“We Bought a Zoo” is a holiday movie worth rooting for. Directed by the cinema’s last great romantic, Cameron Crowe, it features cute tykes, young romance and a grownup grieving for a lost love, adorable animals and the comically crotchety Thomas Haden Church.
The director of “Jerry Maguire” — whose last film, “Elizabethtown,” was a heartfelt flop — seems to be taking no chances, pulling out all the emotional stops.
How was this going to work?
All those Marvel superheroes, many of them with their own action franchises, packed into one epic, save-humanity-adventure.
How will the retro patriotism of Captain America mesh with the flippant cynicism of Iron Man? Could the brooding Hulk bond with the regal brawn of Thor?
How could anybody balance the inter-connection of back stories, the clash of personalities, the need for shared screen time, the utter necessity of building up a villain capable of putting fear in this fearsome foursome and then some?
But it does work, because Joss Whedon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) brought his A-game to “The Avengers.” It works because he never loses sight of the fragile humanity of the characters, even in their special effects brawls. It works because somebody finally got The Hulk’s blend of rage, guilt and bull-in-a-chandelier-shop fun right.
The new anime version of “The Borrrowers,” titled “The Secret World of Arrietty” by screenwriter and “supervisor” Hiyao Miyazaki, has the fascination with household “spirits,” the same lovely color palatte and attention to detail that his films are famous for. But Miyazaki, director of “Ponyo,” Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro,” didn’t direct this Studio Ghibli film.
Perhaps that is why it lacks his sense of whimsy, that little sprinkling of Miyazki magic that the Japanese director has given his best work over the decades.
“The Words” is, as its name suggests, a wordy melodrama about a young writer, Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), who finishes his first novel, three years in the making — which is promptly rejected. Maybe, he wonders, he’s not who he thought he was — a writer.
Then he stumbles across a yellowed, unpublished manuscript from long ago and sees his salvatation, his shortcut to fame.
Maybe, he realizes, he’s not who he thought he was — an ethical, honest man.
“Words” is an overly complex variation on an idea Woody Allen toyed-with in his stumbling “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” this notion of counterfeit literary fame, a stolen manuscript. What co-writer/directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal (“Tron Legacy”) attempt to do with it is get at the guilt that comes with ill-gotten glory.
“Who is John Galt?” has become the question on all of America’s lips in “Atlas Shrugged: Part II, The Strike.”
But a better question might be “Where is John Galt?” Or “When is John Galt going to show up?”
Because whatever its politics, “Shrugged” shrugs its way through the middle installment in this right wing soap opera with zero sense of urgency and no hurry whatsoever.
They’ve re-cast the adaptation of Ayn Rand’s romance novel for the downtrodden rich, using more former “name” actors in the leading roles. Thus, D.B. Sweeney is the mythical Galt, the guy luring America’s “I built this” crowd into some sort of uptopia for the One Percent.
But he doesn’t show up until the curtain. Not that his arrival animates this humorless rant.
“The Apparition” wafts out of the ether like the ghosts of bad movies past, the very picture of the cinema’s Dog Days of August.
It’s a “Paranormal Activity” knockoff, without the found footage conceit. And it’s science vs. ghosts, in a limp salute to “Paranormal” and “Ghost Busters” before it.
Anne and Georges are elderly Parisians taking life’s victory lap.
Their child is grown and married. Pianists and piano teachers, they can attend concerts and listen to CDs of their famous former students. Their routines are as set and comfortable — he knows which books she likes and recommends them, she knows how he takes his eggs. And they still have so much to talk about with one another.
But a stroke interrupts that. Michael Haneke’s “Amour” is about what happens afterwards, the steep decline, the physical and emotional challenges facing the still-healthy half of the couple. It’s about the limits and ultimate expressions of love, about what a loving couple has after everything that they’ve shared in their lives together is gone.
Haneke (“Funny Games,” “Cache,” “The Piano Teacher,” “White Ribbon”) has tackled a difficult subject that is unpleasant to watch, more unpleasant to think about. But the 70 year-old filmmaker has done it with taste, discretion and sympathy.
So why now more “American Pie”?
It’s a lame one, just the same one now with much older guys.
And starlets wearing mileage from whiskey and rye.
Singing “Why did my career go ‘bye’?”
You’ve spied the electronic billboard message on the Interstate and maybe felt a chill as you did — “Amber Alert,” then a car description, maybe even a license plate. Who among us hasn’t at least taken a glance to the left and right to make sure we weren’t passing the suspect vehicle at that very moment?
But who among us would dare to follow such a car if indeed we saw it? Yeah, we’d phone 911. But chase the vehicle, at a safe distance, to a service station? Try to peek in the tinted windows?
That’s the killer premise of “Amber Alert,” an often effective, occasionally illogical no-budget thriller built on “found footage” of such a pursuit.
“Alex Cross” is an interesting exercise in back-engineering, a prequel that takes us back to the days before the psychologist/police profiler was the sage, solemn and inscrutable sleuth whom Morgan Freeman ably brought to the screen in two films over a decade ago.
This Cross is cocky, a bit trigger happy, prone to revenge, a real “action hero.” And this Cross is played by Tyler Perry.
But by definition, he’s less interesting. When you fill in somebody’s back story, you strip away their “loner” mystique. When you focus on the flippant in a film about he frantic hunt for a psychopathic assassin, you diminish the urgency of the hunt and remove the gravitas of the character.
And when you make Tyler Perry run and point a gun, you remember why nobody’s ever used him as an action figure before.
