Review: Adventureland
Greg Mottola’s “Adventureland,” a coming-of-age romantic comedy in which quirky young misfits populate a wacky amusement park, promises a takeaway that is equally fresh and offbeat. Alas, the film ultimately makes little light of the hackneyed idea of true love.
As the film opens, bright-eyed, mop-headed James (Jesse Eisenberg) is graduating from college, class of ‘87. With a degree in comparative literature under his belt, the intellectual stripling is headed for Columbia University’s journalism program come fall. But first, he gets to live out every young writer’s dream: backpacking Europe for the summer.
Not so fast. When James’ father gets demoted at work, the trip is canceled and James is banished to Hometown, Pennsylvania instead. Apparently baby bird hadn’t poked his head out far from under mommy and daddy’s protective wing. He’s got oodles of literary experience, but James is a virgin to life, love … and labor. With no work history, the best job James manages to land is as a carnival games attendant in the amusement park, Adventureland.
Mottola is at his comical best as he introduces the characters and illustrates the rules by which Adventureland is run. The park staff is an assemblage of freaks and geeks. There’s Pete, who is as excitable as a yappy terrier and has a recurring role of steaming through a scene just long enough to punch James in the nuts. And a dopey-sweet Russian-lit nerd named Joel — he puffs from a 19th century pipe and doesn’t need to be nudged to admit that it may be an “affectation.”
As for the games — course the sick truth is that they’re all rigged (we all knew it). The disks in the ring toss are magnetized to never land on their target, and plastic bowlers are superglued to mannequins, never to be knocked loose no matter how hard one throws.
Simply put, “no one ever wins the big ass panda.”
One gets the sense, though, that though Mottola easily conjures up a cast realer than real life, he doesn’t have much sympathy for them. They’re just weirdoes, and one broody dark-eyed beauty quickly surfaces from the dross. Her name is Em, and she goes to NYU.
One spends half the movie trying to figure out exactly why Em is so angst-ridden. Could it be a turbulent home life? We’re told that Em’s mother died recently, and her father has married an abominable new woman. But the tyrants barely make an appearance in their comfortably furnished single family home. Or is it that Em is having a secret affair with Adventureland’s mechanic, Connell (Ryan Reynolds), a hunky, older married man?
Whatever it is, young love blooms.
But the film sadly disappoints where it matters. James and Em are different from the animals at the carnival. And the film makes brisk business of short-selling cred borrowed from cultural icon Lou Reed. In case the soundtrack is not obvious enough, Em wears an oversized Lou Reed tee, and Connell has only to reprise that ONE time that he jammed with the man to get all the girls.
If these two get together, one would not be surprised if they moved back to the suburbia from which they came.
Review: Crossing Over
If Wayne Kramer’s “Crossing Over” were to inspire a game called the Six Degrees of Immigration Woes, what would be the shortest path between two of its biggest stars, Ashley Judd and Harrison Ford?
Let’s see, Judd plays Denise, an immigration lawyer who endures a sexless marriage to paunchy green card bureaucrat, Cole (Ray Liotta). Cole crashes his car into Claire, a pretty young Aussie actress who has overstayed her visa in a desperate attempt to launch her Hollywood career. In fact, a moment before the car crash, Claire was putting a down payment on a triptych of fake IDs at a print shop. Ford’s partner’s sister works at that print shop. But even if she didn’t, the shop would still be of special interest to Ford — he plays Max, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
As Kramer weaves this “Crash”-like web of interconnected stories in present-day Los Angeles, he manages to cover an annoyingly wide range of skin color and visa types.
Max leads a raid which takes a young Mexican garment factory worker and single mother away from her son. A culturally confused Korean teenager, whose family runs a dry cleaning business, can’t quite match his parents’ appreciation for the naturalization process and falls in with an Asian gang. Denise aches to rescue a sweet little African girl stuck in an INS detention center while her mother dies in a hospital a world over.
Of AIDS, no doubt.
All this serendipity and drama is designed to tug at our heart strings, but the plot is so burdened with characters who must explain their complicated predicaments that nothing save powerful shocks of violence and sex can defibrillate this hunkering juggernaut.
Cole strikes a lurid deal with Claire, trading papers for two months of sex, “whenever, wherever” he wants. And immigration status is vaunted like an elusive high. “I’ve got to get legal. You’ve got to get legal,” Claire says to her British boyfriend, who’s trying to conquer the U.S. as the next John Mayer.
Why don’t they both just make a brief foray into Canada?
“Crossing Over” chugs on with its bevy of contrived moral quandaries and a hugely exaggerated sense of its own value and importance. Its more experienced actors deliver tired, lackluster performances as its younger cast members shine, undoubtedly eager to nail their melodramatic lines and prove that they can cry on cue.
Only the viewers are left well-bruised from being beaten over the head with cultural stereotypes and obvious, overblown and cheap histrionics.
Review: Moscow, Belgium
Two bruised apples barrel into each other in the Belgian romantic comedy Moscow, Belgium.
In a working class neighborhood of Ghent lives Matty, a world-weary mother of three. With a complexion as gray as Cinderella when she was still a chimney sweep, Matty’s seen better days. Her husband Werner, an art teacher at the local academy, recently moved in with his 22-year-old student, who — though never appearing on-screen — still manages to makes her presence known by way of annoying text-message chimes that trail Werner wherever he goes. A mid-life crisis, Matty crisply concedes, as she waits for her morally feeble husband to make up his mind about leaving her for good.
But Matty’s about to take up with a younger lover herself. One afternoon, in the parking lot of a grocery store, she crashes her car into a 10-ton truck the color of a smiley face. From the cab emerges a long-haired, red-bearded “Viking” with some romance issues of his own. Divorced and more than 10 years Matty’s junior, Johnny has spent most of his life shuttling between Ghent and Milan, inadvertently driving the love of his life into the arms of his antithesis, a prissy lawyer.
The claws come out in the venomous exchange that follows the collision. Who crashed into whom? Who deserves the blame? It turns quickly into a match of wits between the sexes, and Matty in particular stings with her insults. Eventually both sides calm down and go their separate ways, but something about Matty moves Johnny. He drops by her apartment the next day unannounced to fix her trunk, and asks her out on a date.
The pairing is nothing if not a contradiction. Given to overblown romantic overtures, Johnny compares Matty to Mona Lisa, only to be told that her smile is a painful grimace, and Leonardo da Vinci was gay.
Moscow, Belgium marks the debut of Flemish director Christophe van Rompaey, a homegrown talent who has been waiting a decade for the time and resources to make this feature-length film. Occasionally the dialogue twinkles with originality, though van Rompaey takes more cues from Hollywood than he needs to. Certain European flourishes — nudity in particular — serve the story’s unabashed honesty well.
For all its dreary cliches, what makes Moscow, Belgium eminently watchable is Barbara Sarafian’s Matty. In her scraggy blonde locks, Matty resembles by turns a caged lioness and a feathery princess. Sarafian climbed into her character’s skin, giving life to her ever tic and sigh.
Review: Waltz with Bashir
Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir begins with a feverish dream about a memory and concludes with the cool remove of a moment frozen in time by news cameras. How one arrives at the other is the central question of the film.
It starts with a pack of wild-eyed dogs, hurling with ferocious velocity through the indigo streets of Tel Aviv. Barking and snarling, they come to the foot of an apartment building, as far as they can go. Watching from above is a solitary figure. He is the dreamer, an ex-soldier and friend of the filmmaker. And, as he tells Folman, there are exactly 26 hounds, one for each guard dog that he shot more than 20 years ago. They’ve come to exact their revenge.
Folman, too, was in combat as the Israeli Defense Forces pushed into Lebanon. But Folman has no recall of that time, save for a disturbing memory of starkly naked soldiers — himself among them — emerging from the water onto the shores of Beirut as flares illuminate the ferrous skyline.
In September 1982, Lebanese Christian militiamen slaughtered at least hundreds of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps to avenge the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s newly elected president. Israelis, who could have taken action, never put a stop to the massacre. How guilty are they?
Folman sets out to interview other veterans, psychologists and historians. What follows is a journey that is both violent and intensely reflective, equal parts fantasy and reality. Parts of the film do follow a more conventional documentary technique, with interviewees appearing as talking heads onscreen. But the memories take shape as animated forms, so that they are able to retain their fluidity in time, and even insulated from the laws of physics. At times, less is more as Folman drained them of color and dimension — most scenes are monochromatic, the background flattened to emphasize their symbolism and surrealism.
“Memory is dynamic. It’s alive,” one friend tells Folman. “If some details are missing, memory fills the holes with things that never happened.”
In the episode that gives title to the film, one man tells of a soldier who ran out into a crossfire as if he’d lost his mind. Time in suspense, the man danced for seemingly forever as bullets flew all about him. All around the street lay giant portraits of the freshly assassinated Bashir.
Review: The Class
Even their names are a delight to rattle off. Khoumba. Rabah. Carl. Souleymane. Wei. Cherif. Lucie. Nassim. Agame. Juliette. And so on – 25 students in all. Culled from an urban high school in Paris, the kids in Laurent Cantet’s The Class are no actors. As a consequence, they don’t just speak for their characters, they speak themselves.
This documentary-style film is loosely based on a memoir about teaching French to a group of African kids on the outskirts of Paris by François Bégaudeau, who plays a version of himself named François Marin. The slim and youthful Bégaudeau, who has worked as a film critic and a punk rocker, struggles with his role in the classroom. He naturally prefers critical examination and democratic dialogue, yet attempts to fall back on authoritarian power when things get out of hand.
When Marin puts up a sentence on the board to illustrate the meaning of “succulent,” he writes, “Bill enjoys a succulent cheeseburger.” To which a feisty Algerian girl named Esmeralda retorts, “You always use whitey names. It’s wicked.”
“What names?” replies François.
“Honky names… Honkies, Frenchies, frogs.”
“You’re not French, Esmeralda?”
“Well, I am French, but I’m not proud of it.”
It’s a brand of open dialogue between teacher and student that feels all too rare in classroom dramas.
The Class is an organic sample of present-day France, lifted neatly from all of life’s messiness in a container of walls (the original title of the film is Entre les Murs, or Between the Walls). We follow the 14-year-olds through nine months of a school year as they learn to conjugate nager (“to swim”), write self-portraits, and banter on a assortment of topics ranging from light to loaded. Shame, race, soccer are all treated with an even hand inside the classroom. Active and engaged, these 25 voices propel the film along with a real kinetic energy.
When François is forced to deal with an unruly student, he must come to grips with his powers of discipline — is its use justified? If students aren’t punished when they’ve crossed the line, does that undermine François’s responsibility to impart upon these children the tenet that in society, for every action there are consequences?
Perhaps the most frustrating, yet ultimately satisfying aspect of The Class is that the camera never leaves the classroom. Parents stop by for conferences, and as adversities in the kids’ home lives suggest themselves, François is visibly disturbed.
The audience no doubt empathizes, and in doing so comes to realize that there are infinite back stories dangling from these classroom walls.
Review: Taken
If James Bond is to be believed, secret agents love nothing better than decamping to some exotic corner of the Mediterranean out of reach of pesky villains. Not Bryan Mills, the poor fool. After a career with the CIA as a self-described “preventer of bad things,” he is divorced and alone. Worst of all, he has sentenced himself to a monotonous retirement that consists of nothing more than eating Chinese takeout, scoping the price of small electronics, and reliving the few memories of his daughter Kim’s childhood in his possession.
If the idea of spending 90 minutes with Mills in French director Pierre Morel’s new thriller “Taken” doesn’t quite entice, rest easy, for the plot burdens us with only a rough sketch of a launch pad before rocketing off into outer space.
Daughter Kim, whom Mills has firmly frozen at age 5 in memory reruns, has grown into a leggy brunette of 17, though her mind may have been left behind. She has few opinions of her own, and she is kept on a tight leash by her mother, who loves to watch the now impotent ex-spy suffer for his sins of past neglect.
With a teary pout and a guilt trip, mother and daughter strong-arm Mills into letting Kim and a friend spend a summer in Paris. But no sooner does Kim and friend step off the plane are the two snatched by a gang of Albanian human traffickers.
Who can save her from sexual slavery in under 96 hours (including the flight to Paris)? You guessed it.
In essence, the film is built around an oversized character, both figuratively and literally. Neeson towers a good 6 inches above the rest of the cast and so do his ass-kicking skills.
“I don’t know you who you are. I don’t know what you want… But what I do have are a very particular set of skills acquired over a very long career in the shadows, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you… I will look for you, I will find you. And I will kill you.” So goes the Mills Manifesto.
From there, Mills — who by now has traded in his grunge plaids for a svelte leather jacket — shreds through paper-thin stock characters — beady-eyed, card-playing Albanians, corrupt bureaucrats, and fat and oily Arabs bidding on “certified pure” cream of the sex worker crop are just a few — without a soupçon of mercy.
In fact, no amount of deserved innocence registers in Mills’s single minded focus, other than the innocence of his baby girl. Like 2008’s cringe-worthy “Bangkok Dangerous,” “Taken” is a socially unconscious thriller.
He may not be licensed to kill, but that’s not gonna stop him.
