Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>To Save a Life</em> Vs. <em>The Tooth Fairy</em>
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<p>Put down that <em>Left Behind</em> book, turn off <em>Way of the Master</em>, and go call the gang from youth group, cause the best movie since <em>Fireproof</em> is heading our way. <em>To Save a Life</em> is about this all-American teen, just like us, who is really popular, dating the hottest girl in school but is tempted into pre-marital sex (oh no!) and then his best friend kills himself (ultimate sin!). Jake then has to go on a heart-smart journey, with the help of a cool pastor, in order to convince his pregnant girlfriend to keep the baby, and lead a good christian life. </p><p></p>Andy Webster (some heathen probably) from <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/movies/22tosave.html?ref=movies">The Times</a> (that liberal rag) says: "The director, Brian Baugh, was the cinematographer for the conservative screed <em>An American Carol</em>, a clumsy parody of Michael Moore movies, and here similar politics come in adolescent camouflage.<strong> The film would be a mere nuisance if not for its shameless exploitation of school shootings to advance its agenda.</strong> But forget the lame performances and arch, preachy sentiment; the movieâs sham hip-hop and spurious alternative music alone should keep teenagers away. Thank goodness."
<p>Finally...The Rock has come back to the big screen! Time to take off those elbow pads and put on your dad hat, cause the self-proclaimed People's Champion is back in yet another "Huge Guy + Little Kids" family picture. Dwayne Johnson plays a professional hockey player who after discouraging the dreams of a young girl (for shame!), is sentenced one week of being the actual tooth fairy (!) How's that for comeuppance? </p><p></p>Stephen Holden from <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/movies/22tooth.html?ref=movies">The Times</a> says: "Mr. Johnson, a k a the Rock, shows once again that he has no real acting talent. Charisma? Yes, if you find a blindingly white grin attached to a shaved, over-muscled torso charismatic.<p></p>"Watching the first half-hour of <em>Tooth Fairy</em> is like reaching into a grab bag of novelties, as the movie unveils its tricks. The liveliest scene is a nonsensical verbal joust in fairyland between Derek and an uncredited Billy Crystal that recalls the giddier verbal effusions found in a Danny Kaye movie. After that, the wit more or less evaporates, replaced by bloated sentimentality and clumsy plot exposition."
<p>Indiana Jones and Encino Man have finally teamed up in the film <em>Extraordinary Measures</em>. Instead of the archeological adventure of our dreams however the movie is a medical drama, with lots of serious talking, chalkboard formula pointing, and standing around arms akimbo. Brendan Fraser plays John Crowley who hires a lab-coat-wearing rogue scientist (Ford) to scream a lot and talk about the system in hopes of curing his two children (who have some sort of fatal disease). He already <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYBx7yxEME4">works around the clock</a>, <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/01/12/i-already-work-around-the-clock-harrison-ford-movie-quote-goes-viral/">you know</a>! </p><p></p>Tasha Robinson from <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/extraordinary-measures,37358/">The A.V. Club</a> says: "The film closely follows the pattern of 1992âs <em>Lorenzoâs Oil</em>, but with fewer filmmaking risks, visceral emotions, and colorful, outsized characters.<p></p>"Fraser has little to do but look angsty and determined; Keri Russell, as his wife, is an afterthought. Ford is an entertainingly irascible scene-thief, but knowing heâs just there to spice things up throws seeds of doubt into every moment of the film, undermining and distracting from Crowleyâs real-life struggles. <strong>Why make a film if the story is only worth telling with a made-up, cartoonish super-curmudgeon thrown in for excitement?"</strong>
<p>So apparently not enough peeps have given props to the man-upstairs in their acceptance speeches because he's lost all faith in humanity, at least according to the new pseudo-religious action spectacle: <em>Legion</em>. God goes all old-testament on us heathens and brings out the big guns in the form of a (get this) <em>Legion</em> of angels. According to the synopsis the only hope for humanity is the archangel Paul Bettany and "a group of strangers trapped in a desert diner," whatever that means.</p><p></p>Sony Pictures had the good sense not to screen this for critics beforehand, as to hold back the praise for as long as possible. The only person who seems to have seen it is budding movie critic and self-proclaimed "horror fan" Marc D. from the <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/legion">metacritic comment section</a> who gives the film a 2 and calls it a "stinker."
<p>Also opening this weekend is André Téchiné's <em>The Girl on the Train</em>. The film follows a young women named Jeane (Emilie Dequenne) who accuses a potential boss of an anti-Semitic attack, only to later admit to lying about the whole thing.</p><p></p> Owen Gleiberman from <a href="http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20337985,00.html">Entertainment Weekly</a> says: "Téchiné spends the opening hour of the movie setting up Jeanne as a Rollerblading, Bob Dylan-listening, underachieving ⨠provincial princess who is far too close to her severe mother (Catherine Deneuve, turning off the charm), and who drifts into an affair with a sweet-talking jerk of a wrestler (Nicolas Duvauchelle). <p></p>"Téchiné has made a half-captivating, half-baffling tease of a movie in which one woman's destructive whim has the effect of making anti-Semitism look like a myth. It's a distortion that Téchiné, with a passivity bordering on perversity, does nothing to dispel."
<p>The evolution verses intelligent design debate makes its way to the picture shows via two Paul Bettany movies and which ever grosses higher wins! Well, probably not. Nevertheless, if you have trouble buying the idea of Bettany as an angel (in this week's <em>Legion</em>) or even the idea of angels themselves, why not see him play the father of all religious naysayers, Charles Darwin, in the aptly titled <em>Creation</em>. The film follows the man himself as he struggles between his god-fearin' wife, memories of his recently deceased daughter, and a bunch of birds who have slightly different beaks. </p><p></p>A.O. Scott from <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/movies/22creation.html?ref=movies">The New York Times</a> says: "A great, civilizational drama looms, but what we see on screen is a lumbering, flat-footed fancy-dress melodrama <em>Creation</em>, which was based on a book by Randal Keynes, who is Darwinâs great-great-grandson, may well be a truthful portrait, but it is not a convincing or illuminating one. Its view of life is that a paradigm-shifting breakthrough, rather than being the product of either solitary genius or cultural ferment, amounts instead to a pretext and a substitute for therapy."
<p>Playing this week at the Film Forum is Andrey Khrzhanovsky's biography of poet Joseph Brodsky called <em>A Room and a Half</em>. Brodsky was condemned to internal exile by the Soviets for "social parasitism" (or as we call it nowadays: poetry) and fled to America in 1972 never to return again. Ella Taylor from <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-01-19/film/a-room-and-a-half-an-ecstatically-fanciful-film-by-andrey-khrzhanovsky/">The Voice</a> says: "In this ecstatically fanciful film, Russian filmmaker Andrey Khrzhanovsky brings the acclaimed Nobel Laureate back home via his sonorous verse and a montage of archival footage, wickedly doctored photos, re-enactments, and puckish animation featuring two crows and a very large cat.</p><p></p>"The almost unbearable final sequence imagines Brodsky on his return, filled with wonder at the new, capitalized Russia and sorrow at the empty, subdivided apartment that his parents had made into a warm nest. If Brodsky's return to St. Petersburg is to be read as a break for intellectual freedom, it is most agonizingly understood as his return to the home and parents he had been so desperate to leave as a youth. The loss from exile, Khrzhanovsky suggests, was not his alone."
<p>Gabriel Medina's <em>The Paranoids</em> opens this weekend to mixed reviews. Unfortunately, the film is not about the fake band from <em>The Crying of Lot 49</em> but rather a fictitious Spanish TV show within the movie. The film follows 30-something failing screenwriter Luciano Gauna as he wanders around Buenos Aires, continuing to epically fail. Things change however, when Luciano's childhood friend, and now successful producer, Manuel shows up with his hot girlfriend (hate when that happens). </p><p></p>David Fear from <a href="http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/82188/the-paranoids-gabriel-medina-film-review">Time Out New York</a> says: "Slackersâthose culturally ubiquitous couch potatoes given beaucoup screen time during the Bush Sr.-Clinton eraâdidnât die out with the 1990s. If Gabriel Medinaâs deadpan comedy is to be believed, theyâre apparently alive, well and living in Argentina.<p></p>"So what does <em>The Paranoids</em> say about todayâs generation of Argentine twentynothings, or the social anthropology of arrested adolescence, or what constitutes success in a creatively bankrupt world? Nada, essentially, as Medina is simply content to let the filmâs sub-Jarmusch vignettes slow-fizzle to their finishes."
<p>Coming up this Thursday (that's the 28th for those of you with calenders) at 8pm at the Astoria Beer Garden: <a href="http://www.astoriaindies.com/">Astoria Indies</a> is presenting the worst movie ever made/new cult movie phenomenon <em>The Room</em>. The film has been said to be so unbelievably bad that it forces you into a giddy trance, compelled to watch the atrocity being projected before you. Some swear it to be the best movie experience of their lives. Usually screenings of <em>The Room</em> go down like <em>Rocky Horror Picture Show</em> or Lebowski fest, with people dressing up, screaming at the screen, reciting along with the awful dialogue, singing along, and apparently throwing footballs around and carrying huge bags of plastic spoons (we hear once you see the film you'll understand). All of this taking place at an establishment with a liquor license should spell good times. </p>
<p>This weekend at the <a href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/market/NewYork/NewYork_frameset.htm">Landmark Sunshine Theatre</a> is everyone's favorite rogue-dinosaurs-take-over-dinosaur-amusement-park-picture <em>Jurassic Park</em>. Come get nostalgic as you remember your adolescence and a time when people still cared about dinosaurs. "<em>Clevah Girl!</em>" </p>
<p>Ladies and Gentlemen...another Cohen-in-Concert film. Showing this weekend at <a href="http://www.cinemavillage.com/chc/cv/">Cinema Village</a> is <em>Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 </em>. Although already available on DVD, it might be nice to see it and hear it in a theater. Nick Pinkerton from <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-01-19/film/leonard-cohen-live-at-the-isle-of-wight-1970/">The Voice</a> sums it up nicely:</p><p></p> "Exceptional live recording by Teo Macero does justice to the Army, Cohen's band of (mostly) Nashville session vets, including fiddler Charlie Daniels and Songs From a Room producer Bob Johnston, performing a set list drawn from Cohen's first three albums, closing on a funeral note with "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy." [Director] Lerner solders things together in a narrative arc, breaking for new interviews with witnessesâKris Kristofferson and Joan Baezâwho cast Cohen as a musical sedative. Born-ancient "I know we are not new" Cohen followed young, hellraising Hendrix (with three weeks left to live), subduing a mutinous crowd of some 600,000 with raincoat-weather songs in 3/4 time."
<a href="http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/film_screenings/8549">Tonight and Sunday afternoon</a>, MoMA screens Ed Wood's 1955 film <em>Bride of the Monster</em>, starring Bela Lugosi. <a href="http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2010/01/22/bride-of-the-monster-ed-wood-knew-exactly-what-he-was-doing">L Magazine's Henry Stewart</a> has mounted a rousing defense of the movie: "Ed Woodâs reputation as 'The Worst Filmmaker Ever' is bullshit; his talentlessness is a myth, begat in the Age of Irony as a haughty reaction to the filmmakerâs conspicuous compromises in the face of budgetary constraints. <p></p>Itâs easy to laugh, for example, at his Bride of the Monster from 1955âat its poorly edited-in stock footage, at many of its non-professional actorsâbut itâs just as easy to appreciate its virtues: the touching details (the police captain who pours a glass of water for his pet bird), its critical depiction of police (callously rounding up hobos, bullying newspaper peddlers), its sense of humor ('this is the 20th Century!' the police captain says. 'Donât count on it,' a reporter replies), its battle of the sexes banter, and its exploration of marriage vis-Ã -vis the vanquishing power of love."