The Hemingway Night is a short film about the interplay of ego, friendship, and regret.  The plot is fairly simple, but the interactions are anything but.  Terry, a young man in his 20s, goes to visit his old friend Leon, an older guy still reeling from his recent divorce.  The two decide to have a few drinks before going for dinner, and turn to remembrances of times past, as such events often do.  Eventually Leon gets drunk enough to spill that he more or less blames Terry and one of Terry’s old friends for his divorce.  But Terry’s version of the story reveals just how little Leon understands himself or his ex-wife.

That’s the high-level summary, but I want to talk a little more about the details, plus a few other things.  So if there’s a chance that you’ll see this micro-budget indie short and you want to remain unspoiled about the details, please proceed with caution.

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Around is a semi-autobiographical story about a struggling film student forced to live on the mean streets of New York for a year or so.  Written and directed by 25-year-old David Spaltro, Around has a visual flair that belies the fact that it was filmed on the cheap and financed by credit cards.  It’s a good-looking movie, beautifully shot and well-edited.  Spaltro has a bright future ahead of him.

But Spaltro’s storytelling skills need honing.

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When FOX Searchlight Pictures announced last year that they'd be producing a film based on the life of slain rapper Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. Biggie Smalls and the Notorious B.I.G.), few people took notice -- until they followed up the announcement by saying the lead role would be filled by an unknown selected by an open casting call to which anyone could apply.  Tens of thousands of rappers, actors, and wannabe superstars tried out for the role of one of the most charismatic figures in the New York hip-hop scene of the 1990s, until the part finally went to a young man named Jamal Woolard.  The good news about Notorious, which opens in wide distribution today, is that Woolard is terrific, fully inhabiting the role of Biggie and conveying both the hard street stye of the self-made Big Poppa and the tender, desperate moments of a man who sometimes had no notion of how to take care of himself after having come so far so fast.  

Better still, Woolard doesn't have to carry the movie entirely on his own:  he's surrounded by a capable supporting cast, especially in the form of Angela Bassett as his mother Voletta, Naturi Naughton as Li'l' Kim (who does a much better job than Li'l' Kim would have), and Sean Ringgold as brutal record mogul Suge Knight.  Refreshingly for a big release featuring legions of newcomers, Notorious isn't let down by its cast.  Unfortunately, let down it is. 

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Following the 2005 release of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, there was some excitement over the possibility that more high-profile gay-themed movies would follow, a development that didn’t really pan out. Now, three years later, Hollywood has once again decided to tackle gay-friendly subject matter, this time the life of slain San Francisco politician and activist Harvey Milk- directed by the openly gay filmmaker Gus Van Sant, no less. But while the film has attained a certain amount of contemporary relevance with its parallels to California’s recently-passed Proposition 8, Milk biggest breakthrough may be the idea that the lives of gay heroes can be boiled down to the Hollywood biopic formula just as easily as their straight counterparts.

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Now that we've established for you once and for all which are the greatest and which are the worst James Bond movies of all time, this is the moment to ask:  where does the latest 007 epic fit on that continuum?  Well, for one thing, we're predicting opinions will wildly vary.  In fact, as you probably noticed, even our Screengrab staff was more or less split, unable to decide if Daniel Craig's first crack at the venerable franchise was a long-overdue and genuinely successful reboot, or a failed attempt at breaking the mold that went nowhere.

I got a chance to see Quantum of Solace  this week, and I'll say for the record that I'd be much more inclined to put it in the 'best of' column than in the 'worst of'.  Then again, I thought Craig's Casino Royale was terrific, so it's not surprising that Quantum of Solace, which is quite solidly more of the same, hit home for me.  Those less charitable toward the first Craig reboot will likely find as much to dislike in the follow-up as I did to like.  As in Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace begins with a dynamite action sequence that the rest of the movie can't top, though it's not from lack of trying; and like its predecessor, it takes a more dark, 'realistic' approach to the concept of Bond as a superspy/assassin, flying in the face of the flippant, adventurous tone of previous incarnations.  The direction, by Oscar nominee Marc Forster, is tight and powerful, which gets it over the occasional rough patches in the script, and the cast is generally excellent; Judi Dench continues to excel as M, and Mathieu Amalric is gripping as lead villain Dominic Greene.  The biggest disappointment, though, is that the movie doesn't cast its nets any farther than it has to; it's content to be as good as Casino Royale, but fails to stretch to the degree that it would have been better.  Good as these movies have been, an unwillingness to press forward will result in them becoming as formulaic as the ones they were meant to replace.

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Gavin O'Connor's new film, Pride and Glory, has a plan:  it's mapped out all the things it wants to remind you of.  It clearly wants to echo the moral ambiguity of The Wire, the multigenerational sweep of The Godfather, the close-knit web of loyalty and betrayal of The Departed.  But since it's O'Connor at the helm instead of the talented folks who brought you those stories, it conjures them in tone only, never in quality, and leaves you asking:  haven't I seen this movie before -- like, a hundred times?.

If O'Connor started out with a script that wasn't particularly going anywhere, and if he wasn't especially going to bring anything to the table as the director, he at least gave us some actors with juice to play his family of often-shady New York police officers.  Edward Norton, who isn't the world's most consistent performer but is occasionally capable of greatness, plays Ray Tierney, a conflicted hard-ass who is divided between fidelity to his insular cop clan and a desire to do the right thing no matter what.  This sort of agonized moralist is a specialty of Nortons, but here he just seems sort of bored.  Jon Voight, on the other hand, seems to be having a ball as the family's drunken father figure, and even though the vast majority of his dialogue are windy cliches, he livens up the flick every moment he's on screen.  No such luck with Colin Farrell, toothy at the best of times and absolutely ludicrous here:  as bad-boy brother-in-law Jimmy Egan, he might as well be twirling a Snidley Whiplash mustache and tying his wife (named, no kidding, Megan Egan) to a railroad track. 

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Recently, when we were preparing our list of the greatest leading men of all time, we had occasion to consider the latter days of Robert DeNiro.  The closer you get to the present day, the uglier his career gets, and the more it appears he's just in it these days for the paychecks that will get him into the better restaurants.   When I sat down for a viewing of his latest, What Just Happened, I wasn't expecting much, especially since his comic track record hasn't been stellar since Midnight Run.  The fact that the film's author, Art Linson, is a friend of DeNiro's was also unpromising, since such nepotistic endeavors flatter the friendship over the art, and what's more, it's an inside-Hollywood movie, which has produced its share of great films, but more than its share of stinkers.

I won't say that it's a triumph for DeNiro, or even a return to form, but most of the movie's failings -- of which there aren't enough for me to call it bad -- are those of Barry Levinson's uninspired direction and a somewhat aimless and formless script.  DeNiro doesn't turn in the kind of legendary performance he was once known for, but that's only because the script doesn't let him.  In fact, his role as frazzled middle-aged movie producer Ben -- a stand-in for Linson -- is one of his finest in years:  he never explodes only because he's too ineffectual and harried to aspire to an explosion.  It's a tight, focused, and highly competent performance as a man nearing the end of his rope and no idea of what to do when he gets there, but because he's in such an absurd profession, and surrounded by such grandly dysfunctional people, that circumstance is understood -- by him and by us -- to be comic instead of tragic.  It's a performance that won't remind anyone of Travis Bickle or Rupert Pupkin, but it should definitely remind them that DeNiro still has a few surprises left in him. 

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The second in my weekend mini-festival of movies made by and for people who hate people like me is Fireproof.  So widely is former TV star/religious fanatic/banana enthusiast Kirk Cameron associated with the movie that the theater I went to here in South Texas was advertising it as "Kirk Cameron's Fireproof".  As a thesis statement, this is something I'm eager to put to the test, but just the way it was phrased...is Kirk Cameron really that much of a draw?  Seeing the movie so advertised -- and I later discovered this theater was far from the only place where the movie was thus billed -- was, for me, akin to seeing a marquee reading "Bounthanh Xaynhachack's Appaloosa".  (It's also not entirely accurate:  Cameron didn't write or direct the film, and may not actually know what writing and directing are, as his claim that he was unable to kiss the female lead in Fireproof because she is not his wife suggests that he doesn't actually know what acting is.)  Still, like I said, this movie isn't made for me.  If there are lost millions for whom Kirk Cameron is a legit box office draw -- and the crowded house in the theater suggested that there just might be -- then for tonight, I would be one of them.

In Fireproof, Cameron plays a firefighter who is gradually falling out of love with his wife, played by Fireproof's Erin Bethea.  (Cameron's downright Dukakasian appearance when decked out in fireman gear that looks a size too big for him makes one question why it was chosen as his character's fictional profession, until you gradually realize that it's so they can cut to an occasional action-packed fire rescue as  respite from the constant relationship yackety blap.  That's right, Christian males:  this is a chick flick.)  The reasons are murky, though it's clearly implied that it's mostly her fault for getting on his Hooksexups:  Cameron is relentlessly misogynistic in the movie, and seems to want to repair his marriage out of a sort of bloody-minded sense of obligation than because he actually cares for his wife.  In order to patch things up with the missus, Fireman Kirk decided to follow the teachings of a book called The Love Dare (originally just a made-up gimmick for the movie, now actually available as the producers sensed the presence of additional fleece on the flock); in the end, he learns to conquer his indifference and hostility and grudgingly love his life partner again.  

The biggest problem with Fireproof isn't that Cameron's character, who is named Caleb Holt and acts like it, is an unlikable jerk.  (We're constantly assured by the movie that he is a good person, generally by way of rescuing people from fires instead of just standing around watching them burn to death, but nothing in his behavior towards his wife, his family, his friends, or anyone who isn't actually engulfed in flames manages to convince you that he's not irredeemably schmucky.)  The biggest problem is that the movie is deadly dull.  One of the biggest problems with any message movie is that the message is generally thought by the filmmakers to be more important than the movie part, and that's the case here in spades.  Why should any of us give a shit if Caleb and Catherine can save their marriage, when the script gives us no reason to care about them and the actors give us no reason to like them?  Say what you will about An American Carol (for instance, you could say it sucks), but at least it wasn't boring.  

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This week, as the election nears, I decided to treat myself to two movies that I ordinarily wouldn't see under any circumstance.  Not just because they looked terrible -- although they did -- but also because they were movies that, in a very literal sense, were not made for me.  These movies are less artistic endeavors than they are salvos in the culture war, and if they were aimed at me, it was not as a consumer, but as a target.  

But hey, so what?  I go see a lot of movies that aren't really meant for me.  I've reviewed Tyler Perry movies, which aren't meant for me.  I've reviewed Disney animated movies, which aren't meant for me.  I'm a big fan of Stan Brakhage, and his movies weren't really made for anyone.  I'm a professional, damn it, and as a professional, I can take whatever to the other side in the culture wars dish out.  The first tasty bowl of arsenic:  David Zucker's An American Carol.

The film, as you may know from Phil Nugent's earlier piece on it, is a high-dudgeoned but low-minded spoof in which a stand-in for Michael Moore (portrayed by a stand-in for Chris Farley) is interrupted in his quest to ban the Fourth of July by a visitation by three ghosts, who attempt to dissuade him from his wicked anti-American ways.  Why wasn't his movie released at Christmastime?  Why would anyone want to ban a calendar day?  Why would you send John F. Kennedy to attack a prominent liberal?  I figured if I started asking myself questions like that, I would just go insane.  Instead, I focused on whether or not the movie was actually funny.  I hope I will be believe when I say that, all ideological considerations aside, it wasn't.  It's not that you can't be funny from a specific political point of view; in fact, satire (which, really, An American Carol is too dumb to qualify as, but still) depends on a moral standing ground from which to attack.  It's that these jokes lack any kind of universality, humanity or relatability:  the only way you can think it's funny is if you agree with where it's coming from.  Or, to put it another way:  the new, right-wing David Zucker believes it's funny to have Michael Moore slapped around by Bill O'Reilly.  If you happen to agree, you might be modestly amused; if you don't, the joke will fall even flatter than it actually does.  The old, non-political David Zucker knew better:  he just thought it was funny when people get slapped.  

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One of the problems with being an atheist is putting up with the kind of people who carry the flag for you.  Get annoyed at the likes of a Richard Dawkins, and there's a doofy polemicist like Sam Harris waiting in the wings.  And hey, Camille Paglia and Marilyn Manson, don't do us any favors, okay?  Back in the day, we had clever bastards like Gore Vidal to go on television and lay down careful traps for the likes of Jerry Falwell to step into; Gore would sit there, smiling his deadly little smile, while the defenders of various sky-gods would work themselves into a frenzy.  It's good philosophy as well as good show business to make your target to all the work, while you just sit back and collect the laughs.  

That's a lesson that could stand to be learned by Bill Maher, who, with Religulous, his new comic documentary about how religious people are a bunch of silly-heads, has done the unthinkable:  he has made blasphemy boring.  Maher, who, until he discovered the millions that could be made by playing to one side or the other in the never-ending culture wars, used to be little more than a hack comic with an unrequited love of bad puns and smirky asides.  Those characteristics remain with him to this day (witness the title of the film, and his interminable playing to the camera as if he were an agnostic David Brent), but they'd be forgivable if he had an ounce of -- well, faith in the fact that his position is strong enough to let religious nuts hoist them by their own petards.  Vidal (and Robert Ingersoll, and Clarence Darrow, and even David Cross) knew that religious people would say a lot of crazy bullshit if you just let them talk long enough; he knew better than to force the point. Maher has no such trust, and when the payoff doesn't seem to be coming fast enough for him, he kills the gag by adding subtitles explaining his real thoughts on the matter at hand, or by cutting to dopey stock footage which he then rolls into a tube and beats you over the head with it.

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The operant notion amongst the publicists of my acquaintance lately -- and God bless them, every one -- seems to be:  let's send Leonard screeners of movies to which he is not even remotely in the target demographic.  Of course, I can't say exactly who the target demographic is for Sukiyaki Western Django.  Martians, probably.  I have a slightly better idea who the target demographic is for Tyler Perry's latest outing, The Family That Preys, and I'm damn sure it doesn't include me.  And yet here we are!  On the theory that someone has to review these things -- a theory that I'm not entirely convinced I agree with -- the job has fallen to me, and I will do the best I can possibly do under circumstances that would be a lot more trying if God hadn't invented the martini.

The plot of this one, such as it is, involves Alfre Woodard and Kathy Bates (for whom I briefly felt sorry for having to appear in this toxic waste dump, until I realized it would probably buy them both a new summer house), playing old friends who are faced with various family dramas, traumas, and scandals.  In order to clear the air, get away from their allegedly comical families, and rebuild their friendships, they take a cross-country road trip of the sort that we haven't seen since Gone Fishin'.  Of course, this makes it sound like the movie isn't just about Tyler Perry dressing up in a crazy outfit and acting wacky, which it is.  There's no Madea in this one, but that doesn't stop Perry from hamming it up like gangbusters, upstaging people I've never heard of named KaDee Strickland and Rockmond Dunbar.

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It's been a busy week for screenings; imagine my surprise when a DVD of the new (well, newish; it opens in limited release here in the States this Friday, but it was actually made in 2007) movie by Takashi "The Filmmaker of Love" Miike showed up in my mailbox.  Miike, the mind behind such twisted cinematic fare as Audition, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q, has a reputation for extreme weirdness, and his new one is no exception.  It may bewilder, confuse and infuriate, but it certainly isn't going to bore.

Set in some nebulous time zone between the Battle of Dannoura in the 12th century and the wild and wooly days of the Wild West (or, in this case, the Wild East), Sukiyaki Western Django essentially does to A Fistful of Dollars what Dollars did to Yojimbo:  lifts its plot wholesale and plops it into a western setting.  But, since it's Miike behind the lens, you know you won't see the story of warring clans bloodily competing for gold done up in any kind of pedestrian fashion.  Taking his cues from Sergio Leone, he sets the movie's action in "Nebada", a section of the old west that's about as authentic as the remote deserts of Tuscany.  He also instructs his actors -- almost all of whom are Japanese, though see below -- to speak in an extremely bizarre form of phoenetic English, which proves to be extremely distracting, if sporadically amusing.  And in one of the movie's most ridiculous divergences, Quentin Tarantino plays a freakish admixture of the Man With No Name and the cowboy narrator in The Big Lebowski.  Tarantino, who cannot act in his native language, also cannot act in Japanese, but Miike simply has him imitate the other actors, who are speaking cod English with thick Japanese accents, and the result is...well, you really just have to see it for yourself.

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Filmed in 1957, just a few years after his outstanding USC student documentary Bunker Hill was released and taking place in the same run-down neighborhood in Los Angeles (even some of the establishing shots, at a busy supermarket and on a steep trolley car going up and down the hill known as "Angel's Flight"), Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles follows a day in the life of a small group of unemployed American Indians living more or less hand to mouth.  The men spend their days sleeping and their nights drinking themselves into oblivion, while the women tend to their families or choose someone to spend the night with before the inevitable fighting breaks out.  It wasn't released until 1961, and MacKenzie would only make one more movie before his death in 1980; but what he leaves behind in The Exiles is a fascinating film that blends a documentary subject with a narrative approach, traditional framing techniques with French New Wave camerawork, and neo-realist situations and dialogue with contemplative internal monologues.

Shown on a double bill at the Armand Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles recently, The Exiles follows the surly, overweight Homer Nish; his trusting, pregnant common-law wife Yvonne Williams; and the drunken, womanizing smoothie Tommy Reynolds through a typical day.  Unsparing in its treatment of their character, but never failing to show the social and economic conditions that affect them, the film shows both the nobility and baseness of its subjects, and along the way creates one of the most fully realized portraits of the American Indian in film history.  A brief interlude on the Arizona reservation that is home to Nish's parents provides a much-needed break in the action, contrasting what the 'exiles' left behind with their daily reality and segueing smoothly back into the contemporary action.   

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I think we can all agree that Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the greatest adventure films ever made. Its two sequels, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade both have some serious flaws. Temple of Doom is shrill, silly, arguably racist and saddled with an atrocious love interest; Last Crusade is a hammy rehash of Raiders where the jokes are all broader and the characters are all stupider. But they have their moments. As I sit here trying to review Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I just can't muster the enthusiasm. Crystal Skull, sadly, makes Temple of Doom and Last Crusade look like, well, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In fairness, it's hard to imagine a fourth Indy movie being particularly good at this point, for reasons that become all-too-clear in the first fifteen minutes of Crystal Skull. (Spoilers ahead!)

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By Mike D'Angelo

Like his previous dramatic feature, the Berlin prizewinner Head-On, Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven explores the increasingly porous borders between East and West, shuttling characters back and forth between Hamburg and Istanbul and observing their rootless confusion. Akin divides the film into three chapters, two of which sport titles that announce the impending death of a major character — a structural device that lends even ostensibly mundane scenes a certain uneasy tension. Part One focuses on a cantankerous Turkish émigré (Tuncel Kurtiz) and the hooker (also Turkish) he hires to be his live-in girlfriend (Nursel Köse), to the consternation of his bookish son (Baki Davrak); Part Two follows the hooker's daughter (Nurgül Yesilçay), a student radical in Istanbul who hightails it to Germany following a demonstration gone wrong and falls into a relationship with a young woman (Patrycia Ziolkowska) she hits up for spare change, to the consternation of the woman's stern mother (Fassbinder vet Hanna Schygulla, the only recognizable cast member for most Americans). Part Three shifts the focus again in ways better left unrevealed.

 

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It's difficult for me to be objective about Hammer and Tongs' second major motion picture, Son of Rambow. At one time, I was its protagonists, a kid whose imagination was set on fire by the bombast of media in the 1980s. Like Garth Jennings, Nick Goldsmith and their pre-pubescent proxies, the political subtext of Reagan-era action was completely lost on me at that age, eclipsed by the catharsis of violent fantasy and superheroics. It's impossible for me to watch Son of Rambow away from my intimacy with its subjects, so certain parts of it that I know aren't necessarily good filmmaking still strike me as wonderful.

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By Mike D'Angelo 

In one sense, Standard Operating Procedure is anything but. Errol Morris has few rivals among documentary filmmakers, but he isn't renowned for tackling hot-button issues torn from yesterday's headlines; most of the folks who've sat down before his patented Interrotron camera have been either fascinating eccentrics (Gates of Heaven; Fast, Cheap & out of Control) or aging provocateurs willing to discuss controversies from decades past (Mr. Death, The Fog of War). For all its lurid notoriety, Abu Ghraib seems almost too ordinary a subject for someone as outlandishly gifted as Morris, and while he's done his usual formally sophisticated and journalistically thorough job, S.O.P. is the first movie he's ever made that gives off a faint but unmistakable whiff of déjà vu.

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Review by Bilge Ebiri 

Full disclosure: despite my fondness for the original, I had to leave Michael Haneke's remake of his own film Funny Games before its crazed, depressing finale. Ordinarily, this would probably be a deal-breaker for a review, but in this unique instance, where the filmmaker seems to be deliberately daring his audience to abandon his film, there was something strangely gratifying about bailing on it.

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Review by Bilge Ebiri

How ironic that a film so determinedly old-fashioned should be undone, at least in part, by lack of style. Directed by Bharat Nalluri and adapted by David Magee and Simon Beaufoy from Winifred Watson's novel, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is eager to recreate the glories of a different time, and a different era of moviemaking. Complete with rapid, witty dialogue and mannered performances, Miss Pettigrew concerns a hapless London governess (Frances McDormand) who winds up, during the Blitz, becoming social secretary to a glitzy, ditzy actress (Amy Adams) and helping her juggle a rather complex love life. It could have succeeded, were it not for its singularly drab visuals and its leaden rhythms. It's a TV movie posing as a '40s bedroom farce. Despite a whole set of terrific performances and a sparkling script, it fails to recreate the excitement of the movies' golden age.

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The Bank Job says it's based on a true story, proudly proclaiming on its striking retro posters, "The true story of a heist gone wrong. . . in all the right ways." Unlike some movies that make similar claims, like the upcoming 21, The Bank Job doesn’t take too many gross liberties with its foundational truths, such as they are. This much is fact: in 1971, Lloyds Bank on London’s Baker Street was robbed. During the burglary, the criminals’ walkie-talkie communications were overheard by a ham-radio enthusiast. It was the biggest story in town for about a week, until a government-issued D-notice, or gag order, was put in effect and that was the end of it. (The U.K. government denies a D-notice was ever issued.) The bad guys got away with it, and no one ever found out why. Bank Job writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, along with director Roger Donaldson, take these events and spin them into a decent story about amateur crooks, thuggish pornographers, pervy politicians and evil Black Panthers.

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Review by Mike D'Angelo.

Taking a brief and very welcome break from memorial filmmaking — Columbine, Kurt Cobain, a forthcoming Harvey Milk biopic — Gus Van Sant achieves thrilling new heights of lyrical expressionism with Paranoid Park, his fractured adaptation of a young-adult novel by Blake Nelson. Frankly, I was so certain that I never wanted to see this particular director set foot on a high-school campus again that I contemplated a restraining order. But this brilliantly schizoid character study — structured as the letter-cum-journal entry of Alex, a skate punk with a guilty conscience (sensational newcomer Gabe Nevins, found via MySpace) — digs into the teenage mindset with a clarity and eloquence that Elephant, with its distracting (and, to my mind, obscene) echoes of real-world tragedy, couldn't possibly achieve. Ostensibly, the plot concerns Alex's involvement in the accidental death of a security guard. But since this act of involuntary manslaughter (briefly seen in gruesome detail) is wholly fictional, Van Sant and Nelson's appropriation of it as an overarching metaphor for the furtive, free-floating sense of shame that accompanies puberty feels bold and incisive rather than deeply disrespectful.

 

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Review by Bryan Whitefield.

When City of God was released in 2002, it became an international sensation for its mix of stylized violence and gritty portrayal of life in the Brazilian favelas. It launched the career of director Fernando Mereilles, who used the same location and several of the non-professional actors from the film to create an episodic series for Brazilian TV called City of Men.

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Review by Bilge Ebiri.

With 2006's Man Push Cart and his latest, Chop Shop, Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani has made a good case for himself as the neorealist poet laureate of New York's immigrant underside. Shot with breathtaking immediacy and featuring casts of non-professionals in real-life locations, Bahrani's films give narrative shape and compelling character shadings to documentary worlds. The result is something that feels like a new language being born, even though it owes a conscious debt to both non-fiction filmmakers like Shirley Clarke and realist narrative masters like John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica. Which is all just a fancy way of saying you really, really should not miss Chop Shop.

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December brought us Juno, a teen movie (over)written by a thirty-year-old ex-stripper; February brings us Charlie Bartlett, a teen movie apparently written by a twelve-year-old whipped into a frenzy of high-school anticipation by every other teen movie ever made. It's an odd creature, this Charlie Bartlett — thick with references to Rushmore, Harold and Maude and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, it feels persistently unreal, untempered by real-life experience of high school. The "drug" sequences seem to come from someone less familiar with altered states than with the pot montage in The Breakfast Club, and a key virginity loss is mysteriously set inside a scene from Sixteen Candles. You might find this annoying, or you might find yourself getting wistful for the worst years of your life.

 

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It's rather unfortunate that Jacques Rivette's latest film is being released here with a title that conveys generic period stodginess à la Masterpiece Theatre, since the original French title — Ne touchez pas la hache, or "Don't Touch the Axe" — better conveys the razor-sharp edges of this superlative, expertly calibrated battle of wills. Faithfully adapted from Honoré de Balzac's novella, it opens in and around a Spanish convent, where gimpy, sullen war veteran Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gérard) seeks an audience with a Barefoot Carmelite nun who calls herself Sister Theresa (Jeanne Balibar). Their brief, impassioned interview, conducted under the suspicious eye of the Mother Superior, abruptly concludes when an agonized Sister Theresa cries out, "Mother, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" At which point the film jumps back five years in order to recount the torturous quasi-courtship of the nun — now revealed as the titular Duchess — and the general, an affair characterized by elaborate, courtly head games that amount to a 19th-century equivalent of The Rules.

 

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Diary of the Dead is the latest in George Romero's now forty-year-old "[Noun] of the Dead" franchise. It's back-to-basics in tone and production, after 2005's massive Land of the Dead. It would be easy to accuse Romero of trend-hopping, based on the film's "found footage" presentation and release in proximity to Cloverfield and Brian De Palma's Redacted. But the film parts from the recent surge of Blair Witch-ian diegesis by opening with narration: a character explaining that she's edited and produced the film you're about to watch with the intent not just to record but to frighten. Instead of coming off as pretentiously meta, this contextualizing helps you suspend your disbelief. Romero makes the most of that suspension, and the result is a strange movie that succeeds far more often than it fails.

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Editor's note: Starting this week, Hooksexup Film Lounge reviews and interviews will be folded into Screengrab.

Here's the score: Jumpers are people that can teleport. Bet you'd like to know how — well, too bad. Paladins are people who have been trying to kill Jumpers "since medieval times." Why? Couldn't tell you. Samuel L. Jackson says that, "Only God should have the power to be in all places." He usually says it as he unwraps a giant knife from some dusty cloth before stabbing a Jumper. I don't know if that's the Paladin motto or something. Jumper, as a movie, doesn't really tell you too much. It doesn't do much of anything, for that matter. Director Doug Liman opens the movie opens by having Hayden "Little Annie" Christensen talking about all the cool stuff he's done teleporting about the world that morning. We don't actually see Christensen doing these things, which might've helped engage us right off the bat. But Jumper tells instead of shows — and then, about a third of the way through, stops doing either.

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