Opening
Arizona Dream (US/France, 1993) Johnny Depp stars in this
film about a group of vagabonds who live outside of Tucson. Cleveland
Museum of Art Lecture Hall. At 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 24.
The Dead (Britain/Ireland/US, 1987) Angelica Huston and Donal
McCann star as an Irish married couple with problems in John Huston’s
last movie. Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque. At 8:10 p.m.
Friday, June 26, and 6:25 p.m. Saturday, June 27.
Dry Season (Chad/France/Belgium/Austria, 2006) Named Atim (or
“orphan”) because his father was killed before he was born, a teenager
(Ali Bacha Barkai) sets out with a gun to avenge his father’s death in
this film about life in Chad during a period of political instability.
When Atim finally meets his father’s murderer, a baker named Nassara
(Youssouf Djaoro), the man is handing out bread to the homeless. Atim
starts working for Nassara and develops a relationship with him that’s
tantamount to that of a father and his son. Nassara even tells Asim he
wants to adopt him. Even though Nassara shows that he cares for Atim
and promises to turn him into a good baker, the man’s got a temper and
doesn’t let Atim get away with anything. The resolution is hardly what
you’d expect. The film really captures the country’s beauty, as the
shots of the city depict a vibrant, colorful place where people are
surviving, despite harsh political realities. Cleveland Institute of
Art Cinematheque. At 7 p.m. Thursday, June 25 and 8:55 p.m. Sunday,
June 28. *** (Jeff Niesel)
Guest of Cindy Sherman (US, 2008) As the host of a mid-’90s
public access show called GalleryBeat, Paul H-O spent his free
time hitting gallery openings in New York asking dumb questions (“What
do you eat for breakfast?” is one of his favorites). After finding that
photographer Cindy Sherman wasn’t put off by his in-your-face approach,
he becomes friends with her and eventually gets to interview her during
a work in progress. He ends up hanging out with her in her studio loft
and telling her, “You’re the best-dressed person I know” and “You look
really swell.” Sherman eventually falls for him, and the two end up in
love and living together. As much about the New York art scene (the
film includes interviews with artists like Robert Longo, Julian
Schnabel and Sean Landers), Guest of Cindy Sherman is an
interesting self-portrait of Paul, who also directed the movie and
doesn’t shy from depicting his battles with depression and his feelings
of inadequacy. You can’t help but feel for the guy, even if the
exploration of his relationship with Sherman comes off as a bit
exploitative. Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall. At 7 p.m.
Wednesday, July 1. *** (Niesel)
Hoppity Goes to Town (US, 1941) Imagine in a parallel
universe where there’s no Disneyland but rather, Fleischerland. Could
have happened were it not for the conclusive box-office failure of this
feature from Walt Disney’s rival, the Max and Dave Fleischer animation
factory (then overseen by Paramount), wellspring of Popeye, Superman
and Betty Boop shorts. They made only two long-form cartoons — a
moderately successful Gulliver’s Travels and this much
less-revived original fantasy (alternately known as Bugville and
Mr. Bug Goes to Town), which foreshadows both Pixar’s A Bug’s
Life and Japan’s Twilight of the Cockroaches. The Fleischer
team may have lagged some in the storytelling finesse and memorable
character creation, but their visual marvels here could match (or
exceed) the Magic Kingdom’s. Set in a small, overgrown urban lot where
a community of insects (and one pessimist snail, who speaks in doleful
rhyme) are endangered by foot traffic from the gigantic “human ones”
after a fence breaks, it revolves around an old-timey love triangle
between the grasshopper hero, a villainous landlord beetle and a demure
she-bee (named Honey, of course). Sentimental Hoagy Carmichael-Frank
Loesser soundtrack songs aren’t very catchy, but just soak up the
visuals: painstakingly hand-drawn cityscapes, shifting perspectives
that presage CGI, a spectacularly trippy scene in which Hoppity touches
the ancestor of the Bug Zapper and the knockout closer of a skyscraper
erection shown from the tiny protags’ POV. Not a classic, but still a
real find for animation addicts. Cleveland Institute of Art
Cinematheque. At 6:30 p.m. Friday, June 26, and 4:45 p.m. Saturday,
June 27. *** (Charles Cassady Jr.)
My Sister’s Keeper After six feature films in 13 years, it’s safe to assume writer-director Nick Cassavetes will never be confused with his late father, indie pioneer/auteur John Cassavetes. If Cassavetes Senior’s films were (deliberately) rough around the edges and seemingly improvised (even when they weren’t), Cassavetes Junior occasionally errs on the side of slickness. Exxon Valdez oil spill slickness. Take My Sister’s Keeper, Cassavetes’ alternately moving and insidious adaptation of Jodi Picoult’s bestselling novel. The story of an 11-year-old girl (Little Miss Sunshine cutie Abigail Breslin) who sues her parents for “medical emancipation,” My Sister’s Keeper has such a loaded, Lifetime Movie premise that it can’t help but get under your skin. Conceived in vitro as a genetic match for older sister/cancer patient Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), Anna decides that enough is enough when she hires a lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to take her case. Because Kate will probably die if she doesn’t get Anna’s kidney, her parents (Jason Patric and Cameron Diaz, both very good) are understandably apoplectic upon hearing the news. By withholding the true reason behind Anna’s decision until the courtroom climax, the movie is guilty of the most flagrant type of audience baiting. (The whole “medical emancipation” angle turns out to be a gimmicky red herring.) Also problematic is the use of five narrators (kid brother Jesse brings up the rear) to provide multiple perspectives when one coherently articulated point of view would have sufficed. (That literary device worked far better in Picoult’s book.) The most troubling aspect of the film is the faint whiff of exploitation that lurks around the edges. Cassavetes shows courage in not soft pedaling the ravages of cancer: Kate’s vomiting, nosebleeds, et al. Yet too often it feels like wallowing in misery strictly for the sake of hijacking our tear ducts. “Insidious” indeed. ** (Milan Paurich)
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (USSR, 1964) A film truly
outside of time, Sergei Paradjanov’s celluloid folk tale looks like
nothing else made in 1964. Drawing on a rich heritage of
Carpathian-Ukrainian myths, costumes, color and pageantry, the
tapestry-like story starts off in Romeo-and-Juliet fashion but
ultimately follows transfixingly unfamiliar roads, through
birch-covered haunted mountains, with peasant boy Ivan falling in love
with the daughter of the enemy who killed his father. The girl’s
accidental death sends the adult Ivan into a funk of hopeless grief, a
wound of loss and yearning that not even time and marriage to another
can heal, culminating in sorcery and revenge. For his art-crime of
breaking radically with the official style of socialist realism to make
this bold cinematic ballad, Paradjanov himself suffered professionally
and personally under Soviet authorities, but the film stands as his
masterwork. Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque. At 9:55 p.m.
Saturday, June 27, and 7 p.m. Sunday, June 28.
**** (Cassady)
Skills Like This (US, 2007) An affable, Denver-lensed
shaggy-dog caper comedy about a group of twentysomething slacker types
who impulsively embark upon a half-assed crime spree. First-time
director Monty Miranda finds just the right tone here — bemused
and affectionate without a whiff of smugness — to sell a premise
that could have easily devolved into boorishness. As leader-of-the-pack
Max, Spencer Berger (who wrote the film’s clever screenplay) makes a
most appealing protagonist and graciously cedes the movie’s biggest
laughs to Brian D. Phelan (a riot as Tommy, the group’s resident
screw-up). A romantic subplot in which Max courts the bank teller
(Kerry Knuppe) who helped him get away with his first robbery is a
sweet diversion from the boys-will-be-boys antics. Plenty of young
American indie directors have aped Tarantino over the years, but few
have finessed the job as charmingly — and with such a lightness
of touch — as Miranda. Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque.
At 9:55 p.m. Friday, June 26, and 8:10 p.m. Saturday, June 27.
*** (Milan Paurich)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Nobody went to the first Transformers for Shia LaBeouf. Nobody went for Megan Fox either (well, maybe some of us did). Everybody who saw that summer blockbuster two years ago went for the robots – the shape-shifting, ass-kicking, totally awesome robots. In this overblown sequel, director Michael Bay wisely keeps the camera on the Autobots and Decepticons for most of the movie, shoving aside what little plot there is to make room for big, explosive set pieces where tons of shit blows up. This time around, the “story” has something to do with a reborn and revenge-minded Megatron returning to Earth to kidnap LaBeouf’s Sam and then take over the planet. But who really cares? It’s all about bigger and badder battles that span Sam’s front yard to the Egyptian desert. At two and a half hours, there’s plenty of time to get to know Revenge of the Fallen‘s bots, but Bay is more focused on big bangs, cheap laughs and having his metal heroes call opponents “punk-ass Decepticons.” ** 1/2 (Michael Gallucci)
Underground (France/Yugoslavia/Germany/Hungary, 1995) A Grand
Prize winner at Cannes, Emir Kusturica’s shaggy, surreal tragicomic
lament takes 167 minutes to sum up 50 years of Balkans insanity and
absurdity, with tones ranging from Rabelaisian vaudeville shtick to
horror (the latter especially, as the narrative leaps to the modern era
of Bosnian genocide). The storyline follows the fates of two friends in
the ersatz nation of Yugoslavia: crook Blacky and Communist Party hack
Marko, both allied against the Nazis (“fascist motherfuckers!”) in the
underground resistance movement but who come to be romantic rivals for
Natalija, an ambitious and fickle Belgrade actress. Marko hides a
wounded Blacky (and a small army of partisans, a wedding band and a
chimp) in a cellar near the close of WWII and finds it personally and
politically expedient to dupe them all into thinking that the war is
still going on for years afterward (nitpickers noted a slight
resemblance to the obscure Alec Guinness 1965 dark comedy Situation
Hopeless but Not Serious). Meanwhile in the Tito-dominated 1950s
and ’60s, the missing Blacky is proclaimed a peoples’ hero and honored
Marxist martyr. True, a lot of Kusturica goes a long way, and the
effect is sometimes deadening (and you get the sense the Animal
Protective League wasn’t present on this set, nosiree). Still, this is
one of the most important Eastern European films of the 1990s.
Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall. At 6 p.m. Friday, June 26.
*** (Cassady)
In Theaters
The Hangover A pre-titles sequence sets the scene: Four men
are stranded in the desert, all of them beaten, bruised and bloodied.
One of them calls a bride-to-be on his cell, informing her that her
wedding — just hours away — isn’t going to happen. The
groom is “lost.” Flashback two days earlier, when four men —
groom Doug (National Treasure‘s Justin Bartha), his best
friend Stu (The Office’s Ed Helms), buddy Phil (Bradley
Cooper, who played Rachel McAdams’ dick boyfriend in Wedding
Crashers) and the bride’s loser brother Alan (standup comedian Zach
Galifianakis in a breakout performance) — are prepping for Doug’s
bachelor party in Las Vegas. They check into a $4,200-a-night suite, go
to the roof for a celebratory drink and … wake up the next morning,
not remembering a thing. Including how a tiger got in their bathroom,
why they now have a baby and where they left Doug. They spend the rest
of the movie piecing together their forgotten night. It’s one of the
funniest movies of the past couple of years, with enough testosterone
to power Caesars Palace. *** (Michael Gallucci)
Land of the Lost Sid and Marty Kroft’s original Land of
the Lost was by no means a shining moment in television history,
but it was harmless enough fun for the Saturday-morning kiddie audience
of the ’70s. This big-screen version is based on that series’ premise.
While on an expedition, Marshall (Will Ferrell), Will (Danny McBride)
and Holly (Anna Friel) are transported by a device of Marshall’s design
to a strange world inhabited by an ape man Cha-Ka (Jorma Taccone),
dinosaurs and alien lizard men called Sleestaks. Unlike the show,
however, the movie goes for intentional laughs with gratuitous breast
fondling, gay jokes, dinosaur urine showers and a little light
blasphemy. We’re a long way from Saturday morning here, and none of the
jokes are even remotely funny. Land of the Lost fails
just as completely with its action-adventure elements. There’s a CGI
allosaurus chase scene and a few tepid struggles with the Sleestaks,
but thrilling stuff it ain’t. It doesn’t even feel like there’s a real
script here. It’s like the cast and crew went off with a rough idea for
a movie written on a cocktail napkin and just made the rest up as they
went along, figuring Ferrell and McBride’s antics and some mid-level
special effects would cover up any shortcomings. No such luck. This is
just an awful movie and a strong contender for the year’s worst.
* (Robert Ignizio)
The Proposal Even with the age difference (she’s 44; he’s
32), Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds make a darn cute couple in The
Proposal, a high-concept romantic comedy that sizzles more than it
fizzles. Directed by Anne Fletcher, who helped turn Katherine Heigl
into a bona fide rom-com princess in last year’s 27 Dresses, The
Proposal might very well restore Bullock’s title as America’s
(blue-collar) Sweetheart. Bullock plays Margaret Tate, a book editor
who strikes fear into her cowering staff just by entering the building.
After learning that she faces deportation, the boss-from-hell
blackmails her executive assistant Andrew (Reynolds) into marrying her.
Realizing that he’s suddenly got the upper hand, Andrew somehow
convinces “Satan’s Mistress” to fly to Alaska to meet his (what else?)
quirky family. It’s only a matter of time before Margaret and Andrew
realize that they sort of, kind of, actually dig each other. Fletcher
again displays a deft touch with even the most obvious of comic
situations. And hiring veteran cinematographer Oliver Stapleton (The
Cider House Rules, Restoration) ensures The Proposal has
more visual élan than Fletcher’s dowdy-looking Dresses. *** (Paurich)
The Taking of Pelham 123 Walter’s (Denzel Washington) having
a typical day at his job — bullshitting with coworkers,
maneuvering subway trains throughout the city — when a group of
machine-gun-toting bad guys (led by a mustachioed John Travolta) takes
over one of the cars. They stop the train (the Pelham 1 2 3 of the
title) on the tracks, in the middle of a tunnel, and demand $10 million
in exchange for 19 hostages. Travolta’s Ryder gives authorities one
hour to deliver the ransom. If he doesn’t receive it, he’ll kill one
passenger for every minute it’s delayed. Unfortunately, family guy
Walter takes the hijackers’ call and becomes Ryder’s go-to man in this
remake of a 1974 film. Washington brings his usual stately cool to
Walter, slowly transforming him from a downgraded desk jockey to a
button-down-shirt-and-tie-wearing action hero. Meanwhile, Travolta
gives his most intense and showy performance in years as the
foulmouthed and tattooed Ryder. It all culminates in an
underground-to-street showdown, making it a helluva thrilling ride.
*** (Gallucci)
Up Up is an eyes-wide-open fantasy about Carl
Fredricksen (voiced by the always-cranky Edward Asner), whose lifelong
dream of being a globe-trotting adventurer has been halted every step
of the way. He marries his childhood best friend, a girl who shares his
dreams and quest for adventure. Over the years, they live and love and
try to scrape up enough cash to visit Paradise Falls, a mythical
wilderness in South America. After his wife dies, Carl — now an
old man with a bad back and an even worse temperament — spends
his days in his ramshackle house, which stands in the middle of a
construction site (Carl refuses to sell, even as high-rises go up
around him). After he assaults a worker on his property, the court
orders him to a retirement community. So Carl hatches a plan to escape
to Paradise Falls by attaching hundreds of balloons to his house.
Surprisingly, it works, and he sets sail serenely above the city
streets. All goes well until he hears a knock at the door and finds
Russell, an overweight and chatty Wilderness Explorer (it’s like a Boy
Scout) who needs one more badge to advance to the next level. A brutal
storm steers Carl and Russell miraculously in the middle of Paradise
Falls’ outlining forest. And then Carl’s real adventure begins. Unlike
the meditative WALL-E, Up is filled with thrilling action scenes
and colorful set pieces. Like WALL-E, it’s a stunning visual
work with an eco-friendly message. *** 1/2 (Gallucci)
Year One Zed (Jack Black) is an inept primitive hunter forced
to leave his tribe after he gets caught eating from the tree of
knowledge. Zed’s friend Oh (Michael Cera) tags along, and as the two
wander through the ancient world, they encounter various biblical
characters, including Cain (David Cross) and Isaac (Christopher
Mintz-Plasse). Eventually, a plot of sorts begins to emerge: Zed and Oh
learn that their former tribespeople, including a couple of girls (Juno
Temple and June Diane Raphael) for whom they have the hots, have been
sold into slavery and taken to Sodom. So the hapless duo set out on a
rescue mission. Directed and co-written by Harold Ramis, Year
One definitely has the feel of a movie from the guy who wrote
Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack and Stripes. Like
those films, this follows the tried-and-true formula of casting strong
comedic leads as lovable losers who get beaten down but ultimately come
out on top. The movie slips a little when it reaches beyond just trying
to make us laugh to insert a half-assed message about people making
their own destinies. Still, Year One is a reasonably
entertaining film with a generous number of laughs.
*** (Ignizio)
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2009.
