Movie/TV Reviews

The Tale of Despereaux

Susan Granger’s review of “The Tale of Despereaux” (Universal Pictures)

It’s hard for any rodent to follow “Ratatouille” and “Flushed Away” and this glum, lackluster 3-D animated children’s feature doesn’t come anywhere close. As narrated by Sigourney Weaver, once upon a time in the faraway Kingdom of Dor, Despereaux (voiced by Matthew Broderick), a brave little mouse with endearingly elephantine ears, devours stories about brave knights vanquishing dragons and rescuing fair maidens in the Royal Library. Unafraid, he befriends lonely Princess Pea (voiced by Harry Potter’s Emma Watson), whose world has been filled with mourning ever since her mother, the Queen, died from shock after discovering the rat Roscuro (voiced by Dustin Hoffman) in her soup. Since talking to a human is illegal, Despereaux is dispatched from Mouseworld to the dank depths of Ratworld, where he finds cultured Roscuro and persuades him to make amends. But when his apology is spurned, Roscuro decides to take revenge and kidnap the Princess – with the help of the resentful chambermaid Miggery Snow (voiced by Tracey Ullman) – and only Despereaux can rescue her. Adapted by Sam Fell and Robert Stevenhagen from Kate DiCamillo’s Newberry Medal-winning book, its disappointingly dour, Flemish-inspired design, often lacking in background detail, falls well below the Pixar/Disney standard. There are a multitude of faces – far too many for tiny tots to keep track of. In addition, the cruelty evidenced and the disturbing visual elements may upset very young children, despite the fact that everyone is eventually redeemed through forgiveness and the moral lesson: “What you look like doesn’t equal who you are.” On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Tale of Despereaux” is an adequate but hardly remarkable 5. Unless you’re desperate to get the kids out of the house, wait for the dvd.

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The Wrestler

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Wrestler” (Fox Searchlight)

Mickey Rourke makes an amazing comeback in “The Wrestler,” delivering an iconic, Oscar-caliber performance. Describing himself as “a broken-down piece of meat,” ’80s pro-wrestling champ Randy “The Ram” Robinson (a.k.a. Robin Ramzinsky) lives in a dingy, dilapidated trailer in a squalid section of New Jersey. Paying rent precipitates a monthly crisis, occasionally alleviated by his taking a part-time job, doling out potato salad and cold cuts at a supermarket deli counter. His girlfriend is a tough-talking stripper (Marisa Tomei) and his estranged lesbian daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) loathes him. Despite his bulging biceps, his damaged heart is giving out. Nevertheless, Randy’s still a hustler, bleaching his blond mane, visiting a tanning salon, gulping steroids and fearlessly gearing up for a garish re-match with his arch rival known as the Ayatollah. Robert Siegel’s original screenplay, unflinchingly directed by Darren Aronofsky (“Pi,” “Requiem for a Dream,” “The Fountain”), reveals the barbarous fakery of the wrestling ring, along with the bruising physical toll it takes on its masochistic participants. In one bout, a fighter falls backwards off an eight-foot ladder onto barbed wire; in another, combatants are armed with staple guns. And if it doesn’t look like he’s suffering sufficiently, Randy slashes his own face with a razor. All this gruesome violence is graphically documented by Maryse Alberti’s hand-held camera. Despite occasional slips into sentimental melodrama, the picture maintains a stark, somber mood that’s best described as melancholy, evoking “Requiem for a Heavyweight.” What’s most remarkable is the re-emergence of charismatic Mickey Rourke (“Diner,” “Rumble Fish”) who’d tanked his promising screen career. Battered and bruised, insecure and alone, he embodies the courteous, gentle gladiator. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Wrestler” is a gritty, brutally authentic 8. It’s an American tragedy.

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December 12 DVD Update

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s dvd/video update for week of Friday, Dec. 12th:

Back in 1974, Philippe Petit walked, even danced, on a wire some 1,350 feet in the air between the towers of the World Trade Center, inspiring Jordan Marsh’s documentary, “Man on a Wire,” focusing on how this intrepid Frenchman and his stealthy accomplices accomplished the daredevil stunt, utilizing vintage footage, recreations and interviews.
For family viewing, I recommend the wacky, wondrous “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who,” one of Theodore Geisel’s most beloved tales, featuring the voice of Jim Carrey as Horton the Elephant, who firmly believes “a person’s a person, no matter how small.”
In “Anamorph,” Willem Dafoe plays an alcoholic NYPD detective haunted by memories of a serial-killer case and he’s on the trail of a copycat; it’s a tepid cat-and-mouse story cloaked in the artistic concept of “anamorphosis,” meaning paintings designed to have two radically different images when viewed from different angles.
A modern film noir set in post-Milosevic Serbia, a country in transition, Srdan Golubovic’s “The Trap” is a highly acclaimed drama about a dying child and how far a man is willing to go to save him.
For classic film buffs, the ultimate new “Casablanca: Ultimate Collector’s Edition,” starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, includes seven hours of bonus features: an introduction by Lauren Bacall, reminiscences by Stephen Bogart and Pia Lindstrom, and collectibles, like replicas of actual props (Victor Lazlo’s “Letter of Transit”) as well as studio documents.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” features Heath Ledger as the dangerous, demented Joker, a cackling symbol of insane, unpredictable anarchy, who battles billionaire Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale), wreaking criminal havoc in Gotham City. DVD elements include “Gotham Uncovered,” tracing the development of the new Bat-suit and Bat-pod, along with special IMAX scenes.

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Gran Torino

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Gran Torino” (Warner Bros)

Who would have thought that Dirty Harry would become not only one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers but also one of its most compassionate humanists? Eastwood has been nominated for best director and picture four times. The two occasions he won those awards, he starred in the film; the two times he didn’t, he didn’t. Like “Million Dollar Baby,” “Gran Torino” is about a cynical old-timer who befriends a younger person with a troubled background. Retired autoworker/Korean war vet Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is a scowling, surly bigot who comes to terms with his abusive racism through his relationship with a Hmong teenager harassed by hoodlums. As the story begins in a deteriorating, blue-collar Detroit neighborhood, cantankerous Walt is a recent widower. Disgusted with the behavior of his callow sons and their self-centered, disrespectful children at his beloved wife’s funeral, he just wants to be left alone – to drink beer in the company of his dog Daisy. But when Walt catches 16 year-old Thao (Bee Vang), who’s been goaded by gang members, trying to steal his precious, mint-condition 1972 Gran Torino, Thao’s traditional Hmong family, immigrants from Laos, is humiliated. They insist that Thao pay penance by working for Walt, which leads to a gradually growing friendship that’s nurtured by Thao’s spunky older sister Sue (Ahney Her). “I have more in common with these gooks than with my own spoiled, rotten family,” Walt grudgingly admits. So when the Hmong family is threatened, Walt takes action. Working from Nick Schenk’s character-driven, culture-colliding tragicomedy, Eastwood crafts believable people facing an untenable dilemma, tinged with ethnic, racial and religious tension. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Gran Torino” is a timely, confrontational 9. At age 78, Eastwood still commands the screen.

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Doubt

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Doubt” (Miramax Films)

Adapting playwright John Patrick Shanley’s award-winning play about pedophilia within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was a challenge %u2013 one that Shanley himself attempts %u2013 with some degree of success. It’s 1964 at St. Nicholas parochial school in the Bronx, where authoritarian Sister Aloysius’s Beauvier (Meryl Streep) inflexible certitude strikes terror in the mostly Irish and Italian parish. So when trusting Sister James (Amy Adams) expresses concern that Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) might be taking a special interest in Donald (Joseph Foster II), the school’s first black student, Sister Aloysius’s suspicions are aroused. To her, innovative Father Flynn embodies indulgences that she abhors, like delivering folksy sermons, dumping three lumps of sugar in his tea and using a ballpoint pen instead of a proper fountain pen. So after a pivotal encounter with Donald’s troubled mother (Viola Davis), who reveals the emotional reality of her son’s life, a crackling confrontation between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn is inevitable. Directing for the first time since his ill-fated “Joe Versus the Volcano,” Shanley retains the verbal integrity of his drama and opens it up cinematically, showing the socio-cultural context of the conflict. Yet he loses the dramatic intensity. While Hoffman captures the ambiguity necessary to make one unsure about Father Flynn, in a rare melodramatic misstep, Streep seems more of a frightening-yet-funny caricature than a woman-in-conflict – at least until her concluding line of dialogue. I suspect that if deft Broadway director Doug Hughes had the helm with Cherry Jones and Brian F. O’Byrne, who were perfectly matched, “Doubt” could have been an Oscar shoo-in. Nevertheless, on the Granger Movie Gauge, “Doubt” is an enigmatic 8. Did the priest actually molest the boy? All the ‘facts’ exist in the eye of the beholder. It’s your decision.

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The Reader

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Reader” (Weinstein Company)

Unlike most Holocaust literature, Bernhard Schlink’s acclaimed 1995 novel places a perpetrator, not a victim, at the heart of the story, which examines the effort of the ‘next generation’ to come to terms with Germany’s war guilt. Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) is a lonely, alienated lawyer who recalls how – in post-W.W.II Germany – as a 15 year-old (David Kross), he became infatuated with Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a woman twice his age. Furtively, they conducted an intense, sexually-charged, clandestine affair. Although she adored his reading aloud to her, one day Hanna, inexplicably, vanished. Flash forward to 1966, when Michael was a law student attending Nazi war criminal trials where he discovers that his beloved Hanna was formerly a SS concentration-camp guard and is charged with the murder of hundreds of Jewish women whom she left locked in a fiery church. Stunned, Michael realizes that he, alone, possesses irrefutable evidence – Hanna’s shameful secret – that would have a profound effect on her conviction and sentence for this atrocity. Yet this callow youth chooses to remain silent. Then, 20 years later, Hanna’s and Michael’s lives, once again, intersect. One of the most emotionally effective scenes occurs near the conclusion when Michael travels to Manhattan to visit a wealthy writer (Lena Olin) whose mother survived the conflagration in which Hanna unapologetically took part and testified against her at the trial. Despite the literate, well-intentioned efforts of screenwriter David Hare and director Stephen Daldry, the inner workings of Winslet’s damaged character are never revealed and that, in turn, keeps the audience at an emotional distance. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Reader” is an unevenly paced yet morally complex 8, dredging the depths of a legacy of responsibility and culpability.

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Frost/Nixon

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Frost/Nixon” (Universal Pictures)

Based on the play of the same name, this suspenseful drama recreates the legendary 1977 television interviews between disgraced President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) and tenacious British interviewer, David Frost (Michael Sheen). It’s a titanic battle-of-wills. When Frost lost his prized interview program in America, he offered to pay the former president $600,000, plus a share of profits, for a “no-holds-barred” interview. It was a risky move. Sociable yet ambitious, Frost was known for his breezy bantering, not investigative reporting. The big networks wouldn’t make a deal without dictating the terms, and there were no guarantees that Nixon would admit to any wrongdoing. But peripatetic Frost had perseverance. By the end of 28 hours of questioning %u2013 only six of which were broadcast on independent local stations %u2013 self-sabotaging Nixon had tacitly acknowledged his role in the Watergate scandal, giving the public the catharsis they’d been craving. Written by Peter Morgan (“The Queen”) and directed by Ron Howard (“Apollo 13,” “A Beautiful Mind”), it’s an incredible cinematic feat since the plot revolves around two power-players talking. Morgan envisions it as “an intellectual ‘Rocky,'” expanding the gripping narrative by subtly delving into both men’s revelatory backstories. Amplifying the intensity, Howard makes shrewd use of revelatory close-ups, which are not possible on-stage. And seeing Nixon’s California home, La Casa Pacifica in San Clemente, shows the loneliness of his isolation. Recreating their Broadway roles, Frank Langella and Michael Sheen are perfectly matched sparring partners in this prime Oscar-bait match. Kevin Bacon is convincing as Nixon’s wary strategist, while Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell are memorable as Frost’s associates. It’s a shame that the R-rating %u2013 for vulgarities %u2013 discourages curious younger viewers because on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Frost/Nixon” is a ferociously exciting 10. A must-see!

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Cadillac Records

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Cadillac Records” (Sony Pictures Entertainment)

Earlier this year, Jerry Zaks’ “Who Do You Love” delved into the controversial character of Leonard Chess, founder of Chess Records. Now Darnell Martin integrates Chess’s saga with that of various musicians, including Muddy Waters and Etta James, in a celebration of the pioneering blues recording label of the ’50s and ’60s. Based at 2120 South Michigan Avenue in South Chicago, scrappy, ambitious, Polish-born Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody) and his brother Phil (whose character is absent from the film) took over Aristocrat Records and launched Chess Records in 1947 with Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright) as their first star. Muddy serves as the tale’s troubled conscience, as Chess attracts additional talent: Chuck Berry (Mos Def), Etta James (Beyonce Knowles),Howlin Wolf (Eamonn Walker), Little Walter (Columbus Short) and Wille Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer), who narrates the story in a rambling, disjointed flashback, “based on a true story.” Writer/director Darnell Martin has obviously done meticulous research, perhaps delving into more details than we need to know, awkwardly skipping from one anecdotal scene to another with poor pacing, scant character development and an over-abundance of clichés, particularly about the racial barriers that were being broken. As if to compensate for these deficiencies, the cast delivers memorable performances, particularly Jeffrey Wright (familiar from “Quantum of Solace” and “W”), Mos Def, Eamonn Walker and Beyonce Knowles, who is not only far better than she was in “Dreamgirls” but also positions herself at the starting gate if an Etta James biopic is ever made. Noting that the title comes from untrustworthy Chess’s penchant for gifting each of his stars with a new Cadillac, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Cadillac Records” is a superficial yet aurally satisfying 6. Better yet – buy the R&B soundtrack.

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December 12 DVD Update

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s dvd update for week of Friday, Dec. 5th:

Will Smith’s frenetic “Hancock” casts him as a whiskey-guzzling, profanity-spewing grudging superhero, causing chaos whenever he catches culprits, until an earnest public-relations consultant (Jason Bateman) tackles an image make-over.
Eddie Murphy’s “Meet Dave” is a tedious time-waster in which he plays the captain of a human-sized spaceship; the outlandish set-up is amusing for about 15 minutes.
In “Step Brothers,” sibling rivalry reigns between Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, two paunchy, immature, middle-aged oafs who are forced to share a bedroom when Ferrell’s mom (Mary Steenburgen) marries Reilly’s dad (Richard Jenkins).
In “The X-Files: I Want To Believe,” David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson delve into whether a pedophile priest has the psychic ability to find a serial killer.
Animation aimed at kids: “Fly Me to the Moon” involves mischievous Florida junkyard flies stowing away on the Apollo II space flight in 1969 and includes 3-D effects. But the science is so out there that astronaut Buzz Aldrin concludes with a disclaimer about how no insect could ever get inside a NASA ship. And “Space Chimps” recalls 1961, when NASA blasted off a chimpanzee named Ham as a test-run for manned space exploration; that’s the premise for this fictionalized, psycho-babbling story about three brainy primates dispatched after an Infinity probe crash-lands on a far-away planet.
PICKS OF THE WEEK: For adults, “Wanted” chronicles the wry, viscerally thrilling transformation of a nerd (James McAvoy) into a superhero – with the help of friends (Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman) who know more about him than he does. For families, “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” picks up the imaginative adventures of the British schoolchildren a year after “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” but it’s 1300 years later in Narnia and much has changed.

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Transporter 3

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Transporter 3” (Lionsgate)

Frank Martin (Jason Statham) has become a kind of poor man’s James Bond. He’s this imperturbable, indestructible Mediterranean mercenary whose specialty is transporting suspicious packages. What’s remarkable is that he perseveres – no matter how the odds are stacked against him. In this installment, Martin is forced to transport irritating Valentina (Natalya Rudankova), the kidnapped daughter of Leonid Vasilev (Jeroen Krabbe), the head of Ukraine’s Environmental Protection Agency, from Marseilles. While they drive through Stuttgart and Budapest to Odessa on the Black Sea, there is no specific destination because Frank’s supposed to get updates to punch into his GPS. But there’s a hitch. Frank’s wary employer, Johnson, (Robert Knepper from TV’s “Prison Break”), has strapped a chunky metal bracelet on his wrist that’s rigged to explode if he strays 75 feet from his car – and Valentina wears one too. That confines them to a strict perimeter, a device that is inexplicably underutilized. In fact, if you’re expecting a coherent plot, forget it. There isn’t one. The set-up is simply a stage on which to set resourceful action sequences. In one, for example, Frank disrobes, using each article of his clothing to fight off foes. That’s understandable but others lack continuity. Just a lot of noise and fury, captured by fast camerawork and razor-sharp editing. Concept creators/screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen devote much screen time to car chases and the stunt work of fight choreographer Corey Yuen. Director Olivier Megaton’s disjointed style is as hyperkinetic as his name. And is it important that Natalya Rudankova can’t speak English, reciting her lines phonetically? Maybe not. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Transporter 3” is a testosterone-fueled 4. It’s nonsensical but, perhaps, die-hard fans of stalwart Jason Statham won’t care.

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