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So David Duchovny has checked out of a sex addiction rehab.
Duchovny’s publicist assures the general public — please, Wall Street, don’t panic! — that “David has successfully completed his rehabilitation, he is out of rehab and will be starting a movie soon.”
Hmm.
Apparently the Truth is Down There.
– Chase
Kat Dennings and Michael Cera in “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.”
Rating: 68
“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” looks like “Juno” but thinks like “Sixteen Candles.” This night ride through New York City’s indie rock culture is a strong showcase for stars Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, but then director Peter Sollett takes side trips into gross-out humor that don’t fit with Nick and Norah’s native intelligence.
Nick (Cera) just had his heart crushed by Tris (Alexis Dziena), a nightmare in a cheerleading outfit, and he’s dangerously despondent, sending Tris mix CDs that she throws in the trash. Norah (Dennings) has been digging them out as soon as Tris tosses them, and based on Nick’s immaculate taste, has fallen in love with the anonymous boy.
After finally meeting at a gig for Nick’s band, the two relative strangers fake a relationship for Tris’ benefit, and Nick’s bandmates (Aaron Yoo and Rafi Gavron) decide they should make it real. So they offer to drive Norah’s drunk friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) to the secret concert by the hot club band Where’s Fluffy and give Nick and Norah a chance to know each other.
But Caroline disappears, sending Nick and Norah through New York underbelly scenarios in pursuit of Caroline, Fluffy and each other. This is where “Infinite Playlist” plays like a hipster version of “Adventures in Babysitting.” Some gags, such as Caroline’s unflushable chewing gum, are more likely to elicit groans than laughter, but those are sideshows to the chemistry between Cera and Dennings.
As Nick, Cera performs a variation on roles he perfected in “Juno,” “Superbad” and “Arrested Development,” a sensitive guy with a heart on display for easy breaking. But while Cera is the known commodity, it’s Dennings who provides the revelation, bringing a sly reading to even throwaway lines.
By the time “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” reaches its penultimate stop at a landmark in rock ‘n’ roll history, the film saves itself from the goofier elements and focuses on the flowering of Nick and Norah’s love story. Thankfully, at that point it feels like the cool, smart and bittersweet love story it could have been if it hadn’t gotten sidelined by zany, madcap antics.
Alice Braga in “Blindness.”
Rating: 39
Fernando Meirelles’ “Blindness” aspires to explore the darker corners of the human condition — a “Lord of the Flies”-style parable in which society breaks down when nearly everyone goes blind. But Meirelles has created little more than an art-house zombie movie with fewer brains — literally and figuratively — than George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.”
“Blindness” opens in an anonymous city (it was largely filmed in Sao Paulo, Brazil) where a Japanese man goes blind behind the wheel at an intersection. He paws at his eyes as the traffic behind him turns nasty, and when a bystander (played by screenwriter Don McKellar) offers to drive him home, he steals the man’s car.
The man turns out to be “patient zero” in an epidemic, and it spreads to his ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) and many other patients including a young boy (Mitchell Nye) and a call girl (Alice Braga). The government quickly quarantines the afflicted, and while the eye doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore) is strangely immune, she goes along with him to the crumbling hospital/prison.
Sanitary and social conditions quickly devolve as the quarantined break into factions, and the food supply is controlled by a psychopath (Gael Garcia Bernal) and a blind-by-birth accountant (Maury Chaykin). They subjugate the others, forcing the women to become concubines in exchange for food as word trickles in about the breakdown of the world outside.
No one has a name in “Blindness,” but that is appropriate: the film is populated by archetypes rather than characters and a situation rather than a story. Meirelles, the gifted director of “The Constant Gardener” and “City of God,” delivers an infuriating copout ending that arrives without delivering a coherent message, indicating that Meirelles’ own vision for “Blindness” is frustratingly blurry.
1479
Fascinating short piece on a famous scream that has shown up as a sound effect in over 130 films, including all of the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” films. And apparently, the man who did the original was none other than novelty song legend Sheb Wooley. Aa-AAAAH!!!
Rating: 80
The plot for “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is suspiciously commonplace: Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) has his heart stomped by crime drama star Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), so he hops a plane to Hawaii to escape his sorrow only to find Sarah and her rebound rock star, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), staying at the same resort. Sounds like Kate Hudson/Dane Cook celluloid detritus, but “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is one of the smartest comedies to spin out of Judd Apatow’s acid-tongued universe.
“Sarah Marshall” owes much of its success to Segel’s caffeinated script, which is delivered by a spot-on ensemble including Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Tulsa native Bill Hader and former “That ’70s Show” star Mila Kunis, who plays Rachel Jansen, the sharp-witted and preternaturally gorgeous resort worker who revives Peter’s desire to live. The comic energy never lags, seemingly broad characters show surprising depth, and to top it off, there’s an all-puppet vampire musical thrown in for good measure and, of course, Segel’s unsettling full-frontal nudity.
This three-DVD collection is uncommonly rich with extras — director Nicholas Stoller clearly presided over an inspired cast that had far too much fun to fit into one movie. The best segments include the multiple improvisations in “Line-O-Rama,” “Drunk-O-Rama” and “Sex-O-Rama,” the full music video for Aldous Snow’s “We’ve Got to Do Something,” and William Baldwin’s viciously funny David Caruso send-up in the “Crime Scene” outtakes. With “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” there is precious little worth forgetting.
Kerry Washington in “Lakeview Terrace.”
Rating: 59
The underlying layers of racism lurking in modern suburban life provide the essential grist of Neil LaBute’s “Lakeview Terrace,” in which an idyllic cul-de-sac in the San Fernando Valley becomes ground zero in one man’s battle against the steady march of progress. But LaBute’s effort to address societal ills gets sidelined when the film downshifts into familiar thriller territory.
Chris and Lisa (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) are recent transplants from Oakland, Calif. to the Los Angeles area, having recently purchased a nice stucco home in an affluent subdivision. She is black, he is white, and their union is a happy one. But it gets under the skin of their new neighbor, Abel Turner.
As played by Samuel L. Jackson, Abel is a police officer who runs his home like a boot camp, keeping his kids under his heavy thumb and illuminating his property with security lights to ward off criminals. Just like those lights, the intimidation techniques Abel brings to his job never get turned off, and when he meets Chris and Lisa, he sees their marriage and their presence on his block as a direct affront to his world view.
Samuel L. Jackson in “Lakeview Terrace.”
Abel, whose views on race and behavior are fueled by years on the beat, sees Chris as an interloper and a poseur who has no business listening to old-school hip-hop or being married to Lisa. For that matter, he thinks Lisa is a bad influence on his kids. So Abel brings the full brunt of his bad attitude to bear on the couple, and between Abel’s oppressive behavior and the threat of a wildfire just over the ridge, Lisa and Chris soon wonder if it’s too early — or too late — to put the house back on the market.
LaBute has a lot on his plate with “Lakeview Terrace,” and issues of racism, abuse of power, the environment and crime are all addressed in his screenplay. But at its heart, “Lakeview Terrace” is nothing more than a bad neighbor thriller such as “Pacific Heights.” Abel is so over-the-top, and Jackson doesn’t spare a glare in his menacing portrayal, that most of the societal subtext gets steamrolled.
Toward the end, the circumstances surrounding his behavior don’t matter: Abel just becomes a monster that must be stopped by any means necessary. LaBute has taken on difficult territory in the past — “In the Company of Men” is an unforgettable horror show of sexism and interoffice skullduggery — but in “Lakeview Terrace,” all those points get drowned out by Jackson’s show of force.
Rating: 91
In Thomas McCarthy’s “The Visitor,” a sleepwalking man gets a jolt that shocks him back to life. Walter Vale, played with uncommon grace by Richard Jenkins of “Six Feet Under,” is a widowed social sciences professor whose life has slowed to a crawl. When Walter is asked to deliver a paper at a conference, he reluctantly goes to New York where he learns that his Greenwich Village apartment, where he and his wife lived as newlyweds, is occupied by Tariq and Zainab (Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira), an immigrant couple who sublet the flat from an illegal broker.
At first, Walter is happy to let Tariq and Zainab leave the apartment, but eventually warms to the couple. Tariq, a djembe player, teaches Walter about Fela Kuti and African rhythms, and slowly Walter starts showing signs of life. When Tariq is arrested on a minor complaint and faces deportation, Walter becomes his only true advocate as he helps the young man’s mother (Hiam Abbass of “Munich”) communicate with her detained son and fight for his release.
Watching “The Visitor,” it becomes clear how much McCarthy (“The Station Agent”) trusts his audience. By not explicating every single element of Walter’s life, he allows viewers to fill in the blanks, and while there were possibilities for Hollywood endings, McCarthy pivots before anything sappy can happen. “The Visitor” is a film that is pure and free of manipulation. Thanks to Jenkins’ extraordinary portrayal of a man renewed and the open-endedness of this quietly magnificent story, it never really resolves or wraps up, allowing us to continue Walter Vale’s life in our own minds.
Kerry Washington
Kerry Washington takes chances, whether it’s following up a film about Ugandan dictator Idi Amin with a Wayans Brothers comedy or showing up as a panelist on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” This week, the 31-year-old actress stars in Neil LaBute’s “Lakeview Terrace,” and its list of themes is enough to keep a political roundtable busy for weeks.
“One of my favorite things to do is to ask people what this movie is about,” Washington said in a recent phone interview. “They’ll say it’s about power or it’s about gentrification. Some people say it’s about race relations in America, it’s about the generation gap and the culture clash, it’s about conservative versus progressive, or some people say it’s about love and being able to tell the truth in your marriage. And it’s fascinating to me that the movie is about all those things.”
In “Lakeview Terrace,” Washington plays Lisa Mattson, who relocates from Oakland, Calif., to the Los Angeles suburbs with her husband Chris, played by Patrick Wilson. This interracial couple immediately runs afoul of their neighbor, Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) a police officer and strict father who runs the cul-de-sac like he runs his house. Abel does not approve of the Mattsons, and he does everything possible to make the Mattsons consider putting their house back on the market.
Washington said that she expected intensity from LaBute, the director and playwright whose debut film, “In the Company of Men,” was a caustic expose on office politics. What she found was an uncommonly enjoyable working experience.
“You know, he’s just really fun,” Washington said of LaBute. “The film is at moments so dark and so much of his other work is so dark, but he is just this lighthearted, jovial, hilarious person. And that was the tone on the set, believe it or not. Everyone is like, ‘Oh it must have been so intense, and were you all just scowling at each other all day?’ Sam and I were laughing between takes.”
Her filmography shows a wide range of subject matter, but Washington said she has not actively pursued wildly divergent roles, except when she insisted on doing a crazy comedy after her intense experience filming “The Last King of Scotland” in Africa. The result was “Little Man,” a movie about a vertically challenged criminal pretending he is a baby. But Washington is equally adept at comedy and drama: she starred in Spike Lee’s farce “She Hate Me,” and will appear this fall in the director’s World War II drama, “Miracle at St. Anna.”
But her recent appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” offered a side few of her fans had seen. An official surrogate for the presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, Washington held her own debating Maryland Governor Michael Steele. She said that she doesn’t worry about the perception some viewers have of performers who enter the political arena.
“You know, I guess I don’t really think about it in those terms,” she said. “I don’t try to be taken seriously, I just try to be fully present and fully authentic and fully expressive, you know what I mean?”
– George Lang
Meg Ryan and Annette Bening in “The Women.”
Rating: 31
Clare Boothe Luce’s “The Women” became a hit on stage and screen in the 1930s for its blistering satire and stiletto-sharp female characters. Seven decades later, “Murphy Brown” creator Diane English’s modern retelling gets blunted by hackneyed plot devices that feel compromised and safe as milk compared to the original’s toxic Manhattans or even “Sex and the City’s” potent Cosmopolitans.
The central conceit of Luce’s original stays constant: Mary Haines (Meg Ryan) is a socialite who learns from her chatty manicurist (Debi Mazar) that her husband Stephen is cheating on her with Crystal (Eva Mendes), a slinky perfume saleswoman at Sak’s Fifth Avenue with a reputation for predatory behavior. Mary is heartbroken, but it only gets worse when best friend Sylvie Fowler (Annette Bening), a high-powered editor, sells Mary out in the tabloid pages.
That’s the basic framework from the original, from Sak’s Fifth Avenue to “Jungle Red” nail polish. But then English makes hash of Luce’s play by either softening characters such as Sylvie (known as Sylvia in the original) or replacing others with cuddly stand-ins such as the bubbly and prolifically maternal Edie (Debra Messing), who substitutes for the horribly non-maternal Edith.
Other amendments are even less graceful: the film slides into a female self-image sidebar involving Mary’s daughter Molly (India Ennenga) that is clearly tied in with appearances of Dove’s “Real Beauty” marketing campaign on Mary’s television. Dove’s parent company, Unilever, contributed $3 million to the film’s budget, and English, who spent 14 years trying to get “The Women” made, clearly did what she needed to secure that funding. As a result, “The Women” is one-quarter cleansing cream.
As for the performances, Bening is simply too good for this material: her Sylvie comes across like a desexualized version of Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones from “SATC.” Everyone else, including Ryan and Jada Pinkett Smith as bored lesbian writer Alex Fisher, seems to be phoning it in on stylish cell phones from scenic Manhattan locales.
English does bring back one major element from the Luce play and George Cukor’s 1939 film: no men are seen within camera range. Well, at least that is true until the last scene. Utterly toothless and unmemorable, English’s “The Women” couldn’t even get that right.
And while it might not be kind, it has to be noted: Ryan should be barred from further plastic surgeries. Kim Hunter in “Planet of the Apes” had more upper-lip mobility.
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The estate that controls the 1942 short story on which Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window was based has come forward with a copyright-infringement lawsuit against the makers of Disturbia, claiming the 2007 teen-friendly thriller ripped off the Cornell Woolrich story.
Isn’t a ripoff these days known as an homage instead?
– Chase
