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Opens Wednesday
BEE SEASON
Scott McGehee (
The Deep End
) co-directs this adaptation of the Myla Goldberg novel-which probably won't feature "Song for Myla Goldberg" by the Decemberists, more's the pity. Jake and Maggie's mom Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal handled the script for this story of a marriage headed over the cliff (Richard Gere in full-bore Sincere Mode and Juliette Binoche looking aggrieved and restless) and the unfortunate progeny (Anthony's son Max Minghella and the spelling champion of the title, Flora Cross) tagged to resuscitate familial bliss. Prepare for some old-school emotional chain-yanking.
UA DeVargas, PG-13, 104 min.
IN THE MIX
Usher's fans being legion and mostly under 15, this film will probably drag in revenue no matter how awful it is, which, we are obliged to inform you, looks pretty bloody likely. Usher plays Darrell, a DJ who inadvertently saves the daughter (Emmanuelle Chriqui) of a Mafia don (
The Usual Suspects
' Chazz Palmenteri, who must be either putting his kids through college or saving for expensive dental work). His reward for said saving? A full-time job protecting her, which is kind of like the prize for the pie-eating contest being…free pie.
UA South, PG-13, 97 min.
THE ICE HARVEST
This little number nearly slipped under the radar, drowned out in the heavy holiday buzz shouting about country singers and teenage wizards; but it was co-written by wickedly funny novelist Richard Russo (
Empire Falls, Nobody's Fool, Straight Man
) and presents like the child of
Bad Santa
and
Fargo.
Nobody can make spineless adorable like John Cusack, here playing Charlie, a Kansas attorney who, along with his sleazy client Vic (Billy Bob Thornton), has just embezzled $2 million from their crime boss (Randy Quaid). But it's Christmas Eve, the weather's inclement and Charlie cherishes a tendresse for the strip-club owner (Connie Nielsen) with a heart of gold…are they ever going to get the hell out of Wichita?
UA North, R, 88 min.
JUST FRIENDS
There are, the wise tell us, a few useful rules in this life: Don't eat in restaurants named after women, never work anywhere there's one of those height rulers taped next to the exit and at all costs avoid movies in which people wear fat suits. Ryan Reynolds (Will Farrell Lite) takes a slapstick turn in the hot rubber costume, portraying the guy who was portly in high school and who's now an attractive, womanizing music producer. Yep, happens all the time. Anna Faris (admittedly a scene-stealer in
Lost in Translation
) is his scary client and Amy Smart is the girl he's loved all these years and to whom he now finally can pitch that woo.
UA North, PG-13, 96 min.
RENT
Don't get us wrong, we love musical theater (and are, under duress or under the influence, able to reproduce Patti LuPone, Elaine Paige and Betty Buckley solos note for faithful note)-but if the stifled laughter rippling through the UA during the trailer was any indication, the beloved Broadway rendition of
La Bohème
is going to look mighty silly. For one thing, while its mostly original cast members (including Taye Diggs and Wilson Jermaine Heredia as Angel but with Rosario Dawson as the new Mimi) are warbling that it's all about love, the accompanying montage makes it clear that it's actually all about heterosexual love-a travesty, considering that Rent was the first musical with openly GLBT characters. We'll don feather boas and go anyway, wishing Spike Lee had managed to keep his hands on this particular joint.
DreamCatcher, UA DeVargas, PG-13, 135 min.
YOURS, MINE AND OURS
Note to Dennis Quaid:
Why
? Why, when everyone knows you can act (
The Right Stuff, Traffic, Far from Heaven)
, do you persist in taking any old piece of dreck your agent throws at you? Are Meg's alimony payments really that hefty? For whatever occult reasons, you've chosen now to appear in this remake of what wasn't all that funny in 1968: 18 children attempting to destroy the relationship of their parents, a widower (Quaid) and widow (Rene Russo) who've fallen in love. There will be a cute dog which steals things; there will be paint and/or mud splatters and, oh yes, there
will
be vomit-of this we feel certain.
DreamCatcher, UA South, PG, 88 min.
Opens Thursday
NINE LIVES
See SFR's
interview with actress Amy Brenneman
.
CCA, R, 98 min.
Opens Friday
THE WARRIOR
That rare creature, a Hindi film with crossover appeal (think
Lagaan
or
Asoka)
, writer-director Asif Kapadia's action movie has normally calm reviewers like LA Weekly's Scott Foundas fairly gibbering with approval of its epic cinematography and mythic simplicity. Irfan Khan stars as Lafcadia, an enforcer to a local warlord who renounces his violent ways only to discover that getting out has a high price; he heads across the Rajasthan desert toward the Himalayan ranges seeking peace, hotly pursued by the violence he's sown.
The Screen, R, 86 min.
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Short Runs
BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS
Originally filmed in 2002,
Xiao cai feng
is set in 1971 in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, when two Chinese university students (Kun Chen and Ye Liu) are sent to a labor camp in a mountain mining village to purify them of their Western education. When the bored young intellectuals meet a beautiful, gifted young peasant woman (Xun Zhou), they decide to steal books (ergo, Balzac) and educate her. Guess their Western education didn't include anything about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil….
The Screen, NR, 110 min.
BEYOND 5 SENSES
Three Santa Fe women present their experiences of being contactees of the extraterrestrial in this documentary.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 80 min.
DANCES OF ECSTASY
Documentarians Michele Mahrer and Nicola Ma travelled the world from Turkey to Nigeria, the Kalahari to Brazil, recording rituals to discover the nature of the altered state people seek in religious trance, induced by rhythm, music and above all dance-what do Sufi whirling dervishes and teens at an all-night rave have in common?
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 80 min.
DORA THE EXPLORER MARATHON
Dora and her monkey confrère Boots must conquer mountains, forests and villainous fox Swiper-with help and encouragement from small viewers.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 90 min.
GADABOUT TRAVELING FILM FESTIVAL
Equal parts kooky and canny, this tour of the festival caravan presents more than a dozen independent shorts made on shoestring budgets by the up-and-coming, from the self-evident (
I Oversee the Maintenance of a Tool Shed, Why I Love Shoplifting from Big Corporations
) to the self-examining (
À l'ami imagine
, dealing with the isolation of being gay, and
This Is for Betsy Hall
, an impressionistic homage to the filmmaker's bulimic mother).
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 120 min.
GANGES: RIVER TO HEAVEN
Gayle Ferraro's meticulous documentary observes four families, each with a dying matriarch, who have travelled to the banks of the Ganges; the devoutly Hindu believe that those dying near the holy river have a greater chance of being liberated from the suffering of endless rebirth. Ferraro's camera unhesitatingly captures the gorgeous, garish and ghoulish indiscriminately, from funeral processions bedecked in red silk and marigolds to corpses floating in the river depths; the result is an intimate record of the subcontinent's struggle to retain ancient custom amidst modern problems.
CCA, NR, 79 min.
HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS! and A VERY MERRY CRICKET
See
.
Jean Cocteau, NR, 56 min.
MACHUCA
It's the most genuine sign of a country's having come to terms with the messier details of its recent past that its movie producers become willing to back an historically astute film. Now that there's some padding between Pinochet and the present tense of Chile, we're lucky enough to have Andrés Wood's lyrical, funny and also unapologetic, ruthlessly accurate child's-eye version of the events of 1973. Gonzalo (Matías Quer) is an awkward upper-class 12-year-old who's befriended by a scholarship boy from Santiago's shantytown, Machuca (Ariel Mateluna)-and the politics of Gonzalo's family suddenly don't quite stack up for him anymore.
CCA, NR, 121 min.
ONE BRIGHT SHINING MOMENT
Gravelly voice-of-reason Amy Goodman narrates this retracing of George McGovern's exhilarating but doomed 1972 presidential bid, defeated by political machinery new at the time and now well-oiled and seemingly intractable. Gore Vidal, Gloria Steinem, Warren Beatty, Gary Hart, Howard Zinn and the senator himself (at 82 years of age) are among those reminiscing with filmmaker Stephen Vittoria (
Black & White, Hollywood Boulevard
) about the political defeat of the 20th century. Prepare to grieve and get furious all over again.
CCA, NR, 125 min.
PLAGUES & PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA
It's difficult to explain the enormous appeal of a documentary about, among other things, "Hungarian revolutionaries, Christian nudists, pop stars, land sharks, hard drinkers, empty cities, failed resort towns, tons of dead fish, a dying café, and a man who built a mountain" (out of trash, no less)-but the collation of all these disparate subjects yields a movie that's Dickensian, Dionysian and a total delight. Maybe it's the Technicolor vintage stock footage, the pop sensibilities of its two young filmmakers, the voiceover narration by none other than John Waters or the astonishing eagerness of truly bizarre people to be themselves on camera in front of God and everybody; we don't really know, but we know you don't want to miss it.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 86 min.
SUDDEN RAIN: THE FILMS OF MIKIO NARUSE
Nervy, damn-the-torpedoes maneuvers like this are why we can't help but love the Screen, who for the next 10 Sundays will be showing fearsomely prolific (but little-known outside Japan) director Naruse's work, continuing with his 1954
Late Chrysanthemums
, starring
Floating Weeds
' Haruko Sugimura.
The Screen, NR, 101 min.
TONY TAKITANI
See SFR's
.
The Screen, NR, 75 min.
TOUCH THE SOUND
After introducing us to the work of Andy Goldsworthy,
Rivers and Tides
' Thomas Riedelsheimer brings us another uncommon artist in this documentary about world-class, Grammy-winning percussionist Evelyn Glennie, whose ability to perceive and create riotous cascades of sound is not in the least limited by the fact that she is profoundly deaf.
The Screen, NR, 95 min.
WHY WAL-MART WORKS AND WHY THAT DRIVES SOME PEOPLE C-R-A-Z-Y
In the interests of fair-mindedness, the Film Center this week shows a genuinely non-Wal-Mart-endorsed investigation of the chain company's highly successful (employing over 1 million Americans) business strategy; documentarian Ron Galloway will introduce his film in person. "Sam Walton is John Galt," the filmmakers claim, arguing there's "social pathology behind escalating attacks on the company by special interest groups." You can peruse the competing theories for yourself at www.whywalmartworks.com and www.walmartmovie.com.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR
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Now Showing
CAPOTE
In 1959, Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the role of his career), at loose ends after the fantastic success of
Breakfast at Tiffany
's, persuaded his New Yorker editor to let him write about a gruesome murder case; Capote follows him on his trip to the Midwest with best friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener, similarly brilliant), where he began researching what was to become
In Cold Blood
. Director Bennett Miller, writer Dan Futterman and Hoffman don't seek to whitewash Capote's self-serving qualities, and the result is an uncannily accomplished character assassination turned ode to its immensely gifted subject-a film awash in structured, complicated ambiguity, and delicately terrifying.
UA DeVargas, R, 98 min.
CHICKEN LITTLE
Somehow, Zach Braff is pretty much the last guy in the world you'd peg to play an animated chicken, but there it is. This fairy-tale revamp (you know, baseball plus aliens who want to take over the world-your standard stuff) manages to waste the vocal talents of Garry Marshall, Patrick Stewart, Amy Sedaris, Wallace Shawn, Steve Zahn, Joan Cusack, Adam West and Don Knotts (as Mayor Turkey Lurkey).
DreamCatcher, UA DeVargas, UA South, G, 77 min.
DERAILED
Suburban dad Clive Owen is tootling off to work one morning when he discovers he has no train ticket. Hey, presto-leggy femme fatale Lucinda (Aniston) comes to his rescue. Problem one: Rachel Geller as a femme fatale. Problem two: Clive Owen as a suburban dad. And problem three: They're both married, which just means they have to drink a lot before they call their spouses to claim they're working late. But while they are in, as it were, media res, an assailant breaks into their seedy motel room...and it all goes pear-shaped from there. Swedish director Mikael Håfström's movie seems to want to be preposterous, and finally crosses so far over into idiocy that it almost becomes enjoyable; besides, if we'd wanted Hitchcock, we'd have rented
Strangers on a Train
.
UA North, R, 147 min.
GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN'
There may be other, more experienced and talented actors in this movie (for instance,
Hustle & Flow
's Terrence Howard) but few of them will be as discussed as its star, Curtis Jackson (aka rapper 50 Cent)-in part because the film's story is taken from his own life as a street kid turned drug dealer turned rap star. Rather as
8 Mile
benefitted from Curtis Hanson's reining in of Marshall Mathers,
Get Rich
profits from the direction of Jim Sheridan, who has his own kind of street cred (
In the Name of the Father
); but Jackson's performance remains surprisingly tentative and uncertain, given that he's playing himself.
DreamCatcher, R, 134 min.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
It's hard to remember a time when corporate couldn't quite control editorial and anchors appeared live on the news with cigarettes burning indifferently in their fingers; the face of CBS then was Edward R Murrow (David Strathairn), who, along with his producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) dared to speak out against Senator McCarthy. Clooney's unusually restrained, staying out of the way of his fantastic cast-especially Strathairn, who's gobsmackingly convincing. Combine the razor-sharp script with sleek period details like vacuum-tube broadcasting equipment and gorgeous long expanses of uncut newsreel footage, and you get classic, compelling cinema that's also, unfortunately, still all too pertinent.
UA DeVargas, PG, 93 min.
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE
Director Mike Newell ratchets up the tension another notch as the scruffy young wizard (an acceptably adequate Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione and Ron must cope with the Tri-Wizard Tournament, Voldemort in the flesh (apt cast addition Ralph Fiennes) and, perhaps most formidably, finding dates for the Yule Ball. Newell deserves ringing encomia for managing to film Rowling's vasty tome at all; unfortunately he's had to shoehorn so much material into the thing that at times it feels elliptical, like looking at engraved illustrations. With naughty words, flirty looks and a fairly shocking death, however, his
Goblet of Fire
charts the next steps on our heroes' path-and it's only going to get grimmer from here on out.
DreamCatcher, UA DeVargas, UA North, PG-13, 157 min.
JARHEAD
Four actors at the top of their game (Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Cooper and Jamie Foxx) and one of our most enigmatic directors (Sam Mendes of
American Beauty
and
Road to Perdition
) take on Anthony Swofford's Desert Storm memoir. The result is cryptic at best, veering confusingly between cinematic cliché and the blank-faced, stultifying boredom of war. Mendes self-consciously references Vietnam-era classics
The Deer Hunter
and
Apocalypse Now
, but it's unclear where he hopes to position his own film, despite meaty performances from its actors. Beautifully filmed; curiously unmoving.
UA North, R, 122 min.
THE LEGEND OF ZORRO
And this film needed to be made because…? It has an oddly historical flavor, even taking into account the fact that it's set in 19th century California, almost as though the movie were made 10 years ago and has been sitting around some back lot in a can gathering dust, waiting to go straight to video. Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pick up their original roles as the passionately duelling de la Vegas, whose marriage is on the skids because the señor just can't seem to quit with the mask-wearing and the crime-fighting, even though Mrs. Zorro has moved out and started dating Rufus Sewall (go her!).
UA South, PG, 100 min.
PRIDE & PREJUDICE
This week's Austen adaptation has close ties to 1995's
Sense and Sensibility
; indeed, Emma Thompson rewrote the script at the 11th hour for no credit and no pay. Keira Knightley stars as every bookish girl's heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, the next-to-oldest daughter in a rambunctious but poor country family whose daughters must marry well in order to provide an income not only for themselves but also for their aging parents (an hysterical, constantly breathless Brenda Blethyn and, in one of the best performances of the year, Donald Sutherland, unexpectedly moving as the much put-upon father). Opinionated Elizabeth takes an immediate dislike to wealthy but dour Mr. Darcy (Matthew MacFayden) who seems to embody the pride of the title-but is she too proud to accept his help in an hour of need, or to admit that she's fallen for him? If you can manage to turn off the part of your brain that winces at mediocre camera work, you'll be perfectly content; Knightley isn't brilliant but she's quite passable, and very pretty; and when she's onscreen with Sutherland or MacFayden you can't tear your eyes away. Overall, it's another Austen film we can welcome happily into the fold.
UA DeVargas, PG, 127 min.
SAW II
Like its indie horror predecessor, only more so; stars Donnie Wahlberg, Franky G and Beverley Mitchell, among other unfortunates captured and offed by that mischievous rapscallion Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) in ever-more elaborate, grotesque and gratuitous ways, like a Rubik's Cube that's trying to kill you.
UA North, R, 91 min.
SHOPGIRL
Steve Martin stars in the screen version of his own novella, which he also adapted; Martin plays Ray Porter, a hollow-man millionaire who takes a shine to the glove saleswoman at Saks, starving artist Mirabelle (an underworked-of-late Claire Danes)-who's dating an impecunious and romantically clueless young font designer, Jeremy (
Rushmore
's Jason Schwartzman). Will she choose finesse over jeunesse, or someone who honks the horn when he comes to pick her up for a date over someone who knows what a wine list is? It's worth spending the hour and a half to find out, largely thanks to the performances, including unabashed scene-stealing from Schwartzman.
UA South, R, 104 min.
WALK THE LINE
"I feel like I just saw
Ray
," complained a friend. Alas, this pretty succinctly sums up the problem with
Walk the Line
: The performances are outstanding but the writing and direction are about the caliber of a made-for-television movie-and the result is an average-at-best music biopic that you feel you've already seen two dozen times. While Joaquin Phoenix inhabits his character with unbalanced gravity, Reese Witherspoon turns in her most authoritative work to date (as steely June Carter) and director James Mangold offers us some truly kickin' music (with spot-on work by actors playing Sam Phillips, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis in particular), there's a curious flat inadequacy to the film as a whole, as though it needed to be either an hour shorter or seven longer. Spend your ticket money on Johnny's
At Folsom Prison
instead.
DreamCatcher, Jean Cocteau, UA South, PG-13, 136 min.
ZATHURA
Fans of actor-director Jon Favreau's
Swingers
and
Made
probably wouldn't have him figured for a kids' movie guy; but it's clear he can still manage to be witty even on a big budget, without indulging in the aimless pyrotechnics most directors instinctively head for when they aim to please boys under 12. Based on the book by children's writer and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg (
The Polar Express, Jumanji
), the story is simple: Two squabbling brothers (Jonah Bobo and Josh Hutcherson) discover a dusty old vintage board game called Zathura, which turns their house into a rocket ship hurtling through outer space, teaching lessons about fraternal loyalty along the way.
DreamCatcher, UA South, PG, 113 min.
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Nothing Trivial About It
This week's winner is
Adam Harvey
, who connected Marcel Proust and Joan Allen in three swift steps: Jeremy Irons starred in
Un Amour de Swann
; Irons also played Humbert Humbert in
Lolita
opposite Dominique Swain; and Swain went on to play Allen's daughter in
Face/Off
. Mr. Harvey will receive a DVD chosen from our eclectic collection here at the SFR offices.
In honor of that great American holiday of colonialism and conquest, this week's question asks you to identify the three films, all with Thanksgiving scenes, from which the following dialogue is taken:
a) "There was all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly-lookin' people…there was mother-rapers...father-stabbers...father-rapers!"
b) "All I know is that when I'm not with you I am a total wreck…[and when I'm with you], I'm a different kind of total wreck."
c) "When there was no meat, we ate fowl and when there was no fowl, we ate crawdad and when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand."
Submit your answers promptly to
.
