Hancock

Directed by
Peter Berg

Starring
Will Smith & Charlize Theron

Opens Aug. 30 (92 minutes)

As this summer of non-stop superhero blockbusters has shown, high concept has its limits. Hancock means to be both an antidote to the genre and a tongue-in-cheek parody of it, but it still reeks of conference-call give-and-take. You may already know the concept: Will Smith plays the titular superhero, who is so bummed by his responsibility that he spends most of his time passed out drunk on various bus stop benches in downtown Los Angeles. He rouses himself when bad guys do their thing, and while he saves the day he usually causes millions of dollars in damage, thus inviting the ire of the populace he feels beholden to help. There's no love lost. Hancock curses out little tow-headed boys as readily as he flies through the air (albeit shakily). However, after he saves Ray (Jason Bateman), a freelance PR may, from an oncoming train he receives thanks rather than invective. In fact, Ray wants to help the supertramp improve his image. "It's not a crime to be an asshole," Ray tells him, "but it is counterproductive." Contrary to the rep most people in his profession carry, Ray really is an altruist. "He's the Bono of PR," is how a colleague describes him, which is why Ray has a lot of trouble drumming up business. But the reluctant Hancock is his redemption. He talks the big guy into giving himself up and going to prison, with the understanding that once crime increases in his absence, the police will ask for his release, and then he can do the superhero thing right. Concept-wise, this isn't bad, since it allows director Peter Berg to bust the hoariest of superhero cliches. But there is a ringer in the form of Ray's wife Mary (Charlize Theron), who seems antagonistic toward Hancock. In turn, Hancock is attracted to Mary, which is natural given her looks, but there's something else unexplained. The promising parody aspects give way to an origin story that spoils the movie's air of relaxed unseriousness with the same old epic save-the-world bullshit. Berg's patented handheld style, which has kept the movie more or less grounded in a pseudo-reality, is traded in for the usual wide screen blockbuster psychedelia--freak thunderstorms, massive explosions, entire buildings destroyed. Smith has been known to save such movies from themselves, but he seems perplexed by his character once that character achieves self-awareness. He just turns to stone. Theron doesn't quite hold the movie up, but she maintains her initial air of mystery with striking facility. Bateman deserves more credit. Ray is the real superhero, and Bateman's sly, self-deprecating manner is so likable you wish the movie were really about Ray instead of Hancock. When they make The Bono Story, you know who to call. -PB

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"Hancock" (c) 2008 Sony Pictures Entertainment

Tokyo!

Directed by
Michel Gondry, Leos Carax & Bong Joon-ho

Starring
Denis Lavant & Ayako Fujitani

Now playing. In Japanese & French (110 minutes)

It's an interesting idea: Ask three prominent non-Japanese art house directors to submit a short film set in Tokyo, with the city as its theme. And while the half-hour format allows the directors greater depth than the five minutes allotted to the international group of filmmakers who did something similar in Paris, je t'aime, those directors dealt with Paris on its own terms--or, at least, on terms they understood. Michel Gondry's film does address the peculiar socioeconomic issues that newcomers to Tokyo face, but Leos Carax's mock-apocalyptic could really be set in any city, and Bong Joon-ho's contribution seems more about Japan than Tokyo. Frenchman Gondry's "Interior Design" revolves around a young couple (Ryo Kase, Ayako Fujitani) who come to the capital to stay with a school friend (Ayumi Ito) in her cramped apartment while he tries to attract interest in his experimental film. The couple quickly outstays their welcome, but it is the female half who attracts the backstabbing comments, which refer to her as a hanger-on ("She's just the girlfriend") while he is an artist trying to be creative. Still, she's the one who has to find an apartment and a job. Eventually, she is so defeated by her status as "the furniture" that she literally turns into a piece of one. Carax's "Merde" takes its fantasy allusions more seriously. Basically a takeoff on "Godzilla," the film posits a foreigner phantom (Denis Levant) who occasionally emerges from the sewers, stinking and incoherent, to terrorize the good citizens of Tokyo with his abominable manners. It's a cute idea that expats will probably find amusing for a minute and which is drawn out inexplicably with a trial and some philosophical ramblings that attempt to poke fun at Japanese people's push-pull xenophobia. The protagonist of Korean helmer Bong's "Shaking Tokyo" is a man living on a fixed income in a small house. Bong means to comment on the rise of "hikikomori"--agoraphobes who refuse to leave their rooms and usually live off their families. The man here (Teruyuki Kagawa) is older than most hikikomori, and his life is characterized by routine rather than fear of the outside. His only exterior connection is the pizza delivery person who brings him his sustenance. The routine is presented in a mock-ironic tone and Bong gets a lot of visual mileage out of the stacks of pristine pizza boxes. Everything is shaken up when the man finds himself attracted to a new deliveryperson who happens to be a young woman (Yu Aoi). Attempting to make contact with her again, he ends up breaking his routine and leaving the confines of his house, only to discover the streets are empty. One can draw numerous conclusions from this allegory but none would be original. -PB

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"Tokyo!" (c) 2008 Tokyo!

Into the Wild

Directed by
Sean Penn

Starring
Emile Hirsch & Catherine Keener

Opens Sept. 6 (148 minutes)

It's hard to be untouched by director Sean Penn's engagement with the hero of his latest movie. In the early 90s, Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch), just out of college and destined for Harvard Law School, cut all ties with the material world, not to mention his family and friends, and embarked on a two-year long hobo odyssey across the Western United States that ended up in the Alasakan wilderness, where he eventually died of starvation. This true story was given an epic treatment by writer Jon Krakauer, whose book Penn based his screenplay on, but Penn goes further than Krakauer, who didn't feel comfortable second guessing McCandless's reasons. Penn not only admires what the 22-year-old did, but appears to envy him the purity of his purpose and the strength of his convictions, and the most salient feature of his movie is McCandless's almost zen-like self-knowledge. It's a difficult concept to put across, and will likely repel as many viewers as it enchants. Penn received the cooperation of McCandless's parents (played by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden), whom the director cruelly sets up as the representatives of all that McCandless rejected when he gave away his money and burned his social security card. In flashbacks narrated by McCandless's sister, Carine (Jena Malone), we learn of their knock-down, drag-out marriage as well as Walt McCandless's infidelity and the notion that Chris might have been a bastard. Penn conceives the parents as middle class drudges, he a conservative stick-in-the-mud, she an image-conscious harpie. In contrast, Chris can't help but come across as the wounded martyr fixing to make the universe right. "You're not Jesus, are you?" says an old hippie (Brian Dierker) who, along with his mate, Jan (Catherine Keener), picks Chris up hitchhiking and marvels at his self-possession and the way he's taken Thoreau's dictum ("kill the false being within") to heart. When he meets them they are ruined by boredom and self-doubt; when he departs, they're having good sex again. He may not be Jesus, but he's definitely good for the soul. The trouble is, Chris seems to have this therapeutic-by-example effect on everyone he meets, from a spaced out Danish couple tramping through the Grand Canyon to a wheat farmer (Vince Vaughan) who has issues with the law and on to an elderly widower (Hal Holbrook) who has rejected the world without really knowing it. Through it all, Chris spouts his book-derived platitudes and sets his sights on the only place where he believes his being makes sense--the virgin wilderness, where there are no people at all. By the time he figures out that it was his relationship with others that defined his value in the world it's too late. Penn never seems to realize it. -PB

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"Into the Wild" (c) 2007 River Road Entertainment & Paramount Vantage.

The Fall

Directed by
Tarsem

Starring
Lee Pace & Catinca Untaru

Opens Sept. 9 (118 minutes)

Based on an obscure Romanian film from the early 1980s, the second feature of noted TV commercial and music video director Tarsem is strange enough to qualify as middlebrow European art house cinema, but the director's notorious affection for eye-popping visuals make The Fall something else entirely. The weird black-and-white opening credit sequence indicates some sort of catastrophe taking place on a railroad bridge involving a horse and a man who have fallen off into the river below. We eventually come to meet this man, Roy (Lee Pace), recovering from his injuries in a Los Angeles area hospital circa 1915. It turns out he's a stunt man and apparently was trying to impress his girlfriend, the lead actress in a movie they were making, when the accident occurred. However, he isn't the only person in the hospital recovering from a fall. In the children's wing is a five-year-old Romanian immigrant girl, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), who tumbled from a ladder while picking oranges with her mother and siblings. Her arm is only broken, but Ray may be paralyzed. A note that the little girl tries to pass to a nurse is intercepted by Roy, who soon starts entertaining her with stories about Alexander the Great and pirates. Because Alexandria's command of English is incomplete (though still pretty impressive for a five-year-old of any nationality), the stories enter her consciousness in ways unintended by their teller. When Roy includes an "Indian and his squaw" in the story, Alexandria imagines an East Indian, since there was one in the orchard crew where she worked. Tarsem alternates this child's eye view of Roy's tale with the goings-on at the hospital, and gradually we come to see not only the ways the two protagonists' minds work, but Roy's ulterior motive in telling the story. The plot development is melodramatic and a bit farfetched, but because Tarsem is so successful in presenting this time and place as being removed from our own the romanticism holds. Roy is heartbroken, and sees only one solution, a solution that takes advantage of a little girl's trust and innocence. Because Untaru is herself untrained and of Romanian background, her line readings are the most startlingly true things in the film. She responds like a child, naturally, but her actions are in perfect sync with Tarsem's purposes. The conversations between Roy and Alexandria have a beautiful rhythm, and once we learn their true meaning, Roy's deception seems all the more desperate, and unforgivable. If only the fantasy sequences revealed as much. Tarsem famously spent his own money traveling the world for these impressive vistas and bizarre locations. It's impressive and distracting, since the thrust of Roy's tale is important but Tarsem seems only interested in the visual impact. -PB

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"The Fall" (c) 2006 Googly Films, LLC

Opens Aug. 16 (99 min.)
Cinema 11
What Happens in Vegas (c) 2008 Twentieth Century Fox Ent.

Wanted

Directed by
Timur Bekmambetov

Starring
ames McAvoy & Angelina Jolie

Opens Sept. 20 (110 minutes)

At this point, few people seem to be happily anticipating another Will Ferrell sports farce: Semi-Pro did decidedly worse than past entries in the mini-genre, at least in the U.S. Interestingly, his last movie, Blades of Glory, earned unexpectedly well in Japan considering that all Ferrell's previous films went straight to DVD here. Semi-Pro is darker than most Ferrell comedies, and while the surplus of foul language isn't going to make that much difference in Japan, the cynicism displayed by Ferrell's character, Jackie Moon, might turn people off. In the past, Ferrell played innocents: men who were pompous and full of themselves but never venal. Moon, the owner-player-coach of the Flint, Michigan Tropics, a franchise of the now defunct American Basketball Association, puts more effort into promoting games than he does making his team competitive. He bought it with the windfall he made from a soul-funk single that went to number one nationally. His band of losers recognizes Jackie's dishonesty but go along with it until the ABA, never a serious threat to the NBA, decides in 1976 to fold. The NBA says it will absorb the best four teams, which means Jackie has to whip his into shape if he's going to hang on to it, and so he trades the team's washing machine for ex-Celtic Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson), himself a bit washed up. At this point, the movie takes on all the cliches of the classic underdog sports melodrama, and while farcical purposes make that tolerable, it never quite lives up to the potential indicated in the first half. For one thing, screenwriter Scot Armstrong has obviously been ordered to include one outrageous skit every ten minutes to exploit Ferrell's peculiar brand of self-deprecating slapstick, and the strain of coming up with something fresh shows: jumping bikini-clad girls Evel Knievel-style on roller skates; wrestling bears; the most painful puking scene ever conceived. Armstrong shows heart and talent with the rest of the characters, and the actors fill them out with more wit than Ferrell does his. Andre Benjamin, with his marvelous low voice, plays the team's star shooter, Coffee Black, as a kind of diminished Stagger Lee manque. Will Arnett and Andrew Daly play the local radio commentators, who adroitly exchange soused misanthropy and gee-whiz earnestness. But the real star of the movie is Harrelson, who perfectly underplays Monix's jaded mien. Even when he's called on to carry the movie's faux-sentimental baggage by acting as the team's conscience, he makes the ploy sincere without rendering it mawkish. He's the perfect straight man for Ferrell. Unfortunately, Ferrell never steps up to it. Semi-Pro would have been a better, much funnier movie without him. -PB

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Semi-Pro (c) 2008 New Line Productions

Youth Without Youth

Directed by
Francis Ford Coppola

Starring
im Roth & Alexandra Maria Lara

Opens Aug. 30 (124 minutes)

It goes without saying that a movie about a Romanian professor trying in vain to write a book about "the origin of language and human consciousness" isn't going to set hearts afire in multiplexes, even if it is directed by Francis Ford Coppola. With his post-Apocalypse Now track record being what it is, Coppola can do anything he wants without any serious damage being done to his reputation. Jack already did that. Nevertheless, Youth Without Youth is intriguing if only for its intellectual ambition. Based on a novella by philosopher Mircea Eliade, the film tells the story of 70-year-old Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), who, on the eve of World War II, has determined his great tome will never be realized and thus decides to commit suicide. On his way to his maker--on Easter Sunday, no less--he is struck by lightning, and during his convalesence he miraculously reverts to the health and vigor of a 40-year-old. His doctor (Bruno Ganz) tries to keep his patient out of the hands of the encroaching Nazis, who would like to learn the secret of Dr. Matei's rejuvenation. Matei escapes into Switzerland where he continues his studies with a marvelous new revelation: not only is he younger, but he has somehow gained the ability to absorb information at will and induce others to do what he wants them to do. He has also produced a double who is more ambitious than his original self and who propels the book project with greater force. Matei is the Jason Bourne of middle European eggheads. Coppola plays up the occult aspects of this tale with low-key photographic effects that make it seem as if this stuff is not being imagined. However, things get weird once Matei encounters a young woman (Alexandra Maria Lara) who herself has been struck by lightning and who bears a remarkable resemblance to the only woman he ever loved. The effect on this woman is just the opposite: She starts spouting gibberish that turns out to be Sanskrit, a language she doesn't know, and Matei theorizes she is channeling the spirit of an Indian princess. What's more, she starts to age rapidly as her channelings travel back in time. Such a resource is invaluable to Matei's work, but since he's fallen in love with the woman the matter of exploitation comes up. The fact that we couldn't care less attests to Coppola's failure to grasp this material in a way that's dramatically compelling. Some critics have found parallels between Matei's quest for enlightenment and Copolla's frantic attempts to regain his mojo, but it's hard to imagine that he thinks this movie qualifies as redemption. It seems like a cosmic goof, and if you approach it that way from the get-go, you might find it entertaining. -PB

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"Youth Without Youth" (c) 2007 American Zoetrope, Inc.