Apr 28
Director Joe Nussbaum (“Sydney White,” “Sleepover”) directs a debut script by Katie Wech for an uncommonly bland story of high school students getting ready for the prom. Oh darn, all the “Starry Night” decorations go up in flames! Only three weeks to go! The tweedy principal forces working-class, motorcycle-riding bad-boy-with-attitude Jesse (Thomas McDonell) to help Nova (Aimee Teegarden), the straight-A class president and head of the Prom Committee. He sneers that she is “winning the award for most awards.” She recalls: “You were the guy who cried when the hamster died in third grade.” As they fall for each other, various classmates pick their dates. Co-producer Justin Springer calls the spring rite of passage “a magnifier that allows teenage emotions to come out.” Although affectionate towards its well-scrubbed cast, the PG-rated “Prom” is no lens on adolescence. Acne and alcohol are absent at Brookside High School where kids take AP, not STD, tests. At Walt Disney Pictures’ press and promotional screening, ‘tweens in attendance seemed outnumbered by twentysomethings who loudly mocked afterschool cliches that hardly qualified as camp. With Danielle Campbell, Yin Chang, Kylie Bunbury, Nicholas Braun, Jared Kusnitz, Jonathan Keltz, De’Vaughn Nixon, Nolan Sotillo, Cameron Monaghan, Joe Adler, Janelle Ortiz, Raini Rodriguez. 104m. (Bill Stamets)
Mar 10
Grimmmmmm: “Red Riding Hood” is little. The latest teen-girl chastity/purity myth trading on sublimated sexuality from director Catherine Hardwicke (“thirteen,” “Twilight”) may be one of the few werewolf movies without blood in its veins. (Worse, spatters and streaks of blood flow black to insure a clean PG-13 rating.) After a choppily edited opening reel or two, where characters seldom speak important dialogue while on screen, but instead with their backs to camera, “Red Riding Hood” settles into its groove, becoming a Zucker brothers movie with the jokes plucked out. Hardwicke, with “Twilight,” is the highest-grossing female director in history, and it’s a blow for equality that she can move from that marker and attempt to become the distaff Rob Cohen. The visual style lacks only for pockets packed with glitter, the simple story stumbling through mist and muzz and smoke. Set-and-CGI bound, in soft focus as if shot in a talc plant, “Red Riding Hood” demonstrates that when anything is possible, everything winds up looking like a Thomas Kinkade flipbook. Read the rest of this entry »
Mar 05
RECOMMENDED
“It took over 200 years to create the symbol of the presidency,” notes the president in “The Sentinel,” a political thriller with an illicit romance that George Nolfi scripted in 2006. Now he writes and directs a superior “romantic thriller” that spells out what it will take to make David Norris (Matt Damon) president in a foreseeable future. Tinkering with this Brooklyn pol’s itinerary to higher office are strange men-in-hats carrying proto-iPads: their screens map the existential GPS of Norris and all the rest of us. Micromanaging fate is necessary to maintain the exact timetable of human history. Except hat-wearing Harry (Anthony Mackie) is a minute late for a preset spilling of coffee on Norris’ shirt. Norris steps into a venture-capital meeting a bit earlier than expected and sees Harry’s coworkers, some uniformed in long black leather coats like those worn by the firemen in “Fahrenheit 451,” in the act of adjusting the mind of one of his immobilized coworkers. As in “Inception,” subconscious recalibrations alter one’s later “decision trees.” Minimizing “ripples” in the space-time continuum is like maintaining film continuity. “The Adjustment Bureau” posits God not as the Ur-auteur, but as an executive producer with script doctors doing rewrites to steer history since the hunter-gatherers. Read the rest of this entry »
Feb 16
RECOMMENDED
Everyone’s young and precisely pretty, no one’s old in Gregg Araki’s B-movie-plus, “Kaboom,” luminously shot in Jell-O-shot-colored colors, elevating polymorphous ambisexuality at its most playful and, even, comfortingly innocent, as well as being kidnapping-, murder- and UFO-obsessed. It’s both compact self-satire and fizzy simulacrum, a “petite little snack,” to recall a phallic appellation from an earlier film. A compact greatest hits of the timeless, well, 1990s-inflected Araki-verse, “Kaboom” follows in the tradition of his “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,” “Totally Fucked Up,” “Nowhere” and especially “The Doom Generation.” Encouraged by John Waters to explore the snap of his earlier pop without too much regression, Araki grafts a “Twin Peaks”-ish paranoid mystery atop a tale of prototypical freshman year terror, with a wall-to-wall score that includes songs by Cut Copy, Explosions in the Sky, Ladytron, Tears Run Rings, Interpol, Airiel, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Read the rest of this entry »
Nov 23
RECOMMENDED
Limber young women in garters gyrate and scheme, live and love, hope and dream. That would include Ali (“short for Alice”), the small-town Iowa girl with large pipes, mom-less since the age of 7, played by Christina Aguilera as well as Cher’s fading boss of a Los Angeles burlesque palace called, fittingly enough, “The Burlesque Lounge.” They all came west in search of their own deeply felt sense of movie-musical cliché. Sex is indicated, but what’s the baddest threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of “Burlesque”? Money. Real estate. A large, wide Sunset Boulevard skyscraper in the making. That emblem of phallic consequence—and vast sums of fiscal investment—weirdly suits the second feature by writer-director Steven Antin, brother of Robin Antin, proprietress of The Pussycat Dolls, who founded that burlesque enterprise in 1995. Read the rest of this entry »
Sep 29
RECOMMENDED
How many versions of “Romeo and Juliet” have there been? With “Let The Right One In” and this, count two more. “Let Me In” is an American remake of Tomas Alfredson’s tender “Let The Right One In,” based on an engaging vampire novel by Alfredson’s fellow Swede, John Ajvide Lindqvist. Those who admired the 2008 import will recognize many of the same scenes, yet writer-director Matt Reeves’ (“Cloverfield”; writer, “The Yards,” seventy-three episodes of “Felicity”) transposition of the story to 1983 Los Alamos, New Mexico, feels wrenchingly personal in its own right. Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee, “The Road”) lives with his mother in a rundown enclave called Enchanted Hills, missing his estranged father, picked on by older boys. New neighbors move in: a weary older man (Richard Jenkins) and a girl, Abby (the ineffable Chloë Moretz, “Hit Girl”), who seems to be his own age. Reeves would have been 17 at the time, to his characters’ 12 or so; 1983 is also the year after the first release of another study of a Boy and his Other, “E.T.” Where Alfredson’s version is steeped in a prehensile sexuality both more suggestive and more intriguing than the chastity myths of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, Reeves finds an American corollary to the essential loneliness of both vampire and child. (A contemporary version would likely turn out more mawkish, self-pitying, a kind of “Eat Prey Bleed.”) Read the rest of this entry »
Sep 22
RECOMMENDED
The advertising and promotion for the Sundance-debuted “Catfish” pushes farther than any of the don’t-reveal-the-twist twist popularized by Harvey Weinstein’s “don’t tell the secret” of “The Crying Game,” even more than the by-now-rote twists that end most M. Night Shyamalan “Blinding Edge” productions. “Don’t Let Anyone Tell You What It Is.” Um. There have been articulate reactions, since its Sundance debut, ranging from Amy Taubin in Film Comment—”The most buzzed-about movie at Sundance, ‘Catfish’ was suffused with a misplaced sense of entitlement that might have been hilarious if the movie were not also profoundly misogynistic and disingenuous”—to last Friday’s review by A. O. Scott in the New York Times—”Judged by the usual standards, it is a wretched documentary: visually and narratively sloppy; coy about its motives; slipshod in its adherence to basic ethical norms. Shame on them, if that would mean anything to them. But at the same time—precisely because of these lapses—it is a fascinating document, at once glib, untrustworthy and strangely authentic. I say this with a heavy sigh: this is, by far, one of the most intriguing movies of the year.” I quote Scott at length because his reaction pretty much matched my own. Read the rest of this entry »
Director Joe Nussbaum (“Sydney White,” “Sleepover”) directs a debut script by Katie Wech for an uncommonly bland story of high school students getting ready for the prom. Oh darn, all the “Starry Night” decorations go up in flames! Only three weeks to go! The tweedy principal forces working-class, motorcycle-riding bad-boy-with-attitude Jesse (Thomas McDonell) to help Nova (Aimee Teegarden), the straight-A class president and head of the Prom Committee. He sneers that she is “winning the award for most awards.” She recalls: “You were the guy who cried when the hamster died in third grade.” As they fall for each other, various classmates pick their dates. Co-producer Justin Springer calls the spring rite of passage “a magnifier that allows teenage emotions to come out.” Although affectionate towards its well-scrubbed cast, the PG-rated “Prom” is no lens on adolescence. Acne and alcohol are absent at Brookside High School where kids take AP, not STD, tests. At Walt Disney Pictures’ press and promotional screening, ‘tweens in attendance seemed outnumbered by twentysomethings who loudly mocked afterschool cliches that hardly qualified as camp. With Danielle Campbell, Yin Chang, Kylie Bunbury, Nicholas Braun, Jared Kusnitz, Jonathan Keltz, De’Vaughn Nixon, Nolan Sotillo, Cameron Monaghan, Joe Adler, Janelle Ortiz, Raini Rodriguez. 104m. (Bill Stamets)
