September 17, 2009
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
(out of four)
Tut tut, it looks like a hit for Sony Pictures Animation. Eye-popping and mouth-watering in one, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs spins a 30-page children's book into a 90-minute all-you-can-laugh buffet, expanding the premise of a town where it rains ketchup and hot dogs to disaster-movie proportions. With drooling tongues in cheek, tyro helmers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (whose only previous directing credit was cult MTV toon Clone High) bring a fresh, irreverent sensibility to bigscreen computer animation, using 3D projection to maximize their sky-is-falling scenario. This box office and concession-stand draw should make exhibitors very happy.
Continue reading "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" at Variety.com
Posted by Peter Debruge on September 17, 09 at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2007
Stardust
(out of four)
Fans of The Princess Bride have been waiting 20 years for another movie to come along that approximates the charm, romance and magic of William Goldman's true-love fantasy classic. Stardust is more than happy to oblige.
Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, the movie features wishes and unicorns and all manner of magic, which director Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) presents in such a way that every outlandish twist seems perfectly plausible. It's like a Terry Gilliam movie without the headaches.
Posted by Peter Debruge on August 10, 07 at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2007
Broken English
(out of four)
Broken English takes 30 minutes to do what most romantic comedies manage with a simple montage. That's a good thing, by the way. In the post-Seinfeld, post-Sex and the City world of speed dating, nothing indicates the leading lady has given up on love like a series of bad (usually blind) dates that fizzle over superficial reasons, like having "man hands" or "funky spunk."
Broken English thinks more of its audience and its characters. Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) is nearing 40. Her best friend (Drea de Matteo) is married, perhaps not happily so, but at least advantageously attached. Even her mother (Gena Rowlands) has found a second love. Meanwhile, Nora's stuck on the road to spinsterhood, too jaded to put much hope in the men she meets.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on July 25, 07 at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2007
Big Bang Love: Juvenile A
(out of four)
What's the new Takashi Miike movie doing at Outfest? For the uninitiated, Takashi Miike is the most unpredictable director working today, the gonzo poster boy of Asian extreme cinema whose bloody, over-the-top ideas defy imagination — precisely the quality we jaded, seen-it-all-before film critics cherish most in movies: the element of surprise (which in Miike's case is putting it mildly). Outfest, of course, is the country's second-oldest gay and lesbian film festival, turning 25 this year. Needless to say, it is not a forum where Miike's fans might ever expect to find one of his movies.
Continue reading "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A"
Posted by Peter Debruge on July 23, 07 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2007
Golden Door
(out of four)
Virtually everything Americans know about Ellis Island they've learned from the movies, and virtually all those movies were American. Golden Door offers the other side of the story, the one that ends at Ellis Island instead of beginning there. This version tells of a family of Sicilian immigrants who aren't quite sure they want to become Americans — and a country that isn't sure it wants them either.
Hollywood's favorite Ellis Island myth is the one about families whose names were changed when they became citizens. No evidence of any such practice exists, but Golden Door raises a distressing variation on the same theme, as masses of tired, poor and huddled foreigners check their cultural identities like so much unwanted baggage at the gates. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" Lady Liberty cries in her poem, "The New Colossus."
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Posted by Peter Debruge on June 22, 07 at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2007
Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts
(out of four)
Oscar prediction gets a little trickier in the animated shorts category, but then, the program is a lot more fun, so check out all 10 shorts (the five nominees, plus five more culled from the Academy's short list).
There's something for everyone here. Fans of The Little Mermaid can see Disney's hand-drawn take on another Hans Christian Andersen story in The Little Matchgirl, while Pixar aficionados can enjoy Lifted, in which an alien student takes his abduction exam, before the studio releases it with Ratatouille this summer.
Ice Age's Gollum-like Scrat character chases his precious acorn through history in No Time for Nuts. Maestro features an operatic CG bird prepping for his hourly performance. And the intensely personal The Danish Poet most resembles last year's winner, Moon and the Son.
[as featured in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram]
Posted by Peter Debruge on February 16, 07 at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2006
Happy Feet
(out of four)
In the wonderful documentary March of the Penguins, Morgan Freeman describes emperor penguins as "not that different from us, really." They love, they mate, they mourn, they shuffle 70 miles across the frozen Antarctic tundra to feed their adorable fuzzy babies.
Happy Feet takes a subtle, but critically different approach to those same fascinating flightless birds. Instead of turning penguins into people, it transforms people into penguins. It's a device as old as Aesop, using animals to illustrate a parable about human nature, and nobody does it better than director George Miller, creator of the Babe movies.
Posted by Peter Debruge on November 17, 06 at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)
August 25, 2006
Quinceañera
(out of four)
Keen-say-an-yer-ah. Even if you can't say it, you should see this indispensable picture of modern-day Los Angeles told through the eyes of a young Latina on the cusp of her fifteenth birthday. Quinceañera is an unexpected self-portrait from a town that loves to tell stories about itself, often to the exclusion of the countless equally deserving dramas unfolding just a few blocks away. Here, instead of yet another movie about movies, we get an observant little kitchen sink story about the cost of gentrification a mere stone's throw from Hollywood.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on August 25, 06 at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
December 28, 2005
Match Point
(out of four)
The trailer for Match Point ends with a shocking twist. As the film's title appears, so do the words "From Director Woody Allen," and the audience gasps because the preview they've just seen looks nothing like a Woody Allen movie. Well, the movie ends with a twist, too – a wry little joke where Woody gets the last laugh after a perfectly earnest thriller about an ambitious young Irish tennis pro (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) who integrates himself into London society by latching onto a well-connected friend's kid sister (Emily Mortimer), only to risk it all over an illicit affair with the friend's fiancée (Scarlett Johansson).
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Posted by Peter Debruge on December 28, 05 at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2005
Zathura
(out of four)
As movie pitches go, it's hard to imagine anything shorter or sweeter than "Die Hard on a bus" (Speed) or "snakes on a plane" (next summer's Snakes on a Plane). Try this one on for size: "Jumanji in space."
Okay, okay, so you didn't love Jumanji, with its primitive CGI and overbearing (not to mention over-bearded) Robin Williams energy. Zathura is a whole different beast, a wild buckle-up-and-blast-off adventure that plunges every corner of kids' favorite subject.
Posted by Peter Debruge on November 11, 05 at 08:26 AM | Comments (0)
October 07, 2005
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
(out of four)
The magic of the movies is never more evident than with stop-motion animation, and nobody does it better than Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park (better known in the States as the director of Chicken Run). Acting, car chases, even computer-generated special effects have never been specific to the medium, but stop-motion only works on screen. There's nothing like watching the mysterious process through which a series of still photos spring to life before your eyes, and no matter how absorbing the story, the how-they-did-that factor always remains.
Continue reading "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit"
Posted by Peter Debruge on October 7, 05 at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2005
Grizzly Man
(out of four)
"Grizzly People'' co-founder Timothy Treadwell dedicated his life to the protection of North American grizzly bears, traveling to the Alaskan wilderness to live in close proximity with the deadly animals every summer for 13 years. It may seem like an ironic twist of fate that Treadwell ultimately (or perhaps inevitably) met his death in 2003 at the paws of the very animals he worked so diligently to protect, but irony itself is characterized by surprise and contradiction. What other outcome could Treadwell possibly have expected to the lifestyle he had chosen?
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Posted by Peter Debruge on September 23, 05 at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2004
The Polar Express in IMAX 3-D
(out of four)
Chris Van Allsburg's charming Christmas tale, The Polar Express, contains one of the most straightforward lessons to be found in all of children's literature (with the possible exception of Taro Gomi's helpfully titled Everyone Poops), and yet its simple message is more than enough foundation to make a great Christmas classic: ''Sometimes seeing is believing, and sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can't see.'' That sentiment doubles as the founding paradox of Christian belief, but The Polar Express isn't one of those churchy ''true meaning of Christmas'' movies. It's a good, old-fashioned North Pole adventure brought to life with the most state-of-the-art animation technology money can buy, and there's really only one way to experience it:
See The Polar Express on IMAX 3-D or don't see it at all.
Continue reading "The Polar Express in IMAX 3-D"
Posted by Peter Debruge on November 10, 04 at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2004
Hero
(out of four)
In Hero, director Zhang Yimou puts the "art" in the martial-arts movie, using the deceptively simple story of an unnamed warrior (Jet Li) who confronts a bloodthirsty Chinese king's three deadliest assassins to stage a dazzling action spectacular. For anyone who's ever admired the way Hong Kong cinema elevates the visual language of action filmmaking -- from John Woo's balletic shootouts to the graceful dance-like fight choreography of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon -- Hero demonstrates the genre in its most purely operatic form, a colorful pageant of texture, motion and character. The movie's slow pace may catch action fans off-guard, but the unhurried rhythm ultimately helps direct the audience's attention towards the physical elegance of Yimou's fight scenes (each reenacted to a different color theme), told and then retold as a ploy to put the movie's nameless hero within sword's reach of his true adversary, the king. In the end, it is the poetry of Hero's images, not the particulars of its story, that are likely to remain imprinted in moviegoers' memories.
Posted by Peter Debruge on August 27, 04 at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2003
American Splendor
(out of four)
Harvey Pekar is not your average comic-book hero. He's short, cranky and nebbish with absolutely no superpowers to speak of. But that's exactly why he's developed such a fervent fan base among underground comic fans. You see, Harvey Pekar's just an average Joe. By day, he works a dead-end job as a file clerk at the local V.A. Hospital. But when no one else is looking, he scripts the more cantankerous moments from his largely uneventful life for other artists to illustrate.
Continue reading "American Splendor"
Posted by Peter Debruge on August 15, 03 at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)
September 13, 2002
Igby Goes Down
(out of four)
Imagine if Royal Tenenbaum met Mimi Slocumb (the matriarch in Igby Goes Down) -- the kids they might have! In some ways, the Slocumbs and the Tenenbaums aren't so different. In both families, children orbit their disconnected parents like satellites searching for any sign of affectionate life. As played by Susan Sarandon, Mimi's not so much a mother as a manager, bossing her children, Igby (Kieran Culkin) and Ollie (Ryan Phillippe), from her icy perch. In the opening scene of Igby Goes Down, Igby and Ollie patiently wait for a lethal cocktail to put their mother out of their misery. When the drugs don't take hold, they switch to Plan B, cinching a plastic bag over Mimi's head until she finally stops breathing.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on September 13, 02 at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2002
The Salton Sea
(out of four)
How far would you go to avenge your wife's brutal murder? Anyone can take Memento's lead and tattoo your memories of her all over your body, but would you dare take it one step further? Could you embrace her killers' lifestyle in order to bring them to justice?
In The Salton Sea, Danny Parker (Val Kilmer) plunges himself into the tweaker subculture that destroyed his life. But his plan involves more than just another undercover stunt, and the stakes are higher. For it to work, Parker must let go of his former self and accept addiction. He has to in order to get close to the volatile crew of crystal-meth users who hold the key to his revenge, but also as a way of cleansing his own demons.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on May 10, 02 at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2001
Amélie
(out of four)
As the kinetically lovable Amélie Poulain, Audrey Tautou flits about like Juliette Binoche on Ecstasy. Filled with the kind of emotional intensity that seems to fuel Celine Dion songs, her heart is perpetually on the verge of bursting. Amélie is an anomaly, the lone Parisian who thinks of others before herself. She devotes her days to fulfilling the unspoken dreams of the friends and strangers around her. To inspire her lonely father to travel the world, for instance, she liberates his plaster garden gnome and sends snapshots of its merry travels back home.
Posted by Peter Debruge on April 25, 01 at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)