click here for movie theaters and showtimes
Due to the ever-changing nature of the movie biz, showtimes as they appear in ANY and ALL newspapers should always be double-checked with the theaters before setting off for a night at the flicks.
Opens Friday
THE WORLD
Deceptively more micro than macrocosmic, The World in this case refers to a Beijing theme park, one of those awful places with built-to-scale copies of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty and so forth. To tourists, its staff are happy, talented and fortunate-but behind the scenes is an atomized community of isolated, depressed workers trapped by the confines of the World (globalization, anyone?). When security guard Taisheng (Chen Taisheng) meets peachy Tao (Zhao Tao), a young dancer, they open the doors to possibility-if only they don't close precipitously. Expect The World to turn slowly, yet be strongly colored-maybe not with the wild fauve of Zhang Yimou's high-femme wuxia fantasies, but tinted with young writer-director Zhang Ke Jia's duller, more ambiguous social realism, struggling to come to grips with a modernizing China from which no one can just fly away.
The Screen, NR, 143 min.
short runs
BE HERE TO LOVE ME
If you're already a fan of the late Texas guitarist Townes Van Zandt, you're probably been looking forward to Margaret Brown's documentary for months now. If, on the other hand, you've never heard of him, it doesn't actually matter, because the mix of home footage, live performances and interviews with his peers, friends and admirers (Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, to name only a few) will suck you into the life of a songwriter whose personal misery contrasted sharply with his uniquely commanding ability to put into words and music all the emotions that the rest of us feel but often can't articulate.
CCA, NR, 99 min.
BURNING MAN: BEYOND BLACK ROCK
One of the hits at December's film festival, this is the documentary for all of us who are intrigued by the unique city of 30,000 created for seven days every summer in the Black Rock Desert-but not quite intrigued enough to brave the sun damage, or the transition into full-bore "gift community" culture. The filmmakers assiduously tracked Burning Man folk and their doings for a solid 18 months, resulting in a most thorough documentary of the organization.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 105 min.
CHRISTMAS IN THE CLOUDS
It's not exactly the first Native American romantic comedy (we'll always have Dance Me Outside), but it may be the first one headlining Native yuppie characters-and it's arguably the funniest, with a dark, slyly intelligent and screamingly funny sense of the ludicrous. So skip the super-silly Anglo holiday-romance fare and join writer-director Kate Montgomery's cast at a struggling Indian-owned ski resort where M Emmet Walsh plays a rumpled alcoholic Anglo hotel reviewer, Tim Vahle is stressed-out manager Ray Clouds on Fire, Mariana Tosca is gorgeous Tina Little Hawk (whom everyone thinks is the hotel critic) and standbys Rita Coolidge, Lois Red Elk, Wes Studi (as a bingo caller), Shirley Cheechoo and Heather Rae add to the droll ensemble-though Graham Greene steals the show as usual, playing Earl, the hotel chef who's recently become…an evangelical vegetarian.
CCA, PG, 96 min.
DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE
What does an environmentally invasive species called the Nile perch (introduced into Lake Victoria in the 1950s, where it promptly gobbled up every other kind of fish) have to do with economic success (the perch fillet is Tanzania's best-selling export to Europe) and a lowered standard of living for the local people who've always lived off the lake? Director Hubert Sauper won Best Documentary at the European Film Awards with this, his attempt to capture globalization, as it were, on the hoof-to render in film the eye-glazing interconnectivity in which we're subsumed (and which we so naively believe we can control). The result: Visually inventive-and sobering.
CCA, NR, 107 min.
EDGAR CAYCE: A BEAUTIFUL DREAMER
Another film festival fave, this curiously engrossing documentary reveals the life story underlying the legend of "the Sleeping Prophet," a clairvoyant who gave over 14,000 readings during his lifetime-and allegedly healed thousands of incurable illnesses, making him perhaps the first medical intuitive on record. It's not the most beautifully filmed doc you'll ever see, but the subject is so eerily fascinating and filmmaker Darrah Meeley's research so thorough that you soon forget to notice.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 62 min.
ELIAS RIVERA: THROUGH THE EYES OF A MASTER
Join the Santa Fe painter in his studio for an extremely intimate look at his process and his private life. Friends and admirers such as art dealer Dennis Yares, actor Gene Hackman and fellow painter (and wife) Susan Contretas offer their insights into what makes Rivera tick-but the primary star of the show is the man in his studio, concentrating on nothing but paint, canvas and light.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 60 min.
THE NEW WORLD
Not only is The New World the latest from writer-director, Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven, Badlands), but it also essays a mindbogglingly labor-intensive task for researchers and the actors playing Powhatan characters: The resurrection of a defunct language, Algonquian, from a scanty 500-word vocabulary list from the 1600s. Noted Cherokee actor Wes Studi (who among his many other roles deservedly stole scene after scene from Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans) attached himself to the project specifically because of his interest in the work of Santa Fe's Indigenous Language Institute (indigenous-language.org). This preview screening, followed by a catered reception with Studi (and giveaways!), will benefit the Institute. Take your older children for some revisionist history, beautifully, even ruthlessly, filmed.
6 pm Monday, Jan. 9. $45. The Screen, 820-0311. PG-13, 150 min.
THE PASSENGER
See SFR's review, page 37.
CCA, PG-13, 119 min.
SAMURAI!
Boston Phoenix critic Henry Sheehan characterized this genre as follows: "When a man is surrounded inside a burning house by a dozen heavily armed warriors and it's the warriors who are in trouble, you know you're watching a samurai movie." CCA kicks off a meaty series devoted exclusively to bushido, beginning with one of our personal favorites, Kurosawa's Yojimbo (if you're not in love with Toshiro Mifune already, you will be after ronin Sanjuro spits and squints into the sky disinterestedly before obliterating dozens of opponents-because, in his own words, "I'm not dying yet. I have to kill quite a few men first") and continuing this week with the wonderful but lesser-known Three Outlaw Samurai, Samurai Rebellion and Harakiri, which is, yes, about just what you think it is. Hai!
CCA, runtimes and ratings vary
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
Drenched in a subtly literary perfume, Noah Baumbach's debut invites comparison to the fiction of Philip Roth or Saul Bellow (whose paperbacks turn up repeatedly during the movie), though the more obvious antecedent is Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. The film's opening-a combative tennis match in which Bernard (a scruffily bearded Jeff Daniels) and his older son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) play doubles against wife and mother Joan (Laura Linney) and younger son Frank (Kevin Kline's progeny Owen)-promptly sets the stage for ferocious family conflict. Bernard, we perceive immediately, is the worst, an unwilling academic with a musty whiff of the démodé about him; yet Daniels gains our compassion by revealing the insecurities which underlie his sententiousness, as his wife's writing career outstrips his own. As the boys side with either father or mother, respectively, they recreate their parents' dysfunctionality (Walt adopts his father's more noxious mannerisms, while Frank develops precocious tastes for beer and autoeroticism) in a pair of painfully accurate performances. By the time he deploys the film's most dramatic, Godardesque shots, upping the emotional ante at the last minute, Baumbach has definitely earned the right to do so.
The Screen, R, 80 min.
STRAIGHT ACTING
If you were a gay Mormon missionary coming out of the closet, wouldn't your first foray be into the men's locker room with a camera? Well, maybe it's just us. At any rate, director Spencer Windes decided to become an openly gay athlete-and while he was at it, check out the rugby pitch, rodeo circuit and hockey rink. His discovery? All boys, straight or gay, love to play competitive games with long sticks and, um, balls. The doc shows with steamy 17-minute short Night Swimming.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 58 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 few Sundays will continue showing fearsomely prolific (but little-known outside Japan) director Naruse's work, this week with Summer Clouds (1958) and The Whole Family Works (1939). Most of Naruse's work isn't available on DVD or video, either, so take advantage of the newly added showtimes to see the Japanese master's thoughtful work, family stories that ought to be sentimental but somehow aren't, with characters that linger a long, long time.
The Screen, NR, 193 min.
tony takitani
We're so thrilled to see this spare little movie find an audience, because it's absolutely poignant and evocative with a minimum of on-screen fuss. Renowned stage actor Issei Ogaku plays the title character, a profoundly isolated man who experiences a brief reprieve from alienation when he marries a beautiful and affectionate younger woman, who has just a teensy-weensy shopping addiction. Director Jun Ichikawa also adapted the script from the New Yorker short story by Haruki Murakami; spare and minimalist as ikebana yet emotionally absorbing (thanks in part to Ryuichi Sakamoto's clear, Satiesque piano score).
The Screen, NR, 75 min.
click here for movie theaters and showtimes
NOW SHOWING
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
See SFR's review, page 34.
UA DeVargas, R, 134 min.
CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN 2
No, no, no: It doesn't mean they have 24 kids now. It means that the Bakers (Bonnie Hunt and Steve Martin, reprising their 2003 roles) and their near-score of progeny head for Lake Winnetka for a summer cabin and some quality family time, but who should they encounter but Dad's archenemy Jimmy Murtaugh (Eugene Levy), his new trophy wife (Carmen Electra), and their eight offspring, staying across the lake from them. As odd as it might seem to take in a Labor Day flick on the darkest nights of the year, this installment's actually a mild improvement over the last one (no comment as to the difficulty of such an achievement), so slap on the sunscreen and bug spray and enjoy.
DreamCatcher, UA South, PG,
100 min.
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
Leave it to an animated lion and the director of Shrek to stir up more pre-release press opportunities than The Passion of the Mel; amidst the folderol lies a film worth watching if you can manage to ignore the blue and red states playing tug-of-war over its alleged religious content. Its highlight is without a doubt Tilda Swinton in the role she was destined to inhabit from birth: that of the White Queen. Alas, that's about it in an otherwise run-of-the-mill big-budget Disney kiddie-trap (though Georgie Henley as Lucy is unsettlingly good, in a Jodie Foster kind of way); Aslan's being voiced by Liam Neeson renders him cuddly rather than bloodcurdling, and the battle scenes, while large and bustling, don't give you the sense of impossible odds and insanely high stakes they did in Jackson's LOTR trilogy. A good dose of Sir Ian or even Viggo would have gone a long way-the actors here just aren't of the same caliber, and when you combine that with some frankly silly direction, this story of four British schoolchildren who accidentally wander into a magical land at war seems neither enchanting nor believable.
DreamCatcher, UA DeVargas, UA South, PG, 140 min.
THE FAMILY STONE
When eldest son Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney) brings his uptight girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) home for the holidays, with unearthly glee they go for the jugular (in particular Diane Keaton as matriarch Sybil and breakout starlet Rachel McAdams as deliciously malicious Amy), while dad Craig T Nelson and laid-back brother Luke Wilson (who seems to be playing Owen) offer only feeble remonstration. Everett's secret is that he's planning to propose to Meredith; the Stone clan's secret is that they think Everett and Meredith a terrible match; Sybil's secret remains hers for most of the film, but its eventual disclosure changes everything in its wake. Can Luke get the wooden Meredith to loosen up? Can Everett get the rebar out of his rear long enough to realize how pretty Meredith's sister (Claire Danes) is? In the fine tradition of holiday hanky-wavers, there'll be guffaws and muffled sobs en route to resolution; The Family Stone's hardly great art, but genial winter entertainment.
DreamCatcher, Jean Cocteau, UA South, PG-13, 102 min.
FUN WITH DICK AND JANE
Alack, alack, and well-a-day! It's not that we haven't been yearning for a long time for Teá Leoni (who's also Mrs. David Duchovny, of course) to work more. It's just that this wasn't exactly what we had in mind…we were thinking Ralph Fiennes, not Jim Carrey in face-contorting, I'm-so-gosh-darn-funny mode. But as ever, Hollywood has failed to consult us on matters of good taste in casting, so here she is opposite him in this remake of the 1977 George Segal/Jane Fonda caper about a married couple who must turn to a life of crime to pay the bills, because they apparently have no credit rating.
DreamCatcher, UA North, PG-13,
90 min.
KING KONG
Contrary to popular belief, there is such a thing as "too much of a good thing." Case in point: director Peter Jackson's remake of the 1933 classic, clocking in at over three hours. The premise, in case some of you haven't been paying attention, has to do with a very large gorilla. Jack Black stars as Carl Denham, a filmmaker looking to salvage the ruins of his latest picture by making a trek to legendary Skull Island with Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), a struggling young actress and Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), an up-and-coming playwright-culminating with the capture of Kong (and leading, of course, to a rather unfortunate incident involving a skyscraper). Jackson has done little to improve the story. Instead, he's just padded the film out with more action sequences; the film never relents in its nearly nonstop thrill-ride approach to storytelling. Kong absolutely should be seen on the big screen; but if you arrive an hour late and leave 20 minutes early, you won't see a good movie, you'll see an excellent one.
DreamCatcher, UA DeVargas, UA North, PG-13, 187 min.
Memoirs of a geisha
We feel about this pretty much the way we felt about The Last Samurai (not Helen DeWitt's profligate first novel, but the cinematic cheap shot starring Ken Watanabe-and, oh yeah, Tom Cruise): It's pretty, it has three of the world's most beautiful actresses in it (Raise the Red Lantern's Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh, who has a sexy, elegant dignity not seen on screen since Ingrid Bergman-plus feisty Zhang Ziyi, always good for a firecracker or two) and it stars Ken Watanabe, too. Unfortunately, however, it's also an unadulterated bore; when you hear Zhang's voiceover: "Mine is a story that should never have been told"-well, let's just say it begs the question. To learn how geisha really trained and lived, and how their art fared with the advent of the 20th century and the postwar decline of their floating world, check out Mikio Naruse's gemlike, small-scale yet socially realistic films at The Screen.
UA DeVargas, PG-13, 145 min.
MUNICH
Spielberg's latest explores the aftermath of the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes at the '72 Olympic Games in Munich, taken hostage by a pro-Palestinian group called Black September; hostages and terrorists were all killed. When Golda Meir authorizes Mostad agents played by Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciarán Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz and Geoffrey Rush to seek out and kill the 11 Palestians held by Israel to be directly responsible for the architecture of the terrorist act, the men are honored, and eager to sniff out and eliminate their targets. But Spielberg's meticulous direction sets us up along with them; as the agents experience a growing horror, we feel taken aback as well-while still having to maintain our sympathy for these Israelis and their nationalist vision-who would have thought Spielberg could pull off such a thing, without getting caught up in his usual syrupy sentimentalizing or wavering identity politics? The script is honed, warm and funny-and then frightening and metallic; the acting is first-rate (especially from Bana, deeply convincing as the agent who most in danger of losing his mind) and as a whole is thoughtful without being overly talky-mazel tov, boys.
UA DeVargas, R, 164 min.
THE PRODUCERS
Behold, the many and convoluted iterations of The Producers: Once there was a stage musical which became a film; it then became a musical again, but a different one-and now that musical is a film once more. If you think that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick are funny as Bialystock and Bloom, then you clearly wouldn't know Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder if they auditioned you for the role of Hitler. No, Mel Brooks' pungent satire (pillorying both unscrupulous showbiz and the ignorant enthusiams of upper-class art consumers) seems irretrievably lost beneath the bajillions of dollars which have traded hands, and not even some inspired casting (leggy, agile Uma Thurman as dancing Swedish marvel Ulla and Will Ferrell as talentless Nazi playwright Franz Leibkind) can do much to hold up the resultant unwieldy chimera, which starts to seem like an endless loud party downstairs at 2 in the morning. Despite frequent frenetic showstoppers, the show goes on…and on…and on-and is it just us, or has Matthew Broderick had too many Botox injections? There's an alien ironed quality to his once-animated features, as though he's being impersonated by Commander Odo of Deep Space Nine. It's sad to see him and Lane reduced to capering hither and yon, doing everything but turning to the camera and pleading with us to laugh (come to think of it, that may have happened once or twice). You may still be amused, but we were quite crestfallen.
UA DeVargas, PG-13, 134 min.
the ringer
You thought the most tasteless film of 2005 would surely feature he-whore Rob Schneider in a baby diaper, didn't you? But you were wrong, because here's a movie starring Johnny Knoxville (The Dukes of Hazzard) as Steve, who enters the Special Olympics to win a bet and pay off a debt. The gag, see, is supposed to be that he's not Special in that way, so winning should be un fait accompli for him; but it won't be, because if they'd wanted to depict someone smart they'd've cast David Hyde Pierce. Instead, expect our doltish hero to learn his lesson from sweetly beaming "mentally challenged" athletes (who could probably outperform the producers of this movie at stochastic differential equations and chess endgames).
UA North, PG-13, 94 min.
RUMOR HAS IT
We'd be so happy if we could tell you what a delight this little film is; that Jennifer Aniston's funny and adorable, Mark Ruffalo and Kevin Costner are completely believable as her swains, that there's nothing annoying about her family's cavalier attitude toward their own class status (Pasadena, and very, very, very rich) and that the supporting roles for Mira Sorvino, Richard Jenkins and Shirley MacLaine are rich and well-developed. But if we said this to you, our nose would grow even longer than it is already. This is an abysmal movie, out of which we watched audience members walk in small, determined groups; the script tries, from time to time, in a sprightly, cheerfully insistent way to accomplish various things, but then it subsides, defeated by its own bewilderment and clumsiness. It's all made worse by the fact that this family is supposed to be the family on which the Robinsons are based in The Graduate; but inviting comparison to a much better film isn't actually a very smart move, leading viewers to the obvious conclusion: rent Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, and don't bother with what's rumored to be a total flop.
DreamCatcher, UA South, PG-13,
96 min.
SYRIANA
In writer-director Stephen Gaghan's complex, multilayered political thriller, oil is the driving force behind an intricate web of deception, murder and corruption. Using an interwoven story structure similar to that of his Oscar-winning Traffic screenplay, Gaghan offers a conspiracy-minded view of the interconnected world of oil sales, strife in the Middle East and duplicitous business endeavors. With an eclectic but tight ensemble (featuring George Clooney as a burnt-out CIA operative, Matt Damon as an idealistic derivatives trader, brilliant work from Tim Blake Nelson, Will Hurt and Jeffrey Wright, and perhaps most remarkably a star-making performance from Alexander Siddig as a liberal, Western-thinking Saudi prince), Syriana is a bold-albeit left-leaning-work not afraid to spark discussion. Weaving an intricate tapestry of overlapping story and character arcs, Gaghan attempts to explain what is going on in the world today, as oil reserves quickly diminish and no one wants to be left in the dark, literally; the result is a smart thriller that rebukes the clichés and trappings normally associated with this genre.
UA North, R, 126 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; the result is an average-at-best music biopic that you feel you've already seen two dozen times. While the performances are outstanding (Joaquin Phoenix inhabits his character with unbalanced gravity and 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.
UA South, PG-13, 136 min.
click here for movie theaters and showtimes
Nothing trivial about it
In an expansive post-holiday mood, the Screener has decided to give readers a final crack at the double Reader-Devised Torture quiz. First, Rand B Lee defies readers to "identify the absurdly anachronistic set dressing marring the Queen Elizabeth-throne-room scene in Orlando." (We assume Quentin Crisp doesn't count.) Then, David Zeoli dares you to identify the film in which the title character utters both the following lines: "Wherever you go, there you are," and "Character is what you are in the dark." Submit your answers to screener@sfreporter.com; otherwise, our triumphantly evil querents will receive DVDs chosen from our unique collection.
