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)

Film festivals are retrenching around the world as economies contract and sponsorships dwindle. The Chicago Underground Film Festival’s 2008 edition ran in late October, just as the financial crisis began, at a venue that was difficult to get to by public transportation, during an Indian summer heat wave, opening on the closing night of Chicago International, which also was the night of Barack Obama’s primetime infomercial, just a week before the election. The results were disappointing. But a move to September this year, at the Loop-located Siskel Film Center promises better things. Festival director Bryan Wendorf is optimistic. “The economy didn’t really impact the number of films submitted. The quality, as always, ran the gamut from awful to brilliant but there was plenty to look at and choose from.”

Trends emerge during programming. “I never look to program around a predetermined theme, but once the films and videos are chosen patterns emerge,” Wendorf says. “This year there seems to be a lot of work dealing with ideas about place, home and globalization. Some of the work, like Lucy Raven’s experimental documentary ‘China Town’ deals with this in a very conscious and direct way while other works address these issues from more oblique angles.” Another trend is for work on digital video to exploit its own textures rather than pretending it’s the same as film. “Video is almost infinitely malleable. But the festival has never set out to be a ‘new media’ showcase and we are still seeing great work on 16mm and 35mm.”

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By Ray Pride

“The Soloist” doesn’t explain itself: neither Hollywood uplift nor full-on arthouse effort, it succeeds by moment and mood.

Thirty-seven-year-old English director Joe Wright’s three features—”Pride and Prejudice,” “Atonement” and, now, “The Soloist”—succeed in moment and mood as cinematically as anyone’s work on the studio scale today. I don’t mean anything particularly airy by “cinematic,” merely noting that Wright works with composed, lucid visual images combined with intent sound design that are at once concrete and elusive: this is this, but it is also something else. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“A part that suggests the whole,” there’s the definition.

“Synecdoche, New York” is also a dauntingly ambitious movie from a first-time director, even an Oscar-winner as idiosyncratic as Charlie Kaufman. And especially considering its mood and brood: “Synecdoche” is loss; “Synecdoche” is bruise; “Synecdoche” is forgetting; “Synecdoche” is not forgetting; “Synecdoche” is schematic yet oneiric; “Synecdoche” is an epic dream of never attaining your dreams. Of wanting wishing striving until you die.

Funny in parts, too. But the most important aspect is the aftertaste: what is bitter and brackish and dour in the watching lingers afterward. There’s a medical term for the dull, almost pleasurable ache after a solid bruising (or, for men, a kick in the balls): “exquisite tenderness.” That’s what ebbs days after witnessing this grandiloquent edifice, a tower of babbling characters who are trying to create a work of art over the course of a lifetime that just happens to resemble Kaufman’s very enterprise.

Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a shambling playwright of inchoate ambition. He’s mounted a production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” with college-age actors, and his wife, Adele Lack (Catherine Keener), paints portraits in miniature: tiny as a postage stamp, best viewed with a magnifying glass. Writ large, writ small, doppelgangers for almost all the characters brood and multiply after Cotard gets a genius grant and proceeds to create a vision of his life in a vast warehouse, and begins never-ending rehearsals.

After “Synecdoche”’s Chicago International screening, I moderated an hour-long Q&A with Kaufman, and it was one of the more rapt audiences in my experience. Everyone had questions. Some were about the actors—Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Weist, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan—and the roles they play, often taking up the roles of other characters in the aborning masterwork. A few questions were about how Caden suffers physical maladies from the opening scenes that then reach across the remainder of his life. Kaufman has other concerns as well, such as an inspired image to strike terror in any writer, where Caden has post-its reaching not only to a vast indoor horizon but likely the foreseeable future of his life that remains. With 200 or so scenes, twice the number of most contemporary movies, any note of distemper or echo of personal fears is quickly matched by another dart-jab, duck-weave of narrative feint.

But I bring up the subject of the characters’ increasing awareness of mortality, and we compare ages. At a certain point in life, phlegm takes on new meaning, I joke. “Various color phlegm,” Kaufman says. “How do you rate your phlegm? Which is the same as checking the color of your stools.” (Which Caden does.) “This isn’t new for me, it’s progressive, in a kind of way. And there are more aspects to it now. Maybe it’s even easier as I get older. I have lived with that kind of nervousness about my health for a very long time.”

“It made you uncomfortable. Because of your age. Or your health concerns,” Kaufman continues. I ask, would a 25-year-old respond differently? “I don’t know. I don’t know. That might be an issue. I’ve shown it to a lot of colleges, and there seems to be at least an appreciation of it being different, which comes a lot from college kids more than, y’know… I had an old guy in the audience wherever I was before here, D.C., and he came up to me, he asked me during the Q&A how autobiographical it was. I don’t answer that. He came up to me afterwards, and he said, the reason I asked that was because of the doctor stuff. He really related to the way doctors treat him. The way it was represented in the movie. That certainly is my experience with doctors.

If you express something that other people feel in their own lives, then that’s a good thing. Even if it’s a sad revelation. You know what I mean? I’ll tell you what it is. I have a lot of different doctors that I go to for a lot of different things. Occasionally, I’ll come across a doctor, very rarely who will talk about his or her own health problems. Not at length, but they’ll mention something. It’s such a relief. For some reason, I have in my head that doctors… that I’m this pathetic organism and they’re not. Then you find out they’ve got this, or they’ve got that. Then I’m not ashamed to be me. I think a lot of it is the shame of having… having a body. Having a less-than-perfect physical existence. I think that’s perpetuated by doctors, who want to present themselves as kind of a godlike entity. I guess maybe some people want that from their doctor. But I don’t want that. I want to know that there’s a common ground and I don’t have to be embarrassed being a person. I think, in a way, revealing myself in my work, then maybe I’m giving somebody the opportunity to feel that connection.”

However dogged and confounded Caden may be, it also seems he doesn’t have the energy for suicidal ideation. “Well, he’s a romantic. In a way. Maybe. Could be. I’m not going to say,” Kaufman says in his measured stop-start. He’s trying to create art to the exclusion of an unsatisfactory life. “Yeah. Yeah. But it is his life, though. I mean, the life he creates is his art. My writing, for example, my work, is my life. I mean, it’s not. It’s not all of my life, but it is a large part of it. I don’t think I’m not living when I’m working. It’s what I do.”

“Synecdoche, New York” opens Friday. Sin-EK-duh-kee. Sin-EK-duh-kee.

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Producer Art Linson has the power to produce a film dedicated to the proposition that producers are powerless. Pushed by Robert De Niro, Linson adapted his 2002 memoir “What Just Happened: Bitter Hollywood Tales From the Front Line” into a screenplay that’s more blithe than bitter. It’s all it-takes-one-to-know-one tattling that stars De Niro (“Wag the Dog”) as a Linson-like producer named Ben who endures the same emasculating indignities Linson recounts in his book, a follow-up to his 1995 “A Pound of Flesh: Perilous Tales of How to Produce Movies in Hollywood.” Linson’s producer credits include “Car Wash,” “This Boy’s Life,” “Heat,” “Fight Club” and “Into The Wild.” “What Just Happened?” opens with a test screening of Ben’s latest production, an arty, bloody film titled “Fiercely” starring Sean Penn. The red carpet at Cannes beckons, once that business about the dog dying in the last reel is fixed. Ben’s next project will star Bruce Willis, unwilling to shed flab or shave his bushy beard before shooting starts in five days. Ben also deals with two ex-wives and a teen daughter, the debris of his so-called family life. Barry Levinson (“Wag the Dog,” “Jimmy Hollywood”) directs with wit, extracting ripe turns from an in-the-know cast. Willis and Penn are regulars as self-spoofers, and Catherine Keener (“Simone,” “Full Frontal”) kills as Ben’s studio overseer. “I hope to get rid of the clichés of producers as big fat cigar chompers,” said the 66-year-old Linson, who copped to 175 pounds in a phone interview. “When Barry Levinson first read the script, he called me and said there’s nothing in this I haven’t experienced.” Linson insists his film, unlike his film-inside-his-film, tested well with audiences. He said he pre-screened it in “odd cities” such as Baltimore and Dallas. “It’s only people in Hollywood who think it’s too insider,” he notices. As a foray in occupational ethnography, it’s a boffo crowd-pleaser. Except for dog lovers. With Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, Robin Wright Penn, Kristen Stewart and Michael Wincott. 118m. (Bill Stamets)

“Tropic Thunder” might well have been named “The Grudge.”

In an April interview with Los Angeles Daily News journalist Glenn Whipp, Ben Stiller brightly confessed the source of his latest itchy comedy: a twenty-year-old grudge against the director of “Platoon.” “I got there, and Oliver Stone looked at me and, said, ‘You’re cute.’ ‘You’re cute,’ that was it. I never got to audition.” It’s hard to imagine those words in Anne Meara’s mouth, let alone Oliver Stone’s.

“Tropic Thunder,” the result of that long-nurtured chip on the shoulder, directed, co-produced, co-written and starring Stiller, finds him playing Tugg Speedman, a desperately needy, deeply shallow actor in an immensely over-budgeted Vietnam war movie to end all war movies. His cohort of pampered performers-turned-grunts includes Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a fat actor from a movie series called “The Fatties” who farts a lot, and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.). Among other characters, Nick Nolte as the author of the project’s source novel, is cruelly wasted; Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino, a young black actor, makes almost no impression whatsoever; and a pyrotechnics guy played by Danny McBride (“Pineapple Express”) is almost the only breath of oxygen in the rank result.

Did you hear the joke about Robert Downey, Jr.? He’s in blackface. He’s an Australian actor who wants shiny metal trinkets so badly he does the opposite of Michael Jackson’s self-mutilation: he has his skin darkened. Hey! Stop it. Don’t laugh yet. Stop. Where the tragic case of Jackson’s self-mutilation carries layers upon layers of historical and psychological implication, what does this movie do? Lazarus can’t stop speaking street! Until he slips and he’s speaking Aussie! Downey’s eyes, ordinarily one of his most expressive features, are seldom in play. Downey’s debut as a child actor was in a film by his father, whose most accomplished, rudest comedy was “Putney Swope,” in which a black man is elevated to the heights of the advertising industry in 1969. Memorable line: “Putney is confusing originality with obscenity.”

Speaking of obscenity, Tom Cruise plays a grotesquely fat, hairy, bald middle-aged studio executive whose dance moves are as repulsive as his “Risky Business” ones were frisky. But it turns to pissy business when you discover that his character—Les Grossman, is that an Albanian name?—is like a child actor trying, badly, to improvise Mametian swears. “Fuck shit cocksucker shit!” isn’t quite as funny as, say, this genius bit from “American Buffalo”: “Only, and I’m not, I don’t think, casting anything on anyone: from the mouth of a Southern bulldyke asshole ingrate of a vicious nowhere cunt can this trash come. And I take nothing back, and I know you’re close with them.” Stiller and co-writer Justin Theroux come within at least a galaxy’s distance of that outburst with Jack White sweating strung-out inanities about a “hobo’s dick cheese” and vivid descriptions of the gay sex he’ll perform on the other characters if they just untie him and feed him blow. Grossman’s hands and wrists are made up with the most skin-cracking, angry pink-white-flaking eczema. And the character might as well take a shit in the middle of the floor in scenes where he compulsively gyrates his woman-hipped bottom in the audience’s face.

“Tropic Thunder” is the kind of heavy meta that might work in sketches, such as the short-lived “Ben Stiller Show,” shot on a budget of a dollar and a dime. But as a want-to-be-painfully-hip comedy about soul-killing horseshit, it manages handily to be more the thing itself than its reflection. The reasons some writers claim to resent movies like “Fight Club” and “The Dark Knight”—that somehow it’s insincere for an artist to make a decamillion-dollar movie that satirizes consumer culture or that suggests the entire political culture has gone over to the “dark side” of brutal, fearful, vigilantism, is one I seldom feel attracted toward. “Tropic Thunder”? Twenty years of overcontemplation of old ideas in hundred-million-dollar full flower.

While there is much sautéed in the behind-the-scenes pandemonium of “Hearts of Darkness,” Eleanor Coppola, George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr’s documentary about the making of “Apocalypse Now,” not a single instant strikes as cleanly in human, humorous, behavioral or poetic grace as the outtake of Marlon Brando working his wind through an arch peroration, pausing, gacking and saying, much as he asks, “Milk Dud?” in “The Formula,” in character and in beautiful cadence, “I swallowed a bug.”

John Toll, who less than three years ago was cinematographer on Terence Malick’s luminous “The New World,” is called upon to make images that look like they were shot in the Philippines in the 1970s and developed there in a ditch. But as images go, the ones of Ben Stiller I’ll always treasure? The look on his face in “Your Friends And Neighbors” when Catherine Keener shouts during coitus, “Is there any chance you’re gonna shut the fuck up? Let’s just do it. I don’t need the narration, okay?” And stabbing a neck vein with a hypodermic in “Permanent Midnight” with an aggrieved grimace of “Hey, dad! Looking at me yet?”