New Releases
AEON FLUX While director Karyn Kusama probably deserves a lavish Hollywood mansion and a three-picture deal as much as the next filmmaker, she’s one person whose career might have benefited more had she stayed hungry. Her low-budget debut feature, 2000’s Girlfight, was an indie knockout, signaling her arrival as a moviemaker with grit, determination and something to say. Five years later, Kusama’s back with her sophomore effort, and it’s dispiriting to see that it’s a big-budget production deemed so awful by its own studio that it wasn’t even screened in advance for critics. Truthfully, it’s not that wretched — I’ve seen at least two dozen worse films this year that were screened for the press — but in any case, Aeon Flux reveals either that Kusama has willingly squandered her talents for the sake of a fat paycheck or that said talent pretty much dried up after Girlfight hit theaters. Based on an animated series created for MTV a decade ago, Aeon Flux opens with a title card informing us that in the year 2011, approximately 99 percent of the world’s population was wiped out by a virus. Flash forward to 2415, where the descendants of the original survivors continue to live in Bregna, the only established city on the entire planet. Fed up with the fascistic methods of the ruling class, a band of revolutionaries known as the Monicans seeks to topple the government; they order their best agent, Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron), to assassinate leader Trevor Goodchild (Martin Csokas), but as Aeon attempts to carry out her assignment, she realizes that the situation isn’t as clearly defined as previously thought. An impersonal slab of sci-fi sameness, Aeon Flux wears its lethargy like a badge of honor, with Kusama’s draggy direction and Theron’s monotonous performance up front and center in virtually every scene. * 1/2
Current Releases
BEE SEASON For the sake of variety, we need more spirituality in cinema, which is why the very existence of Bee Season is a blessing even if its haphazardness makes it something of a curse. When 9-year-old Eliza Naumann (excellent Flora Cross) suddenly blossoms as a spelling champ, her college professor dad (Richard Gere) suspects she might be a modern-day mystic able to connect directly with God through language. Yet as he devotes all his energy to her, he fails to notice the increasingly bizarre behavior of his wife (Juliette Binoche). Binoche valiantly struggles to carry her unwieldy subplot, so clumsily presented that it repeatedly threatens to sink the entire project. Yet the efforts of the other characters to navigate their own spiritual waters remain compelling, even if it leads to a finale that isn’t powerful as much as it’s puzzling. ** 1/2
CHICKEN LITTLE With its hand-drawn animation division boarded up and its partnership with Pixar in flames, Walt Disney Pictures has taken the next step by creating its own fully computer-animated movie. Yet if Chicken Little represents the future of Disney animation, then the sky is indeed falling: This is as far removed from such old-school classics as Pinocchio and Beauty and the Beast as roast duck is from chicken gizzards. The story is serviceable, centering on a diminutive bird (voiced by Zach Braff) whose warnings about an alien invasion are ignored by the other anthropomorphic animals. And to be fair, the film has its moments, most of them courtesy of a character known as Fish Out of Water (basically an animated Harpo Marx). But the central thrust — a standard “underdog wins the day” slog that on a dime turns into War of the Worlds — is the same sort of hollow experience that has all but drained the traditional toon tale of its potency over the past decade-plus. **
DERAILED The inaugural feature from The Weinstein Company recalls the formation of TriStar Pictures back in the 80s, when the quality of its initial slate was so dreadful that one critic suggested the company should change its name to OneStar. Certainly, Derailed is deserving of whatever critical scorn is tossed its way, whether it’s in the form of a solitary star, a down-turned thumb or even an extended middle finger. The film stars Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston as unhappily married business drones whose attempt at an affair gets interrupted by a French thug (Vincent Cassel) with blackmail on his mind. Armed with only a plot synopsis, I (like many others) figured out the major plot twist even before stepping into the theater, yet this movie is so fundamentally brain-dead on so many levels that predictability turns out to be the least of its problems. *
GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’ Rapper 50 Cent may have set the music world on fire, but as a movie star, he’s as relevant as a dead mic. His starring vehicle, about a drug dealer trying to make it as a rap star, is yet one more uninspired crime pic that liberally borrows from all the violent “dis dis bang bang” titles that preceded it. Yet the movie it most resembles — coincidentally, given the proximity of the release dates — is this past summer’s Hustle & Flow (in which a pimp tried to make it as a rapper). It’s fascinating to place both films side by side and see how one succeeds while the other doesn’t. With its rich characterizations and pungent atmosphere, Hustle flows. Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, with its frayed theatrics and stiff performance by 50 Cent, isn’t worth a plugged nickel. *1/2
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK In his second stint as director, George Clooney (who also co-wrote and co-stars) looks at an inspiring moment in US history, when legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) did the unthinkable by standing up to Joe McCarthy, the junior Senator who was destroying lives left and right in his maniacal pursuit of Communist infiltrators. Clooney has his sights set, and the targets are all big game. Like All the President’s Men, the movie celebrates journalistic integrity in the face of political corruption, and like Quiz Show, it shows how this marvelous invention that has the ability to educate millions of Americans simultaneously has instead been dumbed down to placate the lowest common denominator (in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t take long for Edward R. Murrow to be replaced by Trading Spouses). Comparisons to the insidious Bush Administration abound, and Clooney decries the lack of modern-day media heroes who could compare with Murrow. ***H1/2
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE The fourth installment in the J.K. Rowling screen franchise clearly isn’t afraid of the dark. There’s a reason that this is the first movie in the series to earn a PG-13 rating, as director Mike Newell, the first British director attached to this veddy British series, and scripter Steve Kloves, forced to whittle down Rowling’s enormous tome, steadfastly refuse to coddle the youngest audience members, “family film” status be damned. The series’ greatest strength — namely, the dead-on portrayals by Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson as Harry, Ron and Hermione — never fails to deliver (these kids are wonderful together), and even an overstuffed plot doesn’t slow down the proceedings as much as convey that there’s much at stake in Harry’s increasingly sinister world. ***
THE ICE HARVEST The Ice Harvest is being promoted as this year’s Bad Santa, but it’s just bad, period. It goes through the motions by displaying all the requisite black humor and hipster stylings without stopping to figure out what generally makes these ingredients work. John Cusack stars as Charlie Arglist, a Wichita lawyer who, with his partner Vic (Billy Bob Thornton), steals over two million dollars from a local mob boss (Randy Quaid) and then begins to sweat when an ice storm prevents them from skipping town. As Charlie trudges around the city waiting to make his great escape, he repeatedly bumps into two acquaintances: Renata (Connie Nielsen), a strip club owner, and Pete (hilarious Oliver Platt, the film’s lone bright spot), a vulgar souse. As an exercise in neo-noir, the film is surprisingly inert, and as a dark comedy, it fails to offer any substantial laughs. *1/2
JARHEAD In adapting Anthony Swofford’s book about Marines bored by their experience during the Gulf War, director Sam Mendes and scripter William Broyles Jr. have made a movie that isn’t exactly a war movie or an anti-war movie; if anything, it’s the pioneer in the new genre of the semi-war movie. Jarhead is about warriors without a war, men who have been primed to kill and are then denied that opportunity. Mendes and his actors (led by Jake Gyllenhaal) do an admirable job of punching across this frustration, and our sympathies are with these characters even if we don’t exactly endorse the reasons for their mental morass. Jarhead does its best to remain apolitical, yet the very nature of the piece insures that correlations can be made to the current debacle in the Middle East. Mendes may have been reluctant to offend the war hawks, but history can’t afford a similar luxury: It’s too busy repeating itself to balk. ***
KISS KISS, BANG BANG Scripter Shane Black, best known for penning Lethal Weapon, makes his directorial debut with this fast and furious yarn that isn’t a buddy/action movie as much as a send-up of a buddy/action movie. Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer are both in top form, respectively playing a none-too-bright thief who gets mistaken for an actor and the gay private eye assigned to prepare him for his screen test. The murder-mystery plot becomes needlessly complicated and doesn’t hang together all that well, resulting in a tendency for the picture to move forward in fits and starts. But for the most part, this is sharp entertainment, as numerous Hollywood cliches are gleefully turned inside out. As scathing indictments of Tinseltown go, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang may not be The Player, but it’s a player nonetheless. ***
PRIDE & PREJUDICE In adapting Jane Austen’s literary staple, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach have done an exemplary job of making us care all over again about the plight of the Bennet sisters, whose busybody mom (Brenda Blethyn) sets about finding them suitable husbands against the backdrop of 19th century England. The oldest daughter Jane (Rosamund Pike) immediately lands a suitor, but the independent Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) finds herself embroiled in a grudge match with the brooding Mr. Darcy (Matthew MacFadyen). Romanticists who fell hard for Colin Firth’s Darcy in the 1995 BBC miniseries may or may not warm to MacFadyen (who’s fine in the role), but there’s no quibbling over Knightley’s intuitive, note-perfect work as Elizabeth. Kudos, also, to Roman Osin’s endlessly inventive camerawork, the sort not usually found in period pieces of this nature. ***
RENT For all its energy, this film version of the Broadway smash never quite busts free, a problem that may rest more with the modern film industry’s inexperience with musicals than with anything director Chris Columbus brings to the party. There hasn’t been a great movie musical since Milos Forman’s Hair back in 1979, and outer space has long since replaced the songbook as the filmmakers’ avenue of choice for fanciful flights of expression and imagination. Given the current climate in Hollywood, I’m inclined to give Columbus a break, since his movie is easy to like and even easier to hum. Updating Puccini’s 1896 opera La Boheme, Rent’s late creator Jonathan Larson focuses on a group of bohemians trying to get by while living in New York’s East Village. If it all sounds like Melrose Place on welfare, the story’s defining characteristic is that half of its leading players are HIV-positive, lending an air of poignancy to the proceedings as the players belt out catchy tunes. ***
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE Marital discord receives an innovative treatment in this feature that earned Noah Baumbach writing and directing awards at Sundance. In 1986 Brooklyn, a college professor (Jeff Daniels) and his wife (Laura Linney) reach the conclusion that their marriage is on its last fumes. Upon separating, they subject their sons (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) to all manner of ill-advised actions, which only serve to confuse the boys even further. The film is tantalizing in the way in which it presents just enough information so that we can’t help but come to the conclusion that the self-absorbed Bernard and Joan are lousy parents — yet then it pulls the rug out from under us by showing evidence to the contrary. Never denigrating itself by offering facile answers, it examines the difficulties of joint custody, the flaw in favoring one parent over the other, and the continued ability to wring mood out of Tangerine Dream’s score for Risky Business. All four lead performances are outstanding. ***1/2
WALK THE LINE One often encounters an overwhelming sense of déjà vu when watching a biopic about a celebrity, since they tend to trace the expected ups and downs in the most conventional manner possible. Yet “conventional” doesn’t have to mean “boring,” and for all its familiarity, there’s plenty to like about Walk the Line. Director James Mangold, adapting (with co-scripter Gill Dennis) two Johnny Cash autobiographies, does a fine job of capturing an electric period in rock history without any strains of self-importance. First and foremost, though, the film positions itself as a love story, one that finds Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) locating his soulmate in country star June Carter (Reese Witherspoon). Phoenix commands the screen, yet even he’s topped by Witherspoon in her most fully realized performance since Election. Phoenix may provide the movie with its voice, but it’s Witherspoon who delivers its soul. ***
YOURS, MINE AND OURS A descent into the pits of hell disguised as a motion picture, Yours, Mine and Ours is the sort of broad, insincere schmaltz that moviegoers seem to eat up at this time of year (see: Cheaper By the Dozen in 2003 and Christmas With the Kranks in 2004). A widower (Dennis Quaid) with eight kids bumps into his former high school sweetheart, now a widow (Rene Russo) with 10 children. On a whim, they decide to get married, but managing a household comprised of 18 minors proves to be a formidable challenge. A remake of a pleasant 1968 film with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball, this jettisons all semblance of wit for the sake of one noisy, overwrought sequence after another. Somebody please kill this before it breeds again. *
ZATHURA Like Jumanji, this is based on a children’s picture book by Chris Van Allsburg. Despite both involving a magical board game, this film differs in that it’s set in outer space, showcases better visual effects, and replaces Jumanji’s Robin Williams with a manic, defective robot (on second thought, that last point might not qualify as a difference). Imaginative without being particularly exciting, Zathura will appeal immensely to young viewers while causing adults to be the ones to occasionally fidget in their seats. Grown-ups, however, will be the ones who benefit from the script’s funniest quip, a throwaway line involving the indie flick Thirteen. **1/2
OPENS FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9:
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE: Tilda Swinton, Anna Popplewell.
SYRIANA: George Clooney, Matt Damon.
This article appears in Dec 7-13, 2005.
