reviews

It’s *Seabiscuit* on ice as the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team gets immortalized on film with warm, fuzzy, ain’t-America-grand, flag-waving apple-piety. Times were tough and things were bad and the world looked like it was going to hell, and gosh darn but didn’t the country need this little pick-me-up in the form of twenty redblooded American kids beating and skating the crap out of the Russians and taking home the gold.

Hide the children! Bring in the dog! Lock the doors! No, it’s not Janet Jackson’s nipple, it’s penises. More than one of them. And breasts and pubic hair. And teenagers having sex. And masturbating. And smoking! And drinking. And engaging in acts of civil disobedience.

Loves me some Owen Wilson, so why wouldn’t I find *The Big Bounce* at least mildly diverting? And I do, but it’s as instantly forgettable as… as… as that other thing I can’t remember. I’m not sure I can even remember this movie — what was it called again? Something about Hawaii and a big scam and a great cast… but who were they? What were they doing? Who am I, and why am I here?

If there’s one thing that *The Perfect Score* is really good at, it’s at pointing out what a wonder Scarlett Johansson is, how she’s just *there* all the time, how she delivers even seemingly undeliverable lines like she really believes them. This is achieved through placing her next to actors for whom these things are mostly not true, actors who range from I’m Trying Really Really Hard, Can’t You Tell? to If I Can Just Say These Lines Without Tripping Over Myself, They’ll Give Me A Big Paycheck.

These movies, they just make it so damn easy. Do they realize that? A pseudohorrorific, semipsychologicamical flick about going back in time and erasing the bad things that’ve happened? About fixing the world and making it right if only you can prevent Awful Thing X from happening? About getting your memories rewritten so that you’ve always lived in a world where Awful Thing X never happened? Gosh, the reviews practically write themselves: My life was fine and dandy until I saw that Ashton Kutcher movie, oh if I could only rewind my life to the moment before the lights went down, I could save the world!

In 1985, two young British mountain climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, took a dangerous shot at an unconquered Andean peak, and it nearly killed both of them. Their story, legendary in mountaineering circles, now comes to the big screen in Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald’s remarkable “dramatized documentary.” You’re probably thinking the same thing I … more…

The standard I-gotta-be-me theme and Broadway-show packaging of Disney’s animated output gets a snarky makeover in this sporadically amusing big-screen adaptation of the Emmy-award winning Saturday-morning toon, though there’s a weirdly disconcerting moment for every chuckle. Spot (voice by Nathan Lane: Nicholas Nickleby, with an infectious mania) is a cute blue dog with aspirations beyond … more…

Made in Tehran by an Iranian director, Crimson Gold remains unseen in that country because the director refuses to submit to government editing. And that director, Jafar Panahi, has refused to attend U.S. film-festival screenings of Gold in protest of the requirement of the American government that Iranians entering U.S. be fingerprinted. As his deeply, … more…

*Made-Up,* the directorial debut of god-among-actors Tony Shalhoub, is everything you’d expect from a man who’s managed to buck the Hollywood system, where casting so often comes down to ethnic stereotyping, to create a panoply of memorably warm, funny, weird, human characters. And it’s nothing you could expect, because *Made-Up* isn’t quite like anything I’ve seen before. Mockumentaries aren’t hard to come by, of course, but none of them have ever turned back on themselves like this one does.

Remember when Ben Stiller was a human being, and not a punching bag for filmmakers? Remember *The Ben Stiller Show,* which was intelligent and witty and dangerous and bitingly satirical? Only about four people watched it, of course, which is why it didn’t last more than a handful of episodes, but it was enough to let you know that Stiller — a writer and director for the show, an instigator, one might call him — is way better, way smarter than the idiotic crap he’s been debasing himself in lately.