Movie/TV Reviews

Mongol

Susan Granger’s review of “Mongol” (Picturehouse)

The theatrical trailer for this ferocious historical epic is a bit misleading. It appears to revolve around Genghis Khan, the 13th century conqueror of Asia and the Middle East, when, in reality, this – the first of a trilogy – is a coming-of-age story about the nomadic boy who eventually became a great warrior
Set between 1172 and 1206, it begins with nine year-old Prince Temudgin (Odnyam Odsuren) traveling the steppes on horseback with his father, Khan Esugei, the tribal leader, en route to broker a bride from a traditional rival, the powerful Merkits. En route, they stop overnight with a lesser tribe but it’s here that Temudgin spies tall, spunky 10 year-old Borte (Bayartseteg Erdenebat) and – much to his father’s dismay – chooses her instead. (There’s a wonderful scene as the eligible girls are lined up for his perusal.) The wedding is set in five years. But en route home, Esugei is poisoned, the family yurt (a portable, circular structure with a wood frame) is looted and Temudgin is captured. Reckless but resilient, the lad is often imprisoned, yet repeatedly escapes. When he grows up (as played by Japanese star Tadanobu Asano), he then embarks on a quest not only to recapture what is rightfully his, including Borte (now played by Khulan Chuluun), but also to unite various warring factions and modernize Central Asia.
Oscar-nominated director Sergei Bodrov (“Prisoner of the Mountains”) is from Russia, a territory that was once plundered by Khan’s troops. He and screenwriter Arif Aliyev have created a solemn, somewhat ponderous family drama/adventure saga, studded with violent carnage and nuances of the exotic Kazakh culture.
In Mongolian with English subtitles, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Mongol” is a sweeping, blood-soaked 7. Beware the wrath of Khan.

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dvd update

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s dvd update for week of Friday, June 20th:

As a recently divorced couple, Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey team up in “Fool’s Gold,” searching for the legendary Queen’s Dowry treasure of jewels that was lost in the Caribbean in 1715. Extras include a gag reel and behind-the-scenes bantering with Kate and Matt.
Martin Lawrence stars in “Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins” as talk-show sensation RJ Stevens, who left behind his modest Georgia upbringing and family name to become a self-help guru. Now he’s headed back for his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. The dvd has almost 45 minutes of outtakes and deleted/extended scenes plus an alternate opening.
Clint Eastwood’s daughter Alison makes an auspicious directing debut with “Rails & Ties,” a heartfelt, if bleak family melodrama starring Marcia Gay Harden and Kevin Bacon. What’s striking is the uncanny resemblance between Bacon’s reserved demeanor and ‘early’ Clint Eastwood performances.
Set in Beirut, “Caramel” follows the lives of five women who meet regularly in a beauty salon to discuss men, sex and motherhood; it’s both an astute cultural study and a charming comedic drama.
Although “Chaos Theory” never got a wide release, it stars Ryan Reynolds as a timid, uptight efficiency consultant who learns to embrace life’s unpredictability when his wife (Emily Mortimer) sets the kitchen clock ahead by mistake.
“Popeye and Friends Vol. 1” and “Popeye the Sailor 1938-1940 Volume 2” show how everyone’s favorite sailorman hasn’t aged a day since his debut 75 years ago, proving the power of eating spinach.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Evoking memories of “Cinema Paradiso,” Patricia Riggen’s engaging road movie “Under the Same Moon” traces parallel stories of a mother and son in Los Angeles and Mexico. In Spanish with English subtitles, it’s a gem – one of those rare films that truly touch your heart.

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The Love Guru

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Love Guru” (Paramount Pictures)

While prominent Hindu leaders have called for a boycott of this new Mike Myers comedy because it mocks their religious concepts, I suspect none will be necessary because the gullible audience for this feeble spoof of self-help spiritualism will probably shrivel on its own.
As a child, Guru Pitka (Mike Myers) was left at the gates of an ashram in India. After years in training and developing “Mariska Hargitay” as his mantra, he’s summoned by Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba), the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, to help her star player, Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco), who has been emotionally crippled ever since his wife (Meagan Good) ran off a rival French Canadian goalie, the enormously endowed Jacques “Le Coq” Grande (Justin Timberlake). So much for plot. Most of the screen time is devoted to Pitka’s mugging maharishi schtick, including crotch jokes, urine-soaked mops, hockey pucks to the head and elephant erotica.
Mike Myers’ interpretation of the dubiously accented swami – whom an Oprah Winfrey impersonator calls “the next Deepak Chopra” – looks like every other smirking character he’s done. But since Myers serves as producer/star/co-writer (with Graham Gordy), there was no one to tell him that his ludicrous cavorting is little more than an 88-minute “Saturday Night Live” skit. Certainly not first-time director Marco Schnabel.
As in the “Austin Powers” franchise, Myers pads out the proceedings with cameos, including Ben Kingsley as cross-eyed Guru Tugginmypudha, “Mini-Me” Verne Troyer as the hockey coach, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert as a drugged-up announcer and John Oliver of “The Daily Show” as Dick Pants, the guru’s agent.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Love Guru” is an atrocious, inanely tedious 2. Or, as Ghandi said, “An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.”

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Get Smart

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Get Smart” (Warner Bros.)

First the good news. With his self-effacing demeanor, Steve Carell (“The Office”) is a natural as secret agent Maxwell Smart, originated by Don Adams on the ‘60s TV series.
When we meet him, the Cold War is still on and he’s the most conscientious analyst at CONTROL, the covert U.S. spy agency. While he’s eager to become a secret agent, the Chief (Alan Arkin) wants him to stay where he is. But when Russia’s evil KAOS, led by Siegfried (Terence Stamp) and his assistant Shtarker (Ken Davitian), compromises the identity of all other field agents, Smart is drafted into action as Agent 86, paired by default with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) whose face has been surgically altered.
Encouraged by his friend, superstar Agent 23 (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), Smart plays his hunches and gathers gadgets, including a radar-detector wristwatch and a Swiss Army Knife with a flamethrower attachment and a miniature titanium-threaded grappling hook. He and Agent 99 land in Moscow, infiltrate the lair of Krstic (David S. Lee), despite his menacing 7’2” bodyguard (Dalip Singh, pro wrestling’s The Great Khali), uncover a nuclear arsenal and unmask a double-agent.
So what’s the bad news? The age difference between Carell and Hathaway is a major miscalculation. And while writers Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember base the characters on their sitcom counterparts, the screenplay doesn’t match the cleverness of TV writers Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, nor does Peter Segal’s direction which turns Maxwell Smart into a sincere, sensitive, indomitable fellow, as opposed to Adams’ goofy, accident-prone enthusiast. Yes, there’s the shoe-phone (the earliest cellphone on record) and an updated Cone of Silence. But on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Get Smart” is a silly 6, missing it by that much.

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Elsa & Fred

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Elsa & Fred” (Distrimax Inc & Mitropoulos Films)

Set in Madrid, this timelessly sublime romantic comedy about the irresistible power and total madness of passion focuses on two elderly people who discover it’s never to late to love and to dream.
When recently widowed Alfredo (Manuel Alexandre) moves into a new apartment, his new neighbor, ebullient Argentinean Elsa (China Zorrilla), is intrigued. That she backed her car into one belonging to his volatile daughter Cuca (Blanca Portillo), smashing her headlights, only serves as an introduction. After all, he has a dog named Napoleon Bonaparte and she lives in apartment J, as in Josephine. Plus, they both have controlling offspring. Hers are two sons, one a penniless painter. His is Cuca and her out-of-work husband Paco, who is trying to manipulate Alfred into investing in a cybercafé.
“Have you had any laughs?” Elsa boldly asks shy, reserved Alfred, an admitted hypochondriac. “You’re not afraid of dying. You’re afraid of living,” she observes astutely. “I’m your only salvation.”
So their love affair begins. With her active imagination, Elsa’s determined to enjoy every minute and Alfred discovers all he’s been missing in life. As their relationship ripens, Alfredo learns that Elsa is not only a Fellini fanatic but has always dreamed of re-enacting that magical moment from “La Dolce Vida” between Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni in Rome’s Trevi Fountain. If not now, when?
Directed by Marcos Carnevale from a screenplay by Carnevale, Lily Ann Martin, Marcela Guerty and Jose Antonio Felez, it’s brilliantly acted by the two septuagenarians who wallow in shameless sentimentality. In Spanish with English subtitles, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Elsa & Fred” is an exuberant, thoroughly entrancing 8. As Pablo Picasso said, “It takes a long time to become young.”

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The Happening

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Happening” (20th Century Fox)

Writer/producer/director M. Night Shayamalan has made a creepy, cautionary eco-thriller that neither cautions nor thrills. But it’s based on an interesting apocalyptic premise: what if nature turned on us? After all, honeybees are vanishing and no one knows why. Perhaps it’s an inexplicable natural phenomenon. But as Philadelphia science teacher, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), tells students in a quote attributable to Albert Einstein: if bees disappear, humans will follow within four years. (Except Einstein never said any such thing.)
Then early one morning as leaves rustle in the wind, everyone in New York’s Central Park becomes disoriented and suicidal; construction workers leap off nearby buildings. Panic quickly spreads throughout the Northeast. So Elliot grabs his mood ring (remember them from the ‘60s?) and flees the city by train with his seemingly comatose wife (Zooey Deschanel) and gabby math teacher friend (John Leguizamo) who totes his own repressed eight year-old daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez). Scared and stranded in rural Pennsylvania, they’re on the run – but from what? An airborne neurotoxin, emanating from plants and trees? Is it some kind of ecologic retribution?
The astounding success of M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” with its spooky “I see dead people” leveraged him a Hollywood career but his subsequent sci-fi sagas – “Signs,” “Unbreakable,” “The Village,” “Lady in the Water” – have gone rapidly downhill and this is another disappointment. No logic sustains the ominous foreboding of the minimal plot. There’s no palpable terror, no twist. The stilted dialogue is crammed with clichés, and since the edgy, underwritten characters behave bizarrely to begin with, they have nowhere to go emotionally.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Happening” is a fear-filled yet tepid 3. Instead of being full of dread, it’s dreadful.

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dvd update

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s dvd update for week of Friday, June 13th:

With gas prices rising and diesel fuel at an all-time high, what would happen if the trucking industry shut down? The insightful documentary “Big Rig” takes a deep look at America’s most underrated industry and the long-haul truckers who propel it.
Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” is a suspenseful, sadistic thriller about a yuppie couple (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth) who are terrorized when they allow two polite, well-spoken psychopaths (Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet) into their Hamptons vacation home.
Another slasher fest, “The Signal,” references George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and Kioshi Kurosawa’s “Pulse;” its three-part format revolves around hapless citizens of a fictional city called Terminus who are driven into zombie rage by a mysterious signal that jams phones and televisions.
With “The Tudors” over until next season, the royal intrigue of Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman) and her sister (Scarlett Johansson) continues in “The Other Boleyn Girl” which, admittedly, is more soap opera than historical drama.
“Heavy Metal in Baghdad” is a documentary about the Iraqi band Acrassicauda and their journey from Saddam’s dictatorship, through the US invasion, to their exodus as refugees in Istanbul, as they attempt to keep both their music and themselves alive.
Adrenaline-fueled NASCAR fans can get behind the wheel with “ESPN Inside Access: Jeff Gordon,” packed with race highlights, and New York Mets enthusiasts will treasure “Shea Goodbye: 45 Years of Amazin,'” commemorating the beloved stadium in all its glory, history and fanfare.
FATHER’S DAY PICK OF THE WEEK: Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman team up in “The Bucket List,” directed by Rob Reiner. This heartwarming adventure shows it’s never too late to live life to its fullest as two men with a common bond choose rectify their regrets about all those “missed opportunities.”

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The Promotion

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Promotion” (Dimension Films)

This amusing, occasionally insightful workplace comedy revolves around two rivals for the same job as manager of a new branch of a Donaldson supermarket in Chicago.
Having been assured of the promotion by his boss (Fred Armisen), the meek veteran assistant manager, Doug Stauber (Seann William Scott), does whatever he’s told. After all, his perky medical-assistant wife Jen (Jenna Fischer from “The Office”) yearns for a house and they’d like to start a family. But complications occur with the arrival of Richard (John C. Reilly), an amiable transfer from Montreal, who’s bucking for the same, better-paying job that Doug covets. He’s married to Laurie (Lili Taylor), a Scotswoman, and they already have a baby daughter.
While Doug’s told he’s a “shoo-in,” he’s known to exaggerate his accomplishments and hide negative evaluation cards he’s received from customers. On the other hand, Richard is a former alcoholic who listens to self-help CDs, even as he smokes marijuana in the workplace. Complicating their passive-aggressive competition, as the mega-grocery chain continually tries to maintain good community relations, the tempers of both men are sorely tried by several of the local delinquents who continually cause trouble in the parking lot.
In casting this humanistic, low-key, character-driven satire, writer and first-time director Steve Conrad (“The Weather Man,” “The Pursuit of Happyness”) hit the jackpot, daring to choose clownish Seann William Scott (Stifler in “American Pie”) as the rigid Everyman, and John C. Reilly (“Chicago,” “Walk Hard”) always delivers a credible performance. These actors smooth over Conrad’s bland, repetitive style and uneven pacing. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Promotion” is a bittersweet, flimsy 5. After the gamesmanship, it’s obvious that – with their anger management issues – neither employee is really qualified for the coveted position.

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The Incredible Hulk

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Incredible Hulk” (Universal Pictures/Marvel Studios)

The summer parade of popcorn pictures based on comic book characters continues with another remake of “The Incredible Hulk.”
Nuclear physicist Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) was accidentally irradiated in a lab accident, causing him to turn into a powerful green giant, The Hulk, whenever he gets angry. His uncontrollable ‘alter ego’ rage alienates him from everyone, including the woman he loves, biologist Betsy Ross (Liv Tyler), daughter of Gen. Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt), who’d like to harvest Banner’s DNA to create Super Soldiers. Then a bioforce experiment transforms power-hungry Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) into a destructive force, The Abomination, leading up to a climactic battle between the titans in the streets of New York, as The Hulk fully evolves into a reluctant hero.
Tracing its “Frankenstein”/”Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”/”King Kong” antecedents back to the 1978 TV series with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, the screenplay by Zak Penn (“X-Men”) focuses on Banner as a vulnerable fugitive on-the-run, not only from the law but also from his destiny. French director Louis Leterrier (“The Transporter”) amps up the action with f/x and fast camerawork, pointedly sidestepping logic and Banner’s angst/filled background which is pretty much covered during the opening credits and extensively in Ang Lee’s 2003 “Hulk” with Eric Bana.
Meanwhile, Professor Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) may hold the secret to Benner’s quest for a cure and eagle-eyed fans can spot Lou Ferrigno as a campus security guard.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Incredible Hulk” is a smashing 7, not as good as “Iron Man,” but a credible precursor to “The Avengers,” which will include Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, along with Norton’s Hulk, plus Thor and Captain America, who’ll eventually get movies of their own.

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You Don’t Mess With the Zohan

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” (Columbia/Sony)

Adam Sandler ventures into political satire with this new comedy, playing an Israeli hit man who flees to the United States to become a hairdresser. But in his New York neighborhood, he discovers that Arab and Israeli immigrants are carrying their Middle East tension as excess baggage when they’re forced to cope with a far greater adversary.
A legendary Mossad commando, Dvir Zohan (Sandler) fakes his own death at the hands of his arch-enemy, the Palestinian Phantom (John Turturro), in order to begin a new life. With a Paul Mitchell stylebook under his arm, he attempts, unsuccessfully, to infiltrate high-end Manhattan hair salons. Yet with the help of new friends (Lainie Kazan, Nick Swardson) and vast quantities of hummus, Zohan manages to reinvent himself as swaggering “Scrappy Coco” and land a position at a run-down salon in Brooklyn, working for a beautiful Palestinian (Emmanuelle Chriqui) while shagging a clientele of older women – until his cover is cracked by a Palestinian cabbie (Rob Schneider).
Written with customary crudeness by Sandler, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow and directed by Dennis Dugan, the story, which deals with the cycle of Middle Eastern violence, tries not to take sides. But when three wannabe Arab terrorists phone the “Hazbollah Hot Line” for bomb-making instructions, they’re told the information is “not currently available during peace talks with Israel” and to call back “as soon as the negotiations break down.” Amid bits by Mariah Carey, Henry Winkler, Chris Rock and George Takei, the villains are Mel Gibson-loving racists hired by a Trump-like real-estate developer.
On the Granger Movie Gauge, “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” is a silky smooth, subversively silly 7, making the genial moral that Israelis and Arabs are more alike than dissimilar.

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