AMELIA In its effort to be one of the first Oscar-bait titles out of the gate, the stately but sterile Amelia ends up stumbling over its own feet. A handsome production that fusses over every detail in order to provide the proper look, this biopic forgets to include any sort of spark necessary to get its motor running. As Amelia Earhart, Hilary Swank adroitly mixes tomboy charm with feminist strength, but she's let down by a script (by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan) that doesn't allow her to burrow even an inch under her character's skin. Her Amelia is painted in broad strokes, and as such, the dramatizations of her aerial achievements don't carry the power that should automatically go with lofty historical territory of this caliber. Where the movie most succeeds in its exploration of Amelia's relationships with two distinct men. Publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere) was the person who discovered Amelia and guided her career; they eventually married, but the film posits that she embarked on an affair with fellow aviation pioneer Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor) before returning to her loving husband. Swank and Gere don't exude magnetism in their scenes together, but it's not that kind of relationship: Theirs is a partnership forged from mutual respect and common ground, and it's a credit to both performers that the union feels authentic and enviable. The final portion of the picture naturally centers on the ill-fated 1937 flight that led to the disappearance of Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) over the Pacific Ocean. Despite knowing the outcome, this segment is inherently tense, although some feeble fabrications surrounding the tragedy prove to be as daft as the cinematic theory that the Titanic sank into the chilly depths because the watchmen were too busy watching DiCaprio and Winslet smooch to notice the iceberg right in front of them. **
ASTRO BOY Superheroes are known for showing up on the scene just in the nick of time, but in the case of Astro Boy and his big-screen debut, it's clear that his arrival comes when it's too late to really matter. The star of both comics and television as well as an early model for anime, Astro Boy has been around for well over a half-century, finding immediate success in his Japanese homeland before marching on to international acceptance. A big-budget animated extravaganza from Hollywood was probably a predetermined fate, but turning up at a time when slick superhero sagas are often the rule rather than the exception – even in the toon field (The Incredibles, Bolt) – limits the film's ability to stand out from the pack. In a futuristic city that hovers well above a largely forgotten Earth, the brilliant Dr. Tenma (Nicolas Cage) is so attached to his young son Toby (Freddie Highmore) that, after the boy is accidentally killed, the grief-stricken scientist elects to revive him in a manner that mixes elements of both Frankenstein and Pinocchio. Tenma places Toby's memories in an advanced robot powered by a celestial power source, but he soon realizes he hasn't exactly created (in Geppetto's words) "a real boy." But while Tenma ends up shunning Toby, the opportunistic General Stone (Donald Sutherland) realizes he can use the lad for his own nefarious schemes. Astro Boy is full of incident, and it picks up steam when its title character lands on Earth's surface and falls in with a Fagin-like scoundrel (Nathan Lane) and his young charges. Yet attempts at profundity (themes of societal prejudice are emphasized) yield erratic results, and while the film is visually attractive and the vocal performers are well chosen, at the end of the day there's little to really distinguish this from similar family films about a young outcast who combats loneliness before meeting other colorful characters. Just dub this one Where the Mild Things Are. **1/2
CIRQUE DU FREAK: THE VAMPIRE'S ASSISTANT Based on a series of books for kids, this would seem to be aimed at either those young viewers with an affinity for the Twilight franchise or perhaps at those young viewers seeking an alternative to the adventures of Bella and Edward. Either way, this PG-13 confection would seem to be geared primarily at the teen crowd, with adult attendance a mere afterthought. But older moviegoers who can recall the spate of like-minded horror flicks from the 1980s will find much to appreciate as well. Those '80s efforts like Fright Night, Vamp and The Lost Boys placed teen protagonists in horrific situations and armed them with plenty of humor to go along with those wooden stakes. Like its predecessors, this film similarly mixes comedy with fantasy, and I'd be surprised if writer-director Chris Weitz and co-scripter Brian Helgeland hadn't studied those pictures before embarking on this project (on the other hand, similarities to 1932's classic Freaks and 1972's forgotten Vampire Circus were probably coincidental). Here, the school-age hero is 14-year-old Darren (Chris Massoglia), who, at the urging of his rebellious best friend Steve (Josh Hutcherson), sneaks out to catch a one-night-only presentation by a traveling freak show. The lineup includes a snake boy (Patrick Fugit) and a psychic who can sprout a beard at will (Salma Hayek), but it's spider-wrangler Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly) who catches the boys' attention. Crepsley turns out to be a "good" vampire (dazes rather than kills humans, taking just enough blood for sustenance), and while Steve gets rejected for having "bad" blood, Darren soon becomes the vampire's protégée and finds himself having to steer clear of the soul-sucking Mr. Tiny (Michael Cerveris) and an army of "bad" vampires. Reilly hardly conjures up images of suave bloodsuckers like Christopher Lee or Frank Langella, but his casting proves to be a real boon to the film, providing it with a central vampire whose wit is as sharp as his teeth. Beyond him, there's plenty to enjoy here – too much, since the picture ultimately collapses under the weight of its busy storyline and fails to adequately utilize its strong supporting cast. **1/2
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS Although it's based on a children's book (by Judi and Ron Barrett), this animated charmer is one of those equal-opportunity exercises that provides as much merriment for adults as for kids. After all, it's the grownups who are sure to get a chuckle out of a voice cast diverse enough to include Bruce Campbell, James Caan and Mr. T, and it's the grownups who will pick up on the movie's gentle ecological themes. As for the rest, the adults will feel like kids when bombarded by the film's freewheeling innovations and bright color schemes – all made even more irresistible in 3-D. The film's central character is Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader), a gangly inventor whose latest contraption – a device that turns water into food – seems to be a winner. After its unceremonious launch into the heavens, the machine pours down all sorts of cuisine – hamburgers, pancakes, pasta, you name it – on a regular basis. Flint becomes the town's savior, but stormy weather lies ahead. The visual design of Cloudy is wondrous: There's something inherently amusing in seeing a castle built out of gelatin or a street lined with ice cream rather than snow, and the movie repeatedly offers up these gastronomical delights. Yet underlying the frivolity is a warning about our nation's gluttonous and wasteful ways, a message certainly to be lost on children (who'll wish they had their own candy-dispensing machine hovering above their homes) but relevant to environmentally aware adults. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is an entertaining ride, but it doesn't possess the lasting power of, say, this summer's Up or any of the other top-tier animated features that stick with us for the long haul. It's more comfortable in the company of Kung Fu Panda and Monster House: Like those worthy animated features, this one shows up, gets the job done, and leaves us feeling satisfactorily full. ***
COUPLES RETREAT For all its visual splendor, Couples Retreat never feels as liberating as its locale. Working from a script by Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau and Dana Fox, director Peter Billingsley (A Christmas Story's Ralphie, all grown up) oversees the project more like a foreman making sure the product gets turned out rather than a filmmaker injecting any personal style into the proceedings, leaving it to certain capable actors to provide any juice via well-timed witticisms and double takes. The premise finds married couple Jason (Jason Bateman) and Cynthia (Kristen Bell) imploring their friends to join them on a vacation to an oceanic paradise where the purpose is to reconnect spouses experiencing turbulence in their unions. The other six – overworked but content couple Dave (Vaughn) and Ronnie (Malin Ackerman), bickering spouses Joey (Favreau) and Lucy (Kristin Davis), and divorce' Shane (Faizon Love) and his 20-year-old girlfriend Trudy (Kali Hawk) – are led to believe that the workshops and counseling sessions are optional, but they quickly learn that everyone is required to take part. Before long, nerves are frayed, feelings are hurt, and all the relationships teeter on the edge of disaster. Amidst all the low-simmer shenanigans, Couples Retreat does make some salient (if obvious) points about the inherent difficulties in keeping any marriage fresh and vital. The movie would have benefitted from a more realistic ending than the feel-good slop force-fed to audiences by the heaping spoonful, but along the way, it at least feints in the direction of testiness before backing off. The characters played by Bateman and Hawk are too annoying to be funny, while Bell herself is too bland to be anything. But Ackerman and Love are pleasing to watch, while the lion's share of the barbs are adroitly handled by Davis, Favreau and Vaughn. Ultimately, though, Couples Retreat is too mellow for its own good. Hardly paradise, it's more like the cinematic equivalent of a leisurely walk around the park. **1/2
GOOD HAIR Like most odysseys, Good Hair begins with a single question. "Daddy, why don't I have good hair?" the little girl asks of her celebrity pop. And armed with that query, Chris Rock sets off to make a movie that turns out to be endlessly fascinating and funny. Along with director Jeff Stilson, Rock uses his documentary to examine the complex relationship that African-American women – and many men (Prince is the target of a well-timed jibe) – have with their hair. And for a movie that runs just over 90 minutes, the pair cover an extraordinary amount of ground. Interviewing both celebrities and ordinary citizens alike, Rock manages to engage participants in discussions on the dangers of hair relaxers (aka "creamy crack"), the high cost of weaves, the distribution of the wealth earned by hair products created specifically for blacks (Asians and caucasians benefit the most), the idiocy of straightening the hair of little girls (some as young as three), and, tying it all together, the cultural significance of hairstyles for black women and the drive among many to blend in (i.e. look more white) by any means necessary. On top of all this, Rock also manages to squeeze in a trip to India, home to the vast majority of hair purchased by African-American women. Good Hair is such a marvelous movie for most of its running time that it's a shame several missteps are taken toward the end. One bit finds Rock trying to sell – to no avail – bags of black women's hair, a silly stunt that smacks of Michael Moore grandstanding. The movie's climactic set piece revolves around a gaudy show in which various oddballs compete for the honor of being deemed the best hairstylist by a panel of supercilious judges – an amusing sequence that's nevertheless too trite to anchor the home stretch. And, most jarringly, Rock unwisely chooses to end the picture with a rude remark by Ice-T, an insulting selection considering the movie is packed with choice quotes by the (female) likes of Maya Angelou and Tracie Thoms. On balance, though, Good Hair stands as an informative and entertaining documentary, and one that's pulled off with no small measure of style. ***
THE INFORMANT! No stranger to coloring outside the margins, Steven Soderbergh displays a quirky brand of lunacy with The Informant!, a like-it-or-leave-it endeavor blessed with a terrific central performance from Matt Damon. Damon leaves behind Jason Bourne's muscularity and goes all pudgy as Mark Whitacre, a midlevel executive at the major conglomeration Archer Daniels Midland. Whitacre seems like a pleasant enough fellow, so when he approaches FBI agents Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) and Bob Herndon (Joel McHale) volunteering to uncover a price-fixing racket at the company, they believe he might be honest when he claims he's turning whistleblower because it's the right thing to do. Unfortunately, with Mark Whitacre, there's far more than meets the eye. Whitacre has a way of embellishing some stories and leaving crucial facts out of other ones, which leads to no small amount of frustration for the agents trying to do their jobs. In Whitacre's mind, he's the hero of this particular saga, but to everyone else, he might merely be a lying nutjob. In adapting Kurt Eichenwald's book The Informant (A True Story), scripter Scott Z. Burns and Soderbergh find the proper consistent tone to allow this to function as a loopy satire. Adding to the mirth is a bouncy score by veteran Marvin Hamlisch, which never provides us with the musical cues we might expect. In fact, given the current state of the nation, with its stories of greedy banks and fat-cat CEOs bleeding average Americans dry, tackling this saga of corporate malfeasance with all comic cylinders firing might have been the only palatable way to present such a downbeat tale. Otherwise, if we weren't busy laughing, we'd be busy crying. ***
LAW ABIDING CITIZEN Vigilante justice in real life is, to put it mildly, highly problematic, but when it comes to cinema, who doesn't occasionally feel some measure of catharsis in watching a sympathetic protagonist skirt around a deeply flawed legal system and exact his revenge on his own terms? Law Abiding Citizen initially appears as if it will be a modern rendition of the black-and-white Death Wish, as loving family man Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) must watch helplessly as his wife and little girl are murdered right in front of him. The killer (Christian Stolte) and his accomplice (Josh Stewart) are apprehended, but while Clyde wants them to pay for their crime, his lawyer Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), who's only interested in maintaining his high conviction-rate percentage, negotiates a deal. Cut to 10 years later, and Clyde sets out to get his revenge – not only on the criminals but also on the whole judicial system that failed them. Initially, Law Abiding Citizen makes all the right moves, and it's fun to watch Clyde punch holes in the whole manner in which this country handles its criminal cases. It soon becomes clear that the film is going past the simple morality of Death Wish, which is fine had it continued to offer viewers thought-provoking scenarios. Instead, this turns into an ugly, sordid affair, a gruesome melodrama that, too afraid to tackle the issues it brings up, instead elects to transform into a ridiculous thriller about a psychopath terrorizing a city. Foxx's character is ostensibly supposed to be the hero – or at least turn into one before the end – but Nick Rice remains a shallow, unrepentant lout whose final act is designed to earn audience approval but instead goes down about as easy as spoiled milk. By the end, the murdered wife and daughter are all but forgotten, and Clyde Shelton's pain has been trivialized to an offensive degree. Justice may be blind, but it's got 20/20 vision when compared to this movie that stumbles around in the dark with no hope of providing illumination. *1/2
THIS IS IT A sadness permeates the opening scene in the behind-the-scenes documentary This Is It, but it has nothing to do with Michael Jackson's death. Instead, the sequence – filmed, like the rest of the movie, while Jackson was very much alive – centers on the talented young dancers and singers who auditioned to be a part of the King of Pop's planned series of London concerts. As each person describes the thrill of being included in the Jackson legacy – many of them tearing up as they speak – they comment on how much this opportunity means to them, with a couple stating that this concert even gives them a newfound purpose in their unfocused lives. It's a heartbreaking sequence, considering that Jackson's death meant that none would be able to live the dream that seemed within their collective grasp. It's a smart way to open the film, filling audience members with emotion before the man himself takes the stage to prepare for his mammoth undertaking. After all, many folks (myself included) turned away from Jackson once he made the complete transformation to tabloid freak, and, to be sure, certain audience members are sure to experience a initial wave of nausea as this physical grotesquerie with a dubious history gets ready for his close-up. But then an amazing thing happens. It starts with the music, those generation-spanning hits that have the power to produce instant bouts of affectionate nostalgia. Then there come the dance steps, not as fast and furious as before, but still deft enough to catch the eye. And finally, there's the sheer spectacle, the showmanship that was arguably as responsible for keeping MJ in the light as any other aspect of his carefully built persona. Combined, these element make resistance futile, and for two shimmering hours, all the ghosts of scandals past melt away, leaving in their wake a boy whose only desire is to dazzle. Ultimately, This Is It doesn't quite feel like a documentary, nor does it seem like a concert film. It's clearly a love letter to the fans, but, perhaps more importantly, it's an olive branch to the latter-day critics, cynics and naysayers, all of whom have probably shown up to bury Jackson, not praise him. But the joke's on us. The movie keeps sensationalism and sordidness at bay, and by doing so, it allows us one final look at the Man in the Mirror, an unblemished view that reflects back nothing but a desire to let the music play. ***1/2
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE In tackling Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book, writer Spike Jonze and his co-scripter Dave Eggers have a difficult problem to overcome. Because Sendak's book is so slender – certainly not enough to fill a 100-minute movie – the pair had to build on characterizations, alter some connecting tissues, and concoct entirely new scenes. The end result isn't a bastardization of the literary classic, but neither is it a further canonization of the acclaimed source. It's the sort of film certain to be poked, prodded, discussed, dismissed and/or deified. But ignored? Never. Max Records plays young Max, a troubled child not very adept at dealing with anger or frustration. After a spat with his single mom (Catherine Keener), Max bolts from the house, soon stumbling on a body of water where a small boat awaits him. Max sails away and eventually arrives at an island inhabited by large, furry beasts who alternate between sounding like confused children and neurotic adults. Max especially bonds with Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), the most temperamental of the monsters, but he enjoys spending time with all these behemoths as they play various games and generally have a good time. But petty squabbles erupt among the beasts, and Max, who's been made their leader, clearly doesn't always have the answers or advice that the others hope to hear. Technically, Where the Wild Things Are is a stunning achievement, and the beasts – a combination of costumes and CGI – particularly look astonishing. But there's a reason why Sendak's book runs only a few dozen pages, and by blowing up the story, Jonze has in effect stripped it of much of its wide-eyed wonder. Both the book and the movie are children's tales sporting a dark underbelly, but the film version, unlike its predecessor, is often too literal, resulting in a suffocating atmosphere that further undermines the simplicity of the tale. Like the wild things inhabiting Max's world, it's fascinating but also lumbering – and (to paraphrase The Troggs) it's unlikely to make everyone's heart sing. **1/2