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(08/30/07 4:00am)
Misty hilltops, pigs mucking about, a hand and pen seen in soft focus -- these images promise sensual fare. However, "Becoming Jane," a fictionalized take on the love affair between Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway) and Thomas Lefroy (James McAvoy), quickly devolves into a mundane love story that fatigues rather than inspires. \nAusten's novels detail the great wait for love and happy ending. And if abeyance is not done with delight, it is fulfilled with resignation and pose. But in "Becoming Jane," we see a young Austen, thrown into consistent tailspin by the antics of Lefroy and the general incursion of masculine society. The film almost leads us to believe that the young Ms. Austen was little more than a thirtysomething Carrie Bradshaw with, of course, a better vocabulary and longer hemline. \nA curious tension usually arises when adapting the life of a real person, not from the imagined dichotomy between fiction and documentary (factual truth and underlying truth can look one and the same on-screen), but from the varying agendas of filmmakers and screenwriters. In "Becoming Jane," Austen's literary genius is pinned on her thwarted affair with Lefroy. Rarely is the audience given the option to believe that Austen chose the pen out of principle, either social or artistic. We may never know the full truth, but relying on hackneyed tropes will do little to elucidate. \nFor his part, McAvoy again employs the sprightly gait that first charmed audiences in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." And if his Lefroy seems like a far cry from Mr. Darcy, his is an appropriate counterbalance to Hathaway's bright-eyed Austen. Nevertheless, the most interesting performance is that of Mr. Wisley, played with unexpected pitch by Laurence Fox, even as his character is dismissed as a "boobie." This, if anything, speaks to the Austenian sensibility.
(08/30/07 4:00am)
ritics have flung a lot of Internet ink debating the merits and perils of Mr. Bean, a character created by British comedian Rowan Atkinson. Admittedly, Bean is a mercurial twit, vacillating uncontrollably between benevolence and pettiness. Yet, to relegate him to the child movie bin would handicap adult audiences from an important realization: There's a little bit of the good, bad and guttural in all of us.\nIn this installment, Mr. Bean wins a trip to the south of France and a Sony Handycam. He arrives in Paris, only to contend with a mistaken taxi and a platter of raw oysters. Finally finding the train to Cannes, France, Mr. Bean coaxes a man (Karel Roden) to document his departure, sauntering like royalty through multiple takes on his beloved camcorder. The train whistle blows. Mr. Bean boards, but the door closes on the man. The man's young son (Max Baldry) is left wailing and alone on the high-speed rail.\nAside from lapses into the comic (miming to Puccini's "O mio babbino caro") and the absurd (appearing triumphant after the off-screen destruction of a wooden shed), Mr. Bean devotes his energies to reuniting father and son. Perchance, the father is a juror for the Cannes film festival, and by the story's end, Mr. Bean has fulfilled his mission while inadvertently revamping art-house moviemaking.\nMany critics have dismissed "Mr. Bean's Holiday" as a flawed riff on Jacques Tati's "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday." The titles are similar enough, and the rubber-limbed Mr. Bean could very well be the postmodern spawn of mild-mannered M. Hulot; but the physical comedy of Atkinson departs entirely from the whimsical tinkering of Tati. Nevertheless, both films have satirical ends: Tati the tedium of middle-class French life, Atkinson the snobbery of high art countervailed only by friendship. Therefore, how much you enjoy "Mr. Bean's Holiday" depends heavily on how much you discern between a punch line and the general folly of life.
(08/23/07 4:00am)
The "Bourne" movie franchise, however self-knowingly, has always operated on a conceit. The expectation that the true identity of Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), provides enough suspense for a trilogy running across many years of Hollywood time-space is too improbable to take seriously. But the "Bourne" films have never sought absolute fidelity to their literary counterparts -- Robert Ludlum's novels.\nThe third installment of the "Bourne" films, "The Bourne Ultimatum," picks up where "The Bourne Supremacy" left off; and thankfully Damon's boyish mug has only acquired a few character-building furrows. But what time has left untouched on the surface, has transformed Damon into a protagonist worthy of a protracted movie trilogy, with the possibility of more (there are two full-length novels left of the "Bourne" chronicles). After refining the character for a good part of his movie career, Damon is now able to portray the amnesiac CIA assassin through pure motion, as if brawn was evidence of deeper psychology.\nDirector Paul Greengrass, who also directed the more clumsy "Supremacy," wisely trims the "Ultimatum" story line down to its essence -- a linear, frenetic chase through major European cityscapes with the perfunctory dip into Mediterranean exoticism. Though we sometimes yearn for the complications that Bourne's girlfriend, played by Franka Potente, brought to the narrative in the first two movies, any attempt at romantic intrigue would have cramped Greengrass' style. Truth be told, we don't go to a Bond movie wondering if 007 will get the girl.\nThe director's gift at timing film action, so much so that real time seems less believable, is put into great use in "Ultimatum." You leave the theater knowing clearly the demarcations between celluloid and reality, which makes "The Bourne Ultimatum" one of the most forthcoming, purposeful action films in recent memory.
(08/23/07 4:00am)
It's perhaps reckless to willfully inflate a movie rating for the sake of posterity, but should "The Lookout" ever be compared to overvalued plot-benders like 2000's "Memento," a little falsification is merited. Both movies make use of traumatic brain injury as narrative motive and both received critical acclaim, but "The Lookout" is a far more supreme instance of how the filmmaker's toolbox can be used to evoke danger, depth and hope.\nAt its most basic level, "The Lookout" is a modern film noir with the semi-amnesiac Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) falling naively into the ruthless world of an asthmatic felon (Matthew Goode). On the homestead, we find Chris' blind roommate (Jeff Daniels) and Chris's emotionally inept parents. Carla Gugino and Isla Fisher also make interesting, de-sexualized appearances as the film's muted heroines.\nIt's perhaps a sign of the film's humanity that all of its characters are plagued by the choices and physical limitations that beset us all. Not for one instance is the audience made to decide between the absolutes of good and evil, about which will prevail. And like most true character studies, it's hard to break "The Lookout" down into any obvious film formula.\nDramatic suspense, in thrillers or otherwise, is often assessed from the perspective of the audience, but "The Lookout" hones in on its characters. This dedication, if not made blindly clear by the movie itself, is evidenced by the excellent DVD extras. In addition to revelations about technique, the filmmakers also divulge the gradual germination behind "The Lookout" (the script sat unmade for years). Indeed, this slow-cook shows.
(08/04/07 4:00am)
It's hard to watch Lindsay Lohan's new movie "I Know Who Killed Me" without conjuring up associations to the actress's troubled personal life. It's harder still to believe that the young adult horror genre can successfully buttress a deluge of manic cultural references -- from Cindy Sherman to "Twin Peaks" to Edgar Allen Poe -- but you do what you can to justify an overpriced matinee ticket. \nIn "I Know Who Killed Me," Lohan plays double-duty as studious Aubrey Fleming and exotic dancer Dakota Moss, raven-haired doppelgangers with a shared secret past. \nThe film opens with a flickering montage of neon, touting in varying degrees of wit and subtlety the life and environs of stripper Dakota. As she slicks up, down and around a metal pole, a morass of blood oozes forth from her opera-length gloves. The intrigue, I suppose, is whether this image is an exercise in the surreal or the linchpin to the ensuing murder-mystery. \nAs the movie stammers along, Aubrey goes missing at the hands of a blue-gloved serial killer, only to turn up missing a forearm and tibia in a roadside ditch of wet leaves and mud. Much to the dismay of her parents (Neal McDough and Julia Ormond), Aubrey's path to recovery is hampered by her insistent belief that she is Dakota. The punch line is only slightly less inert than the film's title. \nTentative kudos to director Chris Siverston for attempting a new synthesis of the thriller genre, but the majority of "I Know Who Killed Me" plays out like a tedious slide show, with a color palette of punchy Kodachrome and a story line completely obliged to the perverse worship of imagery and intermittent sensations. Nevertheless, all judgments of exploitation aside, the film does place on display the spunk that at another time more properly defined Lohan's career.
(07/26/07 4:00am)
"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments\nOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;\nBut you shall shine more bright in these contents\nThan unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time."
(07/19/07 4:00am)
"The Last Mimzy" offers a good-hearted pastiche of sights and sounds but fails to trigger substantial visual or emotional resonance. Loosely adapted from the 1943 short story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett, itself a reference to Lewis Carroll's majestic nonsense poem "Jabberwocky," the modern "Mimzy" centers on the attempts of Noah Wilder (Chris O'Neil) and Emma Wilder (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) to save humanity. \n"Mimzy" opens in the far future, after humankind has successfully prevailed over an unspecified environmental and spiritual disaster. New Earth abounds with wildflowers, looks somewhat like a Swiss cough drop commercial and is populated by refined schoolchildren. Their yogi recounts the story of a master scientist who saved the planet by dispatching Mimzys, toy-rabbits-cum-guiding-emissaries, through wormholes to contact altruistic kinder from Earth's past. \nThe last and final Mimzy, along with its accoutrements of strange rocks and opaline prisms, comes into the possession of Noah and Emma. Soon after, the children develop superhuman intelligence: Noah the ability to speak to bugs and scribble Tibetan mandalas ex nihilo, Emma the more global gifts of heightened intuition and compassion. \nTo a lesser degree, "The Last Mimzy" also grapples, albeit superficially, with the relational dilemmas of David (Timothy Hutton) and Jo (Joely Richardson), the children's parents. Much of this domestic intrigue was cut during editing, but the remnants are available among the DVD extras, along with some benevolent computer games and interesting featurettes on mandalas, quantum mechanics and nanotechnology.\nNevertheless, purists should be cautioned against the movie's promiscuous use of distorted camera angles, at once panoramic and claustrophobic, and its subtle patriarchy (Emma whimpers and plots, while her brother builds a bridge to the future -- "Wonderland" or "Narnia" this movie is not). And while "The Last Mimzy" has a number of poignant moments, it is simply too sanitized to merit higher marks.
(07/14/05 3:01am)
Dyrinda Arthur was not a Beatles fan, but now a single chord can bring her to tears. In 2004, Arthur, a student at Stirling University in Scotland, visited Cuba for the first time on a housing and art study trip. At first, Arthur thought her new Cuban friends were playing the Beatles to ease her homesickness; she did not realize how feted the Fab Four were across the island nation, nor that their music had been banned until the 1980s. After returning to Scotland, she went through a self-proclaimed "period of mourning." She is now returning to Cuba as a member of the 2005 Caravan to Cuba sponsored by Pastors for Peace, a humanitarian aid ministry based in New York City. \nThis July, buses filled with donated food, medical supplies, textbooks, toys, and musical instruments travel along 14 routes toward McAllen, Texas. There, the buses attempt to enter Mexico, challenging the license required by the U.S. government to enter or send aid to Cuba. The vehicles then journey south to Tampico, where volunteer dock workers unload the supplies onto cargo ships headed for Cuba. All of the caravan members who start the trip cross the border, and many also fly on to Cuba. Bloomington, which retains a sister-city relationship with the Cuban city Santa Clara through the local organization Cubamistad, was one of the stops on the Caravan route. \nKathryn Hall, a public health administrator from Sacramento and caravan leader, spoke to a small, but enthusiastic crowd during a picnic stop at Bloomington's Bryan Park on July 11. Hall is the founder of The Birthing Project, the only national African-American community based maternal and child health organization. Cuba, which has the lowest infant mortality rate in the Americas, is a source of inspiration for her: "Cuba has some answers to our problems, so I want to tell its story." \nInitiated in 1988 as a special \nministry of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), the Pastors for Peace caravans aim to deliver direct humanitarian assistance to a number of Latin American countries. Because of a persistent U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, Caravan members who are U.S. citizens face significant legal fines as well as possible imprisonment for attempting to import material goods into Cuba. Recent changes have made the embargo even more stringent. On a recent trip, Homeland Security officers confiscated from Hall a bag made in Taiwan that had the word "Cuba" written on it. \nPastors for Peace also faces difficulties on its caravans to Mexican cities. Bob Abpalnalp, who has driven for the caravans since 1998, recounts the time when Mexican soldiers stopped their bus on the way to San Cristobal. The soldiers boarded the bus and one chambered a round, a shocking sound even to Abpalnalp, an ex-naval officer. \nHall considers the Caravan to Cuba as much a humanitarian effort as an opportunity for cultural and educational exchange. Today's Cuba is home to both Lenin Park and Lennon Park, with long-term leader Fidel Castro personally unveiling a bronze statue of the Beatle John on the 20th anniversary of his death. Arthur finds the American preoccupation with Cuba interesting because this anxiety is virtually absent in both Europe and Cuba: "A lot of Americans are very anxious to know what outsiders think of Cuba. But as a UK citizen, I have the freedom to express my solidarity with the Cuban people"