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AS FAR AS culinary treats go, patrons can't do better this summer than Ratatouille. But whereas that Pixar gem is the filmic equivalent of an entree, think of this pleasant time-filler as a particularly palatable side dish.
Movie-star wattage counts for a lot in No Reservations, and both Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart burn brightly, both individually and in their shared scenes. She's Kate, a workaholic chef whose life gets upturned when her sister's fatal car crash leaves her in charge of her precocious niece Zoe (Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin). He's Nick, a sous chef who takes a position under Kate at a posh restaurant and quickly finds himself drawn to this tempestuous woman who considers herself the finest chef in all of New York and physically confronts customers who dare complain about her dishes.
A frothy confection on the surface, No Reservations, based on the 2001 German film Mostly Martha, spends a great deal of time on the painful loss experienced by Zoe as she comes to grips with the death of her mother. Mostly, though, the movie functions as a charming romantic comedy, one bolstered by the crisp camerawork by Stuart Dryburgh (The Piano) and especially the richly textured music by Philip Glass (The Hours), whose score is so grandiose and award-worthy that it occasionally threatens to overwhelm the small picture it's serving.
WITH APOLOGIES TO William Shakespeare, when acclaimed director Werner Herzog makes a movie, there generally isn't a method to his madness; instead, there's madness in his method, a go-for-broke intensity that has informed most of this German maverick's pictures, from his classics Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo to his recent (and excellent) documentary Grizzly Man. That aggressive (insane?) edge is nowhere to be found in Rescue Dawn, a fairly conventional if technically accomplished drama inspired by a true story.
Herzog already tackled the tale of Dieter Dengler in his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, yet here he provides it with a more fictional sheen. Dieter (played by Christian Bale) is a gung-ho U.S. navy pilot who, early in this country's involvement in the Vietnam War, is shot down over Laos and held in a makeshift POW camp along with two other Americans (Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies, the latter basically revisiting his Solaris performance). Dieter couldn't care less that no one has ever escaped from this prison, or that the jungle beyond the compound walls represents the real prison; he's hell-bent on getting out of there, and he begins working on an elaborate scheme that he hopes will allow him to do just that.
Rescue Dawn is a movie that's stripped to the bone in every facet. There are no political allegories or points of view, no fancy special effects, and, except during a curiously flat conclusion, no sentimentality. This is simply a picture about a man at odds with his surroundings, and in that respect, it fits nicely into the Herzog oeuvre. What doesn't fit so neatly is the feeling that, while Herzog has hardly sold out, he has tamed his inner filmmaking demons long enough to make a respectable movie that won't ruffle any feathers during the summer film season.
ADAM SANDLER COMEDIES frequently offer sequences that qualify as case studies in homophobia, so here comes I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry to serve as the popular comedian's mea culpa, his belated realization that, hey, gays are people, too. That's a worthy sentiment, and there's much in the screenplay by Barry Fanaro (TV's The Golden Girls) and the Oscar-winning team of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (Sideways) that examines that notion rather than just paying lip service to a PC attitude.
In other words, there's a good movie to be found in the premise of two firemen (Sandler and Kevin James) pretending to be life partners for financial purposes, but it's repeatedly sabotaged by the desire to placate typical Sandler fans who, God forbid, wouldn't want their boy to get too, you know, fruity on them. Thus, the movie opens with the promise of an open-mouth kiss between buxom twin sisters, peaks with the sight of Jessica Biel in a Catwoman outfit, and ends with the protagonists happily paired off in hetero unions. In addition to this confirmation of the movie's straight-man cred, there are also the usual frat-boy gags involving flatulence, obesity and racial stereotypes (Rob Schneider as a Japanese minister!), as well as the added treat of Dan Aykroyd (as the fire chief) discussing his prostate, his sole remaining testicle and his diapered grandmother.
THE SIMPSONS MOVIE
***1/2
DIRECTED BY David Silverman
STARS Animated; voices of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner
SUNSHINE
***
DIRECTED BY Danny Boyle
STARS Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne
NO RESERVATIONS
***
DIRECTED BY Scott Hicks
STARS Catherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart
RESCUE DAWN
**1/2
DIRECTED BY Werner Herzog
STARS Christian Bale, Steve Zahn
I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK & LARRY
**DIRECTED BY Dennis Dugan
STARS Adam Sandler, Kevin James
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