The Band’s Visit
dir. Eran Kolirin
The forlorn comedy The Band’s Visit may have been
disqualified by the Oscars—it contains too much pidgin English to
be considered a “foreign language” film, apparently—but you get
the feeling that being snubbed sort of suits it. Not only does it join
the noble ranks of this year’s fellow rejects (including
Persepolis and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2
Days), not only is it spared the indignity of losing to yet
another Holocaust movie (from Austria, of all places), but it also
reinforces the movie’s melancholy themes. The Band’s Visit is
about laboring in obscurity and reaping immaterial rewards. It doesn’t
need a golden statuette.
The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, dressed in identical
powder-blue uniforms and lined up like children at a school play, has
arrived in Israel for a gig at the opening of a new Arab cultural
center. No one meets them at the airport, and so they end up on a
public bus to Bet Hatikvah, a sandy outpost with two restaurants, one
pay phone, and a roller rink. There’s no Arab cultural center,
though—that’s in Petah Tikvah. Conveniently, the show isn’t until
the following day.
Bored, sexy Dina (Ronit Elkabetz, last seen as a prostitute mom
in Or (My Treasure)), the proprietor of a ramshackle cafe,
invites the men to stay the night in town. Her confident stare and
cloud of black hair are intimidating, but the courtly bandleader Tewfiq
(Sasson Gabai) eventually assents, and his men fan out into households
across town. What follows could be described as a culture clash, but
it’s more of a culture bump—discomfort, flirtation, fleeting
moments of connection, and then more awkward silence. The Band’s
Visit is clever enough not to offer solutions. Instead, it
presents naiveté as a state to which we secretly, futilely
aspire. ANNIE WAGNER
Semi-Pro
dir. Kent Alterman
The Will Ferrell comedy template: Take a profession (anchorman,
NASCAR driver, ice-skater), insert at least one scene of Ferrell sans
clothing, then pummel the premise with overextended gags and too-few
moments of inspired lunacy. Rinse and repeat.
The latest example, Semi-Pro, returns Ferrell to the ’70s,
this time as Jackie Moon, a one-time one-hit wonder (“Love Me Sexy”)
and owner of the Flint, Michigan, Tropics, a fledgling American
Basketball Association team. Both a player and coach, Moon struggles to
keep his franchise afloat until a rumored merger between the flashy ABA
and the increasingly dull NBA is finally approved. But when that
go-ahead finally arrives, there’s the inevitable catch: Only the best
four teams in the league will be embraced by the NBA. The rest will be
dissolved.
From the cover of this fairly standard setup, Ferrell and company
(including Woody Harrelson, André Benjamin, and the great Will
Arnett) let loose with a barrage of gags. Some, such as an extended
riff involving an unloaded gun, keep upping the ante until you’re
lulled into laughter. Others, like a romantic subplot that leads to a
truly inspired sex scene, are surprisingly fresh. Throughout, director
Alterman wisely keeps things moving, rarely letting scenes outstay
their welcome; at 90 minutes, the movie feels just right. Much as in
Ferrell’s high-water mark, Anchorman, what keeps the movie
afloat is the constant threat that things will spin into absurdity.
Semi-Pro may not be a great comedy—too many predictable
digs at the ’70s, a third act that tries too hard to be
sentimental—but there’s enough lunacy on display to eventually
win you over. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Penelope
dir. Mark Palansky
I’d hoped watching Christina Ricci wearing a prosthetic pig nose for
101 minutes would add at least a grain of amusement to this romantic
comedy. I was wrong. Penelope, produced by and costarring
Reese Witherspoon—her second such mishap, after Legally
Blonde 2—is cloying and dull, a sleeping pill dipped in
treacle.
Penelope is a young lady from a rich family who, because of an
ancient curse, was born with a snout. To lift the curse and get a human
nose, she needs to find another rich kid who will love her for who she
is.
And guess who learns to love her. No, really—guess. Ready?
Herself. She learns to love herself. Which tells you pretty
much everything you need to know about this film.
But since we must: Penelope interviews a parade of shallow, greedy
suitors who are after her dowry. In stumbles the relentlessly debonair
Max (James McAvoy), who would be perfect, except he’s not an
aristocrat. And he has a gambling problem—a serious,
up-all-night, hock-the-TV gambling problem that he abruptly and
painlessly kicks just in time for the denouement.
The problem with Max’s gambling problem is the problem of
Penelope—the movie smoothes out all its rough edges,
flattens all of its texture, until it looks much like Ms. Witherspoon’s
promo shots: pastel, glossy, forgettable. (The sole exception: Peter
Dinklage, the four-foot, five-inch actor from The Station
Agent, as a gloomy reporter. If Witherspoon and Palansky cast a
dwarf just to add fairy-tale whimsy—and I wouldn’t put it past
them—their tactic backfired. Dinklage is the only actor up there
who seems human.)
Witherspoon and her associate producers allegedly spent $15 million
on the project, which they’ll recoup if the IMDb reviews are any
indication. (“I LOVED THIS MOVIE!!!”) Are people really so excited to
see another inferior iteration of the old learn-to-love-yourself story?
If so, our national self-esteem is catastrophically low. BRENDAN
KILEY
The Other Boleyn Girl
dir. Justin Chadwick
Let’s unpack this mediocre movie. It’s directed by Justin Chadwick.
The script is by Peter Morgan, whose two previous films, The
Queen and The Last King of Scotland, won top prizes at
last year’s Academy Awards. It stars Scarlett
Johansson and
Natalie Portman. They are supposed to be sisters. They look nothing
like sisters. Their mother, Kristin Scott Thomas, looks nothing like
her daughters. And the daughters also have nothing in common with their
father, Mark Rylance.
And it’s not just a matter of appearance, of looking the same; it’s
more a matter of acting as if you are related. All four don’t act in a
way that makes it believable that they have spent more than a couple
weeks together. Johansson’s body language does not communicate with the
body language of Natalie Portman. There is a distance between them that
the director, the cinematographer, and the performances failed to
conceal.
The film also stars Eric Bana, who played Bruce Banner in Ang Lee’s
Hulk but here plays King Henry VIII. Nothing in Bana’s body
communicates the power of a king, of a man who has God’s permission to
dominate an entire country. Those who have watched Ray Winstone’s
performance of the king in the TV program Henry VIII (also
written by Peter Morgan) know the kind of language the body must use to
communicate absolute power. The story of The Other Boleyn
Girl: Johansson and Portman are sisters whose father talks them
into abandoning their normal, aristocratic lives in the country and
entering the court to become mistresses of the king. One, Johansson,
gives the king a son; the other, Portman, a girl. And Portman pays a
heavy price for her failure to give the king a boy. It’s good to be the
king. CHARLES MUDEDE
City of Men
dir. Paulo Morelli
City of Men is the movie adaptation of the Brazilian
television program of the same name, which was a spinoff of Fernando
Meirelles’s deservedly popular film City of God, which was
itself adapted from a novel. Whew. Perhaps you recall the opening scene
in City of God, which followed an emancipated chicken on a
tear through the maze of a city slum. Unfortunately, there’s nothing
like that in this new film, directed by one of Meirelles’s assistants.
It’s just a copy of a copy of a copy; and where the style has faded,
sentiment has flooded in.
Acerola (Douglas Silvia), known as Ace, and Laranjinha (Darlan
Cunha), or Wallace, are 18-year-olds growing up on the fringes of the
street gangs that alternate control of their hilltop favela. Neither
has a real father—Ace’s is long dead, and Wallace’s is probably
in prison—and by the way, Ace’s own son, who’s just a toddler,
seems likely to experience the same fate. Not 15 minutes into the
movie, Ace ditches his kid at the beach in order to help Wallace search
for his father. The irony is crushing.
This kind of laziness is everywhere in City of Men. The
same bronze sheen from City of God coats the same
sweat-jeweled backs, but the editing is unadventurous, squandering its
cuts on copious flashbacks to the television show. The story, which is
about deciding whether to be good or bad, is weak; the themes, about
fatherhood and responsibility, are transparent. The only things that
make City of Men tolerable are the performances of its young
leads.
ANNIE WAGNER
