Opening
Bliss (Turkey/Greece, 2007) A Turkish teen takes his cousin
to Istanbul, where he plans to perform an honor killing to atone for
her rape. Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque. At 8:20 p.m.
Thursday, Dec. 10, and 7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 11.
Cherry Blossoms (Germany/France, 2008) Winner of the audience
award when it showed recently at the Cleveland International Film
Festival, Doris Dörrie’s film is a touching story about Trudi
(Hannelore Elsner) and Rudi (Elmar Wepper), an elderly Bavarian couple
who try to reconnect with their children. They first visit two of their
kids, now grown up, in Berlin, but when it’s apparent they’re not
welcome, they take a trip to the Baltic Sea. When Trudi unexpectedly
dies, Rudi has to go back home by himself. He can’t adjust to life
without his wife, so he goes to Tokyo to see his son. That doesn’t go
so well either, but after he meets a young homeless Japanese girl, he
suddenly gets in touch with his spiritual side. A loose retelling of
the 1953 film Tokyo Story, the movie has compassion at its core
and is beautifully shot, but it often opts for sentimental crutches
(several heavy-handed metaphors) that seem forced. Cleveland Museum of
Art. At 6:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 11, and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 13.
** 1/2 (Jeff
Niesel)
Earth Days (U.S., 2009) This documentary chronicles the
evolution of the modern environmental movement. Cleveland Institute of
Art Cinematheque. At 7:20 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 12, and 9 p.m. Sunday,
Dec. 13.
In Theaters
Armored Ty (Columbus Short) is a decorated Iraq war
veteran trying to take care of his younger brother (Andre Jamal
Kinney). He works as a guard for an armored-car company, but his salary
isn’t enough to pay the mortgage. Ty’s best friend Mike (Matt Dillon),
also a guard, has a solution. On their next run, with the help of a few
fellow guards (Jean Reno, Laurence Fishburne, Amaury Nolasco and Skeet
Ulrich), they will stage a robbery and take the cash for themselves. Ty
is reluctant to go along, but as his personal situation worsens, the
plan starts to look more appealing. Besides, Mike assures him, no one
will get hurt. Right. The film’s tone, measured pacing and
straight-forward visual style hearken back to the mid-budget action
films of the ’80s, as does John Murphy’s ominous synthesizer score. The
script is nothing special and could easily have resulted in a mediocre
film. Thanks to the strong cast and director Nimrod Antal’s skill at
generating suspense and tension, though, Armored manages to be a
pretty enjoyable thriller. ***(Robert
Ignizio)
The Blind Side The Blind Side belongs to “white-man’s
burden” movies like Dangerous Minds or The Soloist, in
which benevolent whites heroically rescue underprivileged black people.
Accordingly, there are moments in this movie, based on the life of
Baltimore Ravens rookie tackle Michael Oher, that are cringingly
uncomfortable, like when Sandra Bullock — as Leigh Anne Tuohy, an
affluent Southern woman who has opened her home to Oher — sashays
into the kid’s rough Memphis neighborhood in tight skirt and heels to
give a drug dealer a talking-to, warning him that she’s packing heat.
If this were fiction, it’d be as phony as Astroturf. But like those
other movies, it’s a true story, told with enough sensitivity to almost
overcome the troubling sense of noblesse oblige. Bullock acts her heart
out as the feisty Leigh Anne. Her performance makes a character that
might have been repellent — privileged, pushy evangelical —
rather endearing. ***(Pamela Zoslov)
Brothers Just before he’s to be shipped to Afghanistan, Capt.
Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) picks up his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal)
from prison. Tommy seems to be on a path of self-destruction that would
take an earth-shattering event to right, and that event comes when
Sam’s helicopter goes down and he’s presumed dead. Back home, Tommy is
shaken straight and takes up handiwork around his brother’s house and,
eventually, playtime with Sam’s kids. Meanwhile, Sam and a fellow
soldier are being tortured in a prisoner camp in the caves of
Afghanistan. Sam is put to the test with months of malnutrition and
mental torment, and when his rescue comes, his menacing, gaunt
expression and steely eyes tell us (and his grateful family back home)
that something is amiss. Sam can’t readjust to his old life, especially
his daughters, and things spiral downward in raw, primal fashion.
***(Justin Strout)
A Christmas Carol Using the same performance-capture
animation technique employed in 2004’s Polar Express and 2007’s
Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol is another family friendly
holiday feature by the veteran director of Back to the Future and
Forrest Gump. Zemeckis doesn’t mess with Charles Dickens’ book much,
quoting directly from it in the opening sequence, which finds Ebenezer
Scrooge (Jim Carrey) busting out a “bah humbug” when his nephew Fred
(Colin Firth) arrives to wish him a “merry Christmas.” Of course,
Scrooge is in for a shock when he goes home and an apparition of his
old boss Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman) arrives to warn him that he’s going
to be visited by three ghosts before the night is over. Though his
recent attempts to show off his dramatic acting abilities have fallen
short, Carrey is in good form here. He occasionally indulges in
exaggerated facial gestures and slapsticky antics, but that’s going to
keep young viewers interested. That and the fabulous digital 3-D
effects that make it look like snowflakes are falling in front of your
face. ***(Niesel)
Everybody’s Fine This melancholy movie, based on Giuseppe
Tornatore’s Stanno tutti bene, finds Robert De Niro playing
Frank, a widower retired after 30 years manufacturing coatings for
telephone wires. While Frank prepares for a reunion with his grown
children, they each call to say they can’t make it. Impulsively, Frank
boards a train to pay surprise visits to his children scattered across
the country. Onboard, he shows off a photo of his successful brood:
David, the artist; Amy (Kate Beckinsale), the ad executive; Robert (Sam
Rockwell), the orchestra conductor; and Rosie (Drew Barrymore), the
Vegas dancer. On his first stop, New York, Frank finds David missing
from his rundown apartment. He heads to Chicago, where Amy conceals the
truth about her marriage. In the Northwest, Frank discovers Robert
isn’t a conductor but a percussionist. Rosie, too, is keeping secrets.
Phone conversations, set against a landscape of telephone lines echoing
Frank’s career, reveal that David’s in trouble, and the siblings have
agreed not to tell Dad. There are poignant scenes, as when a lost David
“appears” at his ailing father’s bedside. But mostly the movie clicks
along on a predictable track, punctuated by sappy pop songs.
** 1/2 (Zoslov)
Fantastic Mr. Fox Based on a Roald Dahl story, this dark
farmland fable about a group of foxes that wages war against
weapon-packing farmers centers on Mr. Fox (George Clooney), who makes a
promise to his wife (Meryl Streep) to stop stealing birds for a living
and becomes a newspaper columnist. After two years (which is actually
12 in fox years), he’s bored with the lifestyle and the fact that
nobody reads his column. So he buys a new tree for his family and gets
back in the chicken-killing game for one or two (or three) last scores.
When things don’t work out like Fox plans and he puts a bunch of
friends (including a rabbit, badger and an opossum) in danger, he must
use his natural leadership skills to save them. There’s no mistaking
director Wes Anderson’s touch in Fantastic Mr. Fox: The
dialogue, the way the actors read the dialogue and the movie’s pacing
bear his trademarks. And the old-school stop-motion animation is an
exhilarating break from today’s CGI crop. But a great-looking movie
means nothing if there isn’t a story attached to it. Anderson’s film
not only expands on Dahl’s book, it’s really funny.
*** 1/2 (Gallucci)
Old Dogs Veteran actors Robin Williams and John Travolta show
no shame in hamming it up incessantly in this insipid Walt Becker
(Wild Hogs) comedy about two pals whose friendship is tested
when Dan (Williams) is recruited to babysit two kids he didn’t realize
were his. The slapstick humor gets some easy laughs but usually doesn’t
involve anything more than a swift kick in the crotch. The flimsy plot:
Dan’s ex (Kelly Preston) has to serve a two-week prison term for
protesting an environmentally irresponsible company and enlists Dan to
take care of her 7-year-old twins, revealing that they’re actually his
and she never bothered to tell him. But Dan and Charlie (Travolta) are
trying to take their sports agency to the next level and are in the
middle of signing the “biggest deal ever” with a Japanese company. Oh
yeah, and Charlie has an old dog that hangs around the office, peeing
on everything because it’s so old. It’s no surprise that by the end of
the movie, we realize Dan and Charlie are like two old dogs, loyal to
the core, even though they sometimes bark at each other.
** (Niesel)
Transylmania Arriving two months late and many dollars short
for the easy-to-please Halloween juvenile demographic, this atrocious
lowbrow spoof concerns a bunch of sex-drugs-party U.S. college students
who attend a university in Romania (shot on location, evidently) so one
nerdy horndog can hook up with the comely Transylvanian wench he’s met
and masturbated to on the web. The young Americans tangle with assorted
gothic-horror and teen-idiocy clichés — a
dwarf-mad-scientist dean, a vampire coven, possession by an ancient
sorceress, reality-TV shows, horse farts, sex manuals, a gay student in
deep denial, etc. If any movie in particular seems parodied, it’s
Van Helsing, and nobody can deny that one doesn’t deserve
a stake-through-the-heart skewering. Some of this crap might have been
funny if the filmmakers had some finesse with comedic timing, milieu or
storytelling. As it is, the best joke is about MapQuest, and if you
blink you’ll miss it (blink twice and you’ll miss Transylmania‘s
very limited release). Stick with Mel Brooks or Elvira, Mistress of the
Dark. * (Charles Cassady Jr.)
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2009.
