Reviews: June 2008 Archives

Yes, the first half of WALL•E is as good as everyone says it is. It's essentially a silent comedy, built out of scrap metal, consumer cast-offs, and a forbidding end-of-the-world landscape -- New York City as a far-future archeological dig. Our hero is a plucky bucket of bolts who sees through binocular eyes and burbles like R2D2 as he makes orderly piles out of the refuse left by the erstwhile Earthlings who fled their ruined planet hundreds of years before for the machine-assisted comforts of a distant space station. Their absence is what makes WALL•E's Manhattan so charming -- the irony is that these miserable, junk-strewn environs are attractive to the old-school WALL•E, who busies himself by collecting and categorizing -- a Rubik's Cube here, a light bulb there -- the detritus of civilization. It's not until EVE, a sleek, iPod-styled girl robot shows up on the scene that WALL•E becomes aware of his own loneliness.

The most interesting thing about Wanted is that its protagonist is one of the most unlikable action heroes in memory -- a smug, self-regarding asshole whose honestly distasteful misanthropy is at least refreshing in a genre that often relies on charming sociopaths to sell popcorn. As the film opens, Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is a hapless desk jockey working at a job he can't stand for a boss he hates. (Somebody show this guy Livejournal, Facebook, anything.) He knows that his own girlfriend is getting screwed on the kitchen countertop by one of his office mates during the daily lunch hour. He types "Wesley Gibson" into Google and laments the returned empty page. He can't get $20 out of the ATM because he doesn't have $20, and he can't get $10 out because the machine only dispenses 20s. And our little Sisyphus can't get over the idea that, after he gets off work in the evening, he just has to get up the next morning and go back to work again. For those of us in the audience who long ago made our peace with real-world annoyances like earning a paycheck and polishing our résumés, Wesley expresses contempt in second-person voiceover. Presumably, dear viewer, you haven't killed anyone lately -- and that makes you a pussy.

Briefly, because a couple of people have asked me about it, here's my take on The Signal. I can understand why it's being celebrated in some quarters: The first act is a top-notch horror movie dealing with the effects of a mysterious transmission that, apparently, takes over every broadcast and cable television channel serving Terminal City (heh), amplifying the violent tendencies inside ordinary people until they manifest in explosive fits of brutality. (Talk about rage zombies!) Shot in low-grade HD, the movie picks up the story thread of Mya Denton (Anessa Ramsey), who, as the movie begins, wakes up in bed with her boyfriend and then goes home to her husband. Mya is a pretty, horror-movie blonde -- simultaneously tough and vulnerable -- and as long as we watch the story unfold through her eyes, hubby Lewis Denton (A.J. Bowen) moving through layers of rage as he seethes over her infidelity, The Signal is absolutely dynamite. It's like the lovechild of Cronenberg, Carpenter and Romero.

Admirers of underdressed movie stars will enjoy Matthew McConaughey, who sports only swimwear for many of his scenes in Fool's Gold. Everyone else may feel a little cheated. Fans of romantic comedy will note that McConaughey plays surprisingly few scenes opposite with co-star Kate Hudson, although the movie supposedly shows them falling in love all over again after a recent divorce. Fans of adventure stories will be treated to one of the most underwritten treasure hunts in movie history, despite lots of pointless expository dialogue detailing the whys and wherefores of an ill-fated Spanish treasure galleon. There's also a desperate shortage of jokes, but the movie's real problem is its lack of focus -- director and co-writer Andy Tennant lavishes screen time on peripheral characters like Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart), a villainous-but-dopey rap mogul, and Gemma Honeycutt (Alexis Dziena), a borderline-sexist bimbo stereotype with daddy issues, instead of spending it developing the relationship between the two honest-to-goodness movie stars at the center of his story. The presence of expert character actors like Donald Sutherland and Ray Winstone doesn't make this interminable time-waster any easier to take, but at least everyone looks good, thanks to ace cinematographer Don Burgess, whose work includes nice underwater photography. D

Ostensibly a warning about the perils of Hollywood-style self-absorption, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins feels too much like another one of those films in which movie-industry types admire the nobility of the rubes living in flyover country. Martin Lawrence plays the title character, who left his Georgia home behind, changed his name to Dr. R.J. Stevens and launched a hit daytime talk show in the Jerry Springer mode. The film begins with Daddy Jenkins (James Earl Jones) sternly suggesting that, after nine years in L.A., it's time for Roscoe to come back for a family visit. The mayhem that ensues is largely driven by the clash between Roscoe's uptight-vegan reality-TV-star wife (Joy Bryant) and family members like used-car salesman Clyde (Cedric the Entertainer) and boisterous, straight-talking, sweet-tea-guzzling Betty (Mo'Nique). Also on-hand is an old high-school crush, Lucinda (Nicole Ari Parker). The actors all try hard (Mike Epps as motormouthed cousin Reggie is a hyperactive standout) and there are a few laugh-out-loud gags -- one of them involving a cheerfully explicit dog-on-dog sex scene -- but talented writer/director Malcolm D. Lee (check out Undercover Brother) relies so much on hoary formula that his story and characters never come alive. It has its moments scattered here and there, but few surprises. C

"Why did he have to say everything three times?" someone complained after a recent critics' screening of My Winnipeg, the latest in Guy Maddin's oeuvre of old-school cinema pastiche. In the film's opening scenes, our protagonist -- an actor playing the part of Guy Maddin, or at least Guy Maddin's alter ego -- fights to stay awake in the passenger car of a train as rear-projected scenes of snowy Winnipeg pass by his window. (It's a trademark effect -- the visual effects are just far enough out of whack to amplify Maddin's imagination by underscoring the artifice of the world he creates.) He fears he will be unable to leave town. His spoken-word monologue is part Tony Leung in 2046, part Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: "It must be the sleepiness which keeps Winnipegers here," he surmises. "If only I could stay awake -- pay attention to where I'm going, where I've been, and get out of here. Stay awake. Stay awake. Stay awake."

You've seen the TV commercials advertising erection pills, right? The ones sagely advising that, if you still have the erection after three hours, you should see a doctor? Well, Mother of Tears: The Third Mother -- hailed in some circles as a comeback film for revered director Dario Argento, whose career has been on a long downhill slide since his glory days in the 1970s and 1980s -- is sort of like that. The whispering Technicolor magic of his great film Suspiria has long been replaced by a more ordinary aesthetic, and the scale of a beautiful, upsetting thriller like Opera, with its famous, soaring point-of-view sequence set inside an old, cathedral-like theater, is much reduced. It's an impressive show of potency -- especially if you're lucky enough to see it with a good sound system turned up high enough that the bass frequencies vibrate your seat -- but somehow the romance is gone.

When I settled in to take a look at Nimrod Nation, an eight-part documentary series that aired beginning in 2007 on the Sundance Channel, I expected to sit still for an episode or two before deciding when and whether to continue. To my not-inconsiderable surprise, I devoured the first four episodes in a single afternoon, took down two more in the evening, and finished out the package the following morning. Taken as a whole, Nimrod Nation is not a great documentary, but it's a friendly and unassuming collection of days in the life that gets big points for compulsive watchability.