Year: 2005

Or, if a trip to Orlando is too much hassle, just pop into *Memoirs of a Geisha,* cuz it’s totally, like, Japanesey. Except what’s *really* cool is that it’s like those all-you-can-eat Asian buffets, where they’ve got a little bit of chow mein and a little bit of tempura — mmm, deep-fried — but nothing, like, too strange and yucky like sushi. Like, it’s Asian enough to be cool, like Hello Kitty, but not so alien that you’re like, Huh?

Look, tickets for *The Producers* on Broadway while Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick were starring in it were something like $125, and that’s before all the service charges and handling fees and ‘donations’ to theater restoration funds and taxes and a $12.50 glass of wine at intermission. And that was if you could get them. The demand to see these two do Mel Brooks was obscene, so even if you didn’t blanch at the price of admission, you still might not have had the opportunity to check them out.

So this is the one, after *The Lord of the Rings,* that, if you’re any kind of proper geek at all, you’ve been looking forward to with a mixture of glee and dread, counting the ways it could all go wrong and dreaming of the ways it could all go right. I mean, they gave it to the guy who made the *Shrek* flicks, and the *Shrek*s are great but they’re *goofy* and Narnia isn’t, and then there were rumors that the allegory would be removed from the film, which is of course not only wrong but impractical: How do you remove the allegory, the unspoken symbolic stuff lurking behind a story, without completely changing the story beyond recognition?

Look, I’m stretching to find something positive to say about *Aeon Flux* cuz I really wanted to like it. Even after the very bad sign of it not being screened in advance for critics. Cuz Charlize keeps growing on me, and you can see that she approached this babe from the world of animation with the right mix of seriousness and silliness, like she wants to do the character justice but recognizes at the same time how silly she really is. Cuz director Karyn Kusama clearly has a flair for cinematic style and visual elan. Cuz I’ve finally pretty much decided, after a lot of vacillating through a lot of movies, that I *like* Marton Csokas, and he doesn’t sneer so much here as he usually does, which is a good thing — he’s got a great and genuine *smile,* it turns out.

I have a sneaking suspicion that *First Descent* is a huge put-on, the latest jape from Christopher Guest and his merry band of mockumentary tricksters. Oh, sure, ‘Kemp Curley and Kevin Harrison’ are credited as the producers and directors, but come on: everyone knows that Kemp Curley was the missing Stooge. It’s a joke.

It’s almost like theater, these nine short, interconnected one-act plays that unfold in real time in long, uncut single takes: writer-director Rodrigo Garcia, who’s mostly directed for TV, adopts the urgency and the immediacy of the stage by eschewing the tricks of film and setting his extraordinary cast free in front of the camera. Nine … more…