Wolf Creek doesn’t bother with hissing cupboard cats or miscellaneous bumps in the night. Whereas the first chapters of cliched horror flicks are filled with cheap scares to set the audience atwitter, Aussie writer-director Greg McLean lets everyone relax for quite a while in his feature debut. The story, as always, begins happily: Two young women and one dorky guy are roughing it on their drive across Australia, seemingly doing little but unpacking and packing their tents, staring at stars and sunrises, and laughing like idiots 90 percent of the time. (It doesn’t matter who’s who, because no one is given much of a personality, but the “stars” are Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi, and Nathan Phillips.) This goes on for a long time, and sure, it’s a little boring, but benefit of the doubt suggests that McLean is merely showing impressive restraint, all the better for when the mayhem comes.

Wrong! The reason McLean doesn’t build up the tension is because it’s never going to show up in the first place. Wolf Creek — actually a crater left by a meteor — is where the happy campers’ car breaks down. Naturally, they’re in the middle of nowhere. Of course, trouble’s soon a-comin’. And most likely, it won’t be much longer ’til you’ll consider a-leavin’. There are zero jumps in Wolf Creek — based, you might have guessed, on actual events — and virtually no suspense, except for the oh-my-god-you-people-are-stupid variety. (For example, Australians must always leave their keys in the ignition, because every time either of the women jumps in a potential getaway car and doesn’t see a set dangling, she totally freaks.)

Editing in general is not a strength here. Day and night get all kinds of mixed up, and gentle Ben (Phillips) disappears completely as his lady friends get tortured by a local bloke (Mick Taylor) in a cowboy hat. (The film might as well have been subtitled Crocodile Dundee Goes Postal.) Cutting, running, shooting, screaming — one of the sheilas has a gift for varied yelping, which goes something like “Mwah! Aye! Buh!” on an endless loop — the women are dealt with first, while Ben waits patiently for the camera to get back to him to escape his own torture setup. And yet, still they laugh — maniacally, whenever they think they got the bad guy good. By then, you’ll be laughing, too, and packed and ready to bolt before the credits even roll.

copyright 2005 themoviebabe.com

There are two ways you can take Patrick “Kitten” Braden, the Irish
transvestite at the center of Breakfast on Pluto: (1) as a
long-suffering but ever-hopeful boy/girl who just wants to find love,
be it from the mother who abandoned him or one of the many men who like
the cut of his cheekbones, or (2) as an irritating twit whose idea of
femininity comprises ditzy cheer, breathy come-ons, and quick,
smothering intimacy.

But even if you choose the latter, you’ll most likely feel a little
bad for Kitten (Cillian Murphy) whenever Bobby Goldsboro’s mournful
“Honey” plays in the background. Something of a theme song of Kitten’s,
the string-laden 1968 hit gets three spins during Neil Jordan’s
135-minute latest. Naturally, Kitten doesn’t identify with the song’s
gut-wrenched husband; rather, he sees himself as poor Honey—someone who
dies tragically young, putting her lover through unimaginable pain and
guilt. Almost immediately after meeting them, Kitten asks three
separate suitors, “If you came home and found me on the floor, would
you take me to the hospital?”

Beneath his otherworldly loveliness, you see, Kitten is a wounded
soul. As the son of an Irish Catholic priest, Father Bernard (Liam
Neeson), and his blond housekeeper, Eily (Eva Birthistle)—allegedly a
dead ringer for actress Mitzi Gaynor—he couldn’t be anything but. Eily
leaves little Patrick on Father Bernard’s doorstep, though he’s soon
given to a curmudgeonly foster mother who reacts quite badly when she
first finds him putting on dresses and makeup. (“‘I’m a boy, not a
girl!’” she makes the 10-year-old (Conor McEvoy) repeat, adding “I
curse the day I ever took yuh in!” for good measure.) Patrick’s trouble
with authority only gets worse at school, where he’s always being
dragged by the ear to the principal’s office, once for using a
composition assignment to imagine his parents’ coupling.

Co-written by Jordan and Patrick McCabe, on whose novel the film is
based, Pluto speeds through Kitten’s life, divided into 36 “chapters”
that visit the character’s most influential experiences. The gist of
this haphazardly told story is that Kitten wants to find his “Phantom
Lady” Mom even more than he wants to be a girl—not that the latter
really takes much effort. After leaving small-town Tyreelin for London,
where Eily is supposed to live, Kitten seems to attract only men who
know exactly what they’re getting into. In a wink at The Crying Game,
Stephen Rea plays a magician who tells Kitten he could fall for “a girl
like you.” When Kitten tells him he’s not a girl, the magician replies,
“I know. I said a girl like you.”

Jordan uses plenty of music besides “Honey” to steer the viewer
through the narrative’s various sharp turns. Overwhelmingly bouncy ’70s
pop (the Rubettes’ “Sugar Baby Love,” Harry Nilsson’s “You’re Breakin’
My Heart” ) predominates, symbolically punctuated with
slit-yer-wrist-ers (Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times”). The
director also throws in digitized birds, cheeky subtitles, Bryan Ferry,
a member of the Virgin Prunes, and the inevitable lamé-clad fantasy
sequence. Relentlessly loopy, the film aims to prove that, aside from
the love of a wee lost boy for his mam, sass and sparkle conquer all.

The songs, at least, keep Pluto skipping breezily through its
running time. Whether they’re enough to keep you sympathetic toward
Kitten is another issue. Murphy’s role is obviously quite a contrast to
his other 2005 characters, Batman Begins’ the Scarecrow and the
homicidal villain in Red Eye. But just because it’s different doesn’t
mean it’s remarkable: Murphy uses a ridiculously high-pitched voice
that quickly gets grating, and his giggling, flirty take on womanly
mannerisms goes beyond queenliness into caricature. Worse, as Pluto
goes on—with IRA-related confrontations and bombings, one of which
Kitten witnesses in slo-mo, one of which he’s suspected of—it becomes
increasingly clear that its hero is flat-out delusional, living inside
the fairy tale he concocted in school and overwhelmingly oblivious to
the realities of the world. “Serious, serious, serious,” Kitten chides
anyone whose feet remain on Earth.

Vagabonding his way across the British Isles and surviving on the
kindness of strangers, Kitten eventually realizes who his friends are
and becomes the happy member of an alternative family. With “Sugar Baby
Love” returning to accompany a zooming-out shot of the new clan,
Breakfast on Pluto’s finale is supposed to be joyful. If there were
anything behind all that sass and sparkle, you might be convinced.

Transamerica turns Breakfast on Pluto on its empty little head. In
writer-director Duncan Tucker’s feature debut, a pre-op transsexual
named Bree discovers that back when she was an experimental college
student named Stanley, he fathered a son. When Bree agrees, at the
insistence of her therapist, to bail the kid out of a New York jail,
she just wants to drop him off somewhere safe and get back to Los
Angeles for her long-awaited transformation.

Bree, it should be pointed out, is played by a woman. Desperate
Housewives star Felicity Huffman does the honors, with makeup realistic
enough that it reportedly traumatized her daughter during a visit to
the set. The film opens abruptly, with a shot of a young woman in an
instructional video slowly bringing her voice down octave by octave.
Then Tucker cuts to Bree getting dressed for the day, smiling in the
mirror before she heads to her psychiatrist to get one of two
signatures needed for her gender-reassignment surgery. But she lets
slip that she’s received a call from someone claiming to be Stanley’s
son, and Margaret (Elizabeth Peña) refuses to sign the papers until
Bree deals with the situation.

When Bree flies to New York to get the attitudinal Toby (Kevin
Zegers) out of the clink, Toby assumes she’s a church volunteer.
Relieved that she doesn’t have to explain who she is, Bree says that
she’s from the “Church of the Potential Father,” returns Toby to his
decrepit apartment, and gets ready to light out for L.A. The squalor
and Toby’s intention to hitch to California to become an actor soften
Bree, though, so she gets a cheap car and the two head into the
non-punny part of the film’s title.

Besides Bree’s still-unrevealed secret, Tucker’s version of the road
trip is pretty typical: sunrises, sunsets, blindingly bright afternoons
on desolate roads as the pair travel to Kentucky, where the boy grew
up, and Colorado, where Bree grew up. They’re silent; they make
conversation; they argue. Tucker accompanies their drive with
salvation-seeking bluegrass, including a ditty that implores, “Lord,
take away these chains from me.”

Tucker and Huffman—whose lowered but feminine voice and
not-quite-right-carriage are terrific—make Bree not a flamboyant female
impersonator but a rather proper lady. Even before she and Toby become
close, Bree acts like a parent who won’t let her child get away with
anything, from poor table manners to drug use, dishing out the
discipline with lilting sarcasm. (When Toby wants cigarettes and asks
what Bree means by her response of “Quel dommage,” she answers, “It
means you’re not getting any cigarettes.”) Dad is also constantly
trying to discourage Toby from searching for his father (“I’m a loner,”
Toby says in a diner. “That’s wonderful! That’s the spirit!” Bree
replies), but she does bring him to visit her own parents (Burt Young
and Fionnula Flanagan), who lavish attention on their grandchild
without Toby’s ever knowing why.

That reunion also shows us why Bree tells people her parents are
dead—one reason Huffman’s character is a lot easier to like than
Murphy’s Kitten. Bree is a person trapped in a world much glitzier than
she is, someone whose limiting circumstances include working two menial
jobs and having a penis that disgusts her. The film she’s in is a lot
easier to like, too, especially for its non-fairy-tale-ish take on
achieving contentment: When a doctor, before he gives consent for
Bree’s surgery, asks her if she’s happy, she responds, “Yes. I mean no.
I mean I will be.”

copyright 2005 themoviebabe.com

When an ape loves a woman, it turns out that he likes to woo the
object of his affection the same way upright-walkin’ dudes do—the more
sensitive ones, anyway. The beast will cuddle up to his sweetie and
peacefully enjoy the sunset. Or gaze into her eyes in the middle of a
quiet, snow-dusted street. And when the animal gets confused and
frustrated while gallantly trying to walk on ice with her in his arms,
he will just fall down and start gliding in circles with his girl, both
giggling—yes, giggling—the whole time.

At least that’s how it goes in the
Hobbit King’s mind. Peter Jackson’s three hour, seven minute King
Kong nearly doubles the length of the 1933 original, whose outline he
used as a guide for the remake (the director has said that, wisely,
he ignored the ill-received Jessica Lange redo completely). So how
did Jackson, along with co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens,
stretch Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace’s relatively simple story
to epic proportions? Well, the movie is first a poor people’s
Titanic, then a ballsier  Jurassic Park — and eventually Jackson
remembered, oh yeah, there’s all that monkey business too. The combination, my friends, makes for
a helluva ride. And anybody whining about the quickly spread fact that it
takes over an hour before the breathtaking Kong appears should be
grateful for the leisurely but quite funny introduction — because
once the astounding action starts, it doesn’t let up for a long, long
time.

The story still begins in 1933 New York, where the Depression has
put vaudeville performer Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) out of work. As she’s
contemplating a career change outside a burlesque house, a nutty,
opportunistic, Orson Welles–esque film director, Carl Denham (a
perfectly cartoonish Jack Black), decides that Ann is the right woman
to replace the actress who ditched him for an upcoming overseas shoot.
(Requirements: pretty face, size 4. “Fay’s a size 4!” Carl blurts, one
of Kong’s many winks to the original.) Soon enough, they’re off on a
rickety ship to Carl-Knows-Where—and quickly, to avoid the producers
who want Carl’s head for wasting their money on an earlier movie. The
cranky captain (Thomas Kretschmann) eventually tires of Carl’s vague
directives and decides to take the ship home in the dark and fog. But
before he can, a crew member cries, “Wall! There’s a wall ahead!” And the Phase I mayhem, missing only
Celine Dion in its portraiture of  angry waves, tossing about, and destruction, begins.

It’s difficult to discuss what awaits the crew on Skull Island
without sounding like a drooling fangirl. The island: a magnificent
ruin, its high walls embedded with skeletons. The natives: mobs of The
Serpent and the Rainbow zombies, eyes red or rolled right back in their
heads, with stringy hair and a taste for human flesh. The sequence in
which they attack Carl & Co. during a rainstorm and chase them back
to the battered boat is its own little horror movie, and it’s only a
hint of what the survivors will face after the fair Ann is offered to
Kong.

Jackson has claimed that the 1933 Kong was his favorite movie as a
kid and that faithfulness to it was his paramount concern—he even
obtained models and storyboards from the original, the latter of which
were used to re-create the legendary lost giant-spider sequence. But
with more than 70 years’ worth of new technology at his disposal, he
inevitably made something bigger, scarier, and more spectacular in
every way. Kong, unlike his goofy-faced predecessor, is a terrifically
realistic being, with discernible expressions (provided by Jackson’s
Gollum, Andy Serkis) and a roar that will rattle your seat. But even more frightening are the
island’s dinosaurs, ranging from your garden-variety (but easily
pissed) Dinos to T. Rexes’ with teeth as tall as Jack Black. There
are even a few of the small, quicker, jumpier kind. Their natural
enemy? Humans, apparently, and their attacks on the crew are
incessant and heart-pounding. Throughout, LOTR’s cinematographer
Andrew Lesnie alternates between a spooky, foggy pall and the vivid
palette of a lush jungle, with gorgeous orange-pink skies above.
(Sometimes, though, Jackson can’t seem to decide whether it’s the
start of the day or the end of the night.)

Considering all the aces CGI here, it’s
surprising that there are a few green-screen scenes that look
terribly cheesy, mostly when an actor is running parallel to a
digital monster. Another quibble is the occasional slo-mo Jackson
uses to needlessly overemphasize the  drama, such as Driscoll’s
ridiculous, staccatoed typing of “Skull Island” on his unfinished
script. And after a middle chapter of relentless action, the gooey
love stuff that occurs after Kong busts out on Broadway sure takes
steam out of this stunner — really, when the film’s closing in on
its third hour, the audience could do without the beauty/beast
romantic turn around an ice rink.

Of course,  Kong’s tragic end is
supposed to be boo-hooey sap, which Jackson and his co-writers tried
to emphasize by this time giving Ann a case of Stockholm Syndrome and
reciprocating Kong’s love. I’m not sure anyone’s going to cry over a
big ape, but the film’s gushy mood shift — which also, come to think
of it, ends in a very Titanic way — is a small penance for all the
great stuff before it. Jackson clearly made his King Kong with
geeked-out love, and the result is by far the best action movie of
the year.

Meanwhile, the cowboys in Ang Lee’s
Brokeback Mountain are fighting their inner, uh, Kongs. There’s
little doubt that the men, who met in 1963 Wyoming when they took
jobs herding sheep, would rather battle the beasts of Skull Island
than admit a secret they’ve tried to keep — with not much success –
for 20 years. The burden they carry can be summarized with this terse
exchange, which takes place the morning after one freezing night that
forced them to share a tent: “You know I ain’t queer.” “Me
neither.”

The big flaw—or perhaps it’s just a mainstreaming tactic—in Ang
Lee’s basically enjoyable film is that before the first instance of
frantic unbuckling, you’d believe those statements to be absolutely
true. Indeed, even if you know the gist of E. Annie Proulx’s short
story (here adapted by Lonesome Dove writer Larry McMurtry and longtime
collaborator Diana Ossana), the clues that Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger)
and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are interested in each other are
verrry subtle. The way they fidget and exchange sideways glances when
they’re first hired, maybe. Or Jack’s watching Ennis walk away in his
truck’s rearview mirror. And then there’s the time at the guys’
mountaintop camp when Ennis undresses to bathe and Jack steadfastly
keeps his eyes averted.

But these are cowboys we’re talking about, and some viewers may see
the above as simply the way men of few words size each other up or
avoid looking at another guy’s prairie. It’s at least clear that over
the course of their sheep-herding summer of 1963, goofy Jack and
reticent Ennis do develop a sort of friendship, which mostly involves
complaining about their steady diet of beans and occasionally wrestling
in the grass. When the job ends, the cowboys part ways with barely a
nod, with Ennis, a ranch hand by trade, off to marry his fiancée, Alma
(Michelle Williams), and settle down in Wyoming. Jack, a rodeo cowboy,
returns to Texas, where he meets his future wife, feisty rodeo queen
Lureen (Anne Hathaway).

Four years and two screaming new Del Mars later, Ennis receives a
postcard from Jack asking to visit. When the men once again lay eyes on
each other outside Ennis’ home, passion takes over—with Ennis foolishly
embracing Jack within Alma’s view. She says nothing as the pair go off
on a “fishing trip.” She says nothing when they return. This scenario
repeats over the next 20 years, and another of Brokeback’s flaws is how
quickly this period whizzes by, with Lee giving little indication of
the years passing besides the number of kids around and the style of
the wives’ hair.

And if you don’t buy the allegedly deep love that was set up in the
opening scenes, the men’s decadeslong affair never seems as intense as
it’s supposed to. At least not until the later years, when the
warm-eyed, puppyish Jack begins suggesting—and then pleading—that he
and Ennis set up household in the mountains and quit their loveless
lives. Jack admits the sham of his marriage:
“We could do it over the phone,” he says. Ennis, however,
traumatized by  the victim of a gay-bashing whose body Ennis’ father
made him see as a kid, feels that an open relationship would be
dangerous.

The missteps in Lee’s direction doesn’t sink the movie, however. The
script is both heartbreaking and funny, often at the expense of Ennis.
(When a supermarket clerk tells him that he can find his wife in the
condiments aisle, he responds, “The whuut?”) And cinematographer
Rodrigo Prieto makes Brokeback a beauty, especially in the opening
scenes of strange mint-green hills and swirled pastel skies that look
painted by Michelangelo. The landscape provides a metaphor, of course,
with the openness of the country standing in sharp contrast to the
restrictive suburbia that Ennis hides in. But it’s in his cramped
trailer—filled with a couple who barely talk and the kids they can
barely support—that the film finds its truest and most gut-wrenching
emotion.

The biggest reason the Del Mars’ marriage seems the only genuine
relationship in the film is because of Ledger’s and Williams’
career-making performances. Squinting under an ever-present hat and
speaking with the low, wearied grumble of a man twice his age, Ledger’s
Ennis is stoic and closed-off, offering only occasional hints of the
head-on collision smashing in his guts. And Dawson’s Creek vet Williams
is devastating as a wife who quietly carries the burden of the truth
her husband won’t tell her. A love story in which you can’t feel the
love might sound like a dismal failure, but in Brokeback Mountain’s
case, it ain’t.

copyright 2005 themoviebabe.com

In The Family Stone, a girlfriend who becomes desperate to please her
beau’s family gets some advice from his brother: “Maybe you should
stop. Just stop. It’s exhausting.” The same should have been said to
writer-director Thomas Bezucha (Big Eden), whose sophomore effort is a
Meet the Parents retread with the kind of giant, kooky-but-loving brood
without which holiday comedies wouldn’t exist.

Just like its main character doesn’t exist: Meredith Morton (Sarah
Jessica Parker) is spending Christmas with Everett Stone (Dermot
Mulroney) and her potential in-laws, whom she’s never met. She’s
introduced as a take-charge businesswoman, bellowing on her cell while
negotiating a crowded department store and Christmas shopping with
Everett. On the ride to his folks’ house, however, she shows some
cracks in that confidence, even admitting to a nervousness only a
handful of Xanax can calm — ok, fine. But once the couple
reaches the Stone family manse, where everyone except Everett’s cranky
sister Amy (Rachel McAdams) greets Meredith warmly, our heroine morphs
into someone else entirely: a tightly pursed freak who barely manages
her “hello”s and in general has the demeanor of either (a) a
padded-cell-worthy social phobic or (b) a high-society bitch who finds
mingling with the commoners extremely distasteful. But remember: She really wants to make a good impression! Everyone who knows somebody with all the above characteristics raise their hand. (Well, I can’t see you, but I’m guessing that few if any of you are waving.)

The affectionate,
liberal, open-minded Stone family—you know they’re all three because
they cup each other’s faces and another brother, Thad (Ty Giordano), is
deaf, gay, and has a black lover, Patrick (Brian White)—assumes it’s
the latter. Convenient and completely unbelievable cycles of nice and
nasty ensue to ensure maximum conflict: Meredith wonders why everyone
hates her (gee…); Everett, who wants to propose, immediately starts acting as if he doesn’t even like her (at least that last part’s understandable); and the rest of the clan turns icy (and when you piss off
Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson, who play the easygoing parents, you
know it’s bad).

The only consistency here — besides
the script’s tedium — is found in the Amy and stoner-bro Ben (Luke
Wilson) characters, with McAdams and Wilson also providing the movie’s few laughs.
Though there are also the ridiculous last-chapter surprises — but
even these will have you slapping your forehead instead of your knee.

copyright 2005 themoviebabe.com

The visually spectacular The Chronicles
of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will easily win some
ready-made admirers. Readers of the beloved C.S. Lewis children’s
book, obviously, for one. Anyone who geeks out at Lord of the
Rings-style fantasy worlds, for another. And, finally, fans
of–well, Braveheart. If you or your kids don’t fit into any of these
categories, writer-director Andrew Adamson’s Chronicles just may bore
the crap out of the whole family.

Not very surprising, I suppose,
considering a story in which even gifts from Father Christmas (James
Cosmo) come with the message, “These are tools, not toys.” It
takes a while, at least, to get to the yawn-inducing part of this
140-minute parable, which scripters Ann Peacock, Chris Markus, and
Stephen McFeely helped Adamson (Shrek) adapt. The World War II-set
film starts off with a frightening London air raid, which leads a
mother to pack up her four children — Lucy (Georgie Henley), Edmund
(Skandar Keynes), Peter (William Moseley), and Susan (Anna
Popplewell) — and send them to a safer place. Already unhappy about
the move, the siblings aren’t reassured to find their new home is the
dark, cavernous, kid-unfriendly dwelling of a weird hermitic
professor and his cranky housekeeper.

With little else to do but fight, the
youngest, Lucy, forces her brothers and sister to play hide and seek.
And damn if she’s not good at the game: Discovering a giant,
sheet-covered wardrobe in an empty room, Lucy creeps deeply backward
into the cabinet whose rows of stored furs seem endless. Of course,
they do come to an end — right at the border of Narnia, a seemingly
Rockwellian land in which, according to Lucy’s wide-eyed experience,
the snow falls softly, the manimals are friendly, and the tea is
delicious. When the nice faun-boy she meets, Mr. Tumnus (James
McAvoy), soon tearily confesses that it’s his duty to kidnap all
humans who enter Narnia, Lucy learns that it’s actually a miserable
place where holiday-free winters have been perpetual since the evil
White Witch (a scary, dreadlocked Tilda Swinton) seized power.

Lucy’s siblings don’t buy her story
when she reemerges from the wardrobe — the first reference to Lewis’
many biblical themes, faith — but eventually each of them get
through to Narnia, too. And they’re so dazzled by the pristine
alternate universe that they don’t resist too strongly when a
hospitable beaver couple (Ray Winstone and Dawn French) inform them
that they are the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, respectively,
who have been prophesized to get word of the Witch’s oppression to
benevolent Lion, um King Aslan (Liam Neeson) and join him in fighting
her. Their job becomes a bit more urgent, however, when the Witch
takes Edmund — who initially believed her to be a gentle queen –
hostage.

So far, so good: An eerie old house,
wonder wonder wonder, and a freaky albino villain
who’s one serious bee-yotch. Even the pulse-quickening journey to
find Aslan keeps you glued: Led by Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, the children
face treacheries such as crossing breaking ice floes over a rushing
river and the Witch’s vicious, lightening-quick wolves, which often
suddenly surround the party as they try to pass the Witch’s Emerald
City-like castle to get to Aslan. And the story’s never dull when
Swinton’s Witch is onscreen, outfitted in various drapes of white and
made up to be nearly eyebrowless with a flood of often twisted,
always bizarre pale hair. Moreover, she’s just plain mean — barely
hiding her contempt of humans when trying to win over Edmund, she
soon resorts to thunderous shouts when displeased, even toward her
creepy little gnome helper. You don’t have to be a kid for this Witch
to make you wince. 

But then the thousand-armied,
never-ending battles begin, along with, for the more antsy-pantsed
viewers, the tuning-out. Once the children reach Aslan — an obvious
Christ figure who believes in the sacrifice of one for the good of
many — his army of centaurs, cyclopses, and other mythological
beasts charges the Witch’s own freak battalion on a field of green.
Adamson doesn’t shy away from the sword- and horse-assisted violence,
slipping his camera into the  middle of the clash to capture a series
of brutal one-on-one smackdowns. Certainly, these scenes aren’t
appropriate for very young children — and considering the
nod-inducing amount of time devoted to these feuds, it’s questionable
whether adults should be exposed as well.

There are other irritations in this
epic adaptation. For instance, if you’re not amenable to talking
live-action forest creatures — including a wolf (Rupert Everett) who
says things like “Where are the fugitives?” in a Michael Madsen
rasp — well, that’s two strikes against the film. And it’s hard to
escape from the third: Harry Gregson-Williams’ persistent score,
which might as well be titled “You WILL Feel the Magic!” On the
plus side, the script is occasionally funny — when Peter tries to
convince the always-logical Susan to join their crusade based on what
Mr. Beaver said, she responds, “He’s a *beaver.* He’s not supposed
to be saying anything!” And besides one heavy-handed hallelujah
moment, Lewis’ themes of hope, faith, and selflessness don’t come
across as strictly Christian tenets, but simply the foundations of a
harmonious life.

The young actors — none too quippy or
cute — also do a great job as feuding siblings who learn to work
together and care for one another, with 10-year-old newbie Henley
especially impressive considering she carries a good chunk of the
film. And there’s no question that Narnia isn’t a magnificent sight.
From its inhabitants to its landscapes, Narnia is finely detailed
with a rich medieval look that will inevitably recall the Lord of the
Rings trilogy. And cinematographer Donald McAlpine excels in
effecting weather-dependent mood: With the first half of the film
largely taking place in the perfectly intense, gray-blue iciness of
the Witch’s turf, it’s a welcome relief when the kids escape that
environment’s perils and reach the lush, sun-drenched green of
Aslam’s gypsy hood. Chronicles’ wars may be interminable, but at
least they look pretty.

copyright 2005 themoviebabe.com

Darwin’s Nightmare begins and ends with a plane. Large and Russian,
it lands and takes off at the desolate airport in Mwanza, a city in
northwest Tanzania. It’s here that the Nile perch, which destroyed
every other species in nearby Lake Victoria but became a delicacy
throughout Europe, is processed and exported. Worldwide demand makes
the fish too expensive for the impoverished Tanzanians to enjoy
themselves. Instead, they settle for the perches’ discarded heads,
which prior to cooking lie in dirt and maggots.

In other words: The plane is us, capitalist rapists all. Though
Americans aren’t directly indicted in Austrian filmmaker Hubert
Sauper’s latest documentary, its portrayal of an unbalanced global
economy arguably puts all First World nations in the hot seat.
Snakehead-plagued Washingtonians might feel some kinship for the
Tanzanians, but that doesn’t exempt them. Yes, the predatory perch is a
biological oops, released into Lake Victoria 40 years ago as part of a
science experiment. But its impact extends to much more than game fish
and tourist dollars.

Sauper and his crew often had to use false identities and create
ruses to explain their presence in this part of Africa’s Great Lakes
region, but the director still managed to capture stark images and
wangle interviews with both the locals and the factory owners and
pilots involved in the export trade. Initially—and sadly—the film is
hardly shocking, offering scenes of shantytowns and malnourishment to
which television has inured well-fed Westerners. But Sauper isn’t Sally
Struthers; for the most part, he coolly delves into the economic and
sociological events that have resulted in people starving in an area
where thousands of tons of edible fish are harvested every year.

Always offscreen, the filmmaker talks to residents such as Eliza, a
pretty young woman who, like her peers, felt forced into prostituting
herself to pilots to survive. Or Raphael, a man who took a job guarding
a processing plant at night—armed with poisoned arrows and paid $1 a
shift—after the previous guard was murdered. Raphael speaks frankly
about how locals need to take whatever jobs they can get, no matter how
horrible, and about how he wishes for war because it would mean plenty
of work. One ongoing opportunity Tanzanian men have, of course, is to
fish—but that’s mainly because so many of their countrymen die in the
process.

After witnessing the daily arrival of foreign planes ready to be
filled with up to 500 tons of perch, Sauper begins questioning what, if
anything, the exporters fly in with. One cargo manager claims he
doesn’t know, that it’s none of his business. Another calls it
“humanitarian cargo.” The truth, which Sauper sporadically succeeds in
dragging out of his reluctant subjects, is that the planes are often
loaded with illegal arms to supply warring African nations.

Darwin’s Nightmare succeeds in connecting both emotionally and
intellectually, but it’s not without flaws. You may be puzzled at the
film’s beginning, for instance, when Sauper jumps from the facts of the
Nile perch’s invasion to scenes of boys running, crying, and punching
each other on the streets—not the only instance in which the narrative
veers chaotically between points. Sauper isn’t above gimmickry, either.
At one point, he ludicrously has a factory owner sit in a boardroom
with a newspaper after the exec has turned on one of those damn singing
bass that play “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Most problematic of all is Sauper’s condescending tone during a
couple of the interviews, such as when he talks to a proud Tanzanian
father about his son who wants to become a pilot. The director forces
him to imagine the kid flying an export plane, then asks, as if to a
child, what things that plane might bring Tanzanians from those rich,
magical-sounding European countries. Darwin’s Nightmare tells us enough
about well-fed Westerners’ dehumanization of poor Africans without the
director’s indulging in it, too.

Don’t bother with the nonsensical Romeo and Juliet–ish plot of In
the Mix, which, incredibly, took three relatively or totally green
writers (Chanel Capra, Cara Dellaverson, and Brian Rubenstein) to
conceive and one television scripter (Jacqueline Zambrano) to flesh
out. All you need to know about the movie can be gleaned from its
one-sheet, on which the tag line “Everyone wants a piece of his action”
floats above an image of Usher Raymond dressed in a fly suit. He’s
being pawed at by four different female hands—as well as an apparently
pissed-off male one—because when you’re this hot, there’s gonna be some
controversy.

In the Mix was directed by Ron Underwood, whose last major project
was The Adventures of Pluto Nash. (Need I say more?) Key elements of the movie include a
flatulent bulldog, a “Daddy”-cooing princess, Italian-Americans who are
all in the Mafia, a smartass little girl, and a white kid who acts
black. (Really, these are already plenty of nails.) If you must know the story, it centers on Ush—I mean, Darrell,
who’s a successful New York DJ. He’s also tight—in a totally wholesome
way—with the local mobsters, for whom his dad used to bartend. Frank
(Chazz Palminteri), the boss, asks Darrell to spin at an extravagant
homecoming party for daughter Dolly (Emmanuelle Chriqui), who’s been
away at law school. Dolly arrives, everyone cheers, and though she’s
all gooey for her dad—“I love you.” “I love you more!”—she’s also happy
to see old pal Darrell.

With everyone vomiting over himself to celebrate Dolly, the scene is
already pretty awful. But it only gets worse when a drive-by
happens—and Darrell launches himself to take a bullet for Frank. The
family insists that he stay with them while he recovers. Later, Frank
stops Dolly before she goes out for a day of princessing to insist that
she have a bodyguard. She refuses to be tailed by one of his more
unseemly thugs, but Frank then extends the options to “anyone in this
house,” so she picks Darrell.

Issues such as continuity aren’t important here: After Frank agrees
to let Darrell protect Dolly, she goes back inside, and suddenly her
yoga class and lunch date are actually for tomorrow. And forget about
political correctness: Alla da mobstas talka like dis, and Frank’s
elderly tailor doesn’t try to hide his racism when asked to outfit
Darrell with a couple of suits. And, hell, let’s throw logic in the
to-be-ignored pile, as well, with Frank showing more love for Darrell
than for his own blinged-out son (Anthony Fazio), then freaking out
Godfather-style when he finds out that Darrell and Dolly have begun a
romance.

What the filmmakers do deem critical, however, is gushing over the
Ush. When Darrell is DJing, women at the club throw themselves at
him—OK. When Darrell goes dancing with Dolly (preceded by, if reality
and fiction are to be intertwined, his ridiculous insistence that he
has no moves), the eyes of every woman in the place are on him—maybe.
But when Darrell hangs back as Dolly has lunch with the girls and they
not only purringly invite him to join them but also immediately ask him
for dating advice—well, that’s just weird, even if he is the hottest
guy in the room.

To be fair, Usher is serviceable in his first starring role, and his
ingratiating baby face could make him an appealing leading man if he
were to find the right script. And Chriqui is as good a token dream
girl as any to throw around such lines as “You do not control me!”
There are some funny moments in the movie, too, whether intentional
(mostly courtesy of comedian Kevin Hart, who plays Darrell’s best
friend) or not (such as when Frank asks one of his goons how he thinks
Dolly’s been acting lately and the guy says, “Different—like she’s in
love or something!”). But still. If one of Darrell’s comments after
receiving a compliment on his spinning is to be taken seriously—“That’s
what happens when you love what you do. It turns out right!”—then all
those involved with In the Mix must really hate their jobs.

copyright 2005 themoviebabe.com

Darwin’s Nightmare begins and ends with a plane. Large and Russian,
it lands and takes off at the desolate airport in Mwanza, a city in
northwest Tanzania. It’s here that the Nile perch, which destroyed
every other species in nearby Lake Victoria but became a delicacy
throughout Europe, is processed and exported. Worldwide demand makes
the fish too expensive for the impoverished Tanzanians to enjoy
themselves. Instead, they settle for the perches’ discarded heads,
which prior to cooking lie in dirt and maggots.

In other words: The plane is us, capitalist rapists all. Though
Americans aren’t directly indicted in Austrian filmmaker Hubert
Sauper’s latest documentary, its portrayal of an unbalanced global
economy arguably puts all First World nations in the hot seat.
Snakehead-plagued Washingtonians might feel some kinship for the
Tanzanians, but that doesn’t exempt them. Yes, the predatory perch is a
biological oops, released into Lake Victoria 40 years ago as part of a
science experiment. But its impact extends to much more than game fish
and tourist dollars.

Sauper and his crew often had to use false identities and create
ruses to explain their presence in this part of Africa’s Great Lakes
region, but the director still managed to capture stark images and
wangle interviews with both the locals and the factory owners and
pilots involved in the export trade. Initially—and sadly—the film is
hardly shocking, offering scenes of shantytowns and malnourishment to
which television has inured well-fed Westerners. But Sauper isn’t Sally
Struthers; for the most part, he coolly delves into the economic and
sociological events that have resulted in people starving in an area
where thousands of tons of edible fish are harvested every year.

Always offscreen, the filmmaker talks to residents such as Eliza, a
pretty young woman who, like her peers, felt forced into prostituting
herself to pilots to survive. Or Raphael, a man who took a job guarding
a processing plant at night—armed with poisoned arrows and paid $1 a
shift—after the previous guard was murdered. Raphael speaks frankly
about how locals need to take whatever jobs they can get, no matter how
horrible, and about how he wishes for war because it would mean plenty
of work. One ongoing opportunity Tanzanian men have, of course, is to
fish—but that’s mainly because so many of their countrymen die in the
process.

After witnessing the daily arrival of foreign planes ready to be
filled with up to 500 tons of perch, Sauper begins questioning what, if
anything, the exporters fly in with. One cargo manager claims he
doesn’t know, that it’s none of his business. Another calls it
“humanitarian cargo.” The truth, which Sauper sporadically succeeds in
dragging out of his reluctant subjects, is that the planes are often
loaded with illegal arms to supply warring African nations.

Darwin’s Nightmare succeeds in connecting both emotionally and
intellectually, but it’s not without flaws. You may be puzzled at the
film’s beginning, for instance, when Sauper jumps from the facts of the
Nile perch’s invasion to scenes of boys running, crying, and punching
each other on the streets—not the only instance in which the narrative
veers chaotically between points. Sauper isn’t above gimmickry, either.
At one point, he ludicrously has a factory owner sit in a boardroom
with a newspaper after the exec has turned on one of those damn singing
bass that play “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Most problematic of all is Sauper’s condescending tone during a
couple of the interviews, such as when he talks to a proud Tanzanian
father about his son who wants to become a pilot. The director forces
him to imagine the kid flying an export plane, then asks, as if to a
child, what things that plane might bring Tanzanians from those rich,
magical-sounding European countries. Darwin’s Nightmare tells us enough
about well-fed Westerners’ dehumanization of poor Africans without the
director’s indulging in it, too.

Don’t bother with the nonsensical Romeo and Juliet–ish plot of In
the Mix, which, incredibly, took three relatively or totally green
writers (Chanel Capra, Cara Dellaverson, and Brian Rubenstein) to
conceive and one television scripter (Jacqueline Zambrano) to flesh
out. All you need to know about the movie can be gleaned from its
one-sheet, on which the tag line “Everyone wants a piece of his action”
floats above an image of Usher Raymond dressed in a fly suit. He’s
being pawed at by four different female hands—as well as an apparently
pissed-off male one—because when you’re this hot, there’s gonna be some
controversy.

In the Mix was directed by Ron Underwood, whose last major project
was The Adventures of Pluto Nash. (Need I say more?) Key elements of the movie include a
flatulent bulldog, a “Daddy”-cooing princess, Italian-Americans who are
all in the Mafia, a smartass little girl, and a white kid who acts
black. (Really, these are already plenty of nails.) If you must know the story, it centers on Ush—I mean, Darrell,
who’s a successful New York DJ. He’s also tight—in a totally wholesome
way—with the local mobsters, for whom his dad used to bartend. Frank
(Chazz Palminteri), the boss, asks Darrell to spin at an extravagant
homecoming party for daughter Dolly (Emmanuelle Chriqui), who’s been
away at law school. Dolly arrives, everyone cheers, and though she’s
all gooey for her dad—“I love you.” “I love you more!”—she’s also happy
to see old pal Darrell.

With everyone vomiting over himself to celebrate Dolly, the scene is
already pretty awful. But it only gets worse when a drive-by
happens—and Darrell launches himself to take a bullet for Frank. The
family insists that he stay with them while he recovers. Later, Frank
stops Dolly before she goes out for a day of princessing to insist that
she have a bodyguard. She refuses to be tailed by one of his more
unseemly thugs, but Frank then extends the options to “anyone in this
house,” so she picks Darrell.

Issues such as continuity aren’t important here: After Frank agrees
to let Darrell protect Dolly, she goes back inside, and suddenly her
yoga class and lunch date are actually for tomorrow. And forget about
political correctness: Alla da mobstas talka like dis, and Frank’s
elderly tailor doesn’t try to hide his racism when asked to outfit
Darrell with a couple of suits. And, hell, let’s throw logic in the
to-be-ignored pile, as well, with Frank showing more love for Darrell
than for his own blinged-out son (Anthony Fazio), then freaking out
Godfather-style when he finds out that Darrell and Dolly have begun a
romance.

What the filmmakers do deem critical, however, is gushing over the
Ush. When Darrell is DJing, women at the club throw themselves at
him—OK. When Darrell goes dancing with Dolly (preceded by, if reality
and fiction are to be intertwined, his ridiculous insistence that he
has no moves), the eyes of every woman in the place are on him—maybe.
But when Darrell hangs back as Dolly has lunch with the girls and they
not only purringly invite him to join them but also immediately ask him
for dating advice—well, that’s just weird, even if he is the hottest
guy in the room.

To be fair, Usher is serviceable in his first starring role, and his
ingratiating baby face could make him an appealing leading man if he
were to find the right script. And Chriqui is as good a token dream
girl as any to throw around such lines as “You do not control me!”
There are some funny moments in the movie, too, whether intentional
(mostly courtesy of comedian Kevin Hart, who plays Darrell’s best
friend) or not (such as when Frank asks one of his goons how he thinks
Dolly’s been acting lately and the guy says, “Different—like she’s in
love or something!”). But still. If one of Darrell’s comments after
receiving a compliment on his spinning is to be taken seriously—“That’s
what happens when you love what you do. It turns out right!”—then all
those involved with In the Mix must really hate their jobs.

copyright 2005 themoviebabe.com