CulturePulp.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Spider-Man 2'

Expanded version of a review in the Wednesday, June 30 Oregonian....

If you're of a semi-ripe movie-geek vintage, you'll recall the thrill (and relief) of seeing "Superman II" back in 1980.

"Superman: The Movie" had set a gold standard a couple of years earlier; the sequel was theirs for the filmmakers to screw up. But "Superman II" ended up sending audiences into wild applause spasms -- in part because it harvested narrative fruit seeded in the first film. With no origin story to tell, S2 got down to business, exploring the consequences of being a superhero. Clark Kent waffled between love and duty when he gave up his powers for Lois Lane -- at the same time three evil superbeings showed up, ready to rumble.

"Spider-Man 2" succeeds in the exact same way as "Superman II" did -- only more so. In every meaningful way, returning director Sam Raimi has made a better sequel: The fights are more exciting, the special effects are better, the characters have deepened, the performances are meatier, the comedy is funnier -- and the director's love of raw, unbridled cinematic superhero geekery is positively unleashed. Fans of comic-book movies will very likely gnash their teeth with joy.

If Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) learned that "with great power comes great responsibility" in the first "Spider-Man," in "Spider-Man 2" he learns what it means to accept that responsibility. As the sequel begins, Raimi (working from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent, with story help from Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and novelist Michael Chabon) heaps abuse on Puny Parker with a sadistic glee we haven't seen since the director put Bruce Campbell through his paces in the "Evil Dead" flicks. (Parker is always knocking things over or getting bumped around this movie -- to the degree that you start to wonder if Raimi was punishing Maguire for threatening to quit the production over a back injury.)

The genius of the original Marvel comics is that the hero of the story is Peter Parker, not Spider-Man -- and when he's not wearing those homemade tights, Petey's, well, kind of a loser. "Spider-Man 2" takes that conceit and runs with it, further than even the first movie did (right down to a scene where the Spidey suit turns all Peter's clothes pink in the wash).

Torn between his superhero duties, his schoolwork, his jobs, his aunt's poverty, his unrequited love for Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) and his best friend Harry (James Franco) looking to avenge his father's death, Peter's so stressed-out that he's starting to lose his powers. Everyone's writing him off as a talented flake; when MJ does so, taking up with an astronaut who also happens to be the son of his jerkwad boss (J.K. Simmons), Peter throws the tights in the trash and quits the superhero biz.

The movie spends the bulk of its time on this little soap opera; it's nearly 40 minutes before an industrial accident fuses four robotic arms to the back of Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) -- turning him into the criminally mad scientist Dr. Octopus and kicking off an incredible series of battles on skyscrapers and trains. The movie gets off to kind of a slow start (so did "Superman II," come to think of it), but the emotional payoff is pretty much unprecedented in superhero movies -- leaving a pile of jaw-dropping loose ends too good to spoil here.

It is possible to nit-pick "Spider-Man 2." The storyline's a bit of a ramble; the Doc Ock plot plays a bit too much into the usual mad-scientist tropes; and the screenplay doesn't really know what to do with Peter's Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) -- sticking her in the middle of a super-battle that should break her hip three times over and forcing her to deal with a confession by Peter that doesn't really go anywhere.

But that feels like quibbling in the face of such a generous entertainment. Raimi obviously had more free rein this time around, and he relishes it with nothing-to-lose abandon. All the cinematic energy of his "Evil Dead" movies is back -- particularly during a terrifying sequence where the Doc's robot tentacles come to life, slaughtering a roomful of doctors. (Putting it another way, "Evil Dead" fans: A chainsaw is involved.) The movie's also packed with smart little surprises: a hilarious elevator ride; references to as-yet-unmined comic-book characters; street buskers singing the classic Spidey TV theme; the hijacking of a song from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"; even an unlikely thematic parallel drawn from an Oscar Wilde play.

There's a stunning battle on (and in, and around) a train, about an hour-and-a-half in, that really gives the lie to similar digital stuntwork in the "Matrix" sequels. The train-fight, which even gives a couple of nods to "The French Connection," is devastatingly great -- possibly the best sequence of its kind in movie history -- for a couple of reasons. First, it's a true comic-book fight come to life, right down to the camera angles. But second, and most important, the scene has a surprising emotional gravitas. After the fight, Raimi uses the thrills to twist an emotional knife, as innocent bystanders gently cradle a wounded, unmasked hero in a fit of empathy. The mêlée and its aftermath remind us that special effects, used properly, are simply another tool to move the spirit.

Raimi has said that his inspiration for 2002's "Spider-Man" was the first hour-and-a-half of "Superman: The Movie" -- and he's obviously taken "Superman II" as his narrative model for the second go-round. Both movies have a credit sequence that recaps the first film; both pit their heroes against a nastier, more complicated villain; both have heroes losing their powers and living to regret it; both feature key characters discovering the hero's secret identity; both feature the return of previous foes; and both even feature conversations with long-dead parental figures about shirking responsibility for love.

And both are also that rarest of animals -- a sequel that works. "Spider-Man 3" is Raimi's to screw up. Let's hope he doesn't model it on "Superman III."
_____

(127 minutes; rated: PG-13 for stylized action violence) Grade: A-minus

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Two Brothers'

Movie review in the Friday, July 25 Oregonian....

Here's a backhanded compliment: "Two Brothers" is so good at humanizing tigers that you worry it's going to drive the world's children suicidally cat-mad -- that they'll start begging their parents for pet tigers, sticking their hands into cages and dashing into the center ring at the circus.

In other words, the world's children are going to love it.

Co-writer/director Jean-Jacques Annaud used something like 30 big cats to create the characters of Kumal and Sangha -- two tigers who run afoul of hunters, dogs, carnies, politicians and children in 1920s French Indochina. (The whole thing just reeks of Rudyard Kipling, even though it's not actually based on a Kipling story.) As he did in his 1988 jaw-dropper, "The Bear,"  Annaud uses every editing trick in the book to make predatory mammals seem just unbelievably cute, sentient, loving, human and smart.

Sangha, for example, hides among stuffed animals and sleeps with a little French  boy (Freddie Highmore).  Kumal forms a complex kinship with a great white hunter (Guy Pearce),  showing him mercy at key dramatic moments. Heck, one of the brothers' parents plays possum to elude a pack of royal hunters, and even attempts a daring, "Indiana Jones"-style  rescue on a truck flatbed. And all this in live action -- without one cute song or snappy comeback delivered, "Cats & Dogs"-style,  out of a computer-animated mouth.

While it's not in the same league as "The Bear," "Two Brothers" is quite a bit better than its cutesy ad campaign. For one thing, it's a lot less noisy than the commercials. The opening -- in which a tiger and his mate chase each other though an empty temple, romance on their minds -- is utterly wordless, as is much of the movie. It's also utterly beautiful, thanks to clever editing and sound that seems to tap directly into the animals' minds; you're never confused about what they're thinking. Annaud approaches many of his scenes this way, from the animals' point of view -- lending a terrifying sense of perspective to any scene involving a hunt or a trap. In fact, humans often come off as just another animal in the food chain -- a species corrupted by the absolute power of its opposable thumbs and sneaky brain. There's a wonderful image early in the film where both a dead tiger and a wounded man are carried hanging from poles, their arms and legs tied in exactly the same way.

"Two Brothers" also gives at least a cursory nod to the moral complexity of hunting predators; the human performances seemed more nuanced, to this reviewer, than the ones given by the snarling mountain men in "The Bear." After a disastrous foray into big-budget filmmaking ("The Time Machine,"  anyone?), Gelfling-faced  Guy Pearce is nicely understated here. His hunter-author is something of a Hemingwayesque  antihero: He steals ancient statuary and gets greased by corrupt officials, but he also develops a compassion for the animals he hunts. And every act of cruelty seems to have a counterbalance: Selling an older tiger's hide buys feed for younger animals; every jungle cat killed saves another villager's leg.

A note to film purists: Much of "Two Brothers" was shot on digital HD (that would be videotape, though a very nice brand of it), and the movie often has that unsavory video flicker to it whenever anyone (or the camera) moves too quickly. Cinephiles will be appalled, but I suspect no one else will care -- it seems a small price to pay, given that Annaud seems to have used the resulting cost savings to spend more time getting terrific performances from his animals. There are a couple of stunning close-ups of tiger faces in this movie, particularly during a cage-match climax that recalls, in all seriousness, "Spartacus." 

Of course, watching all this, you can't help but remember the recent attack on Siegfried's  better half -- even though Kumal and Sangha do most of their nastiest instinctive-tiger stuff (the actual hunting and killing and biting that’s, you know, in their genetic code) off-camera. Suddenly, Annaud's incredible skill at anthropomorphizing jungle cats seems kind of misleading.

Though no more misleading, one supposes, than if they'd been talking and singing.
_____

(109 minutes; rated PG for mild violence) Grade: B

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Notebook'

Movie review in the June 25 Oregonian....

"The Notebook" has a single goal: to prod your tear ducts.

It is very, very good at this task.

Whether "The Notebook" is good in any other respect is a bit more complicated.

Yes, the movie -- based on a Nicholas Sparks novel -- is gorgeously photographed. It also features unusually strong performances by Rachel McAdams, James Garner and James Marsden. One could even argue "The Notebook" has that elusive, emotion-tugging x-factor that studio executives call "heart."

But at the same time, if you go in armed with a critical axe of even slight sharpness, "The Notebook" splits at the spine. The movie's dragged down by a droopy male lead, narration that would sound lavender in a bad airport paperback, music the filmmakers lean on like a car horn, and an insulting, inconsistent approach to elderly dementia.

The movie's opening credits (shot by Robert Fraisse) play over cinematography that's worthy of one of your nicer cigarette ads: A man sculls on a lake at sunrise, sending a flock of birds soaring straight over the window of an elderly, blank-faced woman (Gena Rowlands). It's gorgeous -- but it's also so over-photographed, so Land's End-catalog-on-crack, that it sends a clear signal that what follows is going to be a romance so highly pitched that it falls just short of sci-fi.

To wit: Rowlands -- despite being in a state of dementia so advanced she can't recognize her own husband, children, or life story -- is calm, immaculately dressed and ready to receive visitors. Sure enough, a "common man with common thoughts" (James Garner) shows up to read to her out of a mysterious, hand-written notebook. From there, Garner narrates the story-within-a-story: the star-crossed tale of how Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling) and Allie Walker (Rachel McAdams) loved and lost in the 1940s.

This is where "The Notebook" reaches a narrative crossroads: You're either going to be onboard with the "improbable romance" that ensues or you really, really aren't.

Unfortunately, this reviewer didn't buy it for a second -- despite the fact that McAdams is an incredible find as Allie, with her hungry eyes, generous laugh and obvious zest for life. Unfortunately, the mesmerizing Allie is pitted against narrative elements that just … don't … work.

There's her wealthy mother (Joan Allen) -- an ice queen so evil she might as well be twirling her husband's silly mustache. Allen's stuck with such groan-inducing lines as "That child's got too much spirit for a girl of her circumstance."

Then there's Ryan Gosling as Noah. His laid-back surfer vibe makes him dull -- even when he's bearded, drunk with grief and stringing along a war widow as a post-Allie anesthetic. This is particularly true when Gosling's sharing the screen with Sam Shepard (playing his father) and competing for McAdams' affections against James Marsden, who does a Clark Gable turn as Allie's funny, charming, supportive, understanding, cultured, smart, wealthy fiancé.

Yes, this is one of those movies where every other man in the film (including Garner) seems better-suited for Allie than the actual guy the movie wants you to root for; it doesn't help that Noah's early courtship tactics consist of such Stalker's Lament lines as "I can be whatever you want" and threatening to kill himself.

Meanwhile, poor Rowlands is all over the place -- seemingly unable to figure out how to play a demented old woman. Sadly, the blame falls on both the screenplay and her son, director Nick Cassavetes. The script has her forgetting her entire life, yet effortlessly following the text of Garner's story. *

A final bedside scene (which feels like a last-minute, tacked-on reshoot) will reduce the audience to sobs -- and for many viewers, that will be enough. But it's a false ending to a movie that tells us that hard facts can be conquered by the power of a good story. That's a power that the bullcorn-choked "Notebook," despite its strengths, simply does not possess.
_____

* While reviewing "The Notebook," I flashed back to my days working in a superfabulous coffee shop located in an upscale Portland shopping district -- one of those neighborhoods with far too many money-losing, let's-give-the-bored-rich-spouse-something-to-do boutiques selling yak-hide handbags or soap made from the tears of authentic Balinese peasants or whatever. I used to work there alongside a young woman with great skin and well-to-do parents who declared herself a photographer (though she may or may not have actually developed her own pictures), a woman I'm pretty sure worked in that coffee shop partly so she could hang her black-and-white pictures of quaint European doorways on the walls. Said she volunteered doing "art therapy." Anyway, one day one of our regular customers -- a mentally disabled person -- walked in, did some odd bit of business, and left, as was his wont. Upon his departure, my co-worker turned, looked at me brightly, and declared, "You know? I hope one day he just ... snaps out of it!" "The Notebook" takes a similarly condescending, pie-in-the-sky approach to advanced dementia. In that regard, at least, it's a profoundly insulting perfume ad, despite strong work from Garner and McAdams.
______

(121 minutes; rated PG-13 for some sexuality) Grade: C

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Mother'

Movie review in the Friday, June 18 Oregonian....

There's one moment of uncomplicated familial bliss early on in "The Mother" -- possibly the only such moment in this emotionally devastating film.

It comes shortly after sixtysomething May (Anne Reid) shepherds her doddering, seemingly much-older husband Toots (Peter Vaughan) over to their son's house for a visit. Everyone settles in for a warm, candlelit dinner, and all the previous signs of trouble -- Toots' wheezing helplessness, the noisy encounters with beastly grandchildren -- recede in the glow. Toots raises his glass with some difficulty.

"You know the one thing I'm most proud of?" he says, tears in his eyes. "My family."

Shortly after making that statement, Toots is dead -- and director Roger Michell's meditation on the perils of aging, passion and self-centeredness comes horribly to life. Son Bobby (Steven Mackintosh) takes May back to her now-empty house. Devastated by the sight of Toots' unfilled slippers, May refuses to live there one more day. "Don't be difficult," her son admonishes -- only to have his mother fix him with a sudden, surprising look of defiance: "Why not?" she asks. "Why shouldn't I be difficult?"

It's a powerful moment. May, we quickly learn, has been emotionally biding her time. "Now all I want to do are interesting things -- things I love," she says. Among those "interesting things"? Drawing some shockingly erotic art, writing down and sharing her complicated feelings about motherhood, and tumbling into bed with Darren (Daniel Craig) -- the much-younger, gorgeous loser who's building a solarium in her son's fabulous London house.

May's name is, of course, ironic; she's definitely the "December" in what quickly becomes a troubled romance. "The Mother" is, in many ways, the exact opposite of one of those "Under the Tuscan Sun"-style fantasies where an older woman discovers her inner muse by letting her hair down. Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi takes an unflinching look at the short- and long-term results of our choices -- the immediate consequences of passion and the quieter, more ruinous consequences of choosing an unsatisfying path though life.

Nothing in "The Mother" is easy. Darren, who comes off as a sort of British Viggo Mortensen, is married, for starters -- and he's already having an adulterous affair with May's troubled, emotionally needy daughter Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw). Meanwhile, Paula is a wine-guzzling, therapy-addicted train wreck -- one of those writers who's slowly realizing she's better at teaching than she is at art -- and she fails to see the irony of hating her mother for stealing the man she was, herself, stealing from another woman.

The movie revels, quietly, in these sorts of complications and hypocrisies -- in punishing people who think with their feelings -- and it's a testament to the cast and crew that it only rarely comes off as melodramatic. Director Michell ("Notting Hill," "Changing Lanes") carefully frames his shots, and he has a wonderful, sensuous way of contrasting the brash sounds of family life with a quiet afternoon breeze. He also has a deep sympathy for May's plight -- at one point in her affair, she moans, "I thought nobody would ever touch me again, apart from the undertaker." It's astonishing to watch Reid's face, hair and clothing become softer, more sensual, as she reclaims her sexuality.

But Michell's sympathy doesn't offer any dramatic escape hatches; there are larger social forces at work here, grinding ahead in a way that recalls, to a degree, the doomed love affair in "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul." May wants to escape a quiet death -- but her children (and the world) are preparing to discard her.

At one point, a more "suitable" suitor, a book-collecting senior citizen with food on his face (Oliver Ford Davies) laments, "I can feel the world streaming past me." It's a sentiment in direct contrast to something said by the much-younger Darren: "I imagine people getting less frightened as they get older." "The Mother" tears a brave, selfish woman in two as she wrestles with the contradictory truths behind those statements -- and the results are subtly terrifying.
_____

(112 minutes; rated R for sexual content including graphic images of sexuality, language and brief drug use) Grade: A

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story'

 Movie review in the Friday, June 18 Oregonian....

If you're a moviegoer of a certain age, then you probably have fond (or, if you're one of those ironic types, "fond") memories of a particular breed of underdog comedy.

In the earlier days of cable and home video, movies about misfit losers banding together to defeat evil snobs -- usually in some sort of sporting event -- burned themselves onto Gen-X retinas. Think "Meatballs." "Revenge of the Nerds." "Caddyshack." "Real Genius." Throw in the popular sports movies from that era (the "Rocky" and "Karate Kid" movies), and you start to wonder if Hollywood was making any movies between the late '70s and early '90s that didn't take the "Cinderella story" as their model.

Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber was apparently devouring all these flicks as a kid -- and taking notes. His debut feature, "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," is quite possibly the first great postmodern underdog sports comedy.

"Postmodern," by the way, is a fancy method of saying the movie has its cake and eats it, too: "Dodgeball" makes vicious fun of the underdog genre -- it imagines a band of losers joining a high-stakes dodgeball tournament to prevent a rich bully from buying out their gym -- and its silly script eviscerates every sports-movie cliché in the process. But at the same time, it's pretty obvious that Thurber absolutely adores comedies like "Stripes" and "Caddyshack" (he's said as much in interviews), and that he really wants to make one of his own. The result, if you're into that sort of thing, is 90-odd minutes of merciless belly-laughs.

Thurber couldn't have asked for a better cast; this is one of the best gatherings of smart comic talent in recent memory. Vince Vaughn steps into what can only be called "the Bill Murray role" as Peter La Fleur, owner of a gym named, archetypically, "Average Joe's." His clientele includes a cuckolded dork (Stephen Root), an aspiring male cheerleader (Justin Long) and a guy who, for reasons unexplained, thinks he's a pirate (Alan Tudyk). Average Joe's is being eyed for takeover by White Goodman (Ben Stiller), who owns the gym across the street. As Goodman, Stiller recalls his brilliant sketch work on 1992's "The Ben Stiller Show" -- he's a pumped-up self-help freak with Patrick Swayze hair and an inflatable codpiece, a man who surrounds himself with unwittingly homoerotic art and has a, shall we say, complex relationship with food. Backing them up in a million tiny, funny ways are such thinking-man's comedy faves as Jason Bateman, Gary Cole, Rip Torn, Hank Azaria and Missi Pyle -- with whiplash-inducing cameos by William Shatner, Chuck Norris, David Hasselhoff and, um, Lance Armstrong.

Most come-from-behind sports movies slightly overstay their welcome, and so does "Dodgeball" -- after our Average Joe's heroes get into the final rounds of the American Dodgeball Association of America (ADAA) finals in Las Vegas, facing off against Ben Stiller and his Purple Cobras. (Please. I'm not spoiling anything with that.) And on the page, the dialogue probably isn't really all that funny. (Sample exchange: Stiller: "This doesn't concern you, LeFleur!" Vaughn: "Not nearly as much as your hair does.")

Nevertheless. Thurber's direction -- clearly influenced by Stiller -- is filled with hysterical moments and grace notes. There's a dodgeball match with a pack of mean Girl Scouts that recalls a similar adult-versus-kids smackdown in that underrated classic "Billy Madison"; a dead-on spoof of 1950s education films (in which Azaria informs us that dodgeball, "a sport of violence, exclusion and degradation," was invented by 15th-century opium addicts); a brutal training montage with a wrench-throwing Rip Torn; Cole and Bateman doing a dead-on spoof of moronic cable-sports announcers; and even an overblown sports-movie score by Theodore Shapiro.

If you hold a perverse soft spot in your heart for straight-to-video underdog junk like, I don't know, "Ski School," then good Lord, you are going to love this.
_____

(95 minutes, rated PG-13 for rude and sexual humor, and language) Grade: B-plus

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Around the World in 80 Days'

Movie review in the Friday, July 18 Oregonian....

Well, first off, let's make one thing perfectly clear: This is not Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days." This is Jackie Chan's "Around the World in 80 Days."

That's a key distinction -- and understanding it goes a long way toward helping this dumb, fun adaptation of Verne's novel to go down smoothly with Verne purists (if, indeed, any such purists still walk the earth).

Another disclaimer: This reviewer has never read Verne's 1873 novel -- in which eccentric scientist Phileas Fogg bets his colleagues that he can circumnavigate the globe in eleven-and-a-half weeks. Nevertheless, I'm fairly certain that, in Verne's original story, Fogg's manservant Passepartout was not a martial-arts master masquerading as a French valet so he can smuggle a stolen "Jade Buddha" back to his village -- all while fleeing a female Chinese warlord and her gang of thugs. Mr. Chan plays Passepartout in the 2004 adaptation, and he (and a trio of screenwriters) have spackled this probing subtext onto Verne's story, with the help of director Frank Coraci ("The Waterboy").

Is the movie silly? Oh, absolutely. It also gets off to a clunky start, rolls flaming across the finish line, and is liberally sprinkled with some groan-inducing gags and cameos -- especially an appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger, leader of the world's fifth-largest economy, as a Turkish prince wearing purple tights and a Fran Lebowitz pageboy.

But despite all that, "Around the World in 80 Days" works more often than it doesn't. In fact, Chan's fanny-kicking world tour is a textbook example of how a movie can be "fun" without, strictly speaking, being "good." (It's a bit like "Shanghai Knights" or a Bing-and-Bob "Road" picture that way.)

Also, if we may speak a bit of heresy: This version of "Around the World" is vastly more entertaining than the more-faithful, star-studded, three-hour 1956 edition, which stars David Niven and Mexican comedian Cantinflas. That version was just released in a gorgeous new DVD set that only magnifies its visual loveliness and sheer dramatic bloat. With the exception of Cantinflas' silent comedy-inspired performance, the '56 film has aged surprisingly poorly; watching its endless shots of exotic "local color" and ham-fisted cameos is a bit like watching a mega-budgeted McGraw-Hill travelogue. Incredibly, it won the 1956 Best Picture Oscar.

Anyway. The 2004 "Around the World" works for the same reason that all the better Jackie Chan movies work: The lead actors bounce off each other nicely, and the fights are packed with clever visual gags.

Steve Coogan ("24 Hour Party People," "Coffee and Cigarettes," "I'm Alan Partridge") is wonderfully droll as Phileas Fogg. Fogg's been re-imagined here as a wacky inventor of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"-style gadgets, which is sort of unfortunate -- but by film's end, he's tossing off a constant stream of asides that get funnier as the movie schleps its way around the globe.

And while we'll never again see the spry young Jackie Chan who made an incredible string of comedy-adventures in the late '80s and early '90s, there are three really, really clever fights in this movie. In one, Chan battles three Chinese assassins in a Parisian art studio -- creating an Impressionist picture on a blank canvas with their paint-soaked punches. In another, Chan tussles with the sinister General Fang (Karen Mok) in and around a half-built Statue of Liberty. And, best of all, the movie just stops cold for 10 minutes so Chan can unleash two Hong Kong stunt teams on each other in the Chinese countryside -- with a welcome cameo from Chan's old sparring partner Sammo Hung (best-known on these shores as the star of TV's "Martial Law").

Yes, all these action-packed digressions make the around-the-world storyline seem like a secondary consideration. And yes, there's a truly awful performance by Jim Broadbent as Fogg's nemesis in the Royal Academy of Science. But the movie never pretends to be anything more than dumb kids' fare -- and, almost against your will, you get caught up in the plain dumb fun of the thing. Jules Verne may be rolling in his grave, but your kids will probably be rolling in the aisles.
_____

(92 minutes; rated PG for action violence, some crude humor and mild language) Grade: B

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Saved!'

Movie review in the Friday, June 11 Oregonian....

Here's producer Michael Stipe talking (to IGN FilmForce) about "Saved!," co-writer/director Brian Dannelly's cine-mocking of the contemporary-Christian lifestyle:

"I don't think this film in any way mocks Christianity…. It is subversive, but it is sweetly subversive. I don't think we are stepping on anyone's toes."

And here's Dannelly, talking in the same vein: "It was also my goal to make a film that wasn't about Christian bashing but about teens in crisis."

Um, okay. Following is some of the "sweetly subversive" dialogue from "Saved!" Here's the setup: Macaulay Culkin and Eva Amurri, playing two of the more rebellious students at American Eagle Christian Academy, spy fellow student Mary (Jena Malone) sneaking into Planned Parenthood. Mary, you see, was knocked up by her gay boyfriend (Chad Faust) just before he was shipped off to a creepy Baptist de-homosexualization camp.

Amurri smirks: "There's only one reason Christian girls go to the Planned Parenthood."

Culkin smirks back: "To plant a pipe bomb?"

How sweetly subversive. No, wait: Maybe I meant to write "knee-jerk, reductive and cartoonish."

Make no mistake: There's a terrific satire to be made about the insularity of modern Christian life. It is very nearly possible, in this modern age, for a Christian teen to completely isolate him- or herself from secular entertainment -- and, by extension, the morally complex world at large -- because the moneychangers in the temple are now selling lukewarm "Christian" alternatives to everything, from rap to t-shirts to sports to television. The result is a sort of extroverted monasticism -- mentally, these kids are as isolated as friars, only with worse music, clothes and haircuts.

However, "Saved!" is not a terrific satire, and it's a shame, because writer-director Dannelly gets a few things exactly right. His sendups of the horror that is "contemporary Christian music" are spot-on; it helps that one of the singers is played by pop-tart actress Mandy Moore, whose secular pop songs are a Blitzkrieg of blandness. The movie also understands that a Christian youth group, thanks to a complex brew of repression and adolescence, is one of the most hormonally charged places on earth. And the youth group's "Pastor Skip" (Martin Donovan) is hilarious when he tries to get down with the kids using phrases like, "Let's get our Christ on!"

But the movie fails because it flunks its psychology exam -- despite the game efforts of a talented cast that includes Heather Matarazzo, Patrick Fugit and Mary-Louise Parker. The opening 20 minutes, which set up Mary's plight, are funny and uncomfortable -- but then the movie starts stacking its thematic deck too tall in its own favor, bouncing its protagonists against evil, stupid fundamentalist characters who'd look unsubtle in a John Hughes film. If Dannelly disagrees with a character's worldview (specifically, the Christian worldview), that character is a hypocrite or a moron, or both.

Mandy Moore, for example, is playing a very real archetype -- the popular, pretty Christian girl who lords her sanctimony over everyone around her. But rather than exploring the psychology of such a character, Dannelly makes her a mustache-twirling villainess; she lies, cheats, abuses her wheelchair-bound brother (Culkin) and has a full-on public meltdown in which she steals a van and drives it into a giant statue of Jesus. Her scenes have all the subtlety of polo-mallet thwacks; while watching it, one can't help but wonder if Dannelly would be getting away with some of his faith-hating gags if he'd titled the movie "Jihad!" and made it about private-school Muslims.

Mind you, Dannelly does have one good point in all this: Jesus preached tolerance and love, so why shouldn't middle-American Christians do the same? But "Saved!" fails to extend that tolerance to the very characters it satirizes -- and the result is, I'm sorry to report, a mean-spirited exercise in hypocrisy.
_____

(90 minutes; rated: PG-13 for strong thematic issues involving teens [sexual content, pregnancy, smoking and language]) Grade: C-minus

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Bukowski: Born into This'

Movie review in the Friday, June 11 Oregonian....

"Bukowski: Born into This" starts off by peppering us with every booze-sozzled, bad-boy cliché associated with novelist and poet Charles Bukowski.

We see him taking the stage for a reading at the City Lights poets theater in 1973 -- with the grainy black-and-white documentary footage (shot by Taylor Hackford) making Bukowski look like nothing so much as a surly, pock-marked orangutan. "I'm quitting halfway through the end unless I get a bottle of wine," he growls in his flat Burroughs monotone. The crowd cheers.

Then we hear the stories. About Bukowski burning his hair with a Bic lighter. About Bukowski pulling a switchblade on a maitre-d. About his legendary (and, let's be fair, largely self-proclaimed) sexual prowess. We see him driving around town in a beat-up Volkswagen with a cracked windshield and a German Iron Cross hanging on the rear-view mirror.

"One more beer, I'll take you all on -- all of you," Bukowski growls at City Lights. The crowd cheers.

But then, amidst all that, John Dullaghan's terrific documentary quietly sets to work -- replacing every single one of those rough-and-tumble, writer's-life chestnuts with a portrait of a complex, damaged, driven human being.

"Bukowski: Born into This" hoists Bukowski by his own petard -- but in a nice way. It sneaks behind his literary persona, revealing the author behind "Women" and "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" to be a poetic boozer, yes, but also a serious artist and occasional sentimentalist. Dullaghan and editor Victor Livingston weave together new and old interviews, reverent poetry excerpts and some shockingly unguarded moments -- creating a meaty (if more than a little hagiographic) documentary about the writer's life.

Putting it another way: "Bukowski" is so good that its occasional "celebrity testimonials" -- from Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Harry Dean Stanton and U2's Bono -- seem completely unnecessary. (Especially the moments where they call him by his intimate nickname, "Hank," which feels presumptuous.)

If the doc finds a unifying thematic thread in Bukowski's life, it can be summed up in one word: stamina. Bukowski built a body of work the old-fashioned way: He refused to stop. (In fact, "Born into This" has the amusing side effect of making every trust-fund "beat poet" who's ever droned on about his "writing" look like a swooning milkmaid by comparison.)

Born in 1920, Henry Charles Bukowski Jr. endured razor-strop beatings, disfiguring acne, ulcers, hundreds of rejection letters, a convoluted love life, a mind-numbing post-office job, and having a movie doppelganger of himself played by Mickey Rourke -- all while building a legendary life in letters. All of these obstacles are related in the documentary, in the same matter-of-fact tones that Bukowski (who died in 1994) employed in his poetry -- which is liberally excerpted in the film and is remarkably dark-humored, pessimistic and blunt.

Meanwhile, the movie is remarkable for digging behind the bad-boy, (arguably) misogynist image that scandalized many a college student in the '80s -- resulting in a surprisingly tender, sometimes frightening portrait of Bukowski the man. In foreign-television interview footage, the author bursts into tears while reading a poem about an old flame. In his 60s, he rushes to a window like a teenager, thinking he hears his girlfriend "Cupcakes" coming to visit. We learn that he owed part of his literary breakthrough to a platonic sugar-daddy -- a start-up publisher who paid Bukowski's bills while he wrote his first novel, "Post Office." And in a shocking scene, the author starts kicking his final girlfriend (whom he eventually married) on-camera, as Barbet Schroeder videotapes them a few years before making "Barfly" from a Bukowski screenplay.

And yet, on balance, "Born into This" ends up being fairly worshipful -- even as it paints a portrait of a troubled, gifted, drunk, angry, sorrowful writer, a man many of the film's interview subjects consider one of the 20th century's most important poets. "You have my soul and I have your money," Bukowski purrs at City Lights. In this instance, the trade seems fair and true.
_____

(130 minutes; unrated at press time; a likely R for language, alcohol abuse, sexual images and discussions, and one scene of domestic violence) Grade: A-minus

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Garfield the Movie'

Movie review in the Friday, June 11 Oregonian....

Now, it would be the easiest thing in the world to use a review of "Garfield the Movie" as a platform to chronicle the decline of "Garfield" the comic strip.

Perish the thought.

After all, "Garfield," the world's most widely syndicated comic strip, presents a sizable target. One could point out that, when the strip debuted in 1978, Garfield seemed funny and subversive -- its star looked more like a cross between Jabba the Hutt and a B. Kliban cat in those days, and the strip acidly spoofed the funny-animal comics it later came to emulate.

Or one could label creator Jim Davis a "sell-out" because of the comic's de-evolution into a t-shirt and greeting-card design incubator. Or one could cite the reports that Davis no longer draws the comic -- relying instead on a "ghost penciller" named Eric Reaves (interviewed last year by Purdue University's Exponent).

Or one could reprint any of "Opus" cartoonist Berke Breathed's numerous jabs at Davis and "Garfield." Why, here's one, from a recent Salon.com interview: "What would happen to all the hacks hired by Jim Davis to write and draw 'Garfield' if we were to put it out of business? Remember what they did to Mel Gibson at the end of 'Braveheart'? There's an idea."

But all that invective seemed beside the point during a recent screening of "Garfield the Movie" -- which delighted a young audience who'd come to watch the big-screen, lasagna-eatin' hijinks of what is, for better or worse, a modern comic-strip icon.

The movie (yes, we're starting the review now) is meringue-light, occasionally amusing, adequately animated and utterly forgettable. In a way, it throws the world's favorite morbidly obese cat in perfect relief: While watching this movie, even a cynic realizes that entertainment, not art, was the point of "Garfield" all along -- so why get exercised about it? It seems as meaningless as pointing out the inadequate number of nostrils on a "Family Circus" character's nose.

The movie's opening is episodic, like a string of comic strips. Garfield (voiced by a bored-sounding Bill Murray) wakes up owner Jon (Breckin Meyer); Garfield jousts with neighborhood cats and dogs; Garfield eats too much lasagna; Garfield generally acts like a lazy twentysomething who won't move out of his parents' house.

And then, this being a movie, director Peter Hewitt and screenwriters Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow introduce "conflict." First, Jon woos Garfield's sexy vet (Jennifer Love Hewitt) by adopting a dancing dog named Odie -- much to Garfield's horror. Then Odie's kidnapped by an evil morning-TV host (Stephen Tobolowsky) who for some reason believes that a dancing dog will make his Emmy-winning brother jealous. (Don't ask. This guy's Cruella de Dumb.) Garfield, feeling guilty, embarks on a rescue mission, with the help of a rogue's gallery of talking rats, cats and dogs.

It should be noted that Garfield himself is fully computer-animated, while every other animal in the film is real. The animation is, for the most part, well-done (though I wouldn't look too closely at an Animal Control guard's flickering hands when he holds Garfield) -- but the fact that our hero is so obviously animated makes him look like an ambulatory Teddy Ruxpin doll whenever he interacts with real animals. That said, his awkward walk is beautifully rendered; he looks like he could collapse from a thrombus at any moment. And a few sequences -- such as Garfield's accidental Rube Goldberg decimation of every object in Jon's house -- are well-staged.

But no matter how histrionic the orchestral score gets, "Garfield" is simply devoid of any real tension. Even the Jon/vet romance is pretty much over the second they tell each other, early on, that they had crushes on each other in high school. Really: The film's greatest traumas are -- what? -- a "shock collar"? Too many cat belches? The sheer number of product placements?

In short, it's an almost flawlessly innocuous entertainment for kids. And, like every other product of the Jim Davis bland-entertainment empire, it will probably gross a modest fortune.
______

(80 mins., rated PG for brief mild language) Grade: C-plus

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Chronicles of Riddick'

If you're a sci-fi fan and you haven't seen "Pitch Black," it's definitely worth checking out. David Twohy's sci-fi suspense yarn was one of 2000's biggest movie surprises.

The film concerns a group of starship passengers who crash-land on a desert planet -- and when the planet's three suns all go into indefinite eclipse, flying monsters come out to feed. It sounds like a B-grade "Aliens" pastiche, except that "Pitch Black" had two things going for it: (1) a sharp script that had "good" and "bad" characters switching roles; and (2) Vin Diesel turning in a dangerous performance as Riddick -- a murderer with genetically enhanced eyes who was on his way to prison before the crash. One of the movie's greatest delights was the way Diesel's character evolved in cool, surprising ways as he slashed monsters, tested loyalities and learned the meaning of sacrifice.

Now, here are some things that weren't in "Pitch Black": (1) geographically muddled wire-fu fights; (2) excessive noise, with people shouting "RIDDICK!" at every conceivable opportunity during the climax; and (3) an unbelievably silly set of war-worshipping villains wearing cast-off costumes from the set of David Lynch's "Dune," with purple dialogue to match.

All of the above are present -- in abundance, I'm afraid -- in Twohy's sequel to "Pitch Black," "The Chronicles of Riddick."

It gives this reviewer no pleasure to report that "Riddick"'s a failure, and it's the saddest kind of failure -- an ambitious one.

Writer/director Twohy had a much, much larger budget to play with this time around, thanks to "Pitch Black"'s cult video success, so rather than making another monster movie, he and Diesel decided to go epic -- pitting Riddick against a planet-destroying interstellar army, while throwing an amazing number of wacked-out visual ideas onscreen. The movie's production design drips with the perspiration of passionate technicians and craftsmen. But, as with the "Matrix" sequels, all that hard work has been put in the service of a flawed script -- a script that delivers a killing blow to the movie.

The movie catches up with Riddick five years after "Pitch Black" -- sweeping him up in a meandering story that has him being chased by a greasy bounty hunter named Toombs (Nick Chinlund) and a religious army of "Necromongers" (subtle name!) who are blowing up planet after planet while they make their way to an imagined Eden they call the "Underverse." Over the course of the film, Twohy shows us tons of stuff we've never seen before -- a planet with upscale Middle Eastern set design; a prison world fortified against 700-degree sunrises; a woman made of air (Judi Dench); a massive Necromonger invasion that involves spiking skyscraper-high spaceships into a planet's surface. Everything seems designed with an eye to the unexpected, and for a short while, it all works beautifully.

And then the Necromongers -- led by Colm Feore, Karl Urban and Thandie Newton -- start flapping their stupid yaps, and the whole enterprise goes straight to pot.

One of the delights of "Pitch Black" was the way characters talked like normal, troubled human beings; you felt like you knew these people, even though they were light-years away. The Necromongers talk like they belong on the set of Elizabeth Taylor's "Cleopatra" as rewritten by a drunken Piers Anthony. After hearing enough ham-baked dialogue like "Never fails to inspire, does it, every time a dynasty falls?," the brain just groans and goes numb.

Combine that with a pointless, noisy side-plot about that fiery prison planet, and pretty soon even the mighty Riddick is swallowed up in the clatter -- Diesel has little more to do than strut, quip and fight, surrounded by a bunch of blathering characters you don't care about. Even a clever final twist, which puts Riddick in a very surprising position, barely registers above the din.

Twohy has described his "Pitch Black" sequel as follows: "It is not a story about good guys versus bad guys -- it is a story about bad guys versus evil guys." Fair enough. Unfortunately, it's also a story about good production value versus bad script.
_____

(109 minutes; rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violent action and some language) Grade: C