At 27, Catherine is already worried about turning into her parents.
“I think I’m like my dad,” she says. “I’m afraid I’m like my dad.”
She’s not talking about a tendency to be critical or scavenge the
refrigerator late at night, though: Her father, a brilliant
mathematician at the University of Chicago, is also mentally ill.

In Proof’s opening scene, Dad—aka Robert (Anthony Hopkins)—reassures
Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow) that she’s just fine. “Crazy people don’t
sit around asking if they’re nuts,” he says. Catherine buys this for a
minute—it’s her birthday, after all, and her father and his bottle of
cheap champagne constitute her midnight celebration. But then she
points out that it’s not a sound argument, because Robert is sitting
around discussing the topic despite the fact that’s he’s clearly
certifiable himself. He concedes to her logic, then counters, “Yes, but
I’m also dead.”

At this, Catherine’s face falls, and already Paltrow is doing a
better job playing a woman on the verge than she did in 2003’s Sylvia.
Perhaps it was the pressure of representing a beloved literary giant,
because whereas Paltrow’s Sylvia Plath was stiff and ridiculous, her
Catherine is petulant, defensive, desperate, and generally cracked. And
when she gets a little love—and relief from the family and professors
who also doubt her prospects—she’s radiant.

The fact that Paltrow had experience playing Catherine onstage in
London couldn’t have hurt. Proof, directed by Shakespeare in Love’s
John Madden, is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize–Ê and Tony
Award–Êwinning 2000 play by David Auburn. He co-wrote the screenplay
with Rebecca Miller (The Ballad of Jack and Rose), and the engrossing
story about trust and love and family remains the same: Catherine’s
been her father’s caretaker for the past five years. After his death,
she must contend with a former student, Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), who
wants to dig through Robert’s 103 notebooks of nonsense in the hope of
finding something publishable, as well as with her sister, Claire (Hope
Davis), a well-put-together sort who’s come in from New York to sell
the house and drag the surely batty Catherine back with her.

The opening scene’s not the last we see of Robert. Madden relies on
flashbacks to illustrate the way Catherine became so angry (at the
people who show up for his funeral but were never around when he was
sick) and so uncertain (of her own mind and abilities, provoked by her
dad’s frequent reminders that he’d done his best work by her age).
Woven through these scenes are hints about Proof’s central question,
unresolved until the end: After Catherine decides to trust Hal, she
gives him the key to a desk drawer that holds what he was looking for—a
remarkable proof that will rock the math world. Hal’s beside himself,
as is Claire, but they’re really thrown for a loop when Catherine tells
them that Robert didn’t write it—she did. Neither believes her, and
it’d be difficult to prove the authorship either way.

Paltrow’s impressive performance is matched by those of her
co-stars. Davis is friendly but crisp as Claire, appropriately
straddling the responsible/irritating caretaker line even though, as
written, her character veers toward a knee-jerk assessment of Catherine
as completely delusional. Gyllenhaal has standout moments, notably his
pained expression during an impromptu eulogy by Catherine and the
tricky way Hal, in love with Catherine, agrees with Claire that she
couldn’t have written the proof but keeps backpedaling in an attempt to
preserve his personal interest. Hopkins, too, gives a sprightly
performance, his Robert energized by talk of work and numbers even
though he’s no longer as sharp as he thinks he is.

Auburn and Miller’s script is, of course, full of sadness and angst.
But there’s cheerfulness—and humor—here, as well. Nerds will love the
way Catherine, Hal, and Robert convivially approach nearly every
conversation with cold logic instead of meaningless small talk, and the
really nerdy nerds will snort at math jokes such as a song called “i,”
during which Hal’s band stands silent for three minutes. (The imaginary
performance, naturally, represents the imaginary number of the song’s
title.) And Catherine keeps up her sarcasm throughout, especially when
everyone around her is failing to point out the obvious. It’s one
indication that although she may be damaged, she’ll probably be all
right. Even if Catherine doesn’t quite believe it, Paltrow makes sure
we do.

Moviegoers who prefer sheer wackiness to math jokes should have a
fine old time with Everything Is Illuminated, writer-director Liev
Schreiber’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s best-selling novel
about a young man researching his family’s past. At least until its
second half, when the film turns solemn with whiplash abruptness.

But I suppose that’s what happens when you try to meld humor with
the Holocaust. Foer’s ballyhooed debut, heralded by some while
pronounced unreadable by others, juggles stories-within-a-story. But
Schreiber extracted only the main plot, which focuses on an American
Jew, also cutely named Jonathan Safran Foer, who visits the Ukraine in
an attempt to locate a woman who appears in an old picture with his
grandfather, whose life she might have saved. Jonathan (Elijah Wood)
retains the services of Heritage Tours for his trip, an agency that
turns out to be Alex (Eugene Hutz), a bling- and track-suit-wearing
college kid who’s obsessed with American culture, and his grandfather
(Boris Leskin), a cranky codger who thinks he’s blind and therefore has
a—sigh—“seeing-eye bitch” named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. Grandpa drives.

Schreiber packs his film with as much tired affectedness as Foer’s
book, if not more. Klezmer plays incessantly, and Alex’s thickly
accented, “comically” malapropian English (“Girls want to get carnal
with me, because I’m such a premium dancer”) serves as irksome
narration. There’s also a giant, mean waitress who appears when the
tourist attempts to order vegetarian food, and, of course, several cuts
to Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., who for the entirety of the trip is actually
outfitted with a shirt announcing the dog’s status as a—ugh, don’t make
me say it again.

Amid all the yuk-a-minute daffiness, Jonathan is as impassive as
wallpaper. Always in a black suit, Wood wears big, heavy-framed glasses
thick enough to grotesquely magnify his eyes, and his skin is pale and
pancake-smooth. Jonathan barely reacts to his sometimes-boorish
traveling companions, timidly submitting to their company even though
he’s terrified of dogs. In short, he’s infuriating. And after a while,
he’s even more infuriating than Alex: It seems an impossible feat, but
Hutz, leader of a “gypsy punk band,” eventually transforms his
character from a caricature to someone with goofy warm-heartedness and
good intentions. He may kinda mean it when he tells the waitress,
“Please, this American is deranged” as he tries to order a potato for
Jonathan, but his pleading works. Even his cracked English is funny
once in a while, though Schreiber ruins one of Alex and Jonathan’s
livelier conversations—“I’ve heard of this John Holmes. He has a
premium penis!”—with a shot of the damn dog.

Once the trio find the shtetl where Jonathan’s grandfather once
lived, the klezmer turns poignant and the car rides get quiet. But from
that point, very little is illuminated, really, especially not to an
audience unfamiliar with the book. There are flashbacks to executions,
sometimes through Alex’s grandfather’s eyes. A lovely elderly woman
(Laryssa Lauret) figures into the finale, and there’s a curious but
interesting hint of the magical realism that’s more prominent in the
book. There are some revelations, and everyone is touched. If you can
survive wacky-foreigner jokes, dog jokes, old-man jokes, Sammy Davis
Jr. jokes, klezmer, and the Holocaust, you might be, too.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

Don’t worry too much about the ending
to Flightplan — you won’t buy it for a minute. Fortunately, though,
even as you’re scoffing at the big revelation, the thriller works
itself back into a frenzy and returns to being fun, fun, fun. And by
fun, of course, I mean edge-of-your-seat tense.

It’s Jodie Foster’s
own little Red Eye as she plays Kyle Pratt — the part was first
written for a man — a new widow who’s flying from Berlin, where she
works in aeronautics, to New York with her 6-year-old daughter and
her husband’s coffin. Julia (Marlene Lawston), Kyle’s little girl, is
quiet and precious, the kind who draws a heart on the cold airplane
window when she sees her dad’s casket and nauseates you just a little
bit. After takeoff, Kyle and Julia spread out in some empty rows and
fall asleep; when Kyle wakes up, Julia’s gone. Because Mommy knows
her planes, she points out to Julia beforehand that the one they’re
flying is the biggest ever, which makes for a quite frantic search
that the flight crew soon gets in on — until they tell Kyle that
there’s no record of Julia being on the plane, and, by the way,
you’re nuts, lady.

Foster is in pretty much every scene, and from the
first shot of Kyle looking stricken and then seeing her husband in an
obvious fantasy sequence, she makes it clear that this mom is on the
edge. But, like Rachel McAdams’ heroine in Red Eye, Kyle is also
keenly observant, quick-thinking, and unrelenting, ensuring that you
root for her even after everyone on the plane starts wishing she’d
shut the hell up. German director Robert Schwentke lends a Das Boot
claustrophobia to his American debut, and new scripter Peter A.
Dowling and Shattered Glass writer Billy Ray infuse the story with
some post-9/11 paranoia while keeping ridiculous fever-pitch dialogue
to a minimum. Add in supporting roles by Peter Sarsgaard  and Sean
Bean, and you’ve got yourself a nice fall popcorn-hoister — if you just
forgive that pesky twist.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

Initially, The Thing About My Folks
seems like a crazee family comedy. And, with Peter Falk playing the
wacky old dad, not a good idea: The opening scene shows Falk nekkid
in the shower, slinging baby powder on himself like a lounge lizard
douses on cologne, as  writer-narrator-star Paul Reiser quips that he
still can’t tell the difference between “a freshly bathed baby and
my father’s balls.” Not nearly as unfortunate but just plain
curious is director Raymond De Felitta’s use of a shaky handheld
camera in the film’s next chapter, in which Sam (Falk) shows up at
the New York home of his son, Ben (Reiser), just as Ben and his wife,
Rachel (Elizabeth Perkins), are putting the kids to bed. I suppose
the approach means to pile on to the chaos that can be found in an
upper-middle-class household, where the demands of small children can
barely compete with a couple’s hunt for a country home without Dad
showing up late in the evening, insisting nothing’s wrong — though,
by the way, Mom’s gone, leaving only a goodbye note behind.

But once
the camera steadies and Sam’s (rather funny) “No, no, no!”s to
offers from food to accommodations stop, The Thing About My Folks
settles in to a surprisingly touching story about marriage and grown
children’s relationship with their aging parents. Reiser’s script is
semiautobiographical, and anyone who hated him on Mad About You will
probably also dislike his sarcastic-but-struggling-to-be-enlightened
Ben. His fans, however, will find him as likable as ever, and Falk
gives a terrific and sometimes frighteningly angry performance as the
jilted husband who refuses to take all the blame for his spouse’s
unhappiness. Folks ends up being a road-trip movie, with Ben taking
his father along to look at a house upstate, and Reiser’s script does
meander a bit as the boys take their time getting back. And though
scenes such as the pair indifferently trying to fish for the first
time is charming, the fart jokes — not so much. There is plenty of
warmth and, yes, some tear-jerking here, however, and the genuine
family fuzziness manages to trump the silly gags.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

The latest from-beyond-the-grave serial killer looks like Freddy, moves
like Jason, and growls like a tiger, even though he’s, um, full of
snakes. His name, apparently, is Mr. Jangles, though to the dopey kids
down in the Louisiana bayou—yes, Louisiana—he’s just known as Ray. The
tastelessly timed slasher clone he’s at the center of is called Venom,
and it’s brought to you by Jim Gillespie, director of I Know What You
Did Last Summer; Constantine scripters Flint Dille and John Zuur
Platten; and Wicker Park screenwriter Brandon Boyce.

Unlike at least
one of those films, it’s not clever, original, nor even remotely
frightening. The requisite group of teenagers—led by Jessica Biel
stand-in Agnes Bruckner—become the requisite target of Ray (Rick
Cramer), who drowned when trying to save a witch-doctor grandma
(Deborah Duke) after a car accident. Before dying, Mr. Local Scary Guy
done gone and opened the suitcase of evil that Grandma had in her back
seat, allowing the souls of all the bad seeds she’d saved to take
over his body. At one point, his snake-bitten corpse is lying on a
coroner’s table; the next, it’s gone—which one of the punks describes
as “the really fucked-up part.”

Cue the killing: First you hear a
guttural growl, then Mr. Jangles comes at you with a tire iron. He
eliminates a good half-dozen or so of his rural town’s residents, each
time with plenty of R-rated gore and not much suspense. Scene after
scene includes someone or other skulking around some spookily quiet
area, but rarely do these setups result in any frights. The finale,
too, is simply a series of anticlimactic chases, with Bruckner’s boobs
bouncing merrily and her lips remaining glossy despite the blood caked
all over her clothes. The ending is no surprise, and after 85 minutes
of crap, Venom’s makers actually have the balls to set up a sequel—now
that’s the really fucked-up part.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

Eugene Levy should never be asked to do the following things: (1) play
a scene in which his pants are around his ankles, (2) say, “It’s only a
little flatulence,” and (3) be accused of peeing in the pool,
especially when there’s no reason for his character to be standing in a
pool to begin with. Sadly, Levy does all this and more in The Man, a
tacky buddy comedy that even at a mere 83 minutes is excruciating. How
bad is it? Well, the script, by a trio of writers of little
significance, contains one-liners such as “Let’s not and say we did”
and actually saves a Spice Girls joke for the big finale. (Co-writer
Jim Piddock, at least, should know better: As an actor, he’s worked
with Levy in both Best in Show and A Mighty Wind.)

Worse, the movie
demonstrates just how low the obviously talented Levy and Samuel L.
Jackson will go for a paycheck: to the point of stealing cartoonlike
Befuddled Midwesterner and Angry Cop roles from a couple of WB rejects.
Director Les Mayfield, who previously helmed the forgettable Blue
Streak and the god-awful Flubber, presides over the mess, which is
unsettlingly ass-obsessed as it tells the story of how Levy’s nebbishy
dental-supplies salesman, Andy Fiddler, gets involved in a little
gun-running operation that Jackson’s Special Agent Derrick Vann sets up
in order to find out who killed his partner.

Mostly, The Man is scene
after scene of Vann’s yelling, “Get in the car!” or “Shut up!” and
Fiddler’s resisting both directives. Vann’s repeated references to
“shit” could be funny only because of the word’s suitability as a
succinct critique of the proceedings, but here’s where the movie digs a
little deeper: Vann’s constant cursing combines with his daughter
issues—naturally, there’s a big recital to miss—to prompt the
softhearted Fiddler to try to make his temporary partner a better man.
Can we now pronounce The Man worthy of your time and money? Let’s not
and say we did.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

Even by romantic-comedy standards, the degree of open-mindedness
required not to scoff at Just Like Heaven is rather large. Based on a
novel by French author Marc Levy, the movie takes a familiar
bickering-strangers-who-fall-in-love story line and adds a dash of City
of Angels—not to mention a lot of heavy-handed messages and some
questionable physics.

Then again, it also has Mark Ruffalo, and—well, a little charm can
go a long way. Ruffalo stars as David, a San Francisco sad sack who’s
preferred cheap beer to human companionship ever since the end of a
relationship two years earlier. David, with no discernible source of
income, is unsuccessfully hunting for a furnished apartment (none of
them have the right couch) when a flier for a sublet repeatedly smacks
into him. Naturally, the place is big, beautiful, and generally
perfect—except it has a month-to-month lease, and no one will discuss
the previous tenant.

David soon begins to piece together why when one of his quiet nights
is interrupted by Elizabeth (Reese Witherspoon), who appears in the
middle of his living room and screams when she sees him. When
Elizabeth, a workaholic ER doctor—previously shown getting into a car
accident after a 26-hour shift—tells him that she lives there, David
assumes that they’ve been scammed. Or he does until Elizabeth vanishes,
occasionally reappearing in, say, the bathroom mirror or the
refrigerator to criticize his slovenly ways and try to get him to move
out.

Freaked, David starts telling Elizabeth to “walk into the light!”
whenever he sees her and consults some literature on the subject of
ghosts recommended to him by Darryl (Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder), a
bookstore-clerk-slash-psychic. Darryl comes over to check out the
“presence” himself but ends up agreeing with Elizabeth: Despite her
ability to walk through walls, she’s not dead.

Elizabeth is basically Election’s Tracy Flick post-medical-school: a
plucky Type A who’s horrified at the thought of beverages without
coasters. We see her putting out fires all over the hospital in the
film’s opening minutes, and even though she hasn’t slept for more than
a day, her makeup’s perfect and her eyes sparkle at the end of her
shift. David, meanwhile, is a slightly more cynical version of
Ruffalo’s 13 Going on 30 Everydude. Laid-back and slightly sarcastic,
David nevertheless starts nervously looking for Elizabeth around every
corner, hides under a pillow and mutters, “Go away—you don’t exist”
when she appears in his bedroom, and squeaks “I can’t” when, after
witnessing a stranger’s collapse, Elizabeth commands him to make an
incision in the man’s chest.

Scripters Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon and director Mark Waters
(2003’s Freaky Friday) keep the tone lightly comic, distributing
one-liners equally except to Heder’s character, who’s limited to such
stoner exclamations as “Righteous!” and, weirdly, the moral of the
story. Of course, even Elizabeth’s dry cleaner gets in on that: When
David goes around asking people about his unwanted guest to figure out
what happened to her, he gets ridiculous replies such as “When I think
of her, I think of sadness and loneliness.” Turns out that Elizabeth’s
drive and polish, you see, hid all the emptiness inside; she never took
time out to smell the roses she’s shown dreaming about during her
five-minute naps at work. The antisocial David, by contrast, is
practically dead himself, and it doesn’t take a bookstore psychic to
see where the story is headed.

The filmmakers mercifully keep the physical comedy to a minimum,
though they do almost manage a scene in which David’s attempt to keep
his ghostly companion from snatching his drink away at a bar is
interpreted as dancing by his woo-hooing friend, Jack (Donal Logue).
David’s subsequent flailing when Elizabeth actually enters his body
goes too far, however. And better not to think about why Elizabeth can
walk through a table yet can sit on a sofa, or even stand on a floor.

That said, logic has never really been a big part of romantic
comedies. Perfect onscreen couples come together only through destiny,
coincidence, and, as Ruffalo himself has demonstrated, time travel. If
Just Like Heaven’s supernaturalism seems crass, it’s just because it’s
been put in the foreground. Potentially more damaging is that Ruffalo
and Witherspoon never really achieve that frisson that expresses their
characters’ opposite-attraction. Still, a comfortableness is evident
even when sparks aren’t flying, and both actors are effortlessly
charismatic. They don’t exactly make Just Like Heaven a blissful spin
on convention, but they do make it just pleasant enough for nonscoffers.

It’s not a stretch to believe in The Baxter, Stella comedian Michael
Showalter’s directorial debut about the nice guys who always finish
last. Showalter, who also wrote the script, stars as one of the gentle
putzes the title refers to, the responsible, dependable sort who
doesn’t sweep a woman off her feet as much as provide a sensible
ottoman for her to rest them on. And just when he’s convinced her that
nothing beats a sure thing, the whirlwind love of her life blows back
into town, crashing through the church doors and shouting from the
balcony à la The Graduate.

Showalter explains all this in voice-over as Elliot Wendall Sherman,
an accountant who meets two women one Monday, his favorite day of the
week. First, there’s Cecil (Michelle Williams), a sweet temp with a
terrible haircut and worse posture who apologizes profusely for being
10 minutes late. Captivated, Elliot quickly finds out that, like
himself, Cecil includes among her current reading material the
dictionary. But just when he’s about to ask her to the opera, an
appointment shows up: the luminous Caroline (Elizabeth Banks), a
sophisticated magazine editor who says “Daddy tells me…” a lot.

The Baxter attempts to re-create the feel of the “old romantic
movies” that Elliot refers to in his narration, so Caroline and
Elliot’s ensuing courtship isn’t really seen and the couple’s raciest
moment is when both are shown reading in bed. Soon they’re engaged, and
though they’ve promised to keep no secrets from each other, Elliot
discovers a nugget from Caroline’s past when her sister is showing him
the family photo album. His name is Bradley (Justin Theroux), and he’s
the fine-looking former love of Caroline’s life. “It would take an act
of God for us to ever cross paths,” his fiancée reassures the
not-so-attractive Elliot at their engagement party. Beat.
“Caroline”—yep, that’s Bradley standing over Elliot’s shoulder.

It’s one of the funnier moments in a movie that’s a whole lot like
the runners-up it celebrates: It won’t show you the time of your life,
but it’s amiable enough. There aren’t any one-liners here, as in the
similarly themed 40 Year-Old Virgin. Showalter’s humor is more subtle,
whether it’s in the nauseating perfection of Bradley (a research
scientist who quotes Keats, makes millions, and “enjoys hanging around
the elderly”) or Elliot’s barely controlled freakouts (a scene in which
he grasps at the bed and cries “Caroline!” while sleeping is a
highlight). It’s all chuckle- but not guffaw-inducing, but to
Showalter’s credit, none of his gags will make you roll your
eyes—though a tired hide-the-other-girl scene does come close.

The bigger problem is that the script’s equal-opportunity derision
eventually makes it hard to root for Elliot. At first simply a little
nerdly, Elliot becomes increasingly insufferable as the fight for
Caroline wears on. Initially, the onus is on Caroline—for example, she
describes Elliot’s gift of flowers as “bulky” while beaming about the
single stem Bradley picked that was “fighting its way through
concrete”—but soon the Baxter’s appealing goofiness turns to clueless
arrogance. Take the scene in which the three go out to dinner: After
the group ditches Elliot’s reservations at a stuffy French restaurant
to go to a burger joint of Bradley’s choosing, Elliot responds by
pretending that he also eats there all the time—which naturally
backfires when he asks to see the menu (the place doesn’t have one) and
insists on ordering a ridiculous bottle of wine for the table (it
serves only beer).

And Banks’ Caroline gets increasingly shrill, though she was never
really believable as the kind of woman who would go for the Nice Guy in
the first place. As the gulf between the allegedly appealing people and
the schmucks grows wider, exactly where each character is going to end
up becomes all too clear. What may surprise you, though, is that after
its unimpressive meandering, The Baxter still manages to sucker-punch
you with the sadness of a severed relationship and the subsequent joy
of a new chance at love. Showalter dedicates the film “to every guy
who’s a little out of step with the world.” The message, of course, is
that they can still prevail. Though far from perfect, The Baxter, too,
squeaks out a victory.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

With Transporter 2, all the speculation can finally be put to rest:
Frank Martin is the new James Bond. Not in the Pierce Brosnan sense,
though. See, Martin isn’t an actor, but rather the ass-kicking,
monosyllabic driver at the center of what’s gearing up to be a sweet
little action franchise. A third installment is blatantly set up at the
end of 2, itself a follow-up to the 2002 original, and chances are a
slightly forgiving audience will welcome the promise of more. Maybe not
of the terrible CGI, which makes an out-of-control airplane look like a
toy being yanked around on a string, or of such sometimes laughable
dialogue as “I’m going to blow you into tomorrow!” But such typical
action-flick faux pas are a lot more pardonable when in the company of
Brit Jason Statham, whose citizen-of-the-world-accented Martin is
self-possessed, dryly funny, and just plain cool in his well-tailored
duds and sparkling black Audi.

Yeah, the car is different from the one
in the first flick, but Martin’s impeccable driving skills haven’t
changed, even if they do seem to, um, take a back seat to the fight
scenes choreographed by first Transporter director Corey Yuen. After
his low-key temp assignment of chauffeuring a government official’s
young son (Hunter Clary) is complicated by evildoers trying to take out
the kid’s dad (Matthew Modine) with a deadly virus, Martin must find
the antidote—not to mention a bunch of new ways to launch his ride into
the air.

Modine is wimpily ridiculous as a VIP, though not as absurd as
the oily, hair-smoothing leader of the bad guys (Alessandro Gassman) or
his scary girlfriend, Lola (newcomer Kate Nauta), a Pink clone who
wears lingerie instead of clothes and likes her artillery as heavy as
her eye makeup. Director Louis Leterrier (Unleashed) and writers Luc
Besson and Robert Mark Kamen load the movie with outrageously
impossible stunts, from Martin’s removing a bomb from his car’s
undercarriage with an airborne twirl to his knocking out a dozen bad
guys with nothing more than a limp fire hose and some impressive
martial-arts moves. It’s all pretty silly, completely over-the-top, and
definitely flawed, but Transporter 2 moves as quickly and thrillingly
as its hero’s vehicle—just the thing, in other words, to make you stop
caring about who’s gonna be the next what’s-his-name.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

The dilapidated, middle-of-nowhere house is there. So are the single
woman’s apartment and the deserted dorm hallway, both so still as night
crawls toward morning. But the majority of The Exorcism of Emily Rose,
based on the true story of a young German woman’s alleged demonic
possession in the ’70s, takes place in the most unexpected of
locations: a courtroom.

No, writer-director Scott Derrickson’s portrayal of Anneliese
Michel’s experience isn’t as balls-out horror-ific as its trailers
suggest. But moviegoers hungry for a good fright might be satisfied
anyway. Combining the most chilling elements of its famous cousin, The
Exorcist, with the supernatural-tinged drama of another misleadingly
marketed but much milder thriller, The Skeleton Key, Emily Rose will
not only provide fuel for a postfilm debate on the finer points of
evil-spirit-related jurisprudence but also give you a bad case of the 3
a.m. willies. (For those who don’t yet know: 3 in the morn happens to
be the “demonic witching hour.”)

Onetime Wim Wenders collaborator Derrickson and co-writer Paul
Harris Boardman, who previously worked together on Urban Legends: Final
Cut, begin the American-set Emily Rose with the title character’s
unseen death. A doctor visits and with a drained face tells Emily’s
family, “I cannot state conclusively that the cause of death was
natural.” Soon, the priest who had been ministering to Emily, Father
Moore (Tom Wilkinson), is arrested for murder. Hotshot attorney and
skeptic Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) takes the case when she’s promised
partnership if she can get the padre to make a deal, the easier for the
church to sweep the scandal under the rug. But Moore isn’t interested:
“I care only about telling Emily Rose’s story,” he says to Bruner,
insisting that the case go to trial and that he be called to the stand.
Opposing them is churchgoing state prosecutor Ethan Thomas (Campbell
Scott), a firm believer in God—though not so much, apparently, in
possession.

The question argued in the courtroom is whether 19-year-old Emily
(Jennifer Carpenter), a devoutly Catholic Minnesotan recently gone off
to college, was truly possessed or, as her school doctor believed,
merely epileptic. Emily’s story is then told in flashbacks, from the
time she was awakened (yep, at 3 a.m.) in her dorm room by a presence
that knocked things from her dresser and pulled the blanket off her
before attacking her outright. As the trial continues, with experts of
both medicine and otherworldly matters arguing over whether Father
Moore’s exorcism attempts and suggestion that Emily stop taking her
anti-seizure medication contributed to her death, long courtroom scenes
are intercut with mercifully shorter chapters showing Emily getting
worse.

Derrickson doesn’t completely stay away from cheap scares of the
hissing-cat variety, but many of Emily Rose’s frights come from
extended moments of quiet suspense such as a perfectly creepy
middle-of-the-night scene in Bruner’s apartment. There are also the
standard freaky characteristics of possession: unnaturally twisted
postures, violent outbursts showing superhuman strength, guttural
voices identifying who’s currently in-house. Michel’s numerous
exorcisms were recorded—a detail that Emily Rose includes to truly
disturbing effect. (A witness who quite willingly hands off a tape to
Bruner tells her, “It’s your burden now!”) CGI is used sparingly,
mostly to portray the melting, black-and-gray faces that regularly
showed themselves to Emily when she was still trying to function
normally, while the flashbacks themselves are tinged orange and red.

The restrained horror combines nicely with Derrickson and Boardman’s
smart script, which refreshingly approaches its supernatural subject
matter with an intellectual reserve instead of “WTF?!” histrionics.
Linney, Wilkinson, and Scott give their usual solid, nonflashy
performances here, with their characters each representing different
viewpoints and arguing their stances with supporting evidence as well
as conviction. The Exorcism of Emily Rose ultimately leaves it up to
the audience to decide what truly happened to Anneliese Michel. And
even if you don’t buy that the woman was possessed, this telling of her
tale will at least leave you admitting that she was the scariest
epileptic ever.

There’s little question about the evil that exists in Crónicas,
writer-director Sebastián Cordero’s gritty drama about a
tabloid-television journalist chasing a story about a serial killer in
Babahoyo, Ecuador. The big unknown in the case is the identity of the
person who has raped and murdered more than 150 children in the town,
where the authorities are ineffectual and the residents prefer to dole
out justice themselves.

John Leguizamo stars in his first Spanish-speaking role as Manolo
Bonilla, a Miami-based reporter for One Hour With the Truth. While
covering the mass funeral of some of the victims, Manolo and his crew,
producer Marisa (Talk to Her’s Leonor Watling) and cameraman Ivan (José
María Yazpik), witness an equally harrowing event: Returning to town
after a solitary road trip, Bible salesman Vinicio Cepeda (Damián
Alcázar) accidentally hits a young boy, the twin of one of the
murdered, with his truck. Vinicio tries to back his vehicle away from
the body, but the gathered crowd interprets this as an attempt to
escape and attacks him, eventually stepping back to let the boy’s
father, Don Lucho (Henry Layana), inflict his own punishment.

Manolo allows Ivan to film everything before eventually stepping in
to break up the men, along with Vinicio’s pregnant wife, Esperanza
(Gloria Leiton), and her son from another marriage, Robert (Luiggi
Pulla). Both Vinicio and Lucho are arrested, and Vinicio’s harassment
continues. Manolo decides to interview the prisoners but is then lured
by the prospect of an even bigger story: Vinicio says that he has
firsthand information about the criminal Manolo has dubbed “the Monster
of Babahoyo,” but he’ll talk only if Manolo agrees to air a sympathetic
piece on his imprisonment. To prove that he has the dirt, Vinicio
directs Manolo to a girl’s body still buried in a place police stopped
searching.

The title of Cordero’s second film (after 1999’s Rodents) translates
as “Chronicles,” or news reports, and the focus here isn’t so much on
the serial killer as it is on the media’s interpretation of and
approach to tragedy. Manolo is a limelight-seeking talking head who
keeps Vinicio’s bait from the police in the hope of solving the
crime—and sopping up the attention—himself. Naturally, he suspects
Vinicio is the killer, but he nonetheless puts together a puff piece
that makes Vinicio look like a martyr, which underscores the criticism
of Crónicas’ tag line: “If It’s on TV, It Must Be the Truth.”

The usually goofy Leguizamo does nice work here as the pretty-boy
reporter, slightly preening but nonetheless sharp as he strategizes the
Silence of the Lambs–esque interviews with Vinicio that constitute the
bulk of the film. Speaking mostly in Spanish but occasionally slipping
into English, Manolo is unmistakably foreign among the poor Latin
Americans, who revere him because he’s a television personality yet
turn on him when they suspect he feels entitled to the pedestal they
put him on. But Cordero’s script ultimately allows Manolo’s competence
and, deep down, his morality, to show more strongly than his ego.

More compelling, however, is Alcázar as the suspected killer:
Relating details about the murders with a childlike glint in his eye,
his game-playing Vinicio is more chilling than, say, the unabashedly
criminal Hannibal Lecter. Better yet, Cordero portrays Vinicio as an
adored family man, leaving his guilt in question until the film’s end.
Even then, the answer is more suggestive than definitive. Like The
Exorcism of Emily Rose, Crónicas leaves plenty of room for speculation,
making a strong case that some mysteries are better left unsolved.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

The smartest thing music-video director Meiert Avis did in his second
feature, Undiscovered, was including a skateboard-riding bulldog. Not
shockingly, the pushin’ pooch is the most entertaining member of a cast
whose best-known performer is…Ashlee Simpson. (Her dad is an
executive producer of the film.) Actually, Jessica’s li’l sis doesn’t
prove to be a terrible actor—her breathy “singing,” however, is another
story—but her thinly drawn character is as blank as the rest in John
Galt’s debut screenplay. Also lacking is any sense of time in this Fame
wannabe, which first jumps years and then…weeks? months? as it tells
the story of Brier (Pell James), a model/actress, and Luke (Steven
Strait), a singer/toolbox.

Brier and Luke first spy each other when he
drops his glove for her to pick up on a New York subway; two years
later, both are in Los Angeles, trying to make it big. Naturally, on
the basis of their 10-second eye-lock in New York, the pair are in
love, but it cannot be: Brier is committed to a philandering rocker
who’s never around. But since the long-haired, thin-mustached, ickily
Fabio’d Luke is so gosh-darn talented, Brier and her new best pal, Clea
(Simpson), start generating fake buzz about him via the Internet and
the paid-for attention of a cheesy Brazilian socialite (Shannyn
Sossamon, spouting a different accent in every scene). Though Captain
Hair’s sudden fame is as unbelievable as the character is unappealing,
at least he’s shown working—which can’t be said for Brier, who besides
one mention of a commercial callback seems to have ditched her
ambitions in favor of hitching on to Luke’s star.

This is hardly the
only whoops in Avis’ lifeless drama: Honorable mentions go to Carrie
Fisher’s embarrassingly wooden turn as Brier’s agent; Avis’ terribly
muddled camerawork, which at one point marries strobe lights to quick
cuts to make the action completely incomprehensible; and such
histrionic dialogue as “You didn’t hurt me—you killed me!” over a
relationship that, once again, is built on a glance through subway
doors. Then again, there is one line that explains why the no-talent,
low-budget Undiscovered even exists: “It’s not about the money—it’s
about the money.”

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com