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 »

“Suggested by” the segment of the same name in Walt Disney’s animated “Fantasia” from 1940, this PG-rated Walt Disney Pictures family-action-adventure is an enervating, overlong tale of a good sorcerer training a chosen one to exterminate an evil sorcerer. Then our hero wins over his childhood sweatheart for an all-night flight aboard a Chrysler Building eagle-style gargoyle to Paris for lattes and croissants. Compared to recent boy-with-powers-saves-world films, this Jerry Bruckheimer junk is far worse than “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” and a tad worse than “The Last Airbender.” Jon Turteltaub (both “National Treasure” films with a third one threatened) directs an uninspired screenplay by Matt Lopez and Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard set in CGI-NYC. Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage, “Kick-Ass,” both “National Treasure”‘s) is a 777th-degree sorcerer from 740 A.D. who searches for centuries and finds a 10-year-old New Yorker in the year 2000. The late Merlin designated a super-sorcerer to wear his magic dragon ring and stop evil sorcerers from “enslaving mankind,” although their labor needs would seem more easily met by a few waves of the wand. These evil ones are later said to aim to “destroy the world,” with no other world in mind. Sorcerers seem not so smart. The plot picks up ten years later. Now a NYU physics nerd, Dave (Jay Baruchel) is the badly cast apprentice. Cage is at his blandest. No good spell is cast by “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Except for a minute or so of sparkly confetti effects in a Chinatown dragon bout, this never enchants. With Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer, Monica Bellucci, Toby Kebbell. 110m. (Bill Stamets)

Junky cinematography and CGI make this DC Comics-born crap hard to watch, as if it were badly inked on low-end pulp. Nor does the leaden and rusty metal score by Mastodon and Marco Beltrami do much for the ears. But it’s over in seventy-two minutes, if you skip eight minutes of blurred end credits. The title character (Josh Brolin, “No Country For Old Men”) is a Confederate Army vet who once “disobeyed a direct order” to torch a Union hospital. This prompted his sociopathic commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), to torch Hex’s Indian wife and their son, forcing Hex to watch and then branding “Q. T.” on his cheek. All this makes Hex mad as hell. He takes up bounty-hunting so he can get back at bad guys in general. Turns out one in particular did not expire in a later fire–flames are frequent in “Jonah Hex”–and Turnbull is dead-set on terrorizing the country and toppling the government. Find Hex before the 4th of July, when the shit is scheduled to go down. “The President thinks you’re special, even magic,” a White House aide tells Hex. Read the rest of this entry »

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Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“Amelie,” “The City of Lost Children”) is a master tinkerer. Slick cuteness and childlike sentiment are in his toolkit. Contraptions, optical ones in particular, pop up in his enchanting fabulations. One of Mussolini’s preserved eyeballs is prized by a collector in his latest movie. Improvised machinations are key to his coincidence-flecked plots and decor by bricoleurs. He also borrows ever so widely and wisely. For his adorable “Micmacs,” he cites as inspirations “Mission: Impossible,” “Toy Story” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Bazil (Dany Boon) is employed as a clerk at a video store until a stray bullet lodges in his brain. He comes upon its manufacturer, and then discovers that right across the street is the manufacturer of the anti-personnel device that left him fatherless three decades ago. Jeunet pits our hero and his gang of gizmo-gleaners against vendors of armor-piercing bullets and landmines. Those capitalists of civil strife boast of the bloodshed in a Sarajevo market on February 5, 1994, along with genocide in Darfur and bringing down a Boeing airline, as outcomes of their wares. Bazil conspires against these archrivals in a setup recalling “Lucky Number Slevin.” Bigger ingredients, though, are sweet witty bits of physical comedy in debt to Chaplin, Keaton and Tati. Eight excerpts of classic scores by Max Steiner are sampled, as well as the look of Warner Bros.’ credit sequence from “The Big Sleep.” Jeunet’s cluttered affections for film craft lead to a tribunal held in a simulated Somalia, with a YouTube kicker. “Micmacs” is a fairy tale confection with an international justice agenda. With André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Yolande Moreau, Julie Ferrier, Dominique Pinon, Michel Crémadès, Marie-Julie Baup. 104m. (Bill Stamets)

“Micmacs” opens June 4 at Landmark Century, Cinemark Cine Arts (Evanston) and Landmark Renaissance (Highland Park)

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Once upon a time a brave little girl with a good heart stopped the gods from obliterating humanity with a sandstorm. Once upon another time, a brave little orphan dared to yell “stop” at a soldier on horseback thrashing a boy in the bazaar who pilfered an apple. The king saw a “king in spirit” in the first boy and adopted him. Fifteen years later, he’s a scrappy prince named Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) who meets a sacred princess named Tamina (Gemma Arterton, “Clash of the Titans”). She’s descended from that girl who saved the world, and is destined to do more of the same when an evil royal careerist seeks to load the hilt of a magic dagger with magic sand that fuels backwards time travel. Beware: if you tap into the entire world supply of magic sand, the world will end. On the run from everyone, Dastan and Tamina trick and tease each other, destined to fall in love and to say they make their own destinies. Some of this may come from the “Prince of Persia” video games authored by Jordan Mechner, also an executive producer. The rest is written by Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, and directed with zest by Mike Newell (“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” “Four Weddings And A Funeral”). Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films present an adventure in pillage: parkour chases riffing on “The Thief of Baghdad,” a plot line about faked intel on hidden weapons to justify an invasion as in “Green Zone,” a bad guy armed with super-whips like in “Iron Man 2,” security systems for ancient chambers from the same guild of engineers behind “Indiana Jones” and “National Treasure,” and extra-sensory assassins centuries ahead of “Men Who Stare at Goats.” For contemporizing comedy, Alfred Molina plays an ostrich race promoter and tax evader. Syncretism is on the call sheet for the art directors. Great CGI on the sixth century urban design. Really cool serpents. This is Orientalism for boys at all longitudes. With Ben Kingsley, Steve Toussaint, Toby Kebbell, Richard Coyle, Ronald Pickup, Gísli Örn Garoarsson. 103m. (Bill Stamets)

Tim Burton confects a lesser landscape of adolescent angst. His fans and Lewis Carroll’s may find this “fantasy adventure” with “political allegory” and “avant-garde visuals” in Disney Digital 3D not their tea or party of choice. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton’s adaptation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and “Through the Looking-Glass” (1871) stars Mia Wasikowska. This 19-year-old Alice flees a garden party, tumbles down a rabbit hole, imbibes elixirs, converses with animals and consorts with scheming queens. A parchment scroll foretells she will behead a dreaded resident of Underland. Wasikowska here recalls Dakota Blue Richards playing the 12-year-old adventurer in “The Golden Compass” astride a fantastic galloping beast, and the 14-year-old sojourner played by Saoirse Ronan in “The Lovely Bones,” for whom a subterranean playroom was the portal to another dreamy realm. A charter member of a clique of the mad, the open-minded Alice entertains advanced ideas about propriety, arranged engagements and mercantile expansion in China. On the centenary of Carroll’s birth, G.K. Chesterton lamented: “Poor, poor little Alice! She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others.” The Alice of our time is assigned duty as a role model for girls nudged to think about finance rather than fiancees. There ought to be more wordplay, like Alice’s disquisition on the use of the word “secret” that anticipates the ordinary-language school of philosophy at Carroll’s Oxford. Burton fails to make her plight nearly strange enough. Her odd new world is insubstantial and its inhabitants are uninteresting. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is a major letdown, compared to inspired loons he’s played in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Sweeney Todd.” Helena Bonham Carter, though, is superb with her digitally-ballooned noggin as the Red Queen. With Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas and Tim Pigott-Smith in the flesh; and in voice only Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Timothy Spall, Christopher Lee and Barbara Windsor. 109m. (Bill Stamets)

No, this PG-rated fantasy adventure is not about a high-school kid fronting a band of misfits for the variety show where he wins a music college scholarship. Someone stole Zeus’s lightning bolt, a less impressive old-school light saber, and Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) is wrongly fingered. Percy has no idea he’s a demigod, born of mortal Sally Jackson (Catherine Keener) and the full-blooded god Poseidon (Kevin McKidd). “I guess we all got daddy issues,” observes another kid with divinity in his genealogy. Soon our hero is secreted to Camp Half Blood where he meets Athena’s daughter Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario). For extra credit: what kind of kids are born of two demigods? Quarter deities? On what chromosome is the god gene? Percy learns his dyslexia is due to his “hardwired” literacy in Greek. That’s what made English on the chalkboard unreadable: “it’s Greek to him.” His attention disorder is really warrior-grade, battle-ready alertness. Chris Columbus (two “Harry Potter”s and two “Home Alone”s) directs a screenplay that Craig Titley adapted from Rick Riordan’s 2005 book, the first in a series of five by the middle-school teacher. The plot is a cross-country quest by Percy, Annabeth and a sidekick satyr Grover (Brandon T. Jackson) to find three green pearls that serve as “Get-Out-of-Hades” hall passes, so they can rescue Percy’s mom from Hades. Because saving your mom is always more important than averting a multi-god smackdown with the collateral damage of “the end of life as we know it.” To orient viewers who didn’t do their mythology homework, the screen teens cite “High School Musical” and “Extreme Makeover,” and use an iPod in a way Apple never anticipated. This places us life as we know it. Slightly inventive are updates for the Land of the Lotus-eaters and the “H” sign pointing to hell. Best line: “Hi, mom.” With Pierce Brosnan, Rosario Dawson, Steve Coogan, Joe Pantoliano, Uma Thurman, Joe Pantoliano. 119m. (Bill Stamets)

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)

By Ray Pride

There’s small, there’s large, there’s big, and then there’s overblown and overbearing.

There’s the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, there’s “King Kong,” and now there’s Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s unlikely bestseller, “The Lovely Bones,” written with his usual collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. “The Lovely Bones” is narrated from beyond the grave by a young girl, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), as she watches over her parents (Rachel Weisz, Marc Wahlberg) and her rapist-murderer (Stanley Tucci), trying to make sense of what’s happened to her so she can move beyond the strange limbo she’s in. This is where the overbearing part comes in: in concept, her surroundings are limited to the experience and emotions of a girl her age, but the riot of stylized color and bold backdrops is less evocative of pictorial masters of subjective delirium like Powell and Pressburger (“Black Narcissus,” “The Red Shoes”) than of IMAX-sized screensavers. Fields and skies that resemble ads for over-the-counter antihistamines do the tale no favor, either.

But after its Oscar-qualifying run, Paramount and DreamWorks made a bold marketing choice, pulling the film’s Christmas release and rescheduling for mid-January. Jackson has so superlatively realized the emotional surges of an immature, inexperienced girl that it’s now being positioned as a film for an audience that sees and re-sees the “Twilight” movies. It’ll be fascinating to see how that plays out, even if some older viewers wonder where the bold yet delicate director of “Heavenly Creatures” went. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Novelist Barry Hannah says it well:  “I really want stories that are rippers in the old sense. Tales of high danger, high adventure, and high exploration.”

And has that been what James Cameron’s been conjuring in his fevered imagination for as long as twenty years, a true ripper? Of all the things that can and will be said about “Avatar,” is that it’s the one 2009 feature drawing from the War in Iraq that could make a mint. While his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker” is the best American movie about war in movies this year, and is racking up year-end critics’ nods, it didn’t blow up at the box office.

Even if James Cameron had spent $200 million-plus on a trainwreck the equal of the Icelandic economy, that would have been gratifying, even at the cost of encouraging the wisenheimers who, without seeing the film, invoked the Smurfs, “Ferngully: the Last Rainforest” and something called “Delgo.” All the pessimistic early jabber made it seem like this would be the in-flight movie that you would see on the way to become part of the Matrix. Of course, virtually no one had seen the movie until its Thursday night premiere in London and its staggered press screenings in the U.K. and North America. Then the lights went down, time passed entertainingly, the lights came up, the Twittering began, and within hours an embargo against reviews before opening day was lifted. Read the rest of this entry »