Capsules

New Releases

In Everybody Wants to Be Italian a young fishmonger (Jay Jablonski) is mistaken for an Italian by a pretty veterinarian (Cerina Vincent), despite the fact that he’s Polish. Funny she should think that because—in a bizarre turn of screenwriterly happenstance—Jablonski thinks the Spanish Vincent is … wait for it … also Italian.

To his credit, writer-director Jason Todd Ipson thought that was a pretty anemic setup for a film, so he conspired to add a genuinely unique and infinitely more promising plotline on top of the original one. Thrust onto a date with Vincent’s character by perturbed employees at the fish shop, Jablonski’s heart really belongs to his ex. Problem is she’s been his ex for eight years and is now married with three kids.

Basically psychotic in his infatuation, Jablonski convinces Vincent to settle for a strictly platonic relationship, despite what Billy Crystal said about such pairings back in that film with Meg Ryan.

And so you have a kind of parallel-universe rom-com, in which one of the would-be lovers is completely immune to the other, a concept made even more delightfully absurd by the fact that the other is the voluptuous hottie from Cabin Fever.

If Italian rode that idea out, we’d be talking about a minor classic. Instead we’re talking about a pleasant but entirely forgettable bit of fluff. Turns out Ipson really does want us to wait for our two leads to hook up, and once his film’s true, boring game plan is revealed, Italian turns out to be merely standard genre fare with a couple decent ideas and a refreshing lack of sentimentality.

At 105 minutes, Italian is far too slack, but it radiates a certain low-watt charm—the jokes aren’t particularly notable, but at least they keep coming. The movie is basically one long half-grin: It’s consistently almost-funny, well-acted and it generally doesn’t make you want to pound stakes into your eyes. In a genre that usually does, that’s something. I guess.

Not Reviewed

The Accidental Husband
Remember the totally badass Uma Thurman from Kill Bill? This is the complete friggin’ opposite. (Opens Fri., Sept. 5.)

Bangkok Dangerous
Nicolas Cage should’ve just stopped at Raising Arizona. (Opens Fri., Sept. 5.)

Save Me
A drug-addicted nympho dude goes to one of those places that are supposed to pray away the gay. Judith Light cries. (Opens Fri., Sept. 5.)

Ongoing

Babylon A.D.
Vin Diesel is apparently still alive. (Not reviewed.)

Baghead
Baghead isn’t all-out horror, though the final reel boasts some genuinely nail-biting intensity lifted straight out of Blair Witch. Inspired by the ridiculous films they’ve seen at an independent film festival, four struggling actors head off to a remote cabin to bang out their very own lo-fi masterpiece over the weekend. It doesn’t take long for them to realize they have no ideas, and they become increasingly distracted by a person running around outside sporting a paper bag on his head. B (M.P.)

Boy A
As a young boy Eric Wilson is sent away for the murder of a female classmate. During his trial he was known to the world as Boy A. When he reemerges into society as a young man, he cloaks himself in a new identity as Jack Burridge (Andrew Garfield of Lions for Lambs). With a hangdog face so timid, sweet and nervous, it’s hard to believe Burridge could perform such a vile act. B (A.S.)

Bottle Shock
Now the story of this 1970s West Coast wine victory has become a sort of Sideways sequel—only this time the neuroses of its characters don’t overwhelm the inside-baseball shenanigans. Unfortunately, Bottle Shock’s sprawling cast has not an interesting personality among them. C- (M.P.)

Chris & Don: A Love Story
The tale of Christopher Isherwood and his longtime partner Don Bachardy is, at heart, a love story. Chris & Don raises a lot of fascinating issues, but pays them only limited attention. Even in documentaries you have to keep the story moving. B (M.P.)

College
Dude gets dumped. Dude goes to college. Dude gets laid. (Not reviewed.)

Crossing Over
According to Movies.com: Immigrants start new lives in L.A. Presumably this film is so bad that even the Internet had to be vague about the plot. (Not reviewed.)

The Dark Knight
A sprawling three-hour epic squeezed into 152 minutes, The Dark Knight is a backbreakingly ambitious picture, grappling with so many meaty, sophisticated ideas and depressingly timely concerns inside its densely layered, too-breathlessly paced crime saga, you can’t quite wrap your head around it all in just one viewing. B+ (S.B.)

Disaster Movie
Explosions and bad jokes! (Not reviewed.)

The Edge of Heaven
An alcoholic old man named Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) is a cheerfully crass lout who bullies his sensitive son Nejat (Baki Davrak) and works out a pricey living arrangement with Nursel Köse’s affectingly aging prostitute, all the while boozing and smoking his way through a massive coronary. His son, a bookish professor from a German university, doesn’t think much of his dad’s new girlfriend. But a kinship develops slowly. There’s not really all that much wrong with The Edge of Heaven except that it feels so awfully familiar. C+ (S.B.)

Elegy
Philip Roth has never been ashamed of delving into his earthquaking libido, especially not as a horny septagenarian. But is there any way to temper his 2001 unabashed male fantasy novel The Dying Animal? Apparently not. Hell, not even hiring a woman to direct it—Spanish director Isabel Coixet (My Life Without Me)—can do much to dampen Roth’s tale of an aging professor getting it on with one of his hot former students. Retitled Elegy and written by Nicholas Meyer (Time After Time, Star Treks II and VI), Coixet’s adaptation stars Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh, one of Roth’s recurring alter egos—a distinguished member of Manhattan’s literati first seen rapping with Charlie Rose about the sad decline of ’60s American hedonism. His body increasingly frail, he nonetheless manages to start a (probably doomed) relationship with Cuban-American hottie Consuela (Penélope Cruz), all the while confiding in best pal Dennis Hopper, who’s hilariously miscast as a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. C (M.P.)

Fly Me to the Moon
A Bug’s Life with the added bonus of spaceships. (Not reviewed.)

Frozen River
First-time writer/director Courtney Hunt clearly intends for this iced waterway to be a metaphor for the delicate predicament a dirt-broke middle-aged mother of two (Melissa Leo) finds herself in—that is, smuggling illegal immigrants from Canada to dreary upstate New York. But it also makes a handy metaphor for Frozen River itself, an old-school regional indie that constantly seems like it’ll collapse into preciousness, but for the longest damn time, simply doesn’t. In Frozen River no one has any money and to get some, they’ll step over anyone. Even the film’s climactic act of selflessness is tempered by the fact that the person making it ensures they still, at the end, come out mostly okay. B (M.P.)

Hamlet 2
Hamlet 2 is an epic glizty craptacular of breathtakingly awful tastelessness, during which Jesus Christ himself borrows his dad’s time machine in order to rescue all those characters who died at the end of Hamlet 1. Not even the lightsaber fight between Hamlet and Laertes can top the tacky, magnificent grandeur of watching Coogan moonwalk on water during the insidiously catchy musical showstopper “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.” B- (S.B.)

Hell Ride
Quentin Tarantino and Michael Madsen are sort of like Wes Anderson and Bill Murray—they have to make movies together or else their heads will explode. (Not reviewed.)

The House Bunny
Anna Faris plays an orphan-turned-vacuous Playboy bunny who’s booted from the Mansion due to her skyrocketing age (27). Homeless, she winds up the house mother to a crumbling sorority comprised of a handful of college undesirables: homely, heavily pierced and/or meek, with not a plastic evil bitch among them. Faris vows to get them the pledges necessary to stave off their destruction by mutating them all into hotties. They in turn try to unleash her inner brainiac, particularly once she finds herself on dates with a smart, nice guy (Colin Hanks) not so into the Maxim definition of romance. C- (M.P.)

I.O.U.S.A.
The subject of this documentary is America’s insurmountable national debt, which stood somewhere around $8.5 trillion during the film’s production and is predicted to break double digits this coming January. The debt was all but conquered shortly after World War II with no small help from war bonds, and the Clinton administration balanced the budget in the early ’90s. But things have gotten worse thanks in part to you-know-who and you-know-what. In essence I.O.U.S.A. is a horror film with rock solid facts. It shows how without some major turnaround in the next generation, our rich nation won’t be able to pay diddly-squat for Social Security and will have to depend on the kindness of strangers like China. C (M.P.)

In Search of a Midnight Kiss
Kiss, a $25,000 retro indie shot in black-and-white DV, features two lovebirds who don’t, at first, seem the least bit compatible. Scott McNairy plays an unemployed L.A. transplant who’s introduced to viewers as he’s caught flogging the bishop to a Photoshopped picture of his roommate’s girlfriend. Fearing another lonely New Year’s Eve, he posts a grumpy ad on Craigslist. Next thing he knows he’s sitting across from the abrasive Sarah Simmonds, being berated and mindfucked like no one has since Patrick Wilson got schooled by Ellen Page in Hard Candy. B- (M.P.)

A Jihad for Love
This documentary explores the intersection of Islam and homosexuality. (Not reviewed.)

The Longshots
Ice Cube teaches a girl to play football. Hijinks and gender profiling ensue. (Not reviewed.)

Mamma Mia!
Thanks to lavish scenery, giddy choreography and impeccable casting, Mamma Mia! translates effortlessly from the stage to the screen. Despite taking 20 minutes to get on its dancing feet, the movie will leave audiences—presumably full of females—grinning over its sweet ending and catchy songs. B+ (A.S.)

Man on Wire
The opening minutes of Man on Wire depict people breaking into the World Trade Center. Their ringleader isn’t some America-hating ne’er-do-well but simply Philippe Petit, an excitable French tightrope walker who, one balmy August afternoon 34 years ago, hung a wire between the two towers and straddled it for 45 minutes before finally relenting to police requests to cut it out. Director James Marsh realizes this is a whale of a tale, best told as a bouncy, freakishly entertaining documentary. B (M.P.)

Mirrors
Kiefer Sutherland fights bad guys who live in mirrors. Silly as it sounds, it’s probably better than the not-at-all anticipated seventh season of 24. (Not reviewed.)

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
The first half takes forever to get moving—the intro is so protracted it feels like it will segue right into the end credits—and the second half never quite finds the proper momentum or tone, even as it hurls out one agreeably dumb idea after another. In the right hands, this overload would have an anything-goes craziness; in director Rob Cohen’s, it’s plodding, endless and utterly soulless. D+ (M.P.)

The Perfect Game
Another based-on-a-true-story flick about baseball. Because there aren’t enough of them already. (Not reviewed.)

Pineapple Express
The latest offering from super-producer Judd Apatow’s inexhaustible factory is a surprisingly earnest attempt to recreate the bantering car-chase buddy comedy of days gone by. Beat for beat and nearly scene for scene, Pineapple Express is structured around tried and true genre tropes, save for one welcome twist—instead of detectives or secret agents, our heroes happen to be a couple pothead slackers who have no idea what they’re doing. It’s sort of like what might happen if Cheech and Chong played Tango and Cash. B (S.B.)

The Rocker
Rainn Wilson plays Robert “Fish” Fishman, the drummer for Vesuvius, a power-pop metal band akin to 1980s Bon Jovi. When the rest of Vesuvius—played hilariously by Will Arnett, Bradley Cooper and Fred Armisen—decide to kick Fish out, his life takes a decidedly not-rock turn. The Rocker finds a few hearty laughs along the way (even if it does stoop to plenty of sight gags) but the biggest crime this movie commits is a waste of huge comedy talent. C (A.S.)

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
Swear to God: This really, truly isn’t a prequel to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. But it might as well be. (Not reviewed.)

Star Wars: The Clone War
The best thing about the animated Clone Wars is that it’ll likely be so awful that George Lucas will have to go into hiding. (Not reviewed.)

Stealing America: Vote by Vote
Another political documentary that will likely reference the 2000 election debacle to scare Americans into voting. (Not reviewed.)

Traitor
Based on a story partially conceived by Steve Martin (yes, that one), Traitor grants us a backstage pass to the underworld of Muslim terrorists, with one of New Hollywood’s golden boys as our tour guide. Don Cheadle plays a Sudanese-born American citizen whose distaste for the States leads him to join the newest plot to strike our country within our borders. B- (M.P.)

Tropic Thunder
Ben Stiller’s latest vaguely awesome-sounding but disappointing hop behind the lens pokes fun at Hollywood, but in a safe, acceptable, “hey, just kidding” way. C- (M.P.)

Trumbo
The story of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s journey from Hollywood royalty to blacklisted writer to Academy Award winner. (Not reviewed.)

The Wackness
In case you haven’t heard of it from its Sundance semi-infamy, The Wackness is the movie in which Ben Kingsley gets to second base with Mary-Kate Olsen in a phone booth. Take that as not so much a spoiler—it happens early on—but as a warning that such daredevil tactics are the film’s very lifeblood. C+ (M.P.)

What We Do is Secret
Shane West is a glam rock star, thus fulfilling his masturbatory fantasies. (Not reviewed.)