Biutiful
Reviewed by Beck Ireland

One of this year's Oscar nominations for best foreign film, Biutiful relentlessly stalks a mystic hustler as he scrambles to care for his children in his final, chaotic days. In this character portrait that dabbles in magical realism, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel, Amores Perros) poetically captures poverty, filth, misery and the desperation that transforms it into hope and heartache.

On good days, Uxbal (Javier Bardem) can barely keep it together. Estranged from his bi-polar, drug-addicted prostitute ex-wife, Maramba (Maricel Álvarez), he raises he kids, Ana (Hanaa Bouchaib), 10, and Mateo (Guillermo Estrella), 7, by himself in a small, dank apartment. He earns money by acting as the middleman and gopher for a Chinese sweatshop that uses labor exploited from illegal immigrants — the Chinese laborers make the cheap knock-off goods and the Senegalese hustle them on the grimy streets of Barcelona. Uxbal finds housing for the immigrants, keeps the police at bay, and brokers deals with management. He also has a sideline communicating with the recently deceased.

So after Uxbal's given a dire prognosis at a doctor's exam, prompted by his painfully peeing blood, he makes a few frantic, desperate decisions in an attempt to make better, longer-lasting provisions for his children. Unfortunately, these actions — skimming money off the police fund, buying cheap heaters, reconciling with his ex-wife — result in tragic double crosses, and Uxbal's life (and near death) are transformed into a claustrophobic nightmare.

As Uxbal, Bardem is the soul of this film. The actor has received an Oscar nomination for this role, and rightly so. He carefully underplays Uxbal's ambition to make arrangements for his children before he dies by balancing grief and hope, and staying away from hysteria. His character propels the movie forward, never stopping for self-pity, but Uxbal still wears his sorrow and his heart on his sleeve.

Perhaps this is as a result of the supporting cast being as nuanced and fleshed out as it is. Ana and Mateo are solidly un-precocious, reacting as children would naturally react. As erratic Maramba, Álvarez first appears in a blast of mania, and then when trying to get back into her husband's good graces, percolates to another high pitch. In addition, the ghosts that haunt Uxbal are subdued but still disquieting.

The film reveals the back alleys of Barcelona as filthy and seedy, but through Rodrigo Prieto's lens, they're also full of color, interest and an intimacy. Although many of the shots were hand-held, the images are steady and bold. Composer Gustavo Santaolalla adds to the ambience with a compelling, percussive score. (R) Rating: 4 (Posted 1/28/11)

Marwencol
Reviewed by Dan Lybarger

Marwencol failed to pick up an Oscar nomination for Best Feature Documentary. Apparently, the film’s distribution budget is too tiny for an Academy Award campaign. That doesn’t mean this oddly fascinating film isn’t worth catching.

The film’s protagonist, Mark Hogancamp, might initially strike people as an oddball or even a loser. In reality, he has conquered a situation that’s comparable in difficulty to climbing Mt. Everest. On April 8, 2000, five men in a New York City bar senselessly beat the 38-year-old Hogancamp. The bludgeoning was so severe that he spent days in a coma and had to relearn how to speak and walk.

If anything good came of the experience, Hogancamp lost his chronic addiction to alcohol and found an unique way to spend his time when he wasn’t bussing at a restaurant in Kingston, NY. Before the crime, Hogancamp was a talented illustrator whose lengthy journals were filled with his vivid drawings. The assault initially left him unable to draw, but he gradually turned to another form of art.

He collected dolls and action figures (the term that guys use for their polyurethane playthings) and created an astonishingly detailed World War II town he dubbed “Marwencol.” He included a plastic avatar of himself and posed and photographed adventures where the town’s women, including a time traveling witch, save him from predicaments similar to the one that nearly killed him.

The tales he concocts and narrates are corny, but his eye for 1/6 scale detail is remarkable. The jeeps in Marwencol don’t look clean or sterile because Hogancamp drags them by a string across the shoulder of a highway in order to give the toy the sort of wear a real vehicle would have. He even meticulously ensures the female dolls have appropriate high-heel shoes, even naming the specific brands.

His work earns him a show at a Big Apple gallery, but Hogancamp frets that going back to the city might put him in danger of another attack. Director-editor Jeff Malmberg holds back on revealing why Hogancamp was beaten, making his attempts to rebuild his life, much less his artificial world, even more poignant. Starting the film by revealing Hogan’s suffering, Malmberg makes it easier to accept his eccentricities, like modeling his dolls after women he’s attracted to as well as his friends and his mother. He even adds a store to the town simply because the wife of his neighbor liked a similar shop in the real world.

There’s a redundancy to Hogancamp’s stories that makes their retelling seem pointless. It’s much more intriguing to see close-ups of the dolls and the fascinating ways in which Mark has arranged them. It’s not surprising that his assailants are depicted as SS thugs, but his affection for figurines that can’t love him back is oddly moving.

Blue Valentine
Reviewed by Dan Lybarger

It’s hard to tell if I endured or admired Blue Valentine. At times, I felt like I was doing both at the same time. The film is often beautiful, but it’s so downbeat, it can make you wonder if survival is all that worthwhile. In short, the film seems to say that young people can develop powerful affection and then get older and become feuding wrecks as their once attractive bodies age.

Director Derek Cianfrance wisely starts his tale not with the rush of young love but near the end of a now troubled relationship. Dean (Ryan Gosling) enjoys playing with his daughter but gets annoyed whenever Cindy (Michelle Williams) asks him to behave like an adult. Despite Dean’s glasses, paunch and receding hair, it’s something he doesn’t do terribly often. No wonder her boss’ flirtations seem tempting.

Despite occasional work painting houses, she’s the breadwinner in the family for her job as a nurse. The fact that the only thing he excels at is emptying booze bottles is also disconcerting. When the two do try to reignite the sparks that brought them together, the results are catastrophic.

In the flashback, however, the situation is far different. In the previous decade, Dean is both handsome and suave in a way that his later self could never hope to be. Gosling looks so different in both halves of the film that it seems as if two different performers are playing the same role. He works as a mover while Cindy is promising high school student dating a popular wrestler. Her thuggish beau has none of the appeal of this new stranger. Who else would pluck a ukulele and sing, “You Only Hurt the One You Love” while she tap dances. It’s moments like these that keep Blue Valentine from slipping into complete despair.

Cianfrance has specialized in making documentaries, and it really shows here. Gosling and Williams, who received a Best Actress Oscar nomination, inhabit their characters so completely that it’s as if we’re watching hidden camera footage instead of a movie. Both their domestic bliss and their turmoil seem so real that it’s often hard to watch. When they’re happy, it’s as if we’ve caught them sneaking kisses in a restaurant, and their intimacy is something we shouldn’t be spying on. During their arguments, the pain seems just a little too authentic.

Blue Valentine does feature a love scene that almost earned the film an NC-17 rating. The Motion Picture Association of America, in their infinite cluelessness, decided that a scene of genuine affection between two fully clothed characters might corrupt the youth of America in a way that our politicians already have.

Instead, this moment lets viewers know that Dean and Cindy have a powerful bond and that something truly special will be lost when the relationship sours. Apparently, emotional bonding during sex is pornographic to the Ratings Board. Boy, their love lives must be dull.

The gloom that runs through Blue Valentine is pretty tough to take, but Gosling and Williams certainly make it more bearable. It’s like hearing a tearful melody being played by Yo-Yo Ma. It will depress you, but you’ll have to admire the way it’s played. (R) Rating: 3.5 (Posted on 1/28/11)

The Rite
Reviewed by Bruce Rodgers

The Catholic Church has been a battered religious institution in recent years — pedophile priests, lawsuits, its doctrine of celibacy under fire, loss of clergy, and criticism, at least in America, for political involvement. Intentional or not along comes the film The Rite to remind people of one the Church’s primary missions: battling the devil.

Adapted from the book The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio and directed by Mikael Hafstrom, The Rite tells the story of Michael Kovak and his final year of study to be a priest while resolving his questions of faith. Played by Irish actor Colin O’Donoghue, Michael decided to enter the seminary to avoid taking over the family business, a mortuary.

Such a either-or dilemma between preparing dead people for burial or tending to souls, or at least pretending to, doesn’t ring true in 21st century America, particularly when one considers the Kovak family. Michael doesn’t like his father (Rutger Hauer), is haunted by thoughts of his dead mother and being the red-blooded, good-looking guy he is, likes the girls.

Michael chooses the seminary because he figures he can get a free college education and then let his “Doubting Thomas” tendencies fully rise just in time to stop ordination into the priesthood. One of Michael’s teachers, Father Matthew (Toby Jones) still thinks Kovak could make it as a priest. An incident one night involving the death of a young girl on a bicycle and a reminder from Father Matthew that Michael could be required to pay the Church a hundred thou or more for his education if he skips out has Michael agreeing to head to Rome for exorcism study.

In Rome, he meets Italian journalist Angeline (Alice Braga, Predators) and is told to study under Father Lucas, Anthony Hopkins plays the famed Jesuit exorcist. Father Lucas is to show Michael the ropes and convince the young American that the devil does exist. In doing so, Hopkins delivers the role on autopilot, a combination of Sir John Talbot from The Wolfman, Van Helsing from Dracula and, of course, Hannibal Lecter. Such hybridization by lesser actors would make the Father Lucas character near laughable. But Hopkins has such a great talent and pride in his craft even predictable scripts in his hand hold the filmgoer’s interest.

The Rite, if one doesn’t think too much about the story, is a fairly good film. Beautifully shot under the direction of cinematographer Ben Davis and with the right atmospheric soundtrack from Alex Heffes, the film creates a believable setting but it’s just not that scary — if one is looking for that sort of titillation

O’Donoghue has a dour if not attractive screen presence and it will be interesting to see this actor’s range with other screenplays. Braga accompanies Kovak in the story without a dewy-eyed clinginess while displaying the right amount of subtle romantic interest.

Another Year
Reviewed by Dan Lybarger

British writer-director Mike Leigh’s movies (Secrets and Lies, Happy Go Lucky) are often quiet drawn out affairs, but they’re never boring because he can deliver an emotional wallop when viewers least expect it.

Part of the reason Another Year works is because Leigh spends much of the film determining what the story is actually about. From the film’s opening, it appears that Another Year is actually about a long married couple that is so happy together that it becomes almost disgusting to realize that their affection is genuine.

Tom (Jim Broadbent) is an engineering geologist, and Gerri is psychologist. Thanks to Tom’s dry wit and Gerri’s quiet, but affectionate manner, the two are as compatible as their animated namesakes are adversarial (yes, the cartoons do come up in the movie). It doesn’t hurt that they have an enviable home and garden and that their son Joe (Oliver Maltman) is a successful attorney. Their only regret is that their 30-something offspring is still single.

Curiously, everyone around them seems miserable, and many appear to be chronic alcoholics. Ken (Peter Wight) spends most of his time in their company whining about a job he could easily retire from, but work is the only place where he feels at peace. Tom’s brother Ronnie (David Bradley) is a fellow who barely says a word, and when he does it could be cutting. Perhaps that’s why he and his son Carl (Martin Savage) haven’t spoken in years.

Their most frequent visitor appears to be Gerri’s coworker Mary (Leslie Manville). In her 40s or 50s, she often declares that she’s happy that she’s not in a relationship after a divorce and an affair with a married man. After a few drinks, however, she starts flirting with the younger Joe and fights a desperate, potentially futile battle against her crushing loneliness.

Mary’s efforts are so pathetic but so understandable that it doesn’t take long for Manville to steal the film from her costars. Manville, who was sadly denied a Best Actress nod for this film, has a knack for making viewers care about a person whose misery is largely self-inflicted. It easy to want her to find a mate, but you wouldn’t want to invite her to any of your parties.

Leigh splits the story into four vignettes set in different seasons. At first, it appears to make the film wander aimlessly, but Leigh has some surprises in store, and this approach allows him to maximize them.

Leigh has made a name for himself, but assembling his stories through improvisational rehearsals and then compiling the best results into the final script. As a result, he tends to get some terrific work from his performer and often pushes them in directions they might not go otherwise.

Broadbent, a Leigh veteran, can do droll wisecracks in his sleep, but it’s a pleasure to watch his face and realize that Tom’s bliss doesn’t come from ignorance. You can spot glances of concern or irritation whenever Mary starts getting tanked.

Leigh’s roundabout approach, which earned him a Best Original Screenplay nomination, can be somewhat frustrating. He introduces several intriguing story threads and then drops them. Imelda Staunton, the star of Leigh’s Vera Drake, has a small but potent turn as one of Gerri’s clients. Leigh rouses our curiosity about these characters but leaves us to figure out what happens to them. It’s easy to grouse about how Leigh can leave us hanging, but at the same time, he thankfully leaves us wanting more. (PG-13) Rating: 4 (Posted on 1/28/11)

The Mechanic
Reviewed by Beck Ireland

Director Simon West (Con Air) remakes the 1972 Charles Bronson vehicle The Mechanic without any of the indictments of disturbing emotional detachment and conspicuous consumerism that have become the hallmarks of the original. Instead, he relies on high-tech gadgets and fast editing to turn the iconic lonely, anxiety-ridden anti-hero into a suave champion. In addition, he needlessly simplifies the mentor/apprentice relationship into a hackneyed game of cat and mouse fueled by guilt and revenge.

Contract killer Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) disguises assassinations as accidents or natural causes, be it drowning, autoerotic asphyxiation or heart attacks. Bishop kills in ways that don't arouse suspicion, and so he gets paid handsomely for it. Then he spends his money on modern furniture and up-scale audio equipment, which only just fill his minimalist, off-grid lair. When he gets lonely, which doesn't seem all that often, what with that boss turntable to keep him company, he hires a prostitute to pretend she's his girlfriend or enables the old alcoholic boatman who watches the pier near his house.

When Bishop's wheelchair-bound, long-time boss Harry McKenna (Donald Sutherland) is offed in what has been made to look like a botched carjacking incident, Bishop reluctantly begins to mentor Harry's estranged son, Steve McKenna (Ben Foster from The Messenger), a raw, half-cocked, coked-up delinquent hoping to avenge his father's death. Together, the duo plots, botches, and then carries off more jobs and then finally takes on the bigger, badder boss Dean (Tony Goldwyn) and each other.

In comparison to the original, the action sequences in the film are faster, bigger, and much more complicated. However, by contemporary standards, they're average fare. There's nothing here that Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis and even Statham himself haven't already done. Furthermore, the lickety-split editing leaves no room for details. In the age of CSI glut on television and movies, it's important for audiences to know just how exactly the protagonist gets out of the pool and into a waiter's uniform.

No Strings Attached
Reviewed by Dan Lybarger

On DVD, you can play Memento so that the scenes are in chronological order so that it’s easier to follow, not that there was really a problem in that department. With No Strings Attached, however, would probably play better on DVD because viewers could bypass the story and get directly to the mildly amusing wisecracks and sight gags.

About the only thing that distinguishes No Strings Attached from the other romantic comedies on the market is that screenwriters Michael Samonek and Elizabeth Meriwether and director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Dave) have included enough quips and pratfalls involving coitus to guarantee the film’s “R” rating.

Much of the banter is nearly as amusing as it is raunchy. It’s hard not to crack a smile when actor Jake Johnson declares that he’s grateful that he has two gay fathers because he’ll never have to worry about either one performing oral sex on his girlfriend. Believe it or not, the gag is actually funny in context.

While Johnson’s character Eli can rest easily, Adam (Ashton Kutcher) does have to worry about his father (Kevin Kline) stealing the heart of his beloved. His worries start to disappear when he becomes friends (with benefits) with a medical student named Emma Kurtzman (Natalie Portman).

Emma has known Adam since the two were teenagers and obviously likes the struggling writer. She also has no desire to let a silly thing like emotional commitment get in the way of their acts of carnal stress relief between her shifts. Adam, however, is madly in love and wants the sort of steady relationship his lecherous father never had.

Because the film never varies from this thin setup, it never develops any momentum or tension. Because Adam and Emma are so thinly drawn, it becomes difficult to care if either finds love with or without the other. Kutcher and Portman, who’s also credited as a producer, do make an effort, but neither has a character engaging enough to follow for nearly two hours.

Curiously, the supporting characters are far more entertaining. Lake Bell steals every scene she’s in as Adam’s flighty but supportive coworker on a Glee-like sitcom. Bell can deliver reams of dialogue while running in heels, which seems like a feat worthy of the Olympics. Similarly, Kline, Abby Elliot, Mindy Kaling (The Office), Greta Gerwig and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges all have more amusing sequences than either of the leads get. It’s as if Meriwether and Samonek had scribbled Adam and Emma as an afterthought.

Although Reitman has managed to fit in nods to his previous movies (Adam’s apartment has a poster for Meatballs) and even makes a cameo as a TV director, No Strings Attached appears to have been helmed on autopilot. The pacing is slack, and the dramatic sequences never come to life. If the characters aren’t copulating or dropping F-bombs, the film goes into hibernation.

Rabbit Hole
Reviewed by Dan Lybarger

Rabbit Hole, which David Lindsay-Abaire has ably adapted from his own play, is a surprisingly uplifting movie about a fate most parents dread more than any other: the lost of a child. Director John Cameron Mitchell is best known for creating such bohemian delights as Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus. Both films are sexually frank, and the latter has the feel of a particularly enjoyable orgy. Oddly, he’s also probably the right person to be making a film about a married couple that has lost their son in a traffic accident.

Probably the shrewdest move Lindsay-Abaire and Mitchell have made is depicting the accident itself only in the reaction on the horrified mother’s face. The filmmakers take nearly 10 to 15 minutes to reveal why Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) don’t interact with their neighbors. By the time Rabbit Hole begins, their four-year-old son Danny has been dead for nearly eight months. The lad is only seen in brief video clips on Howie’s smart phone, but his mark is everywhere in the house. Danny’s fingerprints are all over the fridge, and his room is still full of stuff even though he’s not wearing the clothes or playing with the toys.

Little seems to lift Howie and Becca’s gloom. Group sessions with other couples that have lost children only remind Becca of her grief. When one couple laments that their daughter is gone because God needed another angel, she angrily retorts that the Almighty should simply have made another angel and left the child to reach maturity.

Becca frequently spits out such harsh remarks but Kidman manages to make herself mesmerizing instead of annoying. Becca may be upset, but she has a yearning for some type of connection to make up for the one she lost. In her search, she manages to emerge from her own cocoon by starting an unlikely friendship with the teenager (Miles Teller) whose car hit Danny. The fellow can’t drive now for obvious reasons (Lindsay-Abaire and Mitchell correctly believe we can figure that out on our own), but the guilt is hard for the youngster to shake.

While Kidman tends to have the showier scenes, Eckhart is equally good as Howie. On the surface, he seems to have adjusted better to the loss, but watch what happens when he thinks that Becca has deleted a video of their son. He looks as if he’s holding back a tidal wave of rage or sorrow.

The supporting cast is astonishingly strong. Dianne Weist is terrific as Becca’s mother who keeps making the mistake of comparing the loss of her adult, drug addicted son to Danny, and Sandra Oh is great as a grieving mother who bonds with Howie over her own losses.

Much of the strength of Rabbit Hole is that Lindsay-Abaire and Mitchell don’t offer any answers for how to deal with the loss of a child. The film is consistently believable and involving because you can see all the characters struggling with grief in their own ways. Oddly, this makes the film seem more hopeful than it would have been if the filmmakers had somehow found a universal solution for grief. We’d be much poorer if we could easily erase the memories of those we love so maybe this sort of cure isn’t worth pursuing. (PG-13) Rating: 4 (Posted on 01/14/11)

Casino Jack
Reviewed by Dan Lybarger

Disgraced former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff is such a complicated character that the late director George Hickenlooper deserves credit for simply trying to nail him down in a movie. Casino Jack also has the misfortune of coming out after Alex Gibney’s searing but thorough documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money. No matter how good the film with the shorter title is comparisons will arise.

At least Hickenlooper found the right leading man when he picked Kevin Spacey. Spacey could play bile-spewing tantrums in his sleep but thankfully doesn’t here. He and Hickenlooper also attempt to take viewers somewhere that Gibney and his crew couldn’t go: inside Abramoff’s head.

While Abramoff may have had an ego the size of Texas and Alaska combined, and sported a fedora that made him look more like a gangster than a Washington power broker, Spacey’s Abramoff is a rather square guy who is deathly serious about his family, his marriage and his Jewish faith. When he takes off his fedora, don’t be surprised if you see a yarmulke under it.

It’s hard to see what Abramoff has in common with his lieutenant Michael Scanlon (Barry Pepper). The latter is an unrepentant lecher, but both he and his boss think of their clients as only people to fleece money from. When the two aren’t exploiting Indian tribes eager to protect their vital casinos, they’re lobbying on behalf of sweatshops in Saipan or trying to acquire a fleet of Greek gambling ships.

The owner of those ships, Gus Boulis (Daniel Kash), wants to both sell and control the fleet, so Abramoff and Scanlon make the mistake of sending a mob-affiliated protégé named Adam Kidan (Jon Lovitz) to run the operation. While played with an appropriate amount of nuance by Lovitz, Kidan is a disbarred attorney who’s clearly over his head in the deal. Naturally, the incident leads to a series of events that bring down Abramoff’s crooked operation.

Norman Snider’s script juggles several cons at once, just as the real Abramoff did. Don’t feel surprised if you can’t keep up with the protagonist’s multitasking. It took the authorities a long time to catch up with him, too. As a result, the consequences of Abramoff’s actions aren’t readily apparent. Casino Jack only hints at how tribes with gaming interests hired Abramoff and Scanlon while the two were actively lobbying against the people who were paying them. The film also provides no hint at how heinous the sweatshops in Saipan really were. Workers would be forced into prostitution, and begged congressional investigators to take them back to China, where the conditions weren’t so hellish. Gibney’s documentary makes these facts clear.

Both films indicate that Abramoff may have been a villain, but he is hardly the only one. The same politicians who once begged him for campaign cash turn on him without hesitation when he gets into trouble. When his wife (Kelly Preston) warns him he doesn’t have friends, she appears to be smarter than he is.

Because Abramoff’s life is full of bizarre and appalling moments, no film about him could be dull. Hickenlooper does run into trouble finding the right tone for the story. The scenes with Kidan are darkly amusing, but it’s hard to believe that someone as blindly committed as Abramoff would go through crises of faith before going to the Big House.

While Hickenlooper’s brother is the new Democratic governor of Colorado, he’s attempting to understand the Republican lobbyist instead of demonizing him. As a result, some of the moments where Abramoff softens up aren’t as convincing as the ones where he goes for the kill.

The Green Hornet
Reviewed by Dan Lybarger

The new reworking of the old radio and television series features lots of nifty gadgets and striking visuals. Imagine what it would have been like to see Bruce Lee kicking bad guy butt while French director Michel Gondry’s unique images (in movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) framed him. Taiwanese martial arts star Jay Chou does his damndest to live up to live up to his predecessor at playing Kato. Sadly, Lee had one thing Chou could desperately use: a script.

The new film was written by star Seth Rogen and his regular screenwriting and producing partner Evan Goldberg. The two have penned the amusingly crude Superbad and Pineapple Express, but can’t come up with anything worthwhile with the superhero genre. The two come up with potentially intriguing ideas, like having our superheroes The Green Hornet and Kato operating outside the law to avoid getting caught by the bad guys. If the cops are after them, the thugs don’t realize that they are the Hornet’s real targets.

Sadly, one wonders if Rogen and Goldberg toke up as much as their protagonists often do. Concepts like these are picked up and dropped before they can properly develop. It’s as if the two got bored and moved on before they wrote scenes that achieved their potential.

It also doesn’t help that Rogen and Goldberg have difficulty figuring out how to make the tale’s antihero Britt Reid into something other than a spoiled jerk. He’s the son of a media mogul (Tom Wilkinson) who is as community conscious as he is wealthy. How he can live in a mansion and publish a newspaper in this day and age is a little hard to believe. Perhaps Rogen and Goldberg should have set the tale back in the ‘30s or ‘60s.

When the old man dies, Bitt becomes racked with guilt and wants to do something with his empty life. He discovers that his dad’s driver Kato (Chou) has designed a fleet of sleek, armored cars that got the old man to and from work safely. The vehicles have more weapons than the Marine Corps.

With Kato’s superhuman brain and muscle, Britt then dawns a green mask and starts attacking criminals. It ends up selling newspapers and attracting the ire of Los Angeles’ most feared crime lord Chudnofsky (Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz). The don may not look terribly intimidating, but his determination and slick manner reduce opponents into dying flesh in a manner of seconds.

Waltz isn’t the only performer underutilized in The Green Hornet. Cameron Diaz plays an aspiring journalist named Lenore Case who knows more about criminology and the vice scene in Los Angeles than the dim Britt could hope to grasp. It’s nice to see Diaz shed her dumb blonde persona, and it’s refreshing to see a Girl Friday do something other than look pretty. Sadly, Rogen and Goldberg give her little to do. The attempted love triangle involving Lenore, Britt and Kato goes nowhere. It could have given the film’s two hour running time some more meat.

Gondry’s visual noodling is still pretty fun, but the retrofitted 3D is more of an annoyance than a benefit. This guy’s music videos look better on an iPhone than The Green Hornet does in 3D.

The Dilemma
Reviewed by Dan Lybarger

The Dilemma is less a film about carrying a guilty secret and more of a long, slow painful headache that aspirin can’t do much to cure. Despite being directed by the normally reliable Ron Howard, this latest entry from the pen of Allan Loeb, the mind the deservedly forgotten The Switch, is not funny enough to justify its nearly two-hour running time nor dramatic enough to seem like more than protracted whining.

Vince Vaughn stars as Chicago automotive entrepreneur Ronny Valentine, who can easily talk Detroit tycoons into shelling out big bucks for his ideas. It doesn’t hurt that his best friend Nick Brannen (Kevin James) is smart enough to make some of the most outlandish ideas become possible. From the beginning, Howard starts with a problematic bit of casting, and the film never recovers. Vaughn and James are supposed to be middle-aged men who’ve been friends since college, but the two have no chemistry.

When they interact, it’s as if Vaughn and James met shortly after being cast and went their separate ways later. While James has an inherent likability that makes it easier to tolerate Nick’s insecurities, Vaughn appears haggard and acts as if he’s getting bored with his own silver tongued shtick. If it takes some suspension of disbelief to think these guys are buddies, it takes even more imagination to believe such average-looking fellows would get girlfriends who look like Jennifer Connelly and Winona Ryder.

Even if both performers were working in sync or in top form, Loeb’s script gives them inspiration. Ronny takes break from worrying about whether he should commit to his loyal paramour Beth (Connelly) when he discovers that Nick’s girlfriend Geneva (Ryder) is running around with a fellow named Zip (Channing Tatum). Before Ronny can bring himself to spill the beans on Geneva’s infidelity, he becomes concerned that bad news could make Nick’s neuroses prevent the two of them from meeting an important deadline with Chrysler.

Curiously, the end of Nick’s marriage doesn’t seem like a major catastrophe. Loeb and Howard don’t go very far into Nick and Geneva’s marriage, so their malaise comes off as superficial and even false. We also have no idea how Geneva knows Zip or even how he got his distinctive name. Despite an outrageous hairdo, Tatum gives him as much personality as the character name would imply.

Another troubling aspect of the film is that Ronny and Nick have been contracted to come up with electric cars that run and sound like classic muscle vehicles. That actually sounds cool, but in the movie these cars don’t have to actually move. They just have to make loud engine sounds. Perhaps Nick could figure out a way to get .mp3 files of old school engines under the hood so that he could spend the rest of his time trying to figure out how to get his new car to, oh, run. Queen Latifah plays a Chrysler exec that supports Ronny and Nick’s efforts, but there’s only so much she can do with such undercooked material.

It’s too bad The Dilemma had to be set in Chicago, Vaughn’s hometown. From watching the film, it would seem that the Windy City was the dullest place on the planet. Having been there myself, I can happily say the movie has maligned the place. (PG-13) Rating: 2 (Posted 01/14/10)

All Good Things
Reviewed by Dan Lybarger

All Good Things is about a fellow who may or may not have gotten away with murder. As with his previous film, Capturing the Friedmans, Andrew Jarecki tells a story that actually gets murkier when examined.

It’s easy to conclude that David Marks (Ryan Gosling) is guilty of possibly three murders, except he’s never been convicted and remains a free man. Actually, I’m not guilty of revealing a spoiler. The real jolts in All Good Things come not from whodunit moments, but in the bizarre extremes that David goes to in order to stay off the law’s radar.

The son of New York real estate mogul Stanford Marks (Frank Langella), it’s hard to blame David for not wanting to follow in his old man’s footsteps. At the beginning of the film, he seems downright likable compared to his snobbish, mercenary father. When he woos a blue-collar girl named Katie (Kirsten Dunst), it’s hard not to imagine them making it with their Vermont health food store “All Good Things.”

Wanting to provide for Katie, David reluctantly agrees to work at the family’s firm. While he’s always had a difficult relationship with his dad (the older man forced David to stand outside the house and watch his mother commit suicide), he finds even less to like when he discovers the secret of his father’s fortune.

In speeches, Stanford condemns the peep shows and other sordid trades that dominates 1970s Times Square and talks of replacing the porn houses with office buildings and legitimate theaters. In reality, the Markses make a considerable sum renting the space to the current proprietors on a cash only basis. By sending David out as a collector, Stanford can pretend that his hands are clean.

Years of the degrading work take their toll on David. His drug abuse and mental health issues are only exacerbated. He even develops his father’s mean streak. Naturally, it’s not a surprise that people would suspect him when Katie turns up missing.

The case could have ended there, but over the next few decades, David does some pretty strange things to keep out of jail, even if he is innocent of Katie’s disappearance or the deaths that follow. Jarecki and screenwriters Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling are actually following the real life case of Robert Durst, and portions of the film come straight from his courtroom testimony.

Because Durst is still very much alive and has never been charged in the death of his wife, Jarecki and company have to tread lightly. Their fictional David sure seems like a credible suspect, but All Good Things indicates that there may be more to the story. We see some side stories (in one Katie experiments with cocaine), but Jarecki and company seem to be introducing them as red herrings. Despite some genuinely shocking developments in the third act, All Good Things doesn’t have a consistent momentum that could have made the film as thrilling as it is head scratching.

Fortunately, Gosling is just about right for David. As with Blue Velvet, we get to see him age convincingly, but he also gives David enough sensitivity that it’s easy to side with him instead of his hypocritically Machiavellian father. There may be a decent human being under David’s thick glasses, and that mystery helps set All Good Things apart from other “based on a true story” murder tales. (R) Rating 3.5 (Posted on 01/07/11)

Country Strong
Reviewed by Dan Lybarger (with lots of whiskey)

The nicest thing I can say about Gwyneth Paltrow’s abilities as a musician is that her real-life husband Chris Martin and onscreen partner Tim McGraw are both fine crooners.

Paltrow herself has an adequate voice, but she’s an immediate miscast as a country vocalist. If you believe she’s won five Grammys, George Straight has some ocean front property in Arizona to sell you. When the mediocre material requires her to belt, all she can do is merely drag the tune along. It becomes downright laughable to see the audience going into hysterics over bland mid-tempo material delivered on key but without spirit.

On second thought, that may be the right way to interpret Shana Feste’s derivative, empty script. Feste, who also directed, hasn’t come up with anything that hasn’t been yodeled or howled before. Worse, in both the script and her helming, she never brings a sense of authenticity that makes the best country music powerful. Johnny Cash had an almost nonexistent range but if he was singing about being stuck in prison or fighting a painful drug addiction, he was always believable. That’s why he still has fans even after his death.

Paltrow stars as Kelly Canter, a five-time Grammy winner. Her attraction to the bottle also rivals that of George “No Show” Jones. After a disastrous gig in Dallas, where she falls of the stage and inadvertently terminates her pregnancy, she’s in rehab. Her manipulative husband and manager James (McGraw) wants to get her back on the road to regain her credibility. It’s too bad he’s pulled her out before she’s made any progress.

At the facility, she meets an employee named Beau (Garrett Hedlund, Tron: Legacy), who has a good voice and writes allegedly catchy tunes. For the life of me, I can’t remember a single one of them. She convinces James to let Beau and a beauty contest-obsessed greenhorn named Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester, Gossip Girl) open for her.

Predictably, Beau and Chiles gradually find love and sweet harmonies, and Kelly gets in touch with her inner Lindsay Lohan. Despite all the tears, cheating and (this is country music) vomit, little real drama emerges.

Kelly is a curiously static character, which leaves Country Strong dead in its boots. If there were a decent person hiding under the alcoholic daze, it would be easier to hope that she recovers. Instead, she comes across as a self-absorbed loser. The other characters in Country Strong are similarly one-note. Lots people burst into tears, but the material never seems to merit them. McGraw does his best to play a conniving schemer, but it’s bizarre to see the best singer in the cast sidelined while the filmmakers focus on far less talented vocalists. Perhaps McGraw wants to demonstrate that he’s a real actor as well as a real vocalist, but the other performers could sure use his help.

If Paltrow has trouble passing as the next Gretchen Wilson, she has greater difficulty playing a believable drunk. When Jeff Bridges showed up ready to pray at the porcelain altar in Crazy Heart, it was easy to believe he was a self-destructive lush. Watching Paltrow spewing while wearing a formal evening gown isn’t quite as believable. It might be more pleasant visually, but it’s still unconvincing.

Bridges was also lucky to have Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett writing first-rate songs for him. The tunes in Country Strong are sappy, forgettable and unbearably long. Stars like Sara Evans have made some contributions, but they aren’t enough to stop the malaise.