EL Magazine

AMISSION IMPROBABLE Grin and blow it up
	The A-Team Directed by Joe Carnahan Starring Liam Neeson & Bradley Cooper Opens Aug. 20 (118 minutes)
Having never seen the original American TV series, I can't make comparisons, but if this were a superhero movie it would be an origin story, which means we're in store for an entirely new series. Without the original show as thematic reinforcement, however, its difficult to tell what might distinguish The A-Team from any other generic action movie. Certainly not the wiseass vibe, which is established immediately, as cigar-chomping Army Ranger Col. Hannibal Smith (Liam Neeson) escapes the clutches of some nasty Mexicans and hijacks the SUV of muscle-bound, continually aggrieved B.A. Baracus (Quinton Jackson) in order to save his partner, the grinning womanizer Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck (Bradley Cooper) from a higher class of nasty Mexican. Baracus is royally pissed until he realizes Hannibal and Face are Rangers. He used to be a Ranger, too, and then he was discharged for "some stupid shit." The trio repairs to a hospital where they steal a helicopter pilot so that they can make their escape to U.S. soil. The pilot is the certifiably bonkers Murdock (Sharlto Copley), thus completing the A-Team, who we next see years later at a Special Forces camp in Iraq. At this point, the quartet is still in the good graces of the U.S. government, but that has to change, since the whole point of this boys club of espionage pinheads is that they're mercenaries working outside the law, and the movie shows us how they got there. I'm sure the TV show was simpler, but then it wasn't obliged to stage an expensive explosion every ten minutes. The only real distraction from this symphony of destruction is Jessica Biel, who as an army captain in black leather and heels, is even more incongruous than Baracus's temporary pacifism or Murdock's culinary skills. Her main purpose, besides providing the boys with a sympathetic foil, is to be Face's old love interest, which also makes her ripe for exploitation in their complicated plan to clear themselves after they're charged with purposely losing a set of counterfeiting plates they'd been tasked with capturing from some terrorists. Of course they were set up and of course the setting-up was done by various other personalities involved in security, like the CIA, a "black ops" contractor, and even high-ranking folks in the army. The reason for this conspiracy of dunces has less to do with offering a collective villain than with providing excuses for our heroes to globe-trot endlessly. I lost track of exactly why they were going where they were going when they stowed away on a Germany-to-Long Beach freighter that seemed to reach its destination in less than a day. Thank God for explosions and Jessica Biel. Otherwise you'd be forced to try and understand what these jokers are doing. -PB Cinema 6 "The A-Team" (c) 2010 Twentieth Century Fox

KICKS
Will's son establishes his brand

The Karate Kid

Directed by
Harald Zwart

Starring
Jaden Smith & Jackie Chan

Opens Aug. 14 (140 minutes)

The plot foundation of the new Karate Kid is more compelling than the one for the original movie. In 1984, Ralph Macchio was forced to move from New Jersey to California's Central Valley. Here, Jaden Smith has to leave miserable old Detroit for Beijing, since his widowed mother, an automobile company employee, has been transferred to China. As a nutshell comment on the zeitgeist you can't beat it, and the best thing about this unnecessary reboot is the way it exploits the U.S.-China partnership. When Dre (Smith) and his mother (Taraji P. Henson) arrive at their new apartment, the feeling of displacement is vivid; unlike most Hollywood movies that confront the non-American, this one doesn't linger on weird differences. In the low-key sequence that introduces the apartment building's maintenance man, Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), Dre thinks the hot water is broken and Mr. Han shows him that he has to turn it on first. "Flip switch, save planet," he says in his abbreviated, hangdog English. Dre's concerns are not the environment, however. He's already pissed off some local boys by paying attention to a Chinese girl (Wenwen Han), and in the days that follow they make his life hell at the school they attend together. It turns out they are also students at a local kung fu dojo, where the master teaches them things like "always take advantage of the weakness of your opponents" and "crush them mercilessly." Mr. Han notices how the boys pick on Dre and in the only scene where Chan gets to show off his own kung fu skills he dispatches the pint-size terrorists. Dre wants to learn that stuff for sure, but, of course, first he has to have his mind screwed with in the Asian manner, and Han conditions his ability to take orders by having him hang up his jacket on a peg over and over and over. Once the story gears up for all the lessons to be learned and the endless training montages, it loses whatever character it started out with and becomes the sports epic you expected all along. Some will be relieved that Dre's skin color is never made into an issue, and likely the Chinese backers insisted it not be, but it feels like a missed opportunity, especially since Dre's outsider status is such an integral facet of the story. Then again, Smith, despite having inherited his father Will's star presence, still seems too young to handle the dramatic range required. Maybe he's been coached too much, but Dre is less a person than a collection of studied attitudes. He's in every scene, and you wish he'd take a break once in a while and hand the movie over to Chan, who finally gets an English-speaking role that honors his special brand of charisma. -PB

Cinemas 32 50 60

"The Karate Kid" (c) Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc

The Secret in Their Eyes

Mao's Last Dancer

ell-deserved 2010 Academy Award winner for best foreign language film, Juan JosŽ Campanella's The Secret in their Eyes opens with retired criminal investigator Benjamin Esp—sito (Ricardo Darin) finishing a novel based on a case he worked on some 25 years earlier, in the 1970s. The unresolved brutal murder and rape of a young woman became the turning point in his life. Through a series of flashbacks the who-done-it is laid out with pinpoint accuracy, even if there are some plot points that beg for serious suspension of disbelief. But Campanella succeeds, largely due to an exceptional cast of Argentine regulars. Comedian Guillermo Francella as Pablo, Benjamin's best friend and co-worker, pulls off one of the best performances of the year with his drunken inspirations, comic moments, and ultimately heart-rending performance. As every very good mystery deserves a story of unrequited love, The Secret in their Eyes delivers in spades with Benjamin's 30-year crush on his beautiful boss, Irene (Soledad Villamil), and a simultaneously creepy and moving climax wraps the whole thing up brilliantly. -NV

Opens Aug. 14. In Spanish (129 min.)
Cinema 9

The true story of Chinese dancer Li Cunxin (Chi Cao, of the Birmingham Royal Ballet), who was trained by the state during the 70s under the auspices of Madame Mao, walks on tiptoes between anti-totalitarian melodrama and stranger-in-a-strange-land uplift. Because he's literally plucked from his rural village to become a dancer, Li isn't driven artistically. But once the cadre-instructor (with his Leninist goatee) starts ragging on him he whips himself into shape just to show the commie bastard. This dedication only gets him a ticket to the Houston Ballet, where he's the pet project of the company's director (Bruce Greenwood) whose ambition is to maintain an exchange program with the Chinese. There, Li falls in love with a member of the corps and decides to stay, thus precipitating a famous standoff at the Chinese consulate that resulted in Li being banned for life from ever returning to China. Everyone in Australia, where Li now lives, knows the rest of the story because he wrote a bestselling autobiography. This functional biopic serves the rest of us well enough. -PB

Opens in Aug. (117 min.)
Cinemas 14 29

Repo Men		Stones in Exile

Jude Law and Forest Whitaker make a pretty odd couple as Remy and Jake, lifelong friends who often work side-by-side for a company called the Union that manufactures and sells synthetic body parts. They repossess their employer's "property" when the customer falls behind on his or her loan payments--by any means necessary. Though they are paid well for their services, Remy's wife (Carice Van Houten) is uncomfortable with the moral tenor of her husband's job and demands that he request a transfer to sales. The premise offers plenty of opportunity for gory black humor, and for a while Repo Men looks to be headed in that direction, but once Remy himself becomes a "customer," the movie turns all dark and philosophical, as if his new mechanical organ came with a conscience. Since the conflict is based on the relationship between Remy and Jake, the credibility of the story is seriously undermined by the stark contrast between Law's laddish flippancy and Whitaker's volatility, not to mention their totally different accents. Which country did these guys grow up in? - -PB

Now playing (111 min.)
Cinema 11

Though this hour-long documentary was obviously produced to cash in on the rerelease of Exile on Main St., so much water has passed under the bridge since the album was released in 1972 that Mick Jagger, who used to be skittish about discussing this particular period in the annals of the world's greatest rock'n roll band, seems totally cool with shining a light on all the stories about drugs and sex and money problems. Still, it isn't Cocksucker Blues. Director Stephen Kijak recreates the album's infamous rattletrap aesthetic with dodgy film stock, smudgy sound quality, and exposition that barely does the job. Consequently, you get the magical feeling of those heady days at Keith Richards' French villa without a whole lot of detail as to how the music came about. Among the many talking heads who were there, the Americans, Marshall Chess and Bobby Keys, in particular, provide the most verisimilitude, while the Brits either look at things too wistfully or with too much detachment. The main problem with the TV-length running time is that there's not enough concert footage. -PB

Now playing (61 min.)
Cinemas Uplink Factory (03-6825-5502), 48

NIGHTMARE SCENARIO
Try to get your brain around this

Inception

Directed by
Christopher Nolan

Starring
Leonardo DiCaprio & Ellen Page

Now playing (148 minutes)

No recent movie has been more ambitious than the relatively low-budget Memento. Reportedly, that movie's director, Christopher Nolan, has been working on Inception at least as long, and has said that the ambition involved in bringing it to the screen can only be fulfilled with a lot of money. The opening shootout takes place in a Japanese building and then shifts to a rundown apartment in a Southeast Asian capital where hundreds of people are rioting outside. The furious action centers on Tom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is trying to steal a secret document from a Japanese industrialist, Saito (Ken Watanabe). The reason two locations are involved is because this information is a dream Saito is having; or, more exactly, a dream Cobb and Saito are sharing with a third party. Cobb is an extractor, an operator for hire who sedates targets and then enters their subconscious. The Saito job is a failure, but rather than kill Cobb Saito promises not only to protect him from his enemies but also make it possible for him to return safely to the U.S., where he is wanted for murder. All he has to do is carry out an "inception": rather than remove an idea, Cobb will plant one. Supposedly, it's never been done before, and Cobb takes the challenge. The first half of Nolan's meticulously constructed movie presents the theory of dream manipulation, and at times the explanations border on the geeky. Cobb and his partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt), recruit a new "architect," or dream designer, named Ariadne (Ellen Page). Her training is a means of getting the audience up to speed so that the action-packed second half makes sense. Ariadne catches on quick to the concept, but spending dreamtime with Cobb spooks her. "That's some sub-conscious on you," she says, after their stroll down a bendable Parisian boulevard ends in an unpleasant encounter with Cobb's dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). In the movie's gestalt, dream and reality are fluid, a proposition that can't help but screw with the viewer's head as the inception is carried out with the additional help of Saito, a "forger" (i.e., impersonator, played by Tom Hardy), and a "chemist" (Dileep Rao). As this impossible mission dream team blasts their way further into their subject's subconscious, not to mention their own, they risk being trapped there forever, but, more significantly, the audience risks losing sight of the story, as precarious as it is. The characters are mostly functional, and as a result Nolan's sentimental aims feel forced. Moreover, the script is lazy about motivation: the idea being planted isn't plausible, and Cobb's existential angst is contrived. Inception is an impressive work of imagination, but sometimes ambition gets the best of you. -PB

Cinemas 2 21 24 41 50 54 60

In the City of Sylvia		The Men Who Stare at Goats

Catalan director Jose Luis Guerin's masterpiece In the City of Sylvia is like a Hitchcock film abstracted through the eyes--and ears--of Robert Bresson. Apart from the stunning visuals, Sylvia's sound design mesmerizes. A twenty something young man (Xavier Lafitte) comes to Strasbourg and spends a day at a cafŽ sketching customers. He sees a beautiful brunette (Pilar L—pez de Ayala) and begins to follow her. After a long, involved, labyrinthine cat-and-mouse game, he finally accosts her in a tram, convinced she is Sylvia, a woman he met six years earlier. Guardedly responding to her stalker, she says that she isn't. He apologizes profusely. Later that night he goes to a bar and picks up a young woman. The next day finds him at a bus stop, people watching and eventually seeing "Sylvia" again on a passing tram. With this simple idea, Guerin builds a strange, beguiling, and touching film. Part essay in cinematic voyeurism, part reflection on obsession, desire and mystery, In the City of Sylvia is a wholly original cinematic experience. -NV Opens Aug. 7. In French (85 min.) Cinema 40		Though it purports to be "more true than you would believe," Grant Heslov's movie is also funnier than its title, even if it tries to be funnier than it actually is. As a reporter who decides to go to Iraq after his wife leaves him, Ewan McGregor is saddled with the clunkiest voiceover chore since Orson Welles' stint for frozen foods. Trying to find a way into the country, he meets a man named Lyn (George Clooney) who was once a star member of the New Earth Army, a Special Forces outfit that, as its founder Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) put it, will make America into "the first super power with super powers." Lyn is a Grade A fruitcake, but because he's so desperate the reporter accepts his paranormal claims as they head deeper into the country, where a former New Earther turned psy-ops contractor (Kevin Spacey) has adapted the program "without all the hippie crap." The copious flashbacks act as a drag on the running jokes, and in the end the goats are the funniest things in the movie. -PB Opens Aug. 14 (94 min.) Cinemas 34 58

No One Knows About Persian Cats		Parallel Life

Bearing more subtext than any movie its size has any right to, Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi's latest work is his first to take place in Tehran. Filmed on the sly in a matter of days and snuck out of the country because the Iranian authorities wouldn't authorize its production, the movie itself is also about forbidden art, namely indie rock. Real-life singer-songwriters Negar Shaghaghi and Ashkan Koshanejad have just gotten out of detention and are frantically trying to assemble documents and passports so that they can travel to Europe in order to participate in a music festival. While following their intrigues, which are part fiction, part something else, Ghobadi visits a number of other underground bands, ranging from a prog-metal outfit that practices in a stockyard to a Persian rap collective that deserves wider exposure. Since everything we see is assumed to be illegal, the tension is difficult to gauge. The drama feels insubstantial as a result. Still, there's that subtext. You can't help but marvel at how Ghobadi could make something this coherent under such difficult circumstances. -PB Opens Aug. 7. In Persian (106 min.) Cinema 35		Taking off from the so-called parallel lives theory, this thriller focuses on a young prosecutor, Kim Seok-hyeon (Ji Jin-hee), whose perfect life is shattered when his wife is murdered. The killer is a man who holds a grudge against Kim for a past ruling, but then a reporter tells the prosecutor that everything happening to him also happened 30 years ago to a judge, and the man who killed the judge's wife escaped from prison to murder both the judge and his daughter. Upon closer inspection, Kim realizes that his life and the judge's are even more alike than the reporter thought. He figures he has only 16 days to change the course of events, but then the files of the old case are destroyed, preventing him from following the chain of events. Though director Kwon Ho-young starts off strong, once the chase is underway the movie bogs down in unnecessary expositional business. He thinks the story should follow the same parallel structure as the theory, and the two threads become hopelessly tangled. --RS Now playing. In Korean (110 min.) Cinema 42

BOYS FOR BREAKFAST
Diablo Cody explores adolescent urges some more

Jennifer's Body

Directed by
Karyn Kusama

Starring
Megan Fox & Amanda Seyfried

Now playing (102 minutes)

For her second major movie, Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody sticks to what she knows: how high school girls talk and the way their language expresses their peculiar world-view. This time she tackles a more hackneyed milieu within that realm, the dynamic between the hot girl who puts out and the brainier type who is curious but sensible about sex. Cody's riskiest gambit is having these two types, usually diametrically opposed in your average teen flick, presented as best friends forever. Jennifer (Megan Fox) often treats Needy (Amanda Seyfried) with barely disguised contempt, but Needy is free to honestly and candidly question Jennifer's moral rectitude. It's a standoff, but the wonder of Cody's idea is that the relationship doesn't feel odd. Still, there's a larger, less interesting purpose to this unusual setup. Jennifer drags Needy to a roadside bar where an out-of-town indie band called Low Shoulder is playing. She plans to lay the lead singer and Needy strangely thinks her friend's icy heart will be broken. What happens is actually worse. After the bar burns down, killing dozens of people, the band abducts Jennifer, mistakenly thinking she's a virgin, in order to sacrifice her to the devil so that they can become famous. Jennifer manages to survive, and if she was a ball-buster before, she's now literally a man-eater, who needs the blood of boys she seduces in order to maintain her hot looks. Metaphorically, it's a cakewalk for someone like Cody, but director Karyn Kusama doesn't seem entirely comfortable with the horror tropes. Jennifer's killings are presented in several styles--straightforward, in silhouette--but they are neither particularly scary nor particularly funny. The movie loses its sense of humor in the process as Jennifer starts to make eyes at Needy's boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons), who, like the Michael Cera character in Juno, is preternaturally considerate and sensible--thus pointing up the idea that girls aren't. Eventually, these two BFFs become locked in a death match for Chip's soul and the movie runs off the rails. If the movie has an unshakable core it's Fox, who personifies the horror movie cliche of deadly female sexuality with a lascivious enthusiasm that keeps the energy level high. The paradox of Jennifer as being both victim and victimizer isn't explored as wittily as one might hope, but Fox readily balances the various dramatic requirements. She affects the blank, self-serving demeanor of the girl who knows exactly what she wants and gives it unusual depth, especially when she's explaining to Needy how her new bloodlust shouldn't be an obstacle to their friendship. She even gives Needy a provocative face-chew just to prove she isn't in danger. Cold comfort. As Needy says, "Hell is a teenage girl." -PB

Cinema 11

Zombieland

TRumba

Shaun of the Dead effectively preempted the promising zombie parody genre, but still, it's surprising that there aren't more entries. This good-natured but limp attempt sets the fundamental dynamic of the zombie aesthetic and then adds a layer of smarmy humor that relies too much on the specific charms of its cast members. Woody Harrelson is the roughneck with a Twinkie jones who derives endless enjoyment thinking up new ways to off the undead (banjo to the back of the head?). After he joins up with Jesse Eisenberg, the neurotic college-age virgin with irritable bowel syndrome who narrates the story through the device of his own Rules for Surviving Zombieland, they are bamboozled out of their SUV and weapons by two sister grifters (Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin). More time is given over to this fitful and eventually dull four-way relationship than to creative zombie-killing, but at least it does lead to an encounter with a "big Hollywood star" that serves up the kind of dry self-deprecating humor that the movie needs more of.-PB

Now playing. In Korean (110 min.)
Cinema 42

Though Jackie Chan's Hollywood product pales in comparison with his classic Cantonese films, his great good humor can still lift junky action material, but he's just plain wrong for this comedy. As Bob Ho, a Chinese secret agent on loan to the CIA, Chan is forced to make googly eyes at Amber Valletta, 20 years his junior, playing a single mom who lives next door in a Southwest suburb. Gillian doesn't know Bob is a spy, and their romance is thoroughly despised by Gillian's son (Will Shadley) and teenage step-daughter (Madeline Carroll). So while Bob is busy flushing out some Russian bad guys, he's also trying to bond with Gillian's kids. As spy comedies goes, "Rocky and Bullwinkle" is high art compared to The Spy Next Door, but even the action scenes are flat and pokey. Moreover, Billy Ray Cyrus is on hand to drop in good old boy nuggets of wisdom. In the inevitable blooper reel that closes the film, Jackie is let off the hoo -RS

Now playing. In Korean (110 min.)
Cinema 42

Frozen		Seraphine

One of the small pleasures of horror movies is second-guessing the doomed characters, who know less about their fate than the audience does. Adam Green's efficient if necessarily limited shocker is almost completely played out on a ski lift that's been shut down for the week with three young people stranded in it, high above the ground. The three-way relationship is sketched quickly: two BFFs (Kevin Zegers, Shawn Ashmore) and a girlfriend (Emma Bell), whom the other guy doesn't like and wishes hadn't come. Of course, once the lift stops and all the lights start going out they all wish they hadn't come, and Green punishes them further in our eyes by laying the blame for their predicament on their youthful arrogance, which quickly gives way to panic as the night gets colder and the close proximity leads to even more acid recriminations. Though highly effective in creeping you out, this situation goes only so far, and before long souls are searched and blood is shed, neither of which compensates for being trapped for 90 minutes with these three assholes. -PB Opens Aug. 7 (93 min.) Cinema 25		Modern biopics tend to be hectic and dense. The beauty of Martin Provost's portrait of the early 20th century French painter Seraphine de Senlis (Yolande Moreau) is its leisurely pace, the way it allows the personality of the artist to develop in the viewer's mind rather than on the screen. Seraphine was a poor housekeeper who spent her evenings making pigments and painting pictures of flowers and fruits. Because of her compulsiveness, she comes across as developmentally disabled. Her main client, a landlady who thinks she knows art, looks down on her work, but a German art scholar (Ulrich Tukur) spending the summer in the landlady's quarters notices something wild and stimulating and becomes Seraphine's lifelong patron and promoter, though their relationship is interrupted by the First World War and then the Depression. She was briefly a minor star who couldn't handle the celebrity, and died in a mental institution, but Provost is less interested in where she ended up than in the process. This is a convincing exploration of the creative mind thanks to Moreau's appreciation of her character's delicate sensibility. -NV Opens Aug. 7. In French & German (126 min.) Cinema Iwanami Hall, Jimbocho (03-3262-5252)

LESSONS IN LIZARDRY
Even Vikings can change

How to Train Your Dragon

Directed by
Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois

Starring
Jay Baruchel & Gerard Butler

Opens Aug. 7 (98 minutes)

DreamWorks Animation has had to play catch-up with Pixar ever since its first big hit Shrek, and while it's done perfectly well at the box office it has yet to make the kind of creative breakthrough that would put it on the same level as its arch-rival. How to Train Your Dragon is a perfect example of the DreamWorks model, and while it's the best thing the studio has done since the first Madagascar, it still doesn't break the ceiling. Based on a children's book, Dragon takes place on a stumpy island inhabited by stereotypical Vikings, the kind with horned helmets, appropriated belligerence, and, for reasons that probably had more to do with casting than with verisimilitude, Scottish accents. The population is occasionally terrorized by dragons, who swoop down out of the sky to steal livestock and burn down a hut or two with their fiery breath. These attacks have given rise to a defensive culture of burly men who train to kill the various species of flying lizards. Hiccup (voice by Jay Baruchel) is the adolescent son of the island patriarch Stoick (Gerard Butler), who is resigned to the prospect that his son, an apprentice blacksmith, will never join the anti-dragon defense forces because he's so scrawny and inept. Hiccup desperately wants to please his father, and in a bid to prove his mettle during an attack he inadvertently causes even more destruction. Still bent on being a man, he clandestinely plans more assaults on dragons, using his brains rather than his brawn, and manages to fell a Night Fury, the most fearsome species, without anyone noticing. Prepared to finish the creature off, he instead feels sorry for it and nurses it back to health using technology, and in the process understands why dragons are attacking his island. As an archetype Hiccup is both familiar and foolproof: the clumsy, intelligent kid whose lame attempts to get with the program reveal, both to the audience and to himself, how bogus the program is. His main obstacle to self-realization isn't his imperious father but his peers, in particular Astrid (America Ferrera), the best teenage dragon fighter on the island. Hiccup has a crush on her, and it's only when he shows her the truth about dragons, during a marvelously choreographed flight over the island, that he can stand up for what he believes is true and right. The movie's mix of irreverent humor and self-actualization is closer in spirit to the Disney model than to the knockabout DreamWorks credo, and in that regard Dragon aims high and scores. The dragon itself is an even cuter version of Disney's Stitch, a character the two directors actually created. How anyone, even a hirsute Viking, could harm such an adorable creature is unfathomable. -PB

Cinema 32 50 57

Extraordinary Measures		Mental

Medical thrillers with dying children have their own Hollywood playbook, and while this earnest drama doesn't rewrite it, its didactic elements are rewarding. Brendan Fraser is a whiz kid pharmaceutical executive with two kids suffering from Pompe's disease, a muscular disability that usually kills its victims before they turn ten. John and his wife (Keri Russell) give their kids all the comforts they can afford (a lot, actually) and at night John searches the Internet for treatments. He eventually comes across Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford, in cantankerous mode), a university professor with a theory about the disease but no money to cover his research. John uses his business smarts to set up a foundation and convinces some venture capitalists to support it. In the end, the conflict is less about the disease--though there is a race-against-the-clock theme--than about the way money and time are allocated when creating and marketing a new drug. There's nothing here that a good documentary couldn't have done better, but it's nice when you leave a melodrama with more usable knowledge than you had when you arrived. -PB Now playing (105 min.) Cinema 9		Kazuhiro Soda is making his own claim to being the Frederick Wiseman of Japan. Just as the American auteur made a career inventing the rules of cinema verite and exposing the workings of U.S. institutions, Soda is, as he himself puts it, "pulling back the curtain" on the monoliths of Japan. 2006's Campaign was a surprisingly refreshing and engaging look at the LDP. Mental sees him delving into the world of mental health. He follows a handful of patients at the Chorale Okayama clinic. Unlike Wiseman, Soda lets his subjects talk directly to the camera. And talk they do. He gives them plenty of time to speak about their problems, tell the stories of their lives, and give human voices and faces to issues that are usually ignored or hidden from public view. All the stories are compelling. Some are devastating. But ultimately the viewer is left with a small window of understanding and identification with these brave individuals who could very well be friends or family going through similar struggles with mental illness -NV (135 min.) Now out on DVD with English subtitles.

Le grand alibi		Kamisama Help!

The French sure love Agatha Christie; so much so, in fact, that filmmaker Pascal Bonitzer has adapted The Hollow, one of the English author's Hercule Poirot novels, and removed the redoubtable Belgian sleuth. Apparently, his old world eccentricities wouldn't fit in with the new millennial eccentricities of the upper class types he's assembled for the film. The mystery takes place during a regular weekend soiree hosted by a prominent politician (Pierre Arditti) and his wife (Miou Miou) at their sprawling estate in a peaceful burg just outside of Paris. Among the guests is psychoanayst and serial womanizer Pierre Collier (Lambert Wilson), who is found dead. All fingers point to Collier's wife, Claire (Anne Consigny), who is discovered with, literally, the smoking gun in her hand. Dazed and confused, she denies being the culprit, of course, but everyone else seems to have an airtight alibi. Bonitzer does away with the light-hearted comedy that has characterized the most recent French adaptations of Christie in favor of more biting, caustic dialogue that exposes the hypocrisy of the snooty characters. -PB Now playing. In French (93 min.) Cinema 29		The title is the same as a hit song by the 1980s J-pop group Checkers, which gives some indication of the film's target audience. Singer Kazuki Kato plays Atsuo, a "horror planner" who comes to the abandoned Sato Gakuen for the purpose of turning it into a "haunted school" attraction. It turns out to be the easiest job he's ever had since exactly 25 years to the day before his visit a teacher committed a mass murder of students and staff. While checking out the custodian's office, Atsuo comes across a photo that contains an image of someone who looks just like him. The photo sets off a chain reaction that pulls Atsuo back to that bloody day, forcing him to relive it with the spirits of the dead, not to mention the killer and the force that possessed him to commit his bloody deed. This may sound like heavy-duty occult stuff, but Kamisama Help! is characterized as a "group comedy," with bumbling detectives, ghosts with bad memories, and people being chased for no clear reason. -- -PB Opens Aug. 7, late show. In Japanese (87 min.) Cinema 25

WIZ KID
When you say forever, you better mean it

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Directed by
Jon Turteltaub

Starring
Nicolas Cage & Jay Baruchel

Opens Aug. 13 (110 minutes)

Though it makes pains to distinguish sorcerers from wizards, Disney's new franchise wannabe obviously tries to take advantage of Potter fans' feeling of loss now that the series is drawing to a close. The Mouse House already has a claim on the title via the same-titled segment of Fantasia from 1940 wherein Mickey makes the mops and brooms do his work for him. In fact, that scene is recreated here when the college-age science-dork-turned-"Prime Merlinian" Dave (Jay Baruchel) has only fifteen minutes to clean up his mad scientist dungeon before a hot date shows up, and he get the mops and brooms to do the same thing, with similarly disastrous results. The moral of the Mickey short was that you should never try to worm out of your responsibilities, but the moral here is...nothing. Produced by the same team that put together the National Treasure movies, Sorcerer is mindless entertainment of a slightly higher order, but mindless nonetheless. A hurried preface tells of how in the eighth century the great sorcerer Merlin was beset by an evil counterpart, Morgana, who wanted to rule the world, and that one of his three apprentices, Horvath (Alfred Molina), betrayed Merlin and sided with Morgana, whose soul was locked into a doll by the other two, one of whom, Balthazar (Nicolas Cage), spends the next ten centuries looking for the chosen one who will be able to take his place and keep the world safe from the Morganas and Horvaths. Enter Dave, whose first encounter with the sorcerer at the age of ten leaves him so traumatized he has to change schools. Ten years later, they hook up again and Dave reluctantly agrees to be Balthazar's apprentice. The relationship is mostly played for laughs, with the master throwing arbitrary rules at the youngster, and the acolyte only getting with the magic program when he can find a way of explaining it through molecular physics. With Horvath at large and the soul of Morgana bursting to get out of her mini-crypt, Dave has to learn fast, and besides being frustrated by Balthazar's imperiousness ("so says the guy with the 300-year rawhide trench coat") he's trying to get in good with a blonde DJ (Teresa Palmer). Cage cedes the comedy stage to Baruchel, whose nerdy neediness seems second nature to him and thus comes off as pretty funny most of the time, even when it's overwhelmed by the special effects, which are pretty overwhelming. Too bad. Between Cage's heavy metal couture, Baruchel's whine act, and Horvath's own apprentice, a stuck-up, spiky-haired Brit who makes a tidy living as a casino magician, the movie gets by on making a point of not taking itself seriously at all. -PB

Cinema 60

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (c) Disney Enterprises & Jerry Bruckheimer Prod.

Movie Reviews by
Phil Brasor (PB)
R.Scott (RS)
Rachel Ferguson (RF)
Nicholas Vroman (NV)
Masako Tsubuku (MT)