The Band's Visit: Thoroughly charming

The Band's Visit (2007) • View trailer for The Band's Visit
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, and much too harshly, for fleeing profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.20.08
Buy DVD: The Band's Visit


Ultimately, the universal language of music may be our best chance at salvation.

How short-sighted, then, that when public school budgets hit a crisis — both nationally or locally — the first reflexive response involves cutting all funding for arts and music programs.

Tewfig (Sasson Gabai, far left) and the other seven members of the Alexandria
Ceremonial Police Orchestra find themselves in the middle of nowhere, when a
trip to Israel goes awry due to crossed travel signals. With no idea of what to
do next, and the uncomfortable certainty that language is apt to be rather a
formidable barrier, Tewfig can't imagine how to salvage his band's trip.

Those making such decisions should be strapped to chairs and forced to watch Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit, a charming little drama with a quiet approach but an oh-so-timely message.

Kolirin's simple little story feels as if it was suggested by actual events, but the filmmaker insists not. That merely adds to the movie's charm; the appearance of authenticity makes the narrative's moral point even stronger.

The setting is contemporary. The eight members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, their pastel blue uniforms starched to crisp perfection, arrive in Israel in order to perform at the opening of an Arab cultural center. Unfortunately, signals have been crossed; the musicians find themselves at the airport with no sign of their Israeli hosts.

Demonstrating once again that real men never ask for help — no matter what part of the world we're talking about — the stoic and almost comically proud orchestra leader and conductor, Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai), refuses to contact the Egyptian consulate. Instead, he orders junior member Khaled (Saleh Bakri) to obtain travel directions from a nearby kiosk.

The young man and the station agent work their way through Arabic, Hebrew and even fractured English, and the results prove disastrous: The orchestra members soon find themselves stranded on the outskirts of a microscopic Israeli town at the edge of the desert.

By now, Kolirin has proven to be a master of the understated sight gag. Although the situation, at first blush, isn't remotely funny — imagine an octet of militarily garbed Arabs suddenly dumped into the middle of an Israeli community, no matter how small — the sight of these eight men, their pale blue uniforms such a stark contrast to the barren desert, can't help making us smile.

And with that emotional release, not to mention the wry tone that punctuates every conversation between these men, we immediately understand that this will be a story of inclusiveness, not tragedy.

Horton Hears a Who: Hear ye, hear ye!

Horton Hears a Who (2008) • View trailer for Horton Hears a Who
Four stars (out of five). Rating: G, and suitable for all ages
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.14.08
Buy DVD: Horton Hears a Who • Buy Blu-Ray: Horton Hears a Who! [Blu-ray]

On the 15th of May,

In the jungle of Nool,

In the heat of the day,

In the cool of the pool,

Kangaroo, accustomed to making all the rules in the jungle of Nool, gets quite
put out when Horton the elephant refuses to surrender his clover ... because, as
he insists, it's sheltering a dust mote that is, in turn, home to an entire
microcosmic civilization. And how does he know this? Because every time he
cocks an ear and listens carefully, Horton hears a Who!

He was splashing —

Enjoying the jungle's great joys —

When Horton the elephant

Heard a small noise.

I can think of no higher compliment to pay directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino, than to say that their big-screen adaptation of Horton Hears a Who looks, sounds and feels like a Dr. Seuss book come to life ... or, better still, like a film Theodor Geisel would have made himself, had he embraced the film medium (and been given a gazillion-dollar budget).

But then I shouldn't be surprised, because Blue Sky Studios — famed for its deservedly popular Ice Age franchise — is, along with Pixar, one of the few contemporary animation houses that understands the need to make story and voice performance as important as the eye-popping visuals.

In this case, scripters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio have skillfully expanded upon the original children's picture-book, and done so with such finesses that you'll be hard-pressed to determine where Dr. Seuss' original rhyming prose — half a century old at this point, but still sounding fresh — yields to 21st century embellishment (although I'll bet most 5-year-olds could tell you).

And as if to remind us that Dr. Seuss is best enjoyed when read aloud, narrator Charles Osgood interrupts the on-screen action every so often, just to remind us of where we are in the captivating narrative.

Many of Dr. Seuss' books have an important moral; Horton Hears a Who comes with several. Indeed, hearing our pachyderm protagonist insist that "a person's a person, no matter how small" carries even more weight these days, with so many people feeling disenfranchised by political and corporate monoliths. We all need a protective Horton in our lives.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: Absolutely delightful

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008) • View trailer for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for plenty of innuendo and fleeing nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.13.08
Buy DVD: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

One impeccably timed performance in a comedy is a treasure.

Two are a revelation.


After being dragged along to a high-society fashion show, the still shabbily
dressed Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand, left) -- painfully aware of
how much she doesn't fit these surroundings -- wonders how much longer she
can pull off her charade as "social secretary" to irrepressible American singer
Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams).


Watching Frances McDormand and Amy Adams spar in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is akin to sitting courtside during a fast-paced tennis match between champions: Both actresses work their considerable talents to the max, as if each scene were a competition.

But there are no losers here, and we viewers are the winners: This cleverly retro farce is delightful from start to finish, and you'll not be able to take your eyes off McDormand or Adams. Indeed, when both share the screen — which happens quite frequently — it's difficult to know who to watch. Both spice their performances with carefully composed body English and hilarious little bits of business: a tilt of the head here, a calculated pause and raised eyebrow there.

To borrow from a Cole Porter song that'd be right at home in this environment, the result is de-lovely.

Although feeling very much like a transplanted stage comedy, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day actually is based on a 1938 novel by Winifred Watson, a British author whose sexually charged book — no doubt a revelation for forward-thinking women of her day — must've raised more than a few eyebrows. The novel is practically a blueprint for a pre-WWII Hollywood screwball comedy, and I'm amazed it hasn't been adapted until now.

Director Bharat Nalluri — a veteran of recent, top-notch British TV shows such as Spooks, Hustle and Life on Mars — embraces the material as though born to the genre. Working from a finely tuned script by David Magee (Finding Neverland) and Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), Nalluri guides his talented cast through a fast-paced adult fairy tale that balances its witty dialogue and hilarious plot complications with the real menace of England's impending war with Germany.

Composer Paul Englishby delivers a rollicking, jazz-hued soundtrack that perfectly evokes the era; the result — very much in the mold of Anne Dudley's main theme to the beloved British TV series, Jeeves and Wooster — saucily punctuates this naughty mix of ethical dilemmas and bedroom hijinks.

The story takes place in 1939 London, on the eve of what savvy citizens know is the ramp-up to another nightmare. Times are hard, emotions are high, and jobs are hard to come by; the stuffy gatekeeper at an employment agency therefore is disinclined to help when middle-age governess Guinevere Pettigrew (McDormand) is sacked from yet another placement.

10,000 B.C.: Too primitive

10,000 B.C. (2008) • View trailer for 10,000 B.C.
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, and perhaps too harshly, for prehistoric action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.7.08
Buy DVD: 10,000 B.C. • Buy Blu-Ray: 10,000 B.C. [Blu-ray]


I don't care if the screenwriters are trying to be historically accurate; this movie needs dinosaurs.

Desperately.

After falling into a pit trap, D'Leh (Steven Strait) discovers that he's sharing it
with a greatly annoyed saber-toothed tiger. But the tiger is entangled as well,
and — against his better judgment — our young hero decides to free the beast
and hope that it won't devour him.

Or it needs something. I'd settle for Raquel Welch or Carole Landis.

That's the primary issue: Despite all the golly-gee-wow technology that turns its third act into a breathtaking visual spectacle, the story at the heart of 10,000 B.C. is so retro that it creaks as badly as its juvenile "Me Tarzan, you Jane" dialogue. The special effects notwithstanding, I'd have to say that both 1940's One Million B.C. (with Landis) and 1966's One Million Years B.C. (Welch) were far more entertaining.

Like George Lucas before him, director Roland Emmerich has based his career on re-invigorating Hollywood's golden age of action-adventure serials. Emmerich's early efforts were impressive: Stargate made enough of a splash with genre geeks that it spawned not just one but two TV shows, one of which continues even now; Independence Day was a hell-for-leather riff on War of the Worlds that proved far more fun than Steven Spielberg's way-too-serious remake of the H.G. Wells classic.

Heck, I even enjoyed Emmerich's update of Godzilla, a film that probably would have been far more successful if Sony hadn't tried to persuade us that it was the cinematic equivalent of the Second Coming.

But Emmerich's spectacle began to outstrip his story sense with The Day After Tomorrow, which played like one of the hokey disaster flicks so popular in the 1970s and '80s.

And while 10,000 B.C. isn't quite a disaster, it's also nothing to write home about. Calling this prehistoric ramble "dull" probably overstates the case, but the film takes a long, long time to reach its conclusion.

The primary faults lie both with the script and the starring players. The former — credited to Emmerich and Harald Kloser — is insufferably primitive and simplistic; the latter scarcely register on the screen. Thank goodness for New Zealand actor Cliff Curtis, who makes a strong impression as the seasoned warrior who guides our callow protagonist; absent his involvement, we probably wouldn't care about any of these characters.

Semi-Pro: Pro-foundly awful

Semi-Pro (2008) • View trailer for Semi-Pro
One star (out of five). Rating: R, for relentless profanity and sexual content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.6.08
Buy DVD: Semi-Pro • Buy Blu-Ray: Semi-Pro [Blu-ray]


Five minutes into Semi-Pro, I became convinced that this film had been a victim of the writers strike, and that the cast had been told to improvise every line.

And had done spectacularly poorly.

While rehearsing for his team's next deranged half-time performance, owner
Jackie Moon (Will Ferrell, right) is surprised and disappointed to discover
that newcomer Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson) has been "promoted" to head
coach by all the other players.

But no: Scot Armstrong (Old School) was paid real money to "write" this un-script, as relentless — and pointless — a barrage of profanity and potty humor as we've seen since Matt Stone and Trey Parker unleashed the nonstop raunch of 2004's Team America: World Police.

Is Hollywood the land of opportunity, or what?

I struggle to believe that maybe, somehow, dismaying garbage such as this qualifies as male bonding humor for arrested adolescents swilling beer in frat houses. After all, plenty of people seem to be entertained by "reality" TV train-wrecks such as Big Brother; Semi-Pro is just as fascinating from the standpoint of being jaw-droppingly dreadful.

But even by the already low standards set by Will Ferrell's earlier moron comedies — Talladega Nights and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy come to mind — this one's pretty thin gruel. Like Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence before him, Ferrell has come to believe that his fans will watch anything, so there's no need to try very hard.

One hopes the fans in question will rebel — and soon — just as they did with Murphy and Lawrence.

Semi-Pro takes its almost-plot from a thin veneer of sports fact. Not all that long ago, two basketball leagues existed in these grand United States: the NBA we still know and love, and the renegade American Basketball Association, which lasted nine seasons from 1967 through 1976. The ABA was the colorful rogue league, known for its red, white and blue basketballs and P.T. Barnum-esque promotions. Anything that could get more fans into seats was considered fair game.

League rivalry got pretty bitter, and the situation finally was resolved when four ABA teams — the New York Nets, Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers and San Antonio Spurs — were folded into the NBA. The remaining ABA teams were disbanded, along with the league itself.

So much for the history lesson.

Ferrell stars here as Jackie Moon, a one-song musical wonder who parlayed the money made from his sultry hit, "Love Me Sexy," into ownership of the ABA Tropics, based in Michael Moore's beloved Flint, Mich. When not inflicting audiences with his song — a spoof of the sensuous ballads made famous by Barry White and his Love Unlimited Orchestra — Jackie takes the hands-on approach to team ownership; he's also coach and star power forward.

In Bruges: Caught between heaven and hell

In Bruges (2008) • View trailer
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, drug use and pervasive violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.29.08

At first blush, In Bruges appears to be a droll entry in the British wiseguy noir genre, very much in the mold of, say, Guy Ritchie's Snatched.

Contract killer Ken (Brendan Gleeson) insists that younger colleague Ray (Colin
Farrell) should make the most of their enforced stay in the quaintly picturesque
Belgian city of Bruges, but the latter can't bend himself into a tourist-y mind
set. Sadly, both men soon will learn that their presence in Bruges is mere
preamble to some highly unpleasant doings. Life is like that, in British
gangster flicks.

Our protagonists — definitely not "heroes," in any sense of the word — are contract assassins Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell), who've been ordered to lay low in Bruges, Belgium, in the aftermath of a hit gone terribly awry. They're the original Mutt 'n' Jeff pair: Ken the older, sturdily built, sad-faced, soft-spoken and philosophical sophisticate; Ray the callow, wiry, cheerfully vulgar and shamelessly ignorant dilettante.

They're also quite funny, both individually and as a unit. Despite the absence of common ground, theirs is an oddly intimate relationship, Ken serving as overly patient father to Ray's impetuous surrogate son. Ken, wanting to make the most of their surroundings as they kill time, insists on brochure-guided walking tours and slow boat rides through the canals that interlace the city, the better to appreciate Bruges' utterly gorgeous, fairy-tale architecture and history.

And did I mention that this story takes place during Christmas? (I've no doubt this film will boost the city's tourist trade.)

Ray, petulant as a 5-year-old, couldn't care less. Farrell screws his face up into the picture of abject misery: huddled into a jacket, hands stuffed into pockets, eyes squinched in such bored anguish that his bushy black brows blend together, seeming to perch like some small furry beast on his lower forehead.

Ray shamelessly mocks the picture-postcard setting with language so coarse that we can't help but laugh. ("If I'd grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me. But I didn't. So it doesn't.")

But this younger man also is being eaten by something awful: a memory that reduces him to shattered despair. It has to do with precisely how catastrophically wrong that previous job went, and writer/director Martin McDonagh's film shifts into an entirely different gear once this information is revealed.

Although the odd encounters with eccentric supporting characters continue, the mood suddenly becomes more twisted menace than macabre black comedy. It's like being thrown into a room crowded with people, all of whom have the manners, morals and unpredictable temperament of the sinister master of ceremonies from Cabaret. Very unsettling.

Try as we might, we cannot step back and view these people as exaggerated grotesques, an atmospheric safety valve that allowed us to survive something like (for example) Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.

Mind you, such films aren't intended for the unsuspecting general public in the first place. In Bruges, like its genre companions, is horrifically violent and unapologetically amoral: as savage a view of humanity as anybody could imagine, the story's cartoonish qualities notwithstanding. Proceed at your own risk.

Vantage Point: Point of far too many returns

Vantage Point (2008) • View trailer
1.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for profanity, action violence and relentless gunplay
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.28.08

Barry L. Levy's screenplay for Vantage Point may have seemed like a clever, can't-miss concept on paper, but it's paralyzingly inept on the big screen.

To explain:

In the aftermath of an assassination attempt on the U.S. president, Secret Service
agents Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid, center) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox,
right) examine the footage obtained by American tourist Howard Lewis (Forest
Whitaker), in an effort to see where the shooter was concealed.

Way back in the mists of time, the superlative 1960s horror/sci-fi TV series The Outer Limits aired an episode titled Controlled Experiment, which concerned a pair of Martian researchers who, intrigued by our quaint custom of murder ("which only happens here," one of them notes, "on this weird little planet"), scrutinize an incident involving a jilted floozy who blows away her unfaithful lover after he steps out of the elevator leading to the lobby of a low-rent hotel.

Thanks to a "temporal condenser," which can reverse, slow down and speed up time like some amped-up DVD player, the Martians study the incident from every possible angle, and even freeze the action to interfere with salient details.

On paper, a clever idea. Watching at home, however, viewers quickly grew tired of seeing the primary action — the descending elevator, the lobby confrontation, the bullet emerging from the gun — over and over and over again ... not to mention the golly-gee-whiz noise and light show that accompanied the use of the temporal condenser, also broadcast over and over and over again.

Vantage Point suffers from the same problem.

Familiarity really does breed contempt.

The setting is contemporary, the event a photo-op in a crowded Spanish city square, as U.S. President Ashton (William Hurt) steps to a podium and prepares to open a landmark summit on the global war on terror. Seconds later, he has been shot; Secret Service agents scramble to protect our chief of state, while the panicked crowd attempts to flee before anything else happens. Explosions follow; chaos erupts.

We witness this event on the monitors within a TV news truck parked on the outskirts of the plaza in question; producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) cuts between on-site cameras. She's vexed because one remote operator doesn't follow instructions, and annoyed because the on-air talent is prone to injecting her political views into what should be unbiased reportage.

Then the unthinkable erupts; as Brooks and her control room crew stare, shattered, at the aftermath, the scene flares out like a candle.

And film director Pete Travis "rewinds" what we've just seen in fast reverse, re-setting the clock to a few seconds before noon, and unspools the events again ... but this time from the point of view of veteran Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid).

Another 10 minutes or so of slightly altered exposition, and Travis does this again.

And again.

And again, and again, and again.