Juno
dir. Jason Reitman
“It’s amazing there’s saps that actually cry at this,” quips
16-year-old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) as she gazes at the murky images
of an ultrasound. The fuzzy glob is her own unexpected pregnancy, the
product of a spontaneous quickie with her best friend and longtime
crusher Paul Bleeker (the always brilliant Michael Cera). She has
chosen to give the baby up for adoption, and her willed detachment from
the situation is telling; wise beyond her years and far too clever for
her own good, she spends her life hiding behind a thick coat of irony.
To Juno, being knocked up isn’t a life-changing event, but rather, just
another of life’s stupid situations. And the sooner it’s over with, the
better.
Written by first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody, Juno shares
many of the same traits as its hero. The dialogue crackles but risks
never allowing the audience in; characters threaten to remain buried
beneath a mound of quirks, or worse, descend into easy parody. The film
could have easily crumbled into an overwritten mess, but what rescues
it from aren’t-I-clever self-indulgence is the humanity allowed each
character. When Juno first meets her child’s would-be adoptive parents,
the very boring Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer
Garner), Vanessa tells her she finds pregnancy beautiful. “Well, you’re
lucky it’s not you,” Juno quickly fires back, and it’s the genuine pain
and confusion on Vanessa’s face—and the fact that director Jason
Reitman has taken time to show it—that helps elevate the film
above its hipster trappings. Cynicism is easy, but Juno,
despite its barrage of clever one-liners, doesn’t take the easy way
out. It’s simply one of the sharpest, funniest, sweetest films to come
along in a long while. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
The Kite Runner
dir. Marc Foster
The Kite Runner cleaves to an age-old tradition, and I’m
not talking about classical Asian folktales. Rather, this tradition
entails exotic fiction being anointed by the mass media for
middle-class consumption (in this case, by Oprah), the appropriation of
its third world iconography by Hollywood hacks (fortunate son Marc
Foster), and the thorough schmaltzing of an entire cultural
identity—the conversion of a very real legacy of injustice and
suffering into a palatable cineplex evening for American middle-agers
who don’t like Judd Apatow and don’t understand actual imported
movies.
The Memoirs of a Geisha ordeal (another enervating
DreamWorks buy-up) comes to mind, but instead of shooting for glamorous
sex as filtered through the vibe of a high-end L.A. massage parlor,
Foster’s film envisions Afghan life to have the melodramatic simplicity
of a kebob-house raga, or, more pertinently, American TV shorthand and
stereotype. To be fair, Khaled Hosseini’s bestseller had
sell-me-on-Santa-Monica-Boulevard all over it; every story beat is
either old-world nostalgia or contrived cliché. The movie ramps
up the curdles, whether limning the cartoonish travails of its
9-year-old protagonists in pre-Soviet-invasion Kabul (Hassan’s a tough
low-caste kid, Amir’s his pussified upper-middle-class pal), or the
efforts, 22 years later, of the grown-up, Americanized wimp to rectify
his guilt by returning home to the realm of the Taliban. To boot, a
pivotal rape scene is timidly abbreviated, and the climactic rescue
from a just-plain-evil bully-mullah plays like something out of an
Indiana Jones ripoff.
Overshot, overscored, overdigitized, and underthought, The Kite
Runner pales by comparison to recent films made in Afghanistan,
Kurdistan, and Iran by indigenous filmmakers, simply in how
unconvincingly and patronizingly it paints the country and the culture.
The casting of the Scottish-born, stunningly dull, baby-ass-faced
Khalid Abdalla as the grown Amir serves only to backlight the movie’s
empty head and mushy heart. The happiest grace note is in the casting,
as an amusingly overdressed patriarch, of Homayoun Ershadi, whom too
few of us will remember as Abbas Kiarostami’s architect friend and the
iconic star of his Taste of Cherry—a real visit, for
anyone who’s interested, to a southwest Asia you can believe.
MICHAEL ATKINSON
I Am Legend
dir. Francis Lawrence
The signs were ominous, certainly. Another horror remake? Of a story
already immortalized by the likes of Vincent Price and Chuck Heston?
(In 1964’s The Last Man on Earth and 1971’s jut-jawed,
so-camp-it’s-back-to-straight The Omega Man, respectively.)
And it’s written by the guy responsible for Batman &
Robin? And A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci
Code and I, Robot and oh god stop me now? All that said,
somehow, I Am Legend turns out to be a largely terrific,
meanly gripping movie, anchored by a central performance from Will
Smith at his most serious-minded. I’m as shocked as you are.
Akiva Goldsman’s script stays remarkably faithful to Richard
Matheson’s seminal techno-horror source material: In the
not-too-distant future, a New York scientist stands as the last
unmarked survivor of a man-made plague that has killed half the world
and changed everyone else into nocturnal albino flesh eaters. Director
Francis Lawrence does some impressive work on both the large
scale—the depiction of a moldering NYC is shuddery and
wild—and the small. (An early, extended set piece lit only by
flashlight is a genuinely freaky achievement.)
But, and this is a big but, the whole enterprise is nearly upended
by the use of some noticeably lousy CGI effects. Not only does this
decision smack of tech-addled laziness (can’t Hollywood be bothered to
find a real lion anymore?), but it also threatens to upset the whole
ingenious premise of Matheson’s novel: Rather than telling the story of
a lone soul stalking and hiding from the remnants of society (in effect
becoming a vampire), here it comes across as a guy being harassed by a
bunch of googly-eyed, rubber-legged Colorforms. This rather revolting
development can’t wholly wreck the movie’s accomplishments, but it does
significantly compromise the otherwise stellar atmosphere. Ditch the
computers, slather some greasepaint on some extras, and we’d be talking
a minor classic. ANDREW WRIGHT
Starting Out in the Evening
dir. Andrew Wagner
The professor is old. His health is poor. He has written four
novels. All are out of print. He has one marriage behind him. This
marriage produced an only child, a daughter. His daughter is about to
turn 40. She has no children and wants one before it’s too late. She
has a lover who wants no children. The professor dislikes his
daughter’s lover. The lover, however, admires the professor’s last
novel, The Lost City. The professor’s work has another
admirer—a young woman. The young woman is a graduate student. The
young woman entered his life from out of the blue. His forgotten books
give meaning to her existence. She looks up to him. She is writing a
book about him. She wants to revive his career. She has pretty eyes and
fresh lips. She will do anything he wants her to do.
The professor of this story is Frank Langella; his daughter is Lili
Taylor; his daughter’s lover is Adrian Lester; and his young admirer is
Lauren Ambrose. As a work of cinema, Starting Out in the
Evening is bland. The camera’s movements are entirely controlled
by the steady pace of the story; not once does the cinematographer
wander or look at something that is outside of the plot. The movie’s
score is too sweet and sentimental, and the set designs and colors are
mild.
Yet this is a great film. The reason is Frank Langella’s
performance. He doesn’t just carry the movie; he is the movie. And this
was not an easy achievement. For one, the film has two terrific actors
(Lili Taylor and Lauren Ambrose), and, for two, the subject matter is
tired. This is Love and Death on Long Island; this is Gods
and Monsters; this is the same old story. But John Hurt is in
Love and Death on Long Island, and Ian McKellen is in Gods
and Monsters. With Starting Out in the Evening, all that
Langella is in person—his traits, air, and manner—is not in
this performance: All we see is the heaviness and sadness of an old
writer who has run out of time and words. CHARLES MUDEDE
Goodbye Bafana
dir. Bille August
Nestled deep within Bad Movie Land, there exists a stratum of Very
Important Films whose weighty subject material all but triple-dog dares
a viewer to voice a critical objection. How, after all, do you casually
dis a movie about the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima? Or the
splatterific last hours of Jesus? Or anything directed by Sir Richard
Attenborough?
Goodbye Bafana, the based-on-fact recounting of the nearly
three-decade relationship between Nelson Mandela and his pro-apartheid
jailer, possesses a moral force field that disintegrates within the
first 15 minutes. Dull as dirt and preachy as hell, it does a severe
disservice to a truly great history.
Based on prison guard James Gregory’s memoir, the narrative begins
with the proudly racist Gregory (Joseph Fiennes) being dispatched in
the mid-’60s to work on Robben Island, a notoriously cruel blacks-only
prison designated for political terrorists. While carrying out his
assignment to censor all incoming and outgoing mail, his duties draw
him closer and closer to the galvanizing figure and political views of
Mandela (Dennis Haysbert). Lessons are learned.
For a movie with ample running time (118 minutes), director
Bille August (The House of the Spirits) can’t wait to turn
over his cards—Fiennes’s radical xenophobe sees the light after
approximately one and a half meetings with his captive. After that, all
that’s left is an interminable montage of different prisons, hackneyed
sermons, and period-appropriate hairstyles. There are a few decent
moments scattered here and there (mostly involving Diane Kruger as
Fiennes’s shrewish wife), but overall this is just another
well-meaning, dopily prosaic movie of the sort that often gets a mercy
nomination thrown its way. If The Birth of a Nation was
history written by lightning, as Woodrow Wilson once famously opined,
then this is like, I don’t know, history written by dew or something.
ANDREW WRIGHT
The Walker
dir. Paul Schrader
The third in a trilogy that began with American Gigolo and
Light Sleeper, The Walker is worse than
disappointing: It’s one embarrassment after another. Director Paul
Schrader raids his own work for inspiration, planting loving references
to his previous movies in settings like a gay man’s
chinoiserie-plastered boudoir. His star Woody Harrelson makes a sad
grab for credibility by playing a swishy homosexual (never works,
Woody), and a parade of grand dames (Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin,
and—is she over the Hollywood hill already?—Kristin Scott
Thomas) go slumming in the kind of roles actresses of a certain age are
forced to accept.
Carter Page III (drawl-lisped by Harrelson) is the grandson of a
Virginia plantation owner and son of a senator, but his own career
basically amounts to babysitting. He’s the designated social escort for
a trio of Washington wives whose husbands are too busy to take them to
the opera, with a part-time gig as passer-on of real-estate gossip.
When one of his canasta partners discovers her secret lobbyist lover
dead at home, Carter agrees to pretend he found the body. What follows
is the dullest police investigation I’ve ever seen, the cheesiest foot
race in the history of cinema, and more of that god-awful accent.
Harrelson has decided that his character should sound like Robert E.
Lee with a metronome strapped to his tongue—he sounds like no
Virginian born after 1930 that anyone has ever heard. His occupation
feels dated, too, probably because it was modeled on an associate of
Nancy Reagan’s. And his taste in interior decor belongs to no era I can
identify. All of which makes the movie’s references to current
politics, including an art studio full of crudely manipulated
photographs from Abu Ghraib, feel desperately thin. Just thinking about
this movie makes me depressed. ANNIE WAGNER
The Amateurs
dir. Michael Traeger
A soft satire about a would-be pornographer in small-town America,
The Amateurs has such a lame premise that you can’t help but
wonder how it got made at all. When you consider the multiple titles
and distributors and directors it’s been associated with, and the fact
that it was ultimately directed by its screenwriter, Michael
Traeger—well, Traeger clearly has enough willpower for five men.
He scares me.
Jeff Bridges plays a greasy-haired divorcé prone to
disastrous moneymaking plots (the last, his folksy voiceover informs
us, was a vitamin-selling pyramid scheme). But his loser friends,
including Tim Blake Nelson as a lovesick schmuck and Ted Danson as a
closeted gay, jump at every new venture. Perusing a range of sexually
suggestive advertisements in the local paper—not actual porn,
mind you, that would ruin his character’s affable image and the movie’s
R rating—Bridges hits on his best idea yet: He and his buddies
will make an amateur pornographic film. Speaking a childish argot,
where “scrum” means “fuck” and “babaloos” “breasts,” the production
team recruits strippers and promiscuous ice-cream scoopers and lesbian
“bed store” employees while rejecting a trio of black factory workers
(for insufficient size) and a sad redheaded “gal” (because Tim Blake
Nelson is “in love with her”).
The Amateurs is a disaster on so many levels, but perhaps
the worst is the way it awkwardly critiques its characters’ ideas about
race (the size thing) and homosexuality (“We’re not very
discriminating,” proclaims one of the buddies in a post–coming
out group hug, “idiots, screwups, homos—we’ll be friends with
anybody”) while blithely herding its female characters into the neat
and mutually exclusive categories of sluts and mothers. ANNIE
WAGNER
The Perfect Holiday
dir. Lance Rivera
Are you looking for love this Christmas? Are you hella divorced and
sad? And tell me, how do you feel about fat suits? Totally turned
on? I thought so. Well, you’re in for a treat, lady, because:
“This Christmas, the perfect man just happens to be
Santa.”
That mind-blowing tagline belongs to The Perfect Holiday, a
movie about a nice, lonely gal named Nancy (Gabrielle Union). Nancy is
one of those movie moms: “She’s so busy being everything for
everybody, there’s nobody left for herself!” Boo hoo, right? Right.
Because Nancy lives in a fancy mansion with three
not-at-all-
troublesome baby children, and Nancy’s “job” consists
of cashing hefty checks from her P. Diddy-ish ex-husband and going to
the mall to visit hot Santa. Nancy. SERIOUSLY. What is so
stressful?
The Perfect Holiday opens with some animated credits in
which cartoon Terrence Howard (grinchy!) repeatedly attempts to murder
cartoon Queen Latifah (jolly!), using a saw, a blowtorch, and some sort
of military defoliant. Then Latifah coaxes “the first snowflake of the
season” into her giant mouth. “Come on, li’l fella!” she says. “Mmmm,
buttery, supple, and with a clean
finish. Just like Christmas is
supposed to taste!” Um, ick.
It turns out that hot Santa (Morris Chestnut, created in a lab out
of fairy dust and handsome juice) is not only hot, he also gives
scarves to the homeless and croons gentle holiday melodies filled with
heart. And after a little hint-hint from Nancy’s baby kid, hot Santa
goes a-wooing. Is any of this making sense?
At this point, because I cannot stop thinking about it, I
need to tell you that Nancy’s ex, a rapper or something, goes by the
name J. JIZZY. He has a clothing line called “Jizzy Gear.” Jizzy. Gear.
Excuse me, man. Look at your gear. Your gear is covered with jizz. Why
did you buy that gear? IT’S JIZZY GEAR! This Christmas, the perfect man
just happens to be—eeeeeeeeeew! SANTA, I THINK YOU GOT SOMETHING
ON YOUR GEAR. LINDY WEST
Romance & Cigarettes
dir. John Turturro
Remember when video recorders had just been invented and kids across
the United States spent afternoons together in backyards making movies?
The films were forgettable, but the kids had fun—those afternoons
were about process, not product.
Romance & Cigarettes has that sprawling
hey-my-dad’s-got-a-barn-let’s-make-a-movie feeling, but with a
budget and the kind of movie people you usually like—it was
written and directed by John Turturro, produced by Joel and Ethan
Cohen, and stars James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve
Buscemi, Christopher Walken, Eddie Izzard, Amy Sedaris, and so on. But,
for all that potential, Romance & Cigarettes is
anemic.
A sort of musical—the actors sing along to famous songs by
James Brown, Tom Jones, and others—the story concerns an
adulterer (Gandolfini), his outraged wife (Sarandon), and his lewd
redheaded mistress (Winslet). Puerility is its distinguishing
characteristic. When Sarandon finds out Gandolfini is cheating, she
tells her daughter: “Your father has gone on a beaver diet.” Gandolfini
later notes to the same daughter, apropos of nothing, “It takes me an
hour plus coffee and a cigarette to evacuate in the morning.” When
Gandolfini tells Winslet their affair is over, she claws at his pants,
begging, “Let me suck you before you leave.” He has to throw her in a
nearby lake to keep her mouth off his (self-described) “dinosaur
balls.” All of which would fine—maybe even fun—if
Romance & Cigarettes were funny. Or smart. Or anything
besides puerile.
It is lewd but not erotic, bizarre but not surprising, experimental
but not interesting, and its actors are criminally misused. Early on,
we’ve had enough of Sarandon’s blustery overacting and Gandolfini’s
chronic congestion, but between them, Sedaris and Izzard speak only
about 15 words. There’s no excuse for that.
BRENDAN KILEY
