There’s a peculiar kind of pleasure to be found in watching Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, in 21 Jump Street, horsing around and generally acting like doofuses for our amusement. As rookie cops assigned to patrol — by bicycle — a city park, they’re more than ready to prove their tough-guy status: When they spot a bunch of biker guys experiencing the joys of cannabis beneath a tree, they strut toward the gang in their shorts and bike helmets, but not before flipping their kickstands down with a mighty thwack. Later, Hill says a fervent prayer in the Catholic church that serves as headquarters for the undercover unit to which the duo has been assigned, its sign outside reading, in mistranslated Korean, “Aroma of Christ Church.” Hill kneels in front of the crucifix, beginning his urgent plea with the words, “Hey, Korean Jesus…” That irreverent riff captures the tone of the whole picture — it’s a ramshackle thing, a goof on the idea that anyone might actually care about a movie based on an old TV show, or that anyone might actually care about a movie at all.
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In strict dramatic terms, almost nothing occurs in the Dardenne brothers’ The Kid with a Bike. Some characters show a lack of empathy, even cruelty, but there’s more than enough kindness elsewhere to make up for it, and the terrible things you fear might happen simply don’t. Those qualities make the movie seem slight, almost inconsequential, as if the merest breeze would blow it off-course. But the real strength of The Kid with a Bike is the cautious but generous warmth of its storytelling. Not much happens in The Kid with a Bike, but it leaves you grateful that the worst doesn’t happen — with these characters, you might not be able to bear it.
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The troubles marring the relationship between fast-talking literary agent Jack McCall (Eddie Murphy) and his wife and the mother of his baby Caroline (Kerry Washington) are nothing next to the issues A Thousand Words has in marrying wacky physical comedy and a new age exploration of absentee fathers. The film, which is directed by Norbit's Brian Robbins and written by Bruce Almighty's Steve Koren, is being slung at audiences as a broad family laffer of the Jim Carrey school, but spends just as much time trying to be a serious tale about letting go of childhood resentments and accepting mortality. The "deep" bits aren't, despite a climactic shot in which Murphy actually frolics with his childhood self through a Terrence Malick-style dreamy field of wheat, and the parts that aim to be funny rarely succeed at that either, telegraphing their punchlines so far in advance that they don't really need to follow through on them.
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Although it’s set in the present, the characters in Lasse Hallström’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen seem to have been imported from a different time. The good ones behave in a courtly manner and speak in dignified tones and the rascals twinkle and flounce. Often the effect of Simon Beaufoy’s script (adapted from Paul Torday’s 2007 novel) is refreshing, due in no small part to the congenital irresistibility of the actors speaking his lines -- Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt and Kristin Scott Thomas. It’s when the adorably priggish Cary Grant type is accused of having Asperger’s by his plucky but labile future love interest and the benevolent Sheik bankrolling the duo’s wacky experiment is nearly assassinated by Yemeni jihadists that things get to feel a little pear-shaped.
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I had fun at John Carter. Just not $250 million worth of fun, which leads us to the central and vexing problem: Moviegoing pleasure can no longer be casual. We’re now acutely aware of how much every movie cost, how much every studio – in this case, Disney – has riding on every given project. “What does Disney need to make its money back?” becomes the overriding question, when what we really should be asking is, “Did you see how John Carter slashed his way out of that big, blubbery whatsis and came out all blue and shit?”
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Silent House is not just a horror film but a Very Important Piece of Social Commentary, as you’ll see when you get to the movie’s third-act twist. In other words, it’s not asking you to watch a terrified woman’s face for some 90 minutes -- in sort-of real time, no less -- without an allegedly good reason. This is good-for-you, arthouse-style horror. Which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily any good.
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Is it possible to love a piece of dead fish more than you love people? That’s the question asked, implicitly if not directly, by David Gelb’s documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a portrait of 85-year-old sushi master Jiro Ono that is itself as meticulous and carefully formed as a piece of nigirizushi. The movie’s title comes from an interview with Jiro, who speaks of waking up in the middle of the night with new ideas for perfecting and enhancing his craft. Then we see him standing stiffly behind the bar at his Tokyo restaurant, waiting with an air of placid annoyance for a customer to consume one of his precise and studied creations: With his hands, he has made a dream you can eat. And he wants you to know it.
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Sometimes a movie demands attention more for its “How” than its “What,” and writer-director Joseph Cedar’s Footnote falls squarely in that category. A movie about feuding father-and-son Talmudic scholars isn’t a surefire way to pack ’em in at the box office. But Cedar approaches his subject with so much wit and verve that he almost – almost – makes you forget you’re watching a movie about a very small, cloistered subset of academic obsessives whose life’s work is about as visually undynamic as you can imagine. How do you get action and drama out of pages and pages filled with Hebrew lettering?
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Jennifer Westfeldt's sort-of romantic comedy Friends with Kids is on to something, even if in the end it suffers from a failure of nerve. This is actor and screenwriter Westfeldt's directorial debut (she co-wrote and starred in the 2001 feature Kissing Jessica Stein), and it's polished to the point of shallow glossiness -- it could benefit from being a little rougher, a little messier.
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If the teenage hedonists of Project X want to see what’s in store for them in 40 years — and surely they don’t — they might have a look at Italian writer-director-actor Gianni Di Gregorio’s smart and none-too-sweet little comedy The Salt of Life, in which a 60-ish retiree living in Trastevere suddenly realizes that not a single woman — not his reasonably affectionate but matter-of-fact wife, nor his flirty young next door neighbor, nor any of his various old flames and acquaintances – is interested in sleeping with him. It’s also, to my knowledge, the only movie about the love lives of sexagenarians that closes with the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man.” This is a movie that’ll play great with the blue-haired crowd, and yet I suspect touches like that will go over the heads of the oldsters. The overarching, bittersweet vibe of The Salt of Life is that you just never, ever get over it — whatever the hell it is.
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He is the Lorax, he speaks for the trees – or at least he would, if he could get a word in edgewise. Because Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, as directed by Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda, is so cluttered -- with extra narrative, extra characters, extra everything -- that its famously mossy and bossy central figure barely figures into the plot. More a bowdlerization than an adaptation of the great Theodor Geisel’s somber plea for environmental preservation, The Lorax is so big, flashy and redundant that it courts precisely the kind of blind consumerism it’s supposed to be condemning. It doesn’t trust kids to sit still and pay attention for even a minute.
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I’m pretty sure I ruined the night of a pair teenage boys huddled in the back row of a recent screening of Project X, a party disaster movie targeted at kids who find the Hangover franchise too sophisticated. All I did was sit down beside them, but I may as well have poked my head up into their treehouse. Girls ruin everything, especially the unmitigated enjoyment of a new Todd Phillips movie. A few seconds after the lights went down, as a shrill junior impresario named Costa (Oliver Cooper) was shouting 2 Live Crew lyrics about wanting pussy, the one beside me began twisting in an agony I came to enjoy much more than the movie we were watching.
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With his round, bearded face and gentle voice, John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) is an unassuming monster — it takes a while to spot the terrible danger within him. In Justin Kurzel's The Snowtown Murders, based on an actual series of gruesome crimes that took place in South Australia in the mid '90s, he's the deceptive mastermind behind a string of serial killings, the leader of a group initially, at least in their own heads, bound together by a desire to enact vigilante justice.
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Though it’s always a bad idea to review a director’s intentions at the expense of the actual results, there’s something about Paul Weitz’s movies that makes you want to cut him a little extra slack. Weitz, with his brother Chris, was one-half of the directing team that brought us About a Boy (an affecting and well-crafted adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel), as well as American Pie (which, despite its reputation as a teen raunchfest, was surprisingly in tune with the complexities of sexual relationships as they’re experienced by young women). The pictures Weitz has directed on his own have been either unjustly overlooked (as in the case of the freewheeling satire American Dreamz) or justifiably lambasted (there’s not much to say about the icky gun-for-hire vehicle Little Fockers). But when Weitz is at his best, his films show an easygoing open-heartedness that more technically gifted directors – we’re looking at you, Alexander Payne – can’t even begin to muster. There may not be a single misanthropic bone in his body.
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As any meander through the movies that have their origins in Saturday Night Live sketches will demonstrate, comedic ideas that work in the short form do not necessarily a funny feature make. You have your Wayne's Worlds, sure, but then you also have your Night at the Roxburys and It's Pats, interminable variations on the same joke dragged out longer than anyone either watching or on the screen wanted. The comedy of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, creators of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, might as well come from a different galaxy as those SNL bits, but Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie has at least one thing in common with The Ladies Man — neither demanded nor benefits from the leap to the big screen.
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