Current Releases
THE ANT BULLY It used to be Oscar-bait productions that had no trouble snagging the A-listers. Now it’s the kiddie flicks that have them lining up to sign on the dotted line. But the problem with the high-powered lineup on view here — Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep and Paul Giamatti — is that it promises a viewing experience that never materializes. Writer-director John A. Davis’ slender screenplay might have well been produced by a committee well-versed in mining the usual kid-friendly clichés. Forget comparisons to Antz or A Bug’s Life (both superior to this): The Ant Bully, in which a little boy gets shrunk to ant size and learns all about friendship and teamwork from the busy little bugs, is indistinguishable from any other subpar toon flick that mixes bodily function gags with snooze-inducing “lessons” and believes it’s being profound and inspirational. Alas, the only thing it inspired in me was a sudden urge to spray the screen with Raid.
*1/2
THE DESCENT With rare exception, Hollywood has lost its ability to create memorable or meaningful horror flicks, which makes this British import all the more welcome. One of the finest terror tales in many a full moon, writer-director Neil Marshall’s gory gem follows six outdoor enthusiasts — all female — as they embark on a spelunking expedition deep in the Appalachian mountains. The competitive Juno (Natalie Mendoza) leads the outfit while Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) tries to overcome a recent tragedy in her life; along with the others, they descend deep into a cavern that’s frightening even before its cannibalistic occupants (who all look like Gollum’s cousins) show up and start tearing into human flesh. The Descent is so expertly made that it more than holds its own as a full-throttle horror flick, yet it’s Marshall’s decision to provide it with a psychological bent that puts it firmly over the top. The film addresses guilt — specifically, survivor’s guilt — in a welcome manner and imbues its protagonists with messy moral dilemmas that allow them to alternate between heroine and villain, survivor and victim, wallflower and warrior. It’s just a shame they didn’t keep the original British ending, which will doubtless turn up on the DVD as an extra feature.
***1/2
LADY IN THE WATER With each subsequent picture, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs) has exposed himself as a filmmaker of limited means; if this pattern of diminishing returns continues, he may soon be reduced to trying to revive the long dormant Police Academy series. For now, though, we’re stuck with this dud about an apartment complex superintendent (Paul Giamatti) who tries to protect a Narf (sea nymph) from a Scrunt (wolf) until she can make contact with the Great Eatlon (eagle), all the while keeping one eye peeled for the Tartutic (killer monkeys). This was originally conceived by the auteur as a bedtime story for his daughters, and in that context, it probably worked fine. But as a motion picture aimed at adult audiences, it’s a mess, at once ridiculous and risible. Requiring characters to behave in illogical ways and making up the rules of the game as it goes along, this eventually reaches such high levels of absurdity that by the end you can’t help but wonder if it was all a put-on, Shyamalan’s “screw you” to the critics, studio suits and audience members who abandoned him with The Village.
*1/2
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE In the rocker “We’re a Happy Family,” The Ramones present a dysfunctional family in which “Daddy’s telling lies, Baby’s eating flies, Mommy’s on pills, Baby’s got the chills.” The clan at the center of this Sundance hit isn’t much better off. But one thing brings the members together: the chance to support sweet, 7-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin), who’s been selected to compete in the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant in California. Essentially, this is yet another road picture about bickering family members, and if that sounds a bit too prefab (or at least a bit too RV), screenwriter Michael Arndt, his dialogue backed by an excellent ensemble cast (including Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Steve Carell), manages to adroitly mix up the expected comic shtick with moments of great clarity and insight. The movie climaxes as it surely must — at the competition — and Arndt and the husband-and-wife directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris sharpen their claws for this portion, allowing the characters to engage in a final act of flagrant punk defiance. Joey Ramone would have been proud.
***1/2
MIAMI VICE One of the damnedest movies I’ve seen this summer, Miami Vice is successful only part of the time and confounding all the way through. Since his days as a guiding light on the trendsetting TV series from the 1980s, Michael Mann has revealed himself as a sober, serious filmmaker (Heat, The Insider), so it’s no surprise that his big-screen version bears little resemblance to its TV counterpart. There’s very little in the way of fashion sense or MTV visuals, surface elements that made the show stand apart from the pack. Mann has instead elected to turn his Vice into something altogether leaner and meaner — if not necessarily tighter. The movie runs approximately 2-1/4 hours, and audiences expecting a zippy action flick will find this bo-o-o-ring indeed. Yet those who can tune into its wavelength will frequently find themselves fascinated by its beautifully composed shots, its startling bursts of violence and its baffling narrative segues. As Crockett and Tubbs, Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx bring the requisite attitude but little else.
**1/2
MONSTER HOUSE Young DJ realizes that something’s not right with the creepy house directly across the street; suspecting it’s possessed by an evil spirit, he sets out to uncover its secrets. At its best, this animated adventure harkens back to the fantasy flicks of the 1980s, movies in which innocent children leading sheltered suburban existences often had to cope with the supernatural terrors that lurked around every corner and often even under the bed — it’s no coincidence that the era’s leading practitioners of this sort of unpretentious fun, Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, are executive producers on this new film. As with many of the 80s titles, there’s more here than meets the eye, as what initially appears to be a straightforward haunted house tale morphs into a haunting tale about love, retribution and acceptance, complete with a back story that’s as affecting as it is unexpected.
***
THE NIGHT LISTENER Robin Williams returns once again to the dark side — no surprise, since in recent years his dramatic turns have consistently earned better reviews than his comedic work. In this adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s book, he plays Gabriel Noone, a late-night radio personality who reads a manuscript written by a teenage boy named Pete (Rory Culkin). Moved by the piece, which tells of the lad’s sexual abuse at the hands of his parents and their accomplices, Gabriel strikes up a phone relationship with both Pete and Donna (Toni Collette), the social worker who adopted him. But as Gabriel becomes more emotionally attached to the pair, evidence surfaces which suggests that Pete might be a character manufactured by Donna and not an actual person. The Night Listener establishes an appropriately menacing tone and sets up an intriguing cat-and-mouse scenario between Williams and Collette (who’s genuinely creepy here). But the deeper the story goes, the more it unravels, leading to a damaging finale that isn’t ambiguous as much as it’s asinine.
**1/2
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST Those expecting amazing feats of derring-do won’t be disappointed by this sequel to the 2003 smash. The effects-driven action scenes are clearly the picture’s highlights, and they alone make this worth the price of admission. But while the first Pirates felt like both a self-contained movie and the theme park attraction on which it was based, this one just feels like a roller coaster ride, full of momentary thrills but leaving little in its wake except a sudden desire to rest for a minute. It isn’t breathless as much as it grows tiresome, and it’s especially depressing to see how little the characters have been allowed to evolve. The central thrust finds Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) tangling with the ghostly Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) in an effort to save his own soul from eternal damnation; it’s possible that his scheme will require sacrificing his friends (Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley), but that’s a compromise the self-serving Jack can accept. The best fantasy tales are often the ones in which the special effects are subservient to the characters, not the other way around; still, this moves quick enough to keep most customers satisfied.
**1/2
SCOOP Last year’s Match Point earned Woody Allen his best reviews in years, but Scoop finds the writer-director sliding back into his more familiar position these days: a once-great filmmaker now churning out minor works that earn a few positive notices but are mostly met with critical indifference. Scoop, which bares some similarity to Allen’s more polished Manhattan Murder Mystery from 1993, is a diverting trifle about an American journalism student (Scarlett Johansson) who learns that a handsome British aristocrat (Hugh Jackman) might also be the notorious Tarot Card Killer. While Johansson (so memorable in Match Point) has unfortunately adopted the Woody-stutter-speech for this latest role (thereby illustrating that she’s no Diane Keaton), Allen himself scores some points by having his lowbrow character (a vaudeville-style magician) mingle with the upper crust of British society. And continuing the trend begun in Anything Else, he again casts himself in the role of a hesitant, hands-off mentor rather than as a wrinkled lothario scoring with women young enough to be his granddaughters. That’s a blessing.
**1/2
TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY Like Spam, energy drinks and the music of Yanni, Will Ferrell is one of those acquired tastes that satisfy devotees while perplexing everyone else. Yet even folks who weren’t entertained by his 2004 starring vehicle Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy should dig this latest offering — while it never reaches the giddy highs of last summer’s premiere comedy, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, it’s consistently pleasurable and offers a steady stream of laugh-out-loud moments. Like Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby is also an egotistical, none-too-bright boor. “I piss excellence,” he declares, and his standing as NASCAR’s best driver certainly signals that he’s excellent at something. But his strained relationship with his deadbeat dad (Gary Cole, delivering the film’s shrewdest comic performance) and the arrival of a formidable opponent, a French homosexual race car driver (hilarious Sacha Baron Cohen), leads to his fall from grace and his subsequent (and humbled) climb back to the top. The Highlander quips alone are worth the ticket price.
***
WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? A social document largely structured like a murder-mystery, this is the latest nonfiction feature to indict today’s twin threat of corporate greed and governmental corruption. With the usual mix of talking heads and vintage footage, the film details how during the 1990s, California elected to fight its smog by passing the Zero Emissions Mandate. General Motors led the charge in coming up with a way to work for cleaner air by creating the EV1, a revolutionary car that ran on a battery and therefore required no gasoline. But almost immediately, a fearful GM began sabotaging its own product, aided by the oil companies, the Bush administration, the shady head of the California Air Resources Board and uninformed consumers who opted for gas-guzzling SUVs. Like An Inconvenient Truth, this isn’t a partisan project — even right-wing Mel Gibson is shown extolling the virtues of the EV1, along with the leftie likes of Tom Hanks — but rather a depressing look at how the welfare of this country is repeatedly sabotaged by the avarice of those wielding all the power.
***
WORLD TRADE CENTER The most startling thing about this 9/11 drama is that it’s by far the least controversial movie Oliver Stone has ever made. There’s practically nothing in the way of gonzo filmmaking, political commentary or outrageous acting — instead, the entire film operates at a hushed level, its nobility standing tall in every frame. It’s hard to find any trace of potentially incendiary material; it’s also hard to get terribly excited over the final product. The picture focuses on the police officers (played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena) who would turn out to be two of the only 20 people rescued from the rubble of the Twin Towers. Stone and scripter Andrea Berloff manage several powerful moments, but the end result is still a movie that feels oddly impersonal. That’s in striking contrast to United 93, the superb docudrama that provided audiences with a you-are-there immediacy. Every second of United 93 related in some way to the specific events of that day. On the other hand, replace these real-life characters with two fictional guys trapped in a collapsed building, and what you’re left with is a 1970s-style TV movie-of-the-week, the sort that invariably starred the likes of Christopher George or Lee Majors.
**1/2
OPENS FRIDAY, AUGUST 25:
BEERFEST: Jay Chandrasekhar, Steve Lemme.
HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS: Luke Benward, Hallie Kate Eisenberg.
IDLEWILD: Andre Benjamin, Big Boi.
INVINCIBLE: Mark Wahlberg, Greg Kinnear.
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2006.
