Weekend of July 13, 2008

Box Office

1	new	Hellboy II: The Golden Army	1	$35.9M	$35.9M	$11.2k	3204	88%
2	1	Hancock	2	$33M	$165M	$8.3k	3965	37%
3	new	Journey to the Center of the Earth	1	$20.6M	$20.6M	$7.3k	2811	61%
4	2	WALL-E	3	$18.5M	$162.8M	$4.8k	3849	97%
5	3	Wanted	3	$11.6M	$112M	$3.7k	3157	72%
6	4	Get Smart	4	$7.1M	$111.5M	$2.3k	3086	52%
7	new	Meet Dave	1	$5.3M	$5.3M	$1.8k	3011	22%
8	5	Kung Fu Panda	6	$4.3M	$202M	$1.6k	2704	88%
9	8	Kit Kittredge: An American Girl	4	$2.4M	$11M	$1.3k	1849	81%
10	7	Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull	8	$2.3M	$310.5M	$1.4k	1664	76%
11	6	Incredible Hulk	5	$2.2M	$129.8M	$1.1k	1951	68%
12	9	Sex and the City: The Movie	7	$1.7M	$148.2M	$1.7k	1025	51%

Source: Rotten Tomatoes

Video fantasies — the first symptom of reefer madness

The doctor-patient relationship in The Wackness seems typical at first. It’s 1994 in New York, and a high school senior is enduring another fruitless session with his psychiatrist. The doctor says that he sees “no joy” when he looks at Luke. Luke detects misery wafting from Dr. Squires, too, which only validates the teen’s suspicion that the path to adulthood does not lead to happiness. “Tomorrow, I graduate,” Luke muses in a voice-over. “And then I go to my safety school. And then I get older. And then I die.” To both of them, there is no grass-is-always-greener scenario.

Unless that grass is packed in a bong. When Squires (Ben Kingsley) presses Luke (Josh Peck) to open up, and the kid finally blurts, “Dr. Squires, how much do you need?” he’s not talking about feelings. He’s talking about weed. Whether their sessions were cooked up to disguise Luke’s visits or the drugs serve as payment for sought-out therapy isn’t clear, but the arrangement blossoms into an odd friendship between two lonely dudes.

Luke, floppy-banged and warm-eyed, deals dope in his Upper East Side neighborhood, drowns out his parents’ arguments with hip-hop, and interacts with other students only when they’re looking for the smokable kind of best bud. Squires, meanwhile, is a tastefully long-haired and goateed former hippie who doesn’t really see himself as a grown-up and is stunned to find himself in a cold marriage, numbing his melancholy with alcohol and the very prescriptions he refuses to give Luke, instead advising him to “embrace his pain.” Sex would help Luke, too, just as long as it’s not with Squires’ stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). “Getting laid is getting fixed, you know?” Squires advises. “Except for dogs.”

Writer-director Jonathan Levine’s film is a nostalgia piece about a recent but also rather different time, when old-schoolers like Luke refused to switch from cassettes to CDs and Giuliani was just beginning to clean up New York. (The former mayor is the movie’s main punching bag.) Grafittied placards mark the story’s progression throughout the summer, and hip-hop beats are constant, with artists such as the Notorious B.I.G., Nas, Raekwon, and A Tribe Called Quest filling the soundtrack. The tone is humid: It’s dark inside Squires’ wood-paneled office, but like most New Yorkers, Luke doesn’t spend a lot of time indoors. Instead, he’s sweatin’ his troubles outside, languidly pushing the Italian-ice cart that serves as his pot-delivery system through crowded streets and parks, his headphones providing the real chill.

Aside from the music and not-altogether-dated dialogue (“You’re mad outta my league,” Luke tells Stephanie), The Wackness is a classic story about first love and, more significantly, the struggles of the walking wounded who aren’t quite clinically depressed but can’t always get out of bed, either. Luke and Stephanie’s relationship is natural and engaging—Peck, from Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh, and Thirlby, best known from Juno—are likably low-key and funny without seeming scripted. But the deeper and more interesting arc involves Squires. Kingsley, even with a dubious New York accent, makes Squires entertaining and tragic, out of touch with the demographic he believes he never left and the scene he imagines still exists.

In one of the film’s best scenes, he takes Luke to one of his old hangouts, which is now not quite so happening. “The city isn’t the same,” Squires laments. “The drugs, the girls, the music—the fucking muuuusic,” he says, drawing out the last word with closed eyes and a heavy heart, and you feel his yearning. He finds a temporary distraction when some of Luke’s acquaintances show up, including a hippie princess played by Mary-Kate Olsen, who proceeds to crawl onto his lap. When the group finally gets thrown out, Squires yells, “They’re all 18!” Luke enlightens him that the drinking age has been 21 “since forever.” “Fucking Giuliani,” the doctor responds.

As both of them try to figure out what’s missing in their lives, the film gets a bit sitcom-like, but there’s enough weight to make gimmicks such as Squires helping Luke sell his wares forgivable. It doesn’t matter if you were a teenager in 1994, a flower child in the ’60s, or even a stoner in the here and now: The Wackness may touch on a few specific themes, but ultimately it explores the more universal question of how to deal.

The Globe and Mail needs to run a correction

Life’s trials make for melodrama instead of melancholy in The Stone Angel, writer-director Kari Skogland’s adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s novel. It’s with a heavy hand that Skogland tells the already piled-on, time-jumping story of Hagar, a demented elderly woman who recalls her fiery younger days when her son threatens to put her in a home. Overacted, underwritten, and with flashback cues so lazy the characters may as well just say, “I remember when…,” the film feels like The Notebook II—which almost guarantees it will find an audience easily enraptured by weepies.

The elder Hagar is played by Ellen Burstyn, who can usually make any movie tolerable but is given little to work with here. Her character is, to be blunt, a jerk, her purported “strong will” communicated solely via constant antagonism and snotty remarks toward her son Marvin (Dylan Baker) and his wife, Doris (Sheila McCarthy). When they admit they can’t take care of her anymore, Hagar runs away to the long-abandoned farmhouse where she raised her family, at which point the film largely remains in the past.

Hagar Currie (played in her youth by Christine Horne, whose acting chops and remarkable resemblance to Burstyn make her the best part of the movie) was born the daughter of a wealthy and proud Scotsman and a mother who died giving birth to her younger brother. Dad all but ignored his son while doting on Hagar, insistent that she marry someone of her class. Instead, she chose Bram (Cole Hauser), a commoner who associated with “half-breeds,” which prompted her father to disown her and leave her none of his inheritance.

Hagar does her best to teach Bram and her two sons manners and look the other way regarding her husband’s drinking and the home they can’t afford to decorate. But she eventually realizes that passion can’t sustain a marriage and also takes after Dad in a more damaging manner, favoring younger son John (Noah Meade) over Marvin, whispering to John that he’s a “true Currie.”

Soon, Hagar’s life unravels spectacularly, and the setbacks and tragedies don’t stop until The Stone Angel’s very last frame. Death and disease chip away at both Hagar’s resolve and the audience’s patience, with the plot becoming more of a highlight reel of suffering instead of an interesting story of a deeply lived life. It’s not long before you become immune to it all, which erases any sympathy you might have started to feel for Burstyn’s Hagar the Horrible and makes the final, purple-choked chapters even more exasperating than those that came before.

Lovelier than that loathesome old sun.

In Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog discovers in Antarctica that it’s rather likely human beings will soon go the way of the dinosaur.

What’s distressing is that the director doesn’t seem to mind.

Extinction, after all, would rid this overly technological, painfully nondeliberate world of “abominations” such as yoga classes and “fluffy penguin” movies—another of which Herzog assured his benefactors, the National Science Foundation, he would not be making.

Despite a couple of wisecracks at penguins’ expense, Herzog, who also narrates, sounds almost wistful at the beginning of his ghostly and gorgeous (if meandering) film, wondering what kind of people he’d meet at the world’s southernmost point: “What were their dreams?” he asks.

But Werner the Curious soon morphs into Werner the Crank, with impatient, sometimes laughably teen-goth narration that, depending on your mood, is either entertaining or insufferable. “I loathe the sun, both on my celluloid and my skin,” Herzog drones, pleased when the “postcard-pretty weather” during the region’s perpetual-daylight season turns foul. He’s eager to leave McMurdo Station, a research center with climate-controlled housing and a horrid exercise facility, as soon as he arrives, regarding it as an ugly, too-civilized Antarctica Lite.

Herzog does interview several residents there, though, identifying them with career hyphenations such as “Philosopher-Forklift Driver,” and seems nonjudgmental as he learns what led them to choose life on frozen tundra. Later, however, he’s not so nice, allowing a couple of eccentrics to blather for just a bit before interrupting with overdubs that essentially say, “To make a long, dull story short…”

Scientists, from seal studiers to subatomic-particle chasers to, yes, penguin experts, receive more deferential treatment, with Herzog not only inquiring about their projects but also lobbing hardballs about intelligence and creation.

The film is most absorbing, though, when Herzog stays out of the way: Aside from otherworldly, astonishing views of the continent both aboveground and deep beneath the ice, there’s the eerie audio of seal calls that sound, according to one researcher, “like Pink Floyd or something,” another scientist’s description of sea creatures that are more horrific than anything dreamed up in a sci-fi novel, and randomly caught, fraught footage of a penguin who keeps still as his peers go off to the left or the right, then resolutely toddles straight ahead on his own.

Herzog barely registers any emotion when he notes the little guy is headed for certain death, but the sadness and mystery of the image is unmistakable.

Just found out that the earliest I can see X-Files: I Want to Believe is July 23. Which is, of course, two days before opening. Which is — SIGH — too late for a weekly newspaper to review. Again. (You’ll note an absence of a Hellboy write-up this week as well.)

I realize it’s probably just part of the super-double-handshake-secrecy of the whole thing, but I’m doubtful that Fox (er, the studio, not Mulder) is denying critics at glossier publications who need to see it sooner their chance.

I Want to Review

Coolest. journalist. ever.

When filming a documentary about a writer so eccentric, talented, and gigantically presenced that a peer describes him as having had “the attributes of an action hero,” the risk is less that you’ll render his story uninteresting than you’ll end up with a feature filled with chaos.

Not with Alex Gibney at the helm, however. The Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Darkside and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room – both docs that brilliantly distilled what felt like a Google’s worth of facts into digestible viewing – again plucked, jiggered, and embellished wisely to create Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a dense but enthralling biography that manages to keep its focus on the Rolling Stone journalist while exploring Gibney’s political obsession at the same time.

Gonzo begins not at but near the end of Thompson’s life, specifically a piece he wrote for ESPN’s Web site on Sept. 11, 2001. As a lookalike dramatizes Thompson at a typewriter – an approach not as cheesy as it sounds – and a clip of the smoldering World Trade Center plays in a makeshift Woody Creek, Colo., living room, Johnny Depp reads parts of the prescient article in voiceover: “We’re going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens is hard to say….This is going to be a very expensive war, and victory is not guaranteed – for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush.”

“Hunter” and his desk are then shown facing a window, but the scenery isn’t tree-lined. Instead, there’s a very cool news mash-up, a collage of politicians and war footage flickering while “All Along the Watchtower” plays and propels the narrative back 40-odd years to Vietnam, the 1968 Democratic convention, Nixon’s presidency, and other events that helped birth the Dr. Thompson persona.

No, the soundtrack isn’t exactly original – “Piece of My Heart,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and, most pedestrian, “Sympathy for the Devil” plays during ’60s and ’70s sequences as well – but that’s the film’s biggest misstep. Otherwise, this two-hour soak in Thompson’s life and career is as gonzo as his famed writing style.

With the help of commentators as varied as Jann Wenner, Tom Wolfe, Pat Buchanan, Jimmys Carter and Buffett, and Thompson’s family (first wife Sondi, son Juan, and second wife Anita), Gibney depicts the journalist’s ascent more or less chronologically, from the works that put him on the literary radar (a book on Hell’s Angels and an article on the Kentucky Derby that was about everything but the race itself) to his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas heyday to his final pieces for ESPN.com before his 2005 suicide.

But Gibney takes some fun detours: The director, who was granted access to family artifacts and even unpublished manuscripts, devotes time to Thompson’s out-of-nowhere and nearly successful 1970 run to become the sheriff of Aspen, complete with a campaign commercial, film of press conferences, and, most amusingly, Thompson’s “tentative platform,” which is read by Depp – who, for no reason, is casually holding a gun pointed ceilingward – and includes changing Aspen’s name to “Fat City” and effecting a law that “No drug worth taking should be sold for money.”

All of Depp’s narrative are Thompson’s own words, and when there’s no footage, the director invents, such as a passage from Hell’s Angels about the author’s midnight motorcycle rides that’s accompanied by a dark, blurred, exhilarating driver’s-perspective reimagining. And, naturally, Gibney includes clips from the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing, in which Depp himself played the doc, aka “Raoul Duke,” alongside Benicio Del Toro, both hilarious as characters tripping their faces off. Artist and frequent Thompson collaborator Richard Steadman shows off his electrifying paintings of Thompson and the events they covered, and is a general hoot as he talks about the man who introduced him to hallucinogenics.

Gonzo always comes back to the political world, however, which gives the bio unexpected – but never burdensome – weight. Most wrenchingly, Gibney’s friends and family assert that Thompson may have literally died by gunshot but metaphorically by flashback, and not the acid- or PSTD-induced kind. Politics could animate and depress Thompson, and in 1972, the failure of his supported presidential candidate, George McGovern, to unseat Richard Nixon and bring a swift end to the Vietnam War left him dejected.

More detrimental to his mental health, however, was witnessing history repeat: “The nightmare we’re in today is essentially the same as the nightmare he described back then,” colleague Tim Crouse says, elegantly and sorrowfully ruminating on disastrous administrations, lost lives, and a country that’s low on hope. Thompson’s second wife, Anita, is more direct: “I started worrying about him right after the Bush election. That was the trigger.”

Suddenly, Gonzo moves you to not only mourn an icon, but feel the despair that finally led to the suicide he’d had always threatened. Like Gibney’s previous work, though, you walk away from the documentary melancholy yet informed, in a state that rustles your mind instead of sinks your soul.

And ending with footage of Thompson’s memorial service – his ashes being shot out above a self-designed monument of his two-thumbed, peyote-holding emblem – is appropriately celebratory. An older Thompson characterizes himself this way: “I’m an idiot. I’m a fool. I know. But I’ve been a good read, right?”

War is bad. Now let me nag you about that filthy uniform.

The soldiers populating the anti-war wisp of a film Alexandra need to be reminded that it’s not polite to stare. From the minute the frumpy, slow-moving, but commanding titular character boards a dusty Russian train to a Chechen military camp to visit her grandson, she’s gawked at—with smirks, with disbelief, and occasionally with longing by battle-weary kids who could use a good nurturing.

The fact that they are young enough to still induce the urge to scold them about their manners, however, is part of what fuels the melancholy in writer-director Aleksandr Sokurov’s drama. The other source is the plump nana herself: Alexandra (opera star Galina Vishnevskaya) may be elderly, but she doesn’t hesitate to plant herself in a war zone as long as it allows her to reunite with her grandson, an officer named Denis (Vasily Shevtsov), and therefore a reconnection with the world after being widowed two years prior. After Denis abides her bear hugs and gives her a tour of the site (which includes Alexandra trying out an unloaded rifle and remarking, “It’s so easy”), she’s mostly left to entertain herself, usually muttering about the heat or how dirty everything is.

There’s not much more to the story, which isn’t surprising coming from the director best known for 2002’s single-take feature, Russian Ark. Here, Sokurov pretty much trains his camera on Grandma as she wanders around without a second thought to protocol, more bemused than irritated that anyone under the age of 100 would try to tell her what to do. (“Run along,” she tells one boy tasked with guarding her.) She goes to the market to try to buy the soldiers cigarettes and cookies, making quick friends with a similarly creaky Chechen woman (a scene in which she serves Alexandra tea in her half-bombed apartment is touching) but mostly getting the evil eye from others who want the Russians out.

The plot may be simple, but Sokurov’s message is unmistakable, his babushka’d mouthpiece even once complaining that it’s time for the military to rebuild instead of continually destroying. Still, Alexandra washes over you like a gentle slice-of-life movie rather than polemic, with Vishnevskaya demanding your attention every moment she’s onscreen: Lined, rotund, and wearing old dresses, the actress nonetheless projects a compelling beauty and gives her character a presence that’s schoolmarm gruff but rarely mean. The soldiers’ fascination with Alexandra may get irritating, but it’s certainly understandable.

It’s so much cuter when a kid calls you an asshole.

John Hancock, the character, is supposed to blow as a superhero. He drinks, he curses, he spends his days sleeping on benches or wreaking more havoc on his home base of Los Angeles than he does sparing it when the city’s in distress. Unfortunately, the creators of Hancock, the movie, didn’t think beyond these broad strokes of superjackassery, which means that their antihero merely spreads his suckage filmwide.

Or for the majority of it, at least. Until a surprise turn approximately two-thirds into the movie, Hancock feels as if it were crafted by folks who found The Transformers too high-minded. (For the record, that would be The Kingdom director Peter Berg and writers Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan.) Will Smith glowers impressively as the perpetually hungover title character, but even though it’s a side of the charismatic actor we’ve never really seen before, there’s a reason.

Hancock’s signature moves include chugging a bottle of whiskey, jetting straight up into the sky (with terrible CG when he’s in midair), and yelling at anyone who boos his efforts. (Though, to be fair, it is funny-cuz-it’s-true when he saves a car from being crushed by a train and then says, “All you people blocking the intersection. You’re all idiots.”) His favorite threat is that he’s going to stick one person’s head up another one’s ass. It’s mildly amusing until he actually does it –  in a scene accompanied by the Sanford and Son theme. (Can’t put my finger on it, but something about that feels kinda racist, no?) Hope you also like the word “asshole,” too, because the scripters obviously do, thinking it the most hilarious burn imaginable and having characters of all ages throw it around liberally.

The gist of the story involves Ray (Jason Bateman), the public relations guru Hancock saved from the train, who intends to rehabilitate the superhero’s image. When it’s discovered that Hancock’s a wanted man, Ray suggests he turn himself in, become a model prisoner, and return to society in a properly heroic style, complete with lame uniform and good manners. Of course, Hancock doesn’t go for it – until he does. And people start loving him again, and we find out a bit about his origin, which involves amnesia and immortality.

It’s all yawn-inducing until the world discovers that Hancock isn’t necessarily the last of his kind, as he believes. At this point, the action kicks up, the story gets interesting, and the insipidity in general drops enough to save you from further brain-numbing. It’s not nearly sufficient to compensate for the mess that came before it. But odds are good that a couple of summers from now, you’ll get the chance to be bored stupid by this tedious character again.