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Directors Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin, and writers Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio animate a fun PG-rated story with enough clever details to keep adults awake. There’s more than tossed-off signage for Bank of Evil (formerly Lehman Brothers). At the same time, in different places, kids can feel let in on ways grown-ups really see little ones when off-duty from good parenting. Calling bedtime storybooks unbelievably bad literature is the endearing meanie, the character cited in the self-aggrandizing title of “Despicable Me.” The villain Gru (Steve Carell, voicing his “Middle European” accent) conspires to acquire a gizmo belonging to a younger villain named Vector (Jason Segel). Pleasing his soul-stomping mom (Julie Andrews) keeps Gru going. This people-hating overcompensator thinks that kidnapping a miniaturized moon will impress the known world. He adopts a trio of orphaned sisters once he sees these plucky cookie pushers can furnish a tactical cover for penetrating Vector’s lair and grabbing his miniaturizer. But the crusty Gru falls for the tykes and an unlikely family takes form. The largely gratuitous 3-D CGI is an opportunity for a gag at the end wherein Gru’s impish, chirping minions compete at constructing bridges further and further towards the audience. WIth the voices of Russell Brand, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig, Danny McBride, Miranda Cosgrove, Jack McBrayer, Mindy Kaling. 95m. (Bill Stamets)

In his worst motion-picture product to date, Will Farrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall. When amazed, he exclaims: “Sweet Gregor Mendel!” and “Captain Kirk’s Nipples!” Pooh-pooed as a “quantum paleontologist,” he’s reduced to fielding this question from a kid (Bobb’e J. Thompson) on a field trip: “If you shot a ton of pot at the sun, would everyone get high?” In a career downslide, the ex-scientist stuffs his face with donuts stuffed with M&M’s. Then he is perked up by Holly (Anna Friel), his starstruck sidekick, as in she was kicked out of Cambridge for taking his side. Read the rest of this entry »

Top 5 Domestic Films

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Che,” Steven Soderbergh

“Paranoid Park,” Gus Van Sant

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Reprise,” Joachim Trier

“Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“A Christmas Tale,” Arnaud Desplechin

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

“Hunger,” Steve McQueen

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“In The City of Sylvia,” Jose Luis Guerin

—Bill Stamets

Top 5 Films

“Milk,” Gus Vant Sant

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Let the Right One In,” Tomas Alfredson

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

—Tom Lynch

Top 5 Performances – Female

Sally Hawkins, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Melissa Leo, “Frozen River”

Kristin Scott Thomas, “I’ve Loved You So Long”

Kate Winslet, “Revolutionary Road”

Kat Dennings, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Performances – Male

Benicio Del Toro, “Che”

Sean Penn, “Milk”

Mathieu Amalric, “A Christmas Tale”

Michel Blanc, “The Witnesses”

Ben Kingsley, “Elegy”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Female

Ann Savage, “My Winnipeg”

Nurgul Yesilcay, “The Edge of Heaven”

Viola Davis, “Doubt”

Penelope Cruz, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”

Zoe Kazan, “Revolutionary Road”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Male

Michael Shannon, “Revolutionary Road,” “Shotgun Stories”

Danny McBride, “Pineapple Express”

Richard Dreyfuss, “W.”

Toby Jones, “W.”

Anil Kapoor, “Slumdog Millionaire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Directors

Mike Leigh, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Joachim Trier, “Reprise”

Danny Boyle, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Tomas Alfredson, “Let the Right One In”

James Marsh, “Man on Wire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Screenplays

Fatih Akin, “The Edge Of Heaven”

Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, “Reprise”

Simon Beaufoy, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Charlie Kaufman, “Synecdoche, New York”

Martin McDonagh, “In Bruges”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Domestic Documentaries

“Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog

“The Order of Myths,” Margaret Brown

“At The Death House Door,” Steve James, Peter Gilbert

“The Unforeseen,” Laura Dunn

“Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father,” Kurt Kuenne

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Documentaries

“Man On Wire,” James Marsh

“Of Time and the City,” Terence Davies

“Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman

“Up the Yangtze,” Yung Chang

“Young@Heart,” Stephen Walker

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Follies

“Speed Racer,” The Wachowski brothers

“The Fall,” Tarsem

“Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader

“Australia,” Baz Luhrmann

“My Blueberry Nights,” Wong Kar-wai

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films You Can’t See Yet

“24 City,” Jia Zhang-Ke

“35 Shots Of Rum,” Claire Denis

“The English Surgeon,” Geoffrey Smith

“Liverpool,” Lisandro Alonso

“Voy a Explotar (I’m Going to Explode),” Gerardo Naranjo

—Ray Pride

 

By Ray Pride

January and August of most years are the dodgiest months of all as studio-film releases go, when long-delayed, long-tampered-with and long-painful dogs are let out of their cages. The big studios (and Lionsgate) have in the past year or so done the service to the working reviewer of failing to preview these lost puppies for reviewers. (Although there is a Texas-based reviewer for Variety who notes he’s assigned each Christmas morning to see the most violent release of the season that seeps up under the seasonal tree or bush.)

Folks who see a lot of movies professionally may be even more sensitive than the average movie-lover. Where the guy down the street can say of an enterprise like “The Rocker,” “Nuh-uh. The idea of Rainn Wilson as an aging musical wanna-be who seems to be sporting a diaper turns my stomach. Want to get pizza?” and no one’s the poorer. Steve Coogan playing a one-note, stuck-in-one-gear Steve Coogan-ish asshole in “Tropic Thunder” or “Hamlet 2″? How about sushi? Several writers in the 1980s made the suggestion that Steve Guttenberg was a star because he was an only-slightly-handsomer version of mid-level casting executives. More recently, the rapid-fire output of Judd Apatow-produced comedies about slightly shrubby losers getting the girl have led to similar musings about wish-fulfillment. (Although I’d say the confidence the somewhat slimmed-down Seth Rogen shows in “Pineapple Express” is a nice boost up from, say, Jonah Hill’s apoplectically red-faced spleen and panic in “Superbad.”)

Among this week’s movies that were available for preview is Idit Cebula’s larky French comedy, “Two Lives Plus One,” the story of a Parisian wife pushed and pulled on all sides by her controlling family and whose life changes when she buys a laptop and starts keeping—and publishing—journals. She’s played by Emmanuelle Devos, an actress whose charm goes beyond beauty and sensuality: she’s simply someone you cannot but stare at. She’s the same way in movies like Arnaud Desplechin’s “Kings and Queen”: wide almond eyes with a steady gaze, a slight overbite, assured, reserved—you remember that movies were once more than the sum of spare parts from the house of cards that is stock plot-development. Pictures of people talking, and more importantly, listening, can be more than illustrated radio. The French still make movies like that.

Although Devos has become a substantial star on her home turf, she displays the kind of expressiveness seen more often in American movies in the faces and behaviors of character actors, rather than the well-heeled lead players. Her characters aren’t asked to experience some kind of spiritual transformation or to lead soldiers into battle—the “journey” doesn’t involve an identikit destination, a predetermined, predestined, pre-masticated ending, but the particulars along the way.

But most importantly, she simply has “it”: an actor who, as the saying goes, the camera loves, something beyond physical beauty. Mere charisma? Original Zen: someone you would gratefully watch on any journey. A few names off the top of the head: Luis Guzman. Marisa Tomei. Laurence Fishburne. Shu Qi. Jean-Pierre Leaud. Bruno Ganz. Richard E. Grant. Danny McBride. Tom Wilkinson. Elias Koteas. Warren Oates. Bruce Greenwood. Like termites, they bite through the fabric of the rote story unfolding. (Thelma Ritter in Sam Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street”: she sells multitudes.)

I’ll confess to a couple of other actors that when I see their name on posters, I get the willies. But, just as I’m seldom disproved in my sneaking suspicions that Ben Stiller will play a character that seems ready to scratch his skin off from nerves and physical discomfort, there are actors I’d watch in just about anything. Say, Chow Yun-Fat in “The Children of Huang Shi.” The director Roger Spottiswoode told me he had to be careful in that recent film about just how far back in the frame Chow was in some scenes: he could be fifty feet away, lighting up a cigarette, and your eye is immediately drawn, fixedly, toward his gestures. Godard said something once about the movies having, in the time since Griffith, forgotten about the wind in the trees. It’s good to remember wind in the hair, too, and the transport that can play across a face in that simple instant of communing with nature.

“Two Lives Plus One” opens Friday at Siskel. Some bad movies, too. 

“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?”