Hollywood Waking Up -Three Big Openings

Hollywood is quietly revving its engine this weekend, sending some high profile movies out to theaters. All the press has been about Julia Roberts so called “comeback” in Duplicity, a double crossing corporate caper movie where Clive Owen (The International) plays her partner in crime and love interest. This film looks silly but it has been surprisingly well received by critics, and it was made by the guy who wrote Michael Clayton, so, pretty good pedigree. Also features Paul Giamatti (John Adams) and Tom Wilkinson (Michael Clayton and also John Adams, only he played Ben Franklin). Also hitting theaters is I Love You Man, a bromance movie about a guy (Paul Rudd) who is getting married and doesn’t have any best man candidates. So he sets out to find a new best friend. Depending on who you talk to, this is very funny, a romantic comedy turned inside out, or a routine buddy flick with lots of poop jokes. In fairness, most of the reviews have leaned towards funny. Finally, we have the latest Nicholas Cage outing, Knowing, where he plays a teacher who discovers that an elementary school time capsule may be predicting the future. Spooky. Actually, this one seems really silly (and critics have pretty much panned it; Roger Ebert being the notable exception, he thought it was great), but like a lot of Nicholas Cage pictures, it is scoring big at the box office, so, looks like a hit. All three of these pictures are playing in a whole lot of theaters so you should be able to find one near you.

"Knowing" Too Much

Quite possibly the wackiest movie I have ever seen. It opens in a grade school classroom in 1959, where eager students are drawing pictures that are destined to be sealed up in a time capsule – except one little girl, Lucinda, isn’t drawing pictures at all: she is frantically covering her page with neat rows of numbers. Flash forward fifty years, the time capsule is opened and a boy named Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) takes home Lucinda’s strange writings. This turns out to be a good thing, because Caleb’s dad is John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), an astrophysicist who spends nights pacing his living room, drinking scotch, and mourning the tragic death of his wife; during one of these reveries he takes a look at the mysterious page Caleb brought home, and notices a series of numbers that seem to predict 9/11. Sensing significance, Koestler frantically tries to follow Lucinda’s strange trail, suspecting it warns of some kind of global catastrophe.

From here the film careens down a completely implausible course, with John Koestler roaring around trying to solve the numbers riddle while Caleb stares soulfully about, apparently unperturbed by his father’s growing terror. They find Lucinda’s daughter and granddaughter (this is where Rose Byrne comes in) , providing a kind of love interest thing for both father and son; they encounter strange glowing men who whisper, and there are these shiny black rocks everywhere that seem to have no meaning at all. But in spite of the silliness I enjoyed this movie. It’s fast paced and unpredictable, and not at all serious, and if you accept the premise that a little girl’s crazed scribbling might harbinger the future, the rest of the story makes a kind of nutty sense, except the ending, where it seemed like the writer lost his train of thought and started working on another film. Playing everywhere and making lots of money, as Nic Cage pictures tend to do.

Fun at Work: Sunshine Cleaning

Sunshine Cleaning is a goofy movie but it’s fun to watch. Amy Adams plays a former high school hot shot who finds herself in a dead end job with a dead end romance, trying to raise a troubled child on a shoestring budget. Humiliated by her situation – especially when she runs into better off high school cronies – she decides to reinvent herself and comes up with the idea of crime scene cleanups. With little real knowledge of what her new career entails, she jumps in, dragging her deadbeat little sister (Emily Blunt) along to help her.

There are many interesting directions this plot line could take and Sunshine Cleaning pretty much misses all of them. What’s left is not always that interesting; in fact some of the big developments of the story are pretty silly. But Emily Blunt and Any Adams are so engaging it doesn’t matter. This is lighthearted entertainment with a little bit of an edge, a welcome shift from the dark themes of a lot of recent releases (Watchmen, anyone?). Wonderful supporting performances from Mary Lynn Rajskub (“Chloe” if you’re a 24 fan) and Clifton Collins, best known as the killer Truman Capote fancied in Capote. The kid (Jason Spevack) is good too, toeing a fine line between brattiness and innocence. Nominated for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance. Rated R for a handful of stomach turning moments connected to the whole crime scene cleanup thing (there is no real gore in this picture) and some sex and drugs. Currently in very limited release, opening a little wider on March 20.

Dark Side: The Watchmen

The Watchmen is a film noir comic book gore fest, with sex. Set in the 1980’s, it imagines a world where the United States and the Soviet Union are on the verge of a nuclear showdown, and humankind is terrified. But, reassuringly, America has a convincing deterrent: a big blue guy named Dr. Manhattan, the only true superhero among The Watchmen; he experienced some kind of a nuclear accident that made him godlike. And he’s on our side! Or is he? Can a big blue guy who exists in a quantum universe outside of time really be invested in the people of planet Earth?

The rest of the Watchmen gang are superheroes in the Batman mode: regular people who are in really good shape. The best of them is Jackie Earle Hayley, and whenever he is on screen the energy, action, everything picks up. He plays Rorschach, the guy with the weird face mask that looks like a big sock with morphing patches of ink spreading across his features. I liked him better, though, when he took the mask off. Not an imposing presence, he’s a little guy wired up like a ticking bomb, and no matter how many linebacker sized thugs he faces down, his expression is slightly impatient, slightly amused, never afraid.

The Watchmen has a paper thin plot with a twist at the end that is only surprising if you’ve never seen a movie like this before. It’s not as visually arresting as 300 or Sin City, and it’s not as much fun as Iron Man or Dark Knight. And it is very, very gory; lots of disturbing images that don’t add up to much, plot wise. But if you have a strong stomach, and you’re looking for some late winter escapist action, this movie will do. Playing all over the place, won the box office on its opening weekend but lost the second round to Race to Witch Mountain. Huh.

On a Dramatic Note: Two Lovers

Small, intimate drama with a performance by Joaquin Phoenix that is so fresh and intriguing I found myself hoping, early on, that this isn’t really his last film. Phoenix plays Leonard, a youngish man with a broken heart who survives a suicide attempt, and then moves in with his parents to recuperate. They introduce him to Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of a business partner, a young woman who sees Leonard’s pain and wants to save him from it. Leonard, meanwhile, is falling for his neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) an unpredictable, childlike woman who is only looking for a friend.

While this is the story of a love triangle it is not the kind Hollywood usually spins; this isn’t Sabrina, for example, where the heroine finally learns that glitz and glamour are not substitutes for love. Two Lovers is more like a coming of age story for people in their thirties. These characters are confronted by their lives and they have to decide what to do about it. It’s refreshing, and honest, but also kind of grim and claustrophobic; it’s hard to see any real happiness on the characters’ collective horizons. Nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which is a pretty big deal, and it has been generally well reviewed. Performances are terrific, including Isabella Rossellini popping up as Leonard’s mother. (Have you seen Blue Velvet, people? Who ever thought Dorothy Vallens could morph into a Jewish mother from the Bronx?) Currently in limited release around the country, mostly big cities.