Opening
Adam In the opening scenes of writer-director Max Mayer’s
drama about a man with Asperger’s syndrome, Adam (Hugh Dancy) is at his
father’s funeral. While we never see his dad, we get the sense that
Adam’s going to be lost without him. After all, this is a guy who eats
the same thing every day (bran for breakfast, mac and cheese for
dinner) and keeps his brownstone apartment in meticulous order.
Asperger’s is a mild form of autism that makes it difficult for Adam to
communicate, even though he’s physicist-smart. So when he meets his
lovely brunette neighbor Beth (Rose Byrne), he has trouble telling her
how much he likes her, though at one point he blurts out that he’s
sexually aroused. The two begin a relationship that goes along smoothly
until, in predictable fashion, Adam has one of his fits, forcing Beth
to break up with him. Of course, in the next scene, Adam overcomes his
fear of the outside world and pursues Beth. He tries to convince her to
help him with his new job at an observatory, which requires that he
move to California. The film’s trajectory recalls a made-for-TV
special, and a subplot concerning Beth’s fraudulent father (Peter
Gallagher) is completely extraneous. While Dancy and Byrne have decent
chemistry, the whole thing is pretty schmaltzy.
** (Jeff Niesel)
Adoration Video-obsessed teen Simon (Devon Bostick) gets
carried away with a class assignment that requires him to imagine what
his life would have been like if he had been born to different parents.
So Simon creates a fictional story in which his father (Noam Jenkins)
was a terrorist who blew up a plane. Once his story gets on the
Internet, it causes a good deal of controversy because everyone thinks
it’s true. It doesn’t help that Simon is an orphan, and his only role
models are a coarse tow-truck-driver uncle Tom (Scott Speedman) and
racist grandfather. Because Simon mixes his life with the character
he’s created, the movie’s plot is often confusing and difficult to
follow. Yet Atom Egoyan’s film has intensity and shows just how complex
(and screwed up) human relationships can get — especially when
Simon’s teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) starts to second-guess
the assignment and begins stalking his uncle, until she reveals a
secret from her past. Cedar Lee Theatre. ***(Niesel)
Kabei: Our Mother (Japan, 2008) The idyllic life of a
Japanese family takes a sudden turn when the police show up one night
and detain father Teruyo Nogami (Miku Sato) for violating the “peace
preservation law.” A philosophy professor who has the works of
Nietszche and Goethe in his collection, Teruyo doesn’t adapt his ideas
to the country’s fascist bent. So after he’s locked in prison, his wife
Kayo (Sayuri Yoshinaga) takes on the role of raising two daughters and
struggles to make ends meet. She eventually gets a job teaching at a
primary school that pays the bills and learns to endure without her
husband, though she never loses faith in him. A well-crafted period
piece, Yoji Yamada’s film provides a glimpse into family life during
the 1940s. Based on the memoirs of a young girl who grew up during the
period, it shows how tumultuous things were at that time in Japan, as
nationalism ran rampant and communists and other dissidents were
considered traitors. Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall. At 6:30 p.m.
Friday, Aug. 21, and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 23.
***(Niesel)
The Lady Eve (U.S., 1941) Barbara Stanwyck plays a con artist
in this Preston Sturges farce. At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 20, and 4
p.m. Sunday, Aug. 23.
Léon Morin, Priest (France/Italy, 1961) A young priest
tries to convert a Jewish widow in Jean-Pierre Melville’s film. At 9:30
p.m. Friday, Aug. 21, and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 22.
The Marc Pease Experience While a bad case of stagefright
kept Marc Pease (Jason Schwartzman) from delivering his solo as the Tin
Man in a high-school production of The Wiz, that blunder hasn’t
kept him from pursuing his musical ambitions. Eight years out of high
school and now a limo driver, he’s the main man behind an a capella
group called the Meridian 8, and even though they keep downsizing, Marc
is determined to sell his condo and use the money to record a demo. The
problem is, he wants to enlist Jon Gribble (Ben Stiller), his
high-school drama teacher who hasn’t returned Marc’s phone calls since
Marc blew it as the Tin Man. This concept didn’t work so well for
Hamlet 2, last year’s misguided comedy with Steve Coogan, and it
doesn’t go over much better here, though both Schwartzman and Stiller
are terrific in the few scenes they share together (notably a brawl in
Gribble’s office). Still, the film has some good moments: Marc is such
a lovable loser, you can’t help but cheer him on as he tries to battle
the demons that turned him into the drama club’s goat. Valley View
Cinemas. ** 1/2
(Niesel)
Milestones (U.S., 1975) A new restored print of Robert Kramer’s classic film
about the ’60s. Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque. At 6:30 p.m.
Sunday, Aug. 23.
The Pleasure of Being Robbed (U.S., 2008) Twentysomething New
Yorker Eleonore (cowriter Eleonore Hendricks) hopscotches around
Manhattan stealing grapes, kittens, even a Volvo, seemingly for the
sheer fun of getting away with it. Is she a klepto? Some kind of
criminally inclined performance artist? Twenty-five-year-old first-time
director Josh Safdie never gets around to telling us what makes
Eleonore tick — since his movie only runs 70 minutes, perhaps he
ran out of time — which is the central flaw of this mildly
intriguing DIY indie. There are pleasures to be gleaned here (Hendricks
is a screen natural, and Safdie evinces a neatly understated sense of
deadpan humor), but like the film itself, they’re mostly of the
small-change variety. As a calling card for director-for-hire gigs on
network and cable sitcoms like The Office or Flight of the
Conchords, it does its job in reasonably expedient fashion.
Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque. At 8:25 p.m. Thursday, Aug.
20, and 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 21. ** 1/2 (Milan Paurich)
Post Grad Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) is that girl you hated in college. An attractive straight-A student who participated in all the right extracurricular activities, she’s the one who seems destined for success and is set on working at the city’s biggest and best publishing house. But a funny thing happens on the way to the publishing house. She doesn’t get the gig. Rival Jessica Bard (Catherine Reitman) is hired instead, sending Ryden into a tailspin. Complicating matters is the fact that Ryden leans so heavily on her best friend Adam (Friday Night Lights’ Zach Gilford). He’s clearly in love with her, but she’d rather keep the relationship platonic and falls for the hunky guy-next-door (Rodrigo Santoro) instead. While the film’s not as quirky as, say, Juno, it does go for a similar vibe, particularly when it comes to Ryden’s family. Her goofy dad (an unhinged Michael Keaton), madcap grandmother (Carol Burnett) and manic mom (Jane Lynch) are such oddball characters, they provide it with the comic relief it needs. ** 1/2 (Niesel)
The Room (US, 2003) Among film hipsters on the West Coast,
cult notoriety has been conferred upon
writer-director-producer-star-mogul Tommy Wiseau’s tragic psychodrama.
Wiseau, who kinda seems (in more ways than one) like Fabio crossed with
Ed Wood, plays the lead role (no surprise there) of Johnny, a nice-guy
San Francisco banking exec whose idyllic life starts to fall apart a
month before his planned nuptials. Fiancée Lisa secretly doesn’t
love him anymore (we are told this about four or five times) and is
carrying on an affair with Mark, Johnny’s “best friend” (we are told
this about 400-500 times). With English-as-a-second-language dialogue,
characters who awkwardly entrez and exeunt, laughable love interludes
and from-hunger acting, the world may now be laughing at Mr. Wiseau,
not with him. But grant The Room this much: It’s not an amateur
Tarantino/Lucas/Spielberg/Romero genre clone, like so many turkeys, but
bravely blazes its own way, à la Wood’s singular Glen or
Glenda. Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque. At 9:50 p.m.
Saturday, Aug. 22. ** 1/2 (Charles Cassady Jr.)
Shorts While Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, the Adventures of
Sharkboy and Lavagirl) makes kids’ flicks that aren’t necessarily
smart enough to appeal to adults, they’re a step above the kind of
stuff that usually passes for family entertainment. Shorts centers on the trials and tribulations of one Toe Thompson (Jimmy
Bennett), a defenseless kid who gets picked on at school by the
daughter and son of Mr. Black (James Spader), the town’s power-hungry
millionaire who’s devised a contraption that transforms a cell phone
into a toaster (but doesn’t, thankfully, have Transformers-like
powers). When Toe discovers a secret rock that enables its owner’s
wishes to come true, everyone from his mother and father (Leslie Mann
and Jon Cryer) to his germophobic neighbor (William H. Macy) tries to
get their hands on the thing, sending the small suburban community into
an uproar. Toe tells his story out of sequence (hence the “shorts”
title), and Rodriguez often lets the story spiral out of control. But
it’s good, campy fun that never has to rely too heavily on special
effects to make its point that self-discovery is key.
***(Niesel)
This article appears in Aug 19-25, 2009.
