Films Seen - April 2008

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

TEKKONKINKREET (69) (dir., Michael Arias) Not a big manga fan - looking at Slant's list of the three movies this resembles, I realise I haven't seen any of them - but visual delirium is only part of the deal in any case. The animation isn't much like the rounded storybook lines of Miyazaki, and faces aren't especially detailed - actually reminded me of Beavis & Butthead, esp. the rather far-apart eyes and rows of small sharp teeth - but character relationships are strong, esp. the bond between protagonist kids Black and White, damaged delinquent and sensitive (read: nutty) dreamer, respectively. The (dazzling, glittering) climax becomes a battle for Black's soul, linking with the battle for the city's soul that underlies the film as a whole - "This is my town!" claim various characters - rampant development and gentrification vs. nostalgia for cramped streets and venerable strip-joints where "boys have been made men" since time immemorial; the villain cites a Higher Force for his vile profiteering, adding to the mystical overtones - but prevailing tone is surprisingly melancholy, with frequent suggestions of death and decay ("This town's days are numbered," says White, dreaming instead of elephants and psychedelic apple trees) and a mix of downbeat tone and rumpled gangsters that carries a touch of Melville (esp. the scene where the older yakuza is about to be killed by his protégé - mentors and wards are a constant theme - and wearily submits, even instructing him how to do the deed). Is it deeply wrong to suggest that having a Western - or Western-born - writer and director makes the storytelling more coherent and powerful than e.g. in the more demented, arguably more creative PAPRIKA? Probably.

FEAST OF LOVE (52) (dir., Robert Benton) Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Radha Mitchell, Billy Burke, Selma Blair Benton's tender humanism is always a joy to behold, though at some point you sense he's mostly extending his generosity to the mensch-y, put-upon and wryly philosophical characters, not really bothering with the cold and unprincipled (except to note that such people exist, and they're best left ending up with each other). Conventional in many ways, but the multi-faceted Thing Called Love - whether "a trick Nature plays on us" or the essence of Life itself, a "supernatural force" (tying in with palm-readers and irrational phobias), a stubborn defiance of mortality, a case of red-hot sex, an all-consuming love-at-first-sight or a final consolation for a battered old couple - beams at its core, warming the plot with its quiet transcendence. Freeman's variation on his Wise Geezer routine is more complex than it first appears, but I'd rather have stayed with the lesbians in the grip of amour fou - "We're going to have adventures, you and me!" - to be frankly honest.

21 (32) (dir., Robert Luketic) Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Laurence Fishburne I make no great claims for this rather facetious "Cyprus Mail" piece - but I make no great claims for the film either. One thing I didn't mention is how annoying the absent-father meme is when it turns up (as here) for no obvious reason - since there's no suggestion our hero views Spacey as a surrogate father-figure - nor did I mention how hilarious it is when he and Spacey thrash out their Issues in the lecture-hall (hero's a college student, Spacey his professor), speaking in elaborate double meanings so the rest of the class won't guess they're actually talking about their own relationship. Those kids are going to be the most confused class in MIT history. 

DEFINITELY, MAYBE (42) (dir., Adam Brooks) Ryan Reynolds, Isla Fisher, Rachel Weisz, Abigail Breslin Mileage may vary, but I've watched a lot of rom-coms lately and I'm just sick and tired of these wishy-washy, overlong, fundamentally timid films, films that perform a kind of emotional blackmail, demanding an earnest of Personal Growth in exchange for a happy ending (see also 27 DRESSES, esp. the part about therapy culture ruining the rom-com). Why should the audience have to twist itself in knots, agreeing that "love is not a fairytale" but also chuckling at cutesy, only-in-the-movies scenes like Ryan "rehearsing" his marriage proposal with another girl (the one he truly loves, but doesn't know it), or else nodding at Breslin's precocity - she can say "penis" and "vagina" because that's the way it is, kids grow up fast nowadays - while also smiling at her childish innocence, or swooning at True Love while anticipating endless obstacles and frustration? I'm tired of films existing in some no-man's-land between saccharine and sensible, Harlequin romance and political correctness, buffing up the downbeat while damping down the grandly romantic, films that confuse romance with relationships - films that feel like being in a relationship, with their compromise and over-explication and let's-do-X-because-we-did-Y-before - films that talk endlessly and circuitously, dotting 'i's and crossing 't's like a petty bureaucrat refusing to release your happy ending till all the forms have been filled out in triplicate. Random example: When your hero finally reunites with the girl he's obviously fated to end up with - if only because all other candidates have melted away - and he's toting the dedicated copy of "Jane Eyre" that's been set up as the Magic Key to her heart for the past hour, and she gives a peal of delighted laughter just to see him, you can stop right there and cut to credits, Mr. Brooks. We don't need to see them work out their Issues, we don't care if in 'real life' she'd be mad at him for not having brought the book earlier or whatever. Sometimes love really does mean not having to say you're sorry.      

THE MIST (70) (dir., Frank Darabont) Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Toby Jones A monster movie with things on its mind, which is why it's not always effective as a monster movie, even sliding once or twice into unintentional hilarity ("Tentacles ... Yeah...") - but also means it grows more effective as the scope of its ambitions becomes apparent; the finale may be the bleakest since the (somewhat similar) one in THE RAPTURE 17 years ago, though the coda's a mistake, muddying the Message for the sake of a cheap joke. The Message in question is that Man is "fundamentally insane", specifically that when faced with crisis we become prey to any Big Idea - notably religion - that offers some kind of reassurance by simplifying and demonising, replacing scary entropy with Good and Bad, supernatural causes and handy scapegoats; the process of how this takes place, a society's gradual slide into cult-like irrational certitude, is laid out with visceral power, Harden (as the religious nut) initially a joke, then annoying, then almost hypnotic (she just won't shut up, which is surely the secret behind these Big Ideas: ideologues wear people down by repeating their narrow spiel ad infinitum, so you finally succumb just to get some relief) - and it doesn't take much to see this also as a post-9/11 movie, America's slide to a more simplistic worldview in the throes of crisis (the coming of The Mist is expressed in 'disaster' indicators - a fire-engine passing by, sirens wailing in the distance - and the Current Climate is also evoked in the old woman's speech about right-wing governments spending more on defence than education). Slow to build, sometimes hard to take, but it's telling e.g. how it uses the character of the kid - at first just 'the kid', a staple of every disaster-movie, turning into more as his trauma is - shockingly - played straight, not just kid-in-jeopardy clichés but a shattered, distraught boy gone mute with shock, at which point one can either switch off - cursing the film for its tastelessness in bringing such raw emotion to a monster movie - or follow the tale to its next level, from genre piece to claustrophobic, finally apocalyptic group-dynamics drama in the style of "The Crucible". For what it's worth, I agree the concept of an evil Mist containing creepy-crawlies with big teeth is pretty silly. For what it's worth.

THE BLOSSOMING OF MAXIMO OLIVEROS (34) (dir., Auraeus Solito) Nathan Lopez, J.R. Valentin, Ping Medina Does establish a kind of polysexual ambience, viz. a society where an effeminate 12-year-old can pursue a clearly - if implicitly - sexual dalliance with a grown man without anyone batting an eye (except to tease them affectionately), but once one adjusts to the laissez-faire attitudes there's not much to see here; indeed, the determination to portray "Maxi"'s sissy-boy trappings as No Big Deal may even be a liability, since it cuts down on sub-cultural detail - he and his friends watch DVDs and put on a rather unconvincing beauty pageant, but his life is barely defined outside his family and precocious crush. Plot and characters generally flimsy, leaving only the ambience, and even that comes with a question mark, the suspicion being that Solito is pandering (consciously or not) to the gay-and-lesbian-festival audience fantasy of an unregulated Third World free of oppressive moral strictures - a sexual variation on the noble savage - the chaos and filth of slum life being part of its ramshackle charm (we open on trash in a stagnant pool, to the strains of a song declaring "This is my country / I love my country"; later there are glimpses of bickering neighbours and other picturesque 'ethnic' detail). Technical skill may be gleaned by the scene where the cop first visits the family, with wildly-shifting POVs and eye-lines all over the place. They don't even shoot the THIRD MAN ending from a THIRD MAN camera angle.

THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL (46) (dir., Justin Chadwick) Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Eric Bana, Kristin Scott Thomas A generous reading: Stuck in a patriarchal world - the King's wish for a male heir is the story's main dramatic motor - Anne Boleyn is forced to behave like a man, averring that "Love has no value without power and position", standing up to the King as an equal ("met his match") rather than a doormat, and intriguing busily to get what she wants. A more accurate reading: Anne is a selfish little schemer who single-handedly causes England's schism with the Catholic Church ("Why does the King give Rome such power?" she asks, trouble-makingly), blames blameless sister Mary for beguiling Henry, plays hard-to-get because her only real feelings are for jewels and expensive gifts, but finally - for all the proto-feminist blather - gets what she deserves, her reward for manipulating Henry being a brutal rape (Mary, on the other hand, finds him "surprisingly tender") not to mention a final appointment with the executioner's block. Fun to contemplate the contrast between the stars, supposedly sisters - Portman's sharp, alert little features vs. Johansson's slow sensual languor - and the first half is actually quite fine, with the girls used as pawns by unscrupulous relatives and Chadwick busily craning, shooting through doorways and using Irish Wolfhounds as decor; the second half is increasingly disastrous, not just revealing the film's dubious moralistic streak but trying to cram too much (three years of marriage, etc) and totally diluting the characters. Most sympathetic are Mary - who's devoted to her husband, cares for the King when forced into his orbit, and longs for a quiet life in the country - and her mother, who reckons the "art of being a woman" lies in "allowing the men to believe they indeed are in charge". I rest my case.

WELCOME HOME, ROSCOE JENKINS (37) (dir., Malcolm D. Lee) Martin Lawrence, Joy Bryant, James Earl Jones, Cedric the Entertainer, Michael Clarke Duncan, Mo'Nique Baseball > soccer. Ribs > tofu. Fat > thin. Living in a podunk small town with your trashy, violent family > Making millions as a talk-show host by hosting trashy, violent families on TV. Does not compute, I realise - but maybe that's the problem with working-class (and Afro-American) culture in general, viz. that it turns on anyone trying to better themselves, holding them down and pulling them back to a regressive narrow-minded 'authenticity' where everyone's loud, obese, boorish and unhealthy. Buried somewhere in the family-values boosterism is the tale of Roscoe Jenkins - bullied all his life by contemptuous siblings, belt-wielding Dad and slimy cousin - who finally escapes, goes to the city and, like any survivor of abuse, creates a new persona emphasising self-reliance and the "Team of Me" (as opposed to the bonds of family); that's a terrible thing to teach a child, fulminates our hero's stern father, chiding him (as does the movie) for losing touch with his roots - and one's heart goes out to Roscoe when he replies: "Some kids learn it on their own, Daddy". Also: really loud pants, dogs having sex - not once but twice - and an enormous fart escaping during a morning-yoga session. Does Forest Whitaker know they're making jokes about his lazy eye?

HORTON HEARS A WHO! (58) (dir., Jimmy Hayward & Steve Martino) with the voices of Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Carol Burnett Ah, the wonders of a captive audience! As cartoons become the safest bet in Hollywood, kids (and parents) proving they'll turn out for absolutely anything, the product grows a little more relaxed, even quirky: slapstick chase through the forest, admittedly, lame APOCALYPSE NOW! reference, simplistic oft-repeated Message - "A person's a person, no matter how small" - and modish jokes about cellphones and Facebook - but also an out-of-nowhere manga interlude where the clean corporate style gives way to whoosh! effects, onscreen captions and the frame splitting into three different slivers, a final singalong to R.E.O. Speedwagon (pre-dating the target audience by a good 10 years), and a zany sense of humour, whether it's Horton the elephant trying to work out what "asap" means - and deciding it doubtless stands for "act swiftly, awesome pachyderm!" - or his pal Morton rushing to warn him that Vlad (the vulture) has been hired to destroy Whoville: "I know two Vlads," muses Horton; "Is it the giant carnivorous bird, or the bunny who likes to bake cookies?". Even the Message has a more philosophical aspect - what if our world was a speck on a clover-leaf, etc - though Dr. Seuss gets most of the credit for that; props for linking up the whole thing to climate-change, though. 

LE PETIT LIEUTENANT (62) (dir., Xavier Beauvois) Nathalie Baye, Jalil Lespert, Roschdy Zem, Antoine Chappey Solid police-procedural but also an elegant piece of misdirection, just as the hints that Lespert (as the callow young Lieutenant) will be corrupted or go on a power-trip - driving around with the siren blaring, just because he can - are misdirection, and the suggestions of latent racism are misdirection; the real point is Baye, though the flowering of possible romance between her and the nominal hero is also misdirection - it's really about her unhappiness, her ex-alcoholic's anxiety and the loss of her family, all of which is finally revealed as existing outside (and beyond) the plot, still a throbbing wound even after the cop drama comes to a 'satisfying' cop-drama ending. Style is deliberately plain, even retro - a shot of a plane landing to indicate arrival in a new place, that kind of thing - as if to emphasise the contours of the cop-plot, with its pointed documentary detail (a sign reading "Keep out. Blood drying"; cops talking football while performing an autopsy), suggesting the heroine's turmoil by omission. Genre fun with a subtle emotional kick that also tends to deconstruct the genre (or at least reveal its limitations), though Baye isn't really enough - needed Isabelle Huppert in COMEDY OF POWER mode - and it's all a little schematic; the kind of movie where you just know the final shot's going to be the final shot - and it is.

UNTRACEABLE (51) (dir., Gregory Hoblit) Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks Don't watch vile sadistic videos of people getting killed on the Internet! But do watch our loving reconstruction of such videos, with lingering shots of victims bleeding like stuck pigs and screaming in agony as their skin gets ripped off in an acid bath (and maybe it stirs barbaric impulses, but what can we do? after all, we couldn't have made the film without showing the offending website ... or could we?). Aimed at exploiting people's fear of the lurid evils lurking in cyberspace - esp. those people who may be unfamiliar with cyberspace, hence the FBI Internet cops solemnly saying "Roll on the Floor Laughing" to each other when ROFL appears on the site they're viewing - other hypocrisies including the righteous-psycho figure from SAW (he's just killing them to make a point) and aforementioned double-standard re: deploring sadism while actually wallowing in it. Hard to defend, except to say the premise grips and there's something irresistible (for me) in Hoblit's style, embracing every action cliché of the 90s (the Morse-code Winston is so transparent it's actively hilarious - and do we doubt Colin Hanks is in trouble when he calls Diane to say he's cracked the case, "there's just a few things I need to check out first"?); the only cliché he avoids is the one where the FBI rescue our heroine in the nick of time, though it's merely replaced with the empowering cliché of the warrior-woman. Early scene where the cyber-cops' perps turn out to be ordinary people - even a young boy, pointedly shown being led off to the cop-car - seems to presage a questioning of their role (esp. combined with heroine's daughter asking: "Catch any bad guys?"), but turns out to be part of the same alarmist call for Something to be Done, see also the two (2) un-ironic references to downloads and Internet piracy. Props to one Tyrone Giordano as silent sidekick "Tim", who makes an impact even though his (doubtless cut-down) role consists entirely - and I mean entirely - of gazing soulfully into camera at regular intervals.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED (66) (dir., Wes Anderson) Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston Turns out exotic locales are good for Anderson's characters; left in their own milieu, as they were in TENENBAUMS (my least favourite, though I want to see it again), they can seem self-satisfied and the filmmaker self-indulgent - the weakest scene here is the funeral-day flashback, with the trio back in NYC acting straightforwardly 'zany' - but take them out of their comfort zone and their neuroses catch an edge of desperation, pushing them into hilarity (and greater poignancy; you feel how damaged they must be to behave so ridiculously). His main stylistic tic in this one - not exactly new, but more noticeable - is the short abrupt whip-pan in mid-scene, as if the camera realises it's in the wrong place and hastens to make amends, catching the undertow of panic that makes the film so funny (though it also suggests restlessness, looking for truth, which also ties in with the plot); the Darjeeling Limited itself is certainly exotic, indeed a magical place of bric-a-brac, German eccentrics, crowded frames, weird acronyms and colour-coded turbans - a late montage makes the metaphor explicit: that Life is like a train, its different events like different compartments headed in the same direction - and the film falters slightly after its heroes disembark, but their dance of betrayals, faux pas (everyone's forever being offended or giving offence) and Significant props (passports, belts, glasses, peacock feathers) remains very delicately choreographed. Everything's in quotation marks, Anderson putting his dramatic indicators - "healing", "baggage" - right out in the open, just like it's a gag when the film switches gears for an action scene (that's also in quotation marks); the ultimate effect is sentimental, as if to say no mere indicators can express these characters' pain, and no mere action can compete with their inner turmoil - but that's why Anderson's arch style always seems to hide a sloppy centre, and why he's always a tad below top-class imho. Soundtrack choices impeccable as usual, but I wish they hadn't used "This Time Tomorrow" (however effectively), indeed I wish no-one ever uses "This Time Tomorrow" in a movie again. REGULAR LOVERS owns that song.

27 DRESSES (46) (dir., Anne Fletcher) Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, Malin "Not Chantal" Akerman, Edward Burns Female masochism to the max, though credit for at least trying to explain why someone as beautiful as Katherine Heigl should be so insecure - her character went through high-school sans boobies, basically - which is more than KNOCKED UP ever did. Surprisingly watchable, even amusing for much of its length (the dialogue is fizzy, Fletcher's style is lively, Heigl and James Marsden are pleasant people) but, as always, it tries to do too much: an old-school comedy would've ended with the Worm Turning, Heigl's delicious revenge over her sluttish sister, but this one wants her to deal with her Issues, "stop taking care of everybody", become more assertive, make an informed decision, tear up the 27 dresses in her closet (even the sister - it turns out - isn't really a slut), none of which is exactly lighter-than-air. Therapy culture may be ruining the rom-com - though I wouldn't really know since I don't understand (some) women's fetishization of weddings, find the whole chick-flick hysteria over "dream guys" and "the most important day of your life" somewhat pathetic, and wouldn't ordinarily have watched this movie in a million years. Also notable for a rare big-studio blooper, the same establishing-shot (of a shop) used twice, with exactly the same mother-and-child extras walking by in the foreground (*); talk about cookie-cutter filmmaking.

(*) I'm pretty sure I saw this, but no-one in the online army of movie pedants and nitpickers seems to list it. Any readers who can confirm or deny, please write in.

JUMPER (45) (dir., Doug Liman) Hayden Christensen, Rachel Bilson, Jamie Bell, Samuel L. Jackson Why do the Paladins want to kill the Jumpers? No clear reason, but "Because we can do what we want" -  a.k.a. because they're young and flighty, and their pursuers are not (the J's we see are youngsters, the P's parents and authority figures). "No-one should be everywhere at the same time," growls Jackson as the Jumper-killer, which actually makes no sense - they're not everywhere at the same time, they just go faster from one place to another - but totally chimes with increasing late-00s unease over a wired world, and the generation who are growing up able to vault, unprecedentedly, across older models of communication (check this out, especially the 9th paragraph). Our hero starts off smug and selfish, pointedly declining to use his powers to rescue flood victims on TV, but soon discovers there are "consequences" - translating as an older generation's fond hope/desire that these scarily confident kids ("Nothing's off-limits!") will buckle down and become part of something greater than themselves. Often dumb and grossly undernourished, but I couldn't bring myself to hate it; zips along quite nicely - esp. the first half - though Christensen is wooden (his teenage self is much more likeable) and the action scenes borderline-incoherent. Call Your Agent Dept.: Rachel Bilson, approximately four-fifths of whose role consists of being told: "Stay here!".

THE BUCKET LIST (48) (dir., Rob Reiner) Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Sean Hayes "I think I've earned some time for myself!" cries Morgan Freeman, which is also the rallying cry of the modern senior-citizen, hardly content to stay home and count down the days to the last goodbye - going off to see the world (the Pyramids! the Great Wall of China!), spend some money, live life to the full, die (if necessary) "with his eyes closed and his heart open"; it's a total (and remarkable) upending of conventional wisdom, old age not as a time of diminished energy but a time of liberation, explicitly doing the things one didn't dare do when younger. The fact that our heroes do these things on the cusp of Death is a mere detail, cancer merely a dramatic catalyst; the Message - live your life; Time is running out! - actually goes out to a slightly younger target-audience, the early-60-somethings (like e.g. Rob Reiner) hatching their plan to cheat Death - for a while - and squander all the money a previous generation might've left for their children. The film itself is slick, quite well-acted (see e.g. Freeman controlling every shift of facial expression in the scene where he gets the phone call about his illness), utterly implausible in its set-up - what, he couldn't have contrived a room with an empty second bed? - and too pre-packaged to be actively offensive, turning out exactly as expected. Jack is Jack the Lad, working his eyebrows demonically as he speaks of "putting some moves on" - even the very last line makes it clear he's a Rebel - Morgan's the Magic Negro, a benign, poor-but-dignified figure with secret knowledge (in this case a trove of useless trivia), finally sacrificing himself to give meaning to another's life. The film plays it sneaky, the V.O. suggesting that the opposite will happen - i.e. Jack will sacrifice himself for Morgan - raising hopes of an upset just like Jack's refusal to see his estranged daughter creates (false) hopes that he'll stay ornery to the end. At least he doesn't give away his millions for cancer research.

TELL NO-ONE (61) (dir., Guillaume Canet) Francois Cluzet, Marie-Josée Croze, Andre Dussolier, Francois Berléand, Kristin Scott Thomas Entertainingly frenetic thriller, a mystery with Hitchcockian trappings (wrong man on the run, etc) but actually one of those sublimely preposterous films the French tend to make - CRIMSON RIVERS is another - when aping the Hollywood model. There are clues, cliffhangers ("I can prove I didn't kill Charlotte!" - and cut to something completely different), shady secrets from the past, intimations of twisted goings-on, a locked-room denouement where someone explains the entire plot - and it all 'makes sense', i.e. there are no apparent plot-holes (cf. RIVERS) but what doesn't 'make sense' is for all of it to be piled up and packed together so gaudily, messages from beyond the grave cheek-by-jowl with banlieue toughs plus everything from a foot-chase to soundtrack cameos by U2 and Jeff Buckley. Everything is a little bit hollow - even the chase, because Francois Cluzet is too stiff and passive in the rest of the movie (he's one of those lumpish French actors, like Laurent Lucas) to be suddenly hurtling down back-alleys - everything is a little bit slick, even the quirky asides transparently designed to add colour (e.g. mournful cop Francois Berléand taking a moment to chide his colleague for not recycling). Still more fun than 80% of Hollywood.  

3:10 TO YUMA (42) (dir., James Mangold) Christian Bale, Russell Crowe, Ben Foster, Logan Lerman Seen back-to-back with the original, which is either grossly unfair or the only fair way of judging it. (Discuss, etc.) Two things immediately leap out, (a) that the original was/is visually beautiful in a painterly, pictorialist way - woolly clouds over lovingly-composed vistas, etc - whereas this goes for the fashionably grimy, brown-with-everything look of (what I've seen of) "Deadwood", and (b) that the dynamic between the two men has totally changed, the outlaw pushed into übermensch psychosis (his artistic streak only makes him seem more Lecter-like), the rancher pushed into craven wimpishness. They were much more alike in the original - the outlaw more civilised (his line that people should be buried in the place where they lived is something a farmer might say), the rancher more canny and forceful - so the ending actually made sense, the killer sacrificing himself for the sake of his better self, the life he could've lived but never did (and God bestowing His approval by showering the Earth with cleansing rain), whereas here his sacrifice is no more than a gesture of pity for a pathetic creature (as with Hannibal, his control is never challenged - and a final detail implies the 'sacrifice' isn't much of a sacrifice). Another change is the size of the towns, from one-street hamlets to bustling Western burgs, and perhaps one might say - with the clear proviso that the original often falters as an action movie, and some of the changes are necessary improvements to make it more plausible - that YUMA '57 came from a modest small-town America where the Old West wasn't so remote (it might've been experienced first-hand by one's parents or grandparents) hence could be viewed in terms of ordinary people with broadly common values, while YUMA '07 comes from an aggressive big-city America where the West is an abstract genre setting, like outer space, so the characters get pumped up to crude extremes; you can see it in the character of Butterfield, explicitly "human" in the original, a matter-of-fact entrepreneur who rides along in the stagecoach without protection, a corporate lackey in the remake, dandified and distant in the (stereo)typical way of such people - but really everything's cruder (there's even a torture scene!), from the younger kid, now asthmatic, to the stagecoach robbery, now a pitched battle. Add 7-8 points if you're seeing it fresh, without odious comparisons, but it's still not very good. In a word, ignoble.

THE GAME PLAN (43) (dir., Andy Fickman) Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Madison Pettis, Kyra Sedgwick Is the art of the B-movie dead? Surprisingly enjoyable for about an hour - mostly because The Rock's toothy narcissism is almost as amusing here as it was in BE COOL - and that's how it should've stayed, a surprisingly enjoyable 70-minute B-movie (an hour for the one familiar joke to run its course from mild antagonism to cuddly bonding, then 10 minutes to reveal the truth and wrap things up quickly). Instead they stretch it out to nearly two hours, with a near-death (by allergy) and our hero sternly taken to task for his parenting skills, and excruciating weepy scenes and "You're the best thing that's ever happened to me" - a punchline transparently set up for most of the preceding hour - and the little girl taken away and coming back just when All Seems Lost in the big game for the pennant or whatever it is they're playing for. It's like the people behind it wanted to be taken seriously. Don't they know they're making a Disney family movie with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson?