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For the weekend beginning 14 February, here are the films in focus:
Jumper [rating: 4]
Jumper is junk, a halfway decent premise destroyed by some of the worst hiring choices in the history of motion picture personnel.
Casting is crucial to the success of a film. Just ask anyone who suffered through 2006’s god-awful (no pun intended) remake of The Omen. While audiences could live with Liev Schreiber as the Gregory Peck replacement - barely - in the modern day Antichrist thriller, Julia Stiles sunk every scene she was in. Like a teen mother trying to play grown up in a world where the rules of engagement are beyond her brief years, she diluted the danger in all facets of the copycat creep out. The same thing happens in the new sci-fi stinker Jumper. Between a bafflingly bad Hayden Christensen and a Stiles-like Rachel Bilson as his romantic interest, we wind up with fiction more specious than speculative. read full review…
Persepolis [rating: 9]
Persepolis is astonishing, a revelation realized in masterful monochrome strokes.
They say the best way to know any culture is through its art. It’s also possible to gain a similar perspective via its artists. Born before the revolution in Iran unseated the reigning Shah, Marjane Satrapi saw her parents idealism embraced, and then eradicated, by a movement meant to free the nation’s tyrannized people. The resulting Islamic fundamentalism, with its deference to Muslim law and chauvinistic ritual, drove Satrapi from her home. Years later, she would reflect on these massive cultural and personal changes in a series of graphic novels. Named Persepolis after the ancient capital of the Persian empire, the brave, original books have now been turned into an equally inventive film. Via stark, stylized animation, and a vignette oriented approach to narrative, we learn the shocking truth that not all rebellion serves the needs of the people. Sometimes, it’s merely change for the sake of same. read full review…
Other Releases - In Brief
The Spiderwick Chronicles [rating: 5]
The story of a supernatural world surrounding ours, a domain where fairies battle goblins for control over their magical reality should be stunning. Its scope should sweep us up in conflicts between good and evil, benefice and the baneful, culminating in the ultimate epic showdown. We should want to revisit this realm over and over again, constantly enraptured of the vision and viability it provides. Sadly, none of this occurs during the dysfunctional family film The Spiderwick Chronicles. Even with indie scribe John Sayles involved in the script, this uneven adaptation of all five books by Tony Diterlizzi and Holly Black is nothing more than CGI smoke and mirrors. The characters are flat, their motivations mired in mid-‘80s angst over divorce and parental abandonment, and the action starts up before the proper mythological foundation is formed. Perhaps for a demographic raised on Ritalin, an audience who needs something more than instant gratification out of the typical compliant cinema, this film will fly. Others will be hemmed in by the slipshod sketchiness of Mark Water’s direction and wonder where the awe went.
