Repo Chick
Directed by Alex Cox, 2009
Staged almost entirely on green-screened sets, which are combined with miniature photography to occasionally amusing DIY effect, Repo Chick's every shot is ersatz. It shouldn't even be watchable, but writer-director Alex Cox manages to keep the cheese factor low and even brings a modicum of pizazz to the proceedings. It's a nominal sequel to Cox's 1984 cult film Repo Man, updated as a funhouse reflection of the mortgage crisis. In the title role, Jaclyn Jonet plays a pink-party-dress-clad heiress who's disinherited by her family due to generally Hilton-ish behavior and lands a job in repossession. Eventually, she falls into the clutches of a group of anti-golf terrorists. (Really!) The production values are bargain basement, but the performances are fairly sharp from top to bottom. Unfortunately, there's not a lot to work with in this too-familiar semi-satire, which is agreeably droll but never funny enough, smart enough or even punk-rock enough to really compensate for its embarrassingly Tosh.0 virtual-set approach to filmmaking. Good for Cox getting this made -- it's a better film than the plusher, superficially similar Southland Tales, for instance -- but I miss the sense of time and place of his early films and really hope this type of cartoonish digital artifact doesn't point the new cheapjack way forward for marginalized indie filmmakers.
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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an exotic multiplex confection – a romantic comedy with elements of its visual grammar swiped from comic books and videogames. It's tempting to say that people who are sick of conventional Hollywood love stories will find a bracing alternative here but, unfortunately, Scott Pilgrim isn't much of a love story, unless the affair you're interested in is the one between a boy and his cultural totems. If that's the case, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World should be hugely entertaining. It's a visual knock-out with the sensibility of a pinball machine, caroming from one set piece to the next, turning on lights and spinning little flippy things and ringing bells. It's not 
Count me among the great admirers of Todd Solondz’ 
This no-frills film-festival favorite from Greece is a single-family scenario. Like last year's excellent Belgian film Home, with which it shares a certain dark comedy (but not the earlier film's reluctant optimism), it features a wife and children who exist largely apart from the larger world into which the male breadwinner ventures on a daily basis. But where that separation in Home was generally a question of geography, in Dogtooth it's a matter of patriarchy.
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Wes Anderson's films have always featured a kind of play-acting, from the cops-and-robbers shenanigans of Bottle Rocket to the spiritual tourism of The Darjeeling Limited, with his characters trying on different personas for size. Maybe that's why Fantastic Mr. Fox, itself a new kind of persona, fits so clearly and cleverly into Anderson's body of work, which helps make it such an unexpected joy from start to finish -- the director's best since Rushmore. A typically easygoing Anderson cast, anchored by a nicely understated George Clooney in the title role, inhabits a world of talking animals who are almost, but not quite, human. With a lo-fi stop-action style that well suits the Roald Dahl vibe plus an uncompromised deployment of the director's stylistic trademarks, Mr. Fox simply follows that golden rule of great kids' movies by declining to pander to anybody's idea of what a kid should or shouldn't find amusing. Helped along by a suitably droll screenplay, everyone involved exudes heaps of effortless cool — this film is the kind of suave you get when you're having just huge amounts of fun.
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On my way to work today, I saw a sign outlining a long-term construction project at the Tarrytown Metro-North train station. They're tearing out both train platforms, putting in new elevators, and restoring the station building itself to its former glory. The job is projected to be completed in the fall of 2012. I probably smirked a little bit. "Why bother?" was my thought.
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