Beverly Hills Chihuahua

Posted on March 3, 2009 at 7:08 am

A pampered pooch goes on an unexpected adventure but just about everything else in this movie is only too predictable. Drew Barrymore provides the voice for Chloe, a cashmere couture and diamond collar-clad chihuahua. She enjoys the high life with her wealthy owner, Viv (Jamie Lee Curtis), with a full schedule of shopping and parties. But then Viv’s niece Rachel (Piper Perabo) loses Chloe in Mexico and it will require the help of humans and dogs and even a rat and an iguana to get her safely home.

The protected princess must find her way in a world that is dirty and scary but also exciting. She is chased by bad guys with a scary Doberman named Diablo (voice of Edward James Olmos) and tricked by thieves (a rat voiced by Cheech Marin and an iguana voiced by Paul Rodriguez). But she is befriended by a brave German Shepard (voice of Andy Garcia). And her friends come to the rescue: Rachel and Sam, Viv’s handsome landscaper (Colombian actor Manolo Cardona), and Sam’s lion-hearted chihuahua Papi (voice of George Lopez), with the help of Officer Ramirez (Mexican actor Jesus Ochoa).

The trailer makes it look like a light-hearted doggie fish out of water story with a Busby Berkeley-esque musical number that does not appear in the film. Instead it is a lazy strung-together series of sketchy episodes — oh! the sheltered darling got all muddy and lost a bootie! Dear me, the alabaster goddess is surrounded by brown dogs with accents! Will Delgado desert her? Will Diablo catch her? Will Rachel and Sam start to like each other?

A wide range of outstanding Latino performers does not keep this film from an overlay of condescension and caricature. The jokes about couture and beauty treatments and Rachel’s mistaking the landscaper for a non-English-speaking gardener will not mean anything to the film’s target audience of young children. They will enjoy the cute pooches and “tinkle” humor but may be frightened by the mean Doberman and dog-napping bad guys.

It’s a messy, lackluster movie that feels like it was put together by a committee, product, not story, with a soundtrack of over-played, over-familiar, all-but-inevitable radio favorites. Could Cheech Marin ever have predicted that he would once again appear in a movie that features his signature song, “Low Rider,” and that it would be such a dog?

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Body of Lies

Posted on February 17, 2009 at 7:00 am

Once movie spies were sleek and cool and impeccably dressed. They were devil-may-care, they had joie de vivre, they seemed to know everything, and they were unstoppable. The bad guys had endless money to spend on sociopathic sidekicks and elaborate contraptions. Most important, the bad guy/good guy lines were as clearly outlined as the crease in their perfectly pressed trousers.

But that was a long time ago. In Ridley Scott’s latest spy thriller everyone is tired, everyone is unsure, and everyone on both sides is morally compromised.

Back home in Washington, the CIA’s Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe with 30 extra pounds and a cell phone earpiece permanently in place) sees and hears everything through surveillance screens and computers. While top agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is dodging bombs and bullets, Hoffman calmly purrs directions. Ferris promises a frantic Arab linguist escape to America. Hoffman says no. The linguist is killed. On to the next scrimmage.

There is a brief, clumsy attempt to make a larger point here about America, but it does not help. The movie has the fungible quality of the kind of book you buy for an airplane trip and toss as soon as you arrive. Crowe’s weight gain has no purpose. It seems like a distracting stunt. DiCaprio is, as always, focused and diligent, but his character is all surface. That is convenient in a spy, who must be able to blend in seamlessly, but dull for the audience. That leaves us with some competently-staged action sequences and one electric performance that just provides further contrast with the uninspired tone of the rest of the film. British actor Mark Strong plays Hani, the local head of intelligence, with silky assurance. His expression as he talks to Ferris conveys more about what America does not know about the intricacies and persistence of Middle Eastern conflicts than all of the bluster and blow-ups of this forgettable film.

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Action/Adventure Crime Drama

Push

Posted on February 5, 2009 at 6:00 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, brief strong language, smoking and a scene of teen drinking
Profanity:	Brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Teen drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense peril and violence
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	February 6, 2009

If you add up all the recent movies about ordinary-looking people who walk among us with special hidden powers, you might conclude that there are no normal people left. The accountant next door might be a secret mutant, time traveler, mythological character or cyborg, but he is rarely just an accountant.

“Push” is the latest in this genre, and director Paul McGuigan has learned from and built upon many of the films that have gone before. “Push” offers a whole bestiary of people born with special talents, including Movers, Shifters, Pushers, Sniffers, Bleeders and Watchers. Some of their talents are familiar– Watchers, for example, seem to be your standard clairvoyants. But others, such as Bleeders, are a little further off the beaten track: they scream at an ear shattering, brain-pulping pitch.

The mutants in Push are pursued by a nefarious government agency called “The Division” which wants to harness their powers and exploit them for military purposes. Those who are fortunate enough to avoid being locked up in a prison hospital and subjected to horrendous medical experiments go underground in remote locations in an effort to escape detection by the authorities. The movie opens as Nick Gant, a young boy with the telekinetic powers of a “Mover,” watches his father being murdered by agents of the Division. Gant’s father’s last desperate words to his son are a prediction that some day a girl in need of help will come to him with a flower. Years later, our hero has grown into a young man (Chris Evans) who is hiding out in Hong Kong to stay one step ahead of the agents who killed his father. Lo and behold, he is approached by a young girl with a flower, Cassie Holmes (Dakota Fanning) who is another type of mutant– a “Watcher” who draws pictures of the future, and the two are off and running on an adventure to find the secret suitcase and bring down the evil “Division.”

This movie is a fast moving, erratic combination of clever and cliche, of imaginative visuals and unbearably corny dialogue. There are innovative moments, such as a shoot-out in a restaurant between telekinetically manipulated guns hovering in the air, or a chase through a Hong Kong shop filled with huge fish tanks where the screams of “Bleeders” cause the fish in the tanks to burst into red blossoms. On the other hand, sometimes the lines of dialogue are so awful that the screaming of the Bleeders seems like a welcome relief.

One of the best parts is the backdrop of Hong Kong — old shops and winding streets with ancient musicians playing traditional instruments and house boats on the dock — which proves more interesting than some imaginary alien planet. It may be better than the average mutant-next-door movie, even if it doesn’t have any hidden special powers.

City of Ember

Posted on January 20, 2009 at 6:00 pm

Under the earth’s surface for so long they have forgotten how and why they got there and even that there is another place to be, the citizens of the City of Ember have just about lost their sense of hope, of wonder, of imagination, and adventure. On “assignment day” kids pick their careers out of a hat. The idea of special interest, curiosity, or competence never comes up. And neither does the idea of creating or improving anything. All of the jobs that occupy the time of the citizens of Ember are about maintenance. All of the clothes, all of the infrastructure, everything is made from broken pieces of other things. Decay and breakdown pervade everything. Learning, reading, and creating, are ideas that have just about disappeared.

There is a genial but disengaged mayor (Bill Murray). Everyone seems to accept everything the way it is except for two kids, Lena (Saoirse Ronan), who lives with her dotty grandmother and little sister, and Doon (Harry Treadaway). Together, they race to solve the mystery of how their city was created before it becomes uninhabitable.

An almost Junior Great Books version of Brazil, this is a gorgeously imagined and visually sumptuous but still bleak and dystopic vision. In most stories featuring young lead characters, at some point they consult with a wise older person or get help from an adult. But here all of the other characters, the adults and even Lena’s little sister all seem oddly passive and disconnected and the kids are on their own. It does not have the brightness and energy of many films for this age group, and that may take some getting used to for kids used to a lot of flash.

But like a good book, it rewards patience and thoughtful attention. As with Wallâˆ™E, some audience members will complain that this film is a one-sided and thinly-veiled allegory about current controversies or that it promotes rebellion. But that a very superficial mis-reading of the movie’s message, which is about the much more important and much more fundamental importance of independent thinking and not being satisfied with the status quo. In a time where both candidates for President are competing to persuade voters which will be the most effective in bringing change, it is an important reminder that we can all find ways to make things better.

Eagle Eye

Posted on December 23, 2008 at 8:02 am

A promising premise, some intense action, and a lively appearance by Billy Bob Thornton might have been enough to squeak this one by as a summer movie but when the days grow shorter and the wind blows chill we ask for a little more in our movies and this one does not make it.

The always-appealing Shia LaBeouf plays Jerry Shaw, whose job as a “copy associate” requires him to greet customers, “Welcome to Copy Cabana; how can I help you?” He is behind on his rent and gets an “insufficient funds” notice when he visits the ATM. After his brother’s funeral, he suddenly has three-quarters of a million dollars and an apartment full of weapons. And then he gets a cell phone call telling him that the FBI will arrive in 30 seconds to arrest him and he needs to run. He stays put, the FBI arrives, and he finds himself being interrogated by Agent Tom Morgan (Thornton). He gets another call with instructions to escape and this time, there is no alternative. Meanwhile, Rachel, a young single mother (Michele Monaghan) who has just put her little boy on a train trip to Washington with his school band, gets a call with instructions, too, threatening to kill her son unless she goes along. They meet (“Who are you and why are people shooting at us?”).

Pretty soon, they’re on the road together, doing that bickering/personal revelation/impressing each other/building trust dance amidst chases, explosions, and shoot-outs, with Agent Morgan and an investigator from the Air Force (Rosario Dawson) on the trail.

I’m always up for a good paranoid thriller, and these days the incursions on privacy from both increased technological capability and Patriot Act-era transparency provide some plausible and nicely creepy possibilities to explore. What if someone could track all of our conversations, even when our phones were off and process all of the data stored about us, our families, and our friends, at work, at the bank, at the insurance company, in the IRS files. It turns the enemy into something between Hannibal Lecter, the Borg, and the Terminator, with resistance futile in the face of such an implacable and all-knowing foe.

So far, so good. There are some inventively staged moments, especially one that looks like a live-action variation of the climax from “Monsters Inc” with a chase scene in an airport cargo conveyor system. Thornton brings some twisty humor (and, given the variation in quality, his skill as a writer to his own dialogue) to the story. But the thinness of the premise and the even greater thinness of the characterizations kick in and it all begins to fall apart. I can’t really explain how dumb the resolution is without spoilers, so I am invoking the legendary “Gothika Rule” and will give away the surprise ending to anyone who sends me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com. Let me just say that it doesn’t take an eagle eye to figure it all out.

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“Gothika Rule” Action/Adventure