By Ray Pride

The lightly likeable “I Am Number Four” may also be a breath mint, but I didn’t double-check to be sure.

It’s at least two, two different, media enterprises. The teen-out-of-place adventure is the first feature from the newly constituted DreamWorks Pictures, released through Disney’s Touchstone label, and co-financed by India’s Reliance Big Entertainment. It’s also the first fruit of Full Fathom Five, the young-adult novel forge fronted by James Frey. Frey may be best known for offending the ready-to-be-offended Oprah Winfrey, after her endorsement of his extremely fictionalized memoir of addiction and recovery, “A Million Little Pieces,” which is cheekily, implausibly melodramatic from its very first pages. After lying low for a bit, and publishing another novel under his name, the irrepressible Frey came up with a bold idea in the wake of novel series like the “Harry Potter” books and the “Twilight” tales. Why not trawl the ranks of underemployed graduate students who have paid a fortune to “learn” how to write and take them for another spin? They would propose stories that would be published under a pseudonym, and for which they could never take public credit, all in the “young adult” genre, all of which would hit the “beats” of a Hollywood studio screenplay, that would ideally lever both best-selling series of books and box-office-busting series of movies. (As in the studio system, most profits would accrue to the manufacturer, and not the writer.) Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 1235 A.D. three witches are hung off a stone bridge and then lowered into a river. In the dead of night, one came back. A century or so later, “The Girl” (Claire Foy) is called a witch, blamed for the plague and extradited to an abbey for trial. “Season of the Witch” is the plodding tale of that six-day trek that ends with a supernatural CGI smackdown. The key smackdowners are the unbeliever-slayers Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman). These lusty, smelly Crusaders killed for Christ throughout the 1330s and after. Until that day in Smyrna in 1344 (probably October 28, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia) when Behmen felt bad about impaling an unarmed woman, so he deserted the church. Captured by priests, the duo is forced to escort The Girl in a horse-drawn cage for 400 leagues across a rotting rope bridge and through the Wormwood Forest where demonic wolves lurk. At the abbey there’s a book of spells. The souls of the monks are hijacked by something terribly evil. “We’re going to need more holy water,” reports a cleric. The winged woman here beats the feathers off the one in “Black Swan.” Cage is a seasoned evil-killer, if you’ve seen him in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (2010) and “Ghost Rider” (2007). But the Middle Ages delimits the motor-vehicle mayhem that director Dominic Sena displayed in his “Swordfish” (2001) and “Gone in Sixty Seconds” (2000). Writer Bragi F. Schut continues the end-of-the-world stakes seen in his 2005 CBS series “Threshold.” Shot in Austria, Croatia and Louisiana, “Season of the Witch” is an unoriginal apologia for Catholic action-adventure. Reading scripture aloud in Latin may not smite heathens or halt the plague, but it always kicks satanic ass at the multiplex. With Stephen Campbell Moore, Stephen Graham, Ulrich Thomsen, Robert Sheehan, Christopher Lee. 95m. (Bill Stamets)

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On the 253rd day of enduring his two cousins displaced by the Luftwaffe bombing of London, the disagreeable Eustace Scrubb (Will Poulter, “Son of Rambow”) scribbles in his diary: “Investigate legal ramifications of impaling relatives.” He cannot stand their nattering about Narnia, a fantastic kingdom of chatty satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs and minoboars they visited in the 2005 and 2008 installments prior to “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” All three were written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on the childrens’ book series by lit prof and theologian C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) that were published in the 1950s. Screenwriter Michael Petroni is also credited for the third, the first in 3D. The live action was converted; the CGI was created in 3D; both work quite well. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve never seen one of the Harry Potter films, the latest and next to last is no reason to start. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1″ is the seventh; the eighth will be Part 2. Much technical craft is evident throughout this tale of three friends armed with wands and potions. They undertake a tiresome chain of quests to decode clues, uncover magic items and destroy malevolent entities. Screenwriter Steve Kloves and director David Yates may be faithful to the source novel by J.K. Rowling, but they do no favors to fans of screen narrative. Plot points arise with out-of-the-blue asides like ‘Oh, you didn’t know that so-and-so had a brother?’ One producer readily admits it’s “all about resolution—the dotting of all the i’s and the crossing of all the t’s.” Read the rest of this entry »

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)