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Weekend Movie Forecast: The International or Gomorrah

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Isn't it weird how the trailer for The International (Clive Owen, Naomi Watts) is all like, "You trust banks, don't you? But what if they used your money for something sinister?" That's not a "what if," that's a "what's new?" <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-02-11/film/bail-out-the-international/">Scott Foundas at the Village Voice</a> confirms our skepticism about this good-looking but formulaic "thriller," part of which was shot in a 98% <a href="http://gothamist.com/2009/02/10/if_youve_seen_any_of.php">scale model of the Guggenheim</a>: "As generic as its title... it's one of those movies in which shadowy men meet in parked cars, abandoned buildings, and inconspicuous public spaces (museum galleries are a particular favorite), travel under assumed names, and always glance nervously over their shoulders, fearful of being spied on through a sniper's lens. What, might you ask, is the cause for all this cloak-and-dagger skullduggery? Well, I could tell you, but then I'd have to bore you."

Gothamist

After winning the Grand Prize at Cannes last year and premiering here at the New York Film Festival, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, which weaves together five stories about criminal life in and around a bizarre-looking Naples housing project, opens today. Set in a world where petty criminals and mafioso alike all take their cues from American gangster films, the hip-level film is beautifully gritty without glorifying its subject matter. And it's based on a book about Italian organized crime that forced its author into protective custody.<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-02-11/film/the-average-giuseppes-of-organized-crime-in-gomorrah/">J. Hoberman writes</a>, "Garrone's movie... is less an adaptation of the book than the successful decanting of its toxic fumes... Crime bosses and crooked pols are off-screen. Instead, we have the residents of a vast, moldering housing estate in Scampia, a Naples suburb reputedly home to the world's largest open-air drug market. Set in the middle of nowhere, this poured-concrete maze is part Aztec pyramid, part minimum-security pen...An exemplar for disastrous urban planning in its failed attempt to provide light and space for its inhabitants, the housing block serves Garrone as an allegorical landscape."

Gothamist

<a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/confessions_of_a_shopaholic/?critic=creamcrop#contentReviews">The terrible reviews</a> for Confessions of a Shopaholic, a celebration of materialism couched as cautionary moralizing, make for good fun. Here's Jessica Reaves <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/chi-0213-confessions-shopaholic-feb13,0,3679464.story">at the Chicago Tribune</a>: "If there is a single bright spot in the financial crisis, it is the possibility that one day producer Jerry Bruckheimer will run out of money. In a more just world, this would have happened before he gave the green light to Confessions of a Shopaholic, a thin, largely unfunny comedy that marries lazy filmmaking with bad timing. Star Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers) is charming enough, and a gifted physical comic, but this material is so predictable and leaden that even she has no prayer of keeping it afloat."

Gothamist

<a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090211/REVIEWS/902119991">Roger Ebert says</a>, "Friday the 13th is about the best Friday the 13th movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required. If that's what you want to find out, you can stop reading. OK, now it's just us in the room. You're not planning to see Friday the 13th, and you wonder why anyone else is."I know what you're thinking. No, I haven't seen them all. Wikipedia saw them so I didn't have to. The question arises: Why does Jason continue his miserable existence, when his memoirs would command a seven-figure advance, easy? There is another question. In the 1980 movie, 20 years had already passed since Jason first went to sleep with the fishes. Assuming he was a camper aged 12, he would have been 32 in 1980, and in 2009, he is 61. That helps explain why one of my fellow critics at the screening was wearing an AARP T-shirt."

Gothamist

Of course there's a reason why we saw <a href="http://gothamist.com/2009/02/13/joaquin_phoenix.php">Joaquin Phoenix mumbling through</a> an instantly classic David Letterman appearance this week; he's contractually obligated to plug what's supposedly his last film appearance, the torrid romantic melodrama Two Lovers, which was filmed on location in Brighton Beach. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/movies/13two.html?partner=Rotten%20Tomatoes&ei=5083">The Times's A.O. Scott says</a>, "Though it is set in the present, Two Lovers takes place in what often feels like an earlier incarnation of New York, a world of lower-middle-class neighborhoods and workaday aspirations that is still very real but that seems less interesting to ambitious filmmakers and writers than it used to be."It can be argued that with Two Lovers, James Gray has traded in one set of clichÃ©s for another. But perhaps because the conventions of romantic melodrama have lain dormant for so long, there is something fresh and vivid about the way he uses them here. He is also a generous and sympathetic director of actors, and he makes the most of Vinessa Shawâs grace, Gwyneth Paltrowâs unpredictability and Joaquin Phoenixâs odd, intriguing blend of solemnity and mischief. Their performances go a long way toward preventing the movie from becoming overwrought or schematic."

Gothamist

According to <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/movies/13unde.html?ref=movies">Stephen Holden at the Times</a>, the new IMAX movie Under the Sea 3D is "a visually enthralling 40-minute tour of the southwestern Pacific depths...No computer-designed animatronic invention can begin to match the beauty and grace of the oceanic life photographed in Under the Sea 3D.. You donât have to be a child to be awed by a luminescent world in which sea creatures adopt gorgeous camouflage to lie in wait for their prey or glide through the water accompanied by entourages of smaller fish that feed on tiny organisms attached to the bodies of their larger hosts."

Gothamist

Screening twice tonight <a href="http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T-MM5FF07">at the 92Y Tribeca</a>, <a href="http://nerdcorerisingthemovie.com">Nerdcore Rising</a> explores the "undeniably uncool cultural phenomenon of geeks rapping about geeky themes like Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, and algorithms." <a href="http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/03/14/sxsw_wrap/index.html?CP=IMD&DN=110">Salon calls it</a> a "hilarious and delightful documentary...[that] follows MC Frontalot, pioneer of the nerdcore hiphop movement, on his inaugural tour around the country. Frontalot is actually Damian Hess, a white guy in his 30s from Berkeley, Calif. (in other words, yo, he's my homey), a former Web designer who has turned his compulsive rhyming skills and avowedly mediocre rapping into an actual performing career, all without a major-label recording contract."

Gothamist

The Caller, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, is a moody, elliptical thriller co-starring Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) as a whistle-blowing executive at an international energy firm. After exposing his company's bloody hands in Latin America, Langella becomes a marked man, and anonymously hires Elliott Gould, a private detective, to stay on his tail until the end. (<a href="http://gothamist.com/2008/04/28/elliott_gould_t.php">Gould talked with us</a> about his role in one of our all time favorite Gothamist interviews.) The film itself, however, is not one of our favorites. Aaron Hillis <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-02-11/film/someone-tell-elliot-gould-that-the-caller-is-frank-langella/">at the Village Voice</a> agrees: "There's jumping the shark, and then there's ruining the entire movie, so when Langella is shown in the very first call to be the eponymous client on the other end of the line, we're left to wonder why we're watching Gould scramble for clues to a mystery we've been given the solution to. Unless you can't figure out who the two boys are in the force-fed World War II childhood trauma flashbacks, in which case [spoiler alert!] you're an idiot."

Gothamist

Director Linus Phillips spent two years getting to know nine of Seattleâs homeless population; his documentary Great Speeches From a Dying World is a portrait gallery of sorts, with each subject asked to recite a famous speech from history that they felt related to their lives. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/movies/11grea.html?ref=movies">The Times's Stephen Holden</a> writes that, "given todayâs worsening economic climate, the movie carries an extra weight as newly unemployed workers face the possibility of landing on the street without a livelihood. Which of us in our worst nightmares hasnât imagined a calamitous pile-up of personal disasters that could end in destitution and despair?"

Gothamist

The third Muppet movie, The Muppets Take Manhattan, is screening at midnight this weekend <a href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Films/films_frameset.asp?id=60926">at the Sunshine</a>. Released in 1984, this was the last Muppet film released before Jim Henson's untimely death; it features cameos by Art Carney, Joan Rivers, Gregory Hines, Elliot Gould, Liza Minnelli, Brooke Shields, Dabney Coleman and others.

Gothamist

Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>The International</em> or <em>Gomorrah</em>