Dublin. Fret over their initial mutual hostility. Pray they get where their hearts lead by February 29th. The plot introduces two couples faking matrimony for ulterior motives: both will lead to the real thing. Aww. Anand Tucker lackadaisically directs this incompetent chick flick with no trace of his far better work on the upcoming “Red Riding: 1983,” as well as “Shopgirl” and “Hilary and Jacky.” The recurring schtick of tipsy coots spouting blarney is an affront to some sort of Irish Cultural Heritage Board or Emerald Isle Anti-Defamation Front. With Noel O’Donovan, Tony Roh, Pat Laffan and John Lithgow for only about a minute and a half, thank your lucky charms. 97m. (Bill Stamets)