Westword July 29, 2010 : Page 31
relationships will depend to a degree on which genre you think the fi lm falls into, but far more on whether you think there’s such a thing, in this age of perpetual youth, as a grown-up. (Ella Taylor) Despicable Me. (PG) As the lights were dimming before a preview screening of Despicable Me, the six-year-old who lives in my house leaned over and said, “I hope this is funny—not like Toy Story 3.” Now don’t misunderstand: He adored that movie. It’s just that whenever the subject comes up, the fi rst word he uses to describe the fi nal adventures of Woody and Buzz is “sad.” “Scary,” too, when further pressed. But “funny”? Not once in a month’s time. So, then, to the movie featuring fart guns, shrink rays, and squid shooters! Despicable Me is a silly antidote to Toy Story 3’s thoughtful heaviness—a cavalcade of kiddie giggles, titters, and belly laughs with as much heft as helium. It’s rather joyful and heartfelt, too—a summertime, air-conditioned Grinch, this is the story of a wannabe evil genius (Gru, voiced by Steve Carell) who learns that buried beneath his heft and hefty Mommy issues is a heart large enough to fi nd room for three orphaned girls. To that, add countless yel-low, pill-shaped, one-or two-eyed “minions” who provide comic relief enough to fuel a sure-fi re spin-off show on Nickelodeon. Despicable Me is also one of the rare instances in the recent history of 3-D’s resurrection as The Savior of Cinema in which the technology accentuates the experience. Though, grown-ups, be warned: I had more fun watching the kid giggle through the screening than I did watching the movie itself. It’s no Toy Story 3. (Wilonsky) Everyone Else. (Not Rated) An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade’s superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable. Placing a youngish, newly formed couple under relentless observation, Ade’s two-hour squirma-thon gets a bit more intimate on the subject of intimacy than the viewer might wish. Chris (Lars Eidinger), an underemployed architect, and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), a middling music-industry publicist, take a week to culture their relationship in the Petri dish of his parents’ haute-bourgeois Sardinian villa. The serpent enters this vacation paradise midway through in the form of another, more successful and seemingly happier pair—Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner), a former schoolmate of Chris’s, and Sana (Nicole Marischka), a clothing designer. A barbecue at Hans and Sana’s is not only discomfi ting but also divisive—it creates a triangle. Chris, desperate for Hans’s approval, abandons Gitti to have a drink with him the next afternoon. Act III culminates with a reciprocal dinner invitation, the viewer wondering exactly how the simmering hostility—not to mention the yearning—will bubble over. Predicated on a suc-cession of intractable moments, Everyone Else is concentrated enough to become experiential. Ade’s exploration of intimacy and its discontents recalls the European relationship epics of 35 years ago—Rivette’s L’amour fou, Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage—but it’s purposefully down-sized and set in a lower key. The tumult ends with a simple request that more or less recaps the entire movie: Chris asks Gitti only to look at him. (J. Hoberman) Get Him to the Greek. (R) The roller-coaster spinoff to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek often feels as if it’ll jump the tracks and smash to the ground in a thousand pieces of what-in-the-fuck. It’s a complete and utter mess from the big-loud-dumb start to the awwww-that’s-so-sweet fi nish, less a narrative than a loosely-stitched-together hodgepodge of scenes starring the same characters as they hurl toward the titular venue but not before making myriad soused and sentimental pit stops along the way in London, New York, and Las Vegas—all in three days’ time, tops. Which is not to suggest that it’s not entertaining—far from it. In fact, it’s quite the amiable mess and it’s occasionally uproarious, mostly due to Russell Brand reprising his role as Aldous Snow, frontman for Infant Sorrow, a sort of Spinal Tap redux. Jonah Hill plays the lower-rung record-label lackey who pitches an Infant Sorrow comeback concert to his boss, Sergio (Sean Combs, never more Puff Daddy than here), and is charged with getting an off-the-wagon Aldous to the show. Hill isn’t reprising his role from Forgetting Sarah Marshall—the Hawaiian resort waiter with the creepy crush on Aldous—but a tempered version of said role (and, consequently, most of Hill’s stable of outsize characters). Judd Apatow produced—and can’t you smell the man-on-man love affair? (Wilonsky) Great Directors. (Not Rated) Ten interviews with ten “name” Amer-ican and European directors—including Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Catherine Breillat—diced into a documentary as asinine and fawning as its title suggests. The fi rst measure of Greatness is agreeing to be interviewed by director Angela Ismailos, whose qualifi cation seems to be a faint resemblance to the late actress Melina Mercouri. Leftist leanings are another evident step, so we hear from John Sayles and Ken Loach, who lets slip one of the only candid moments in the fi lm, cautiously noting that his interview is being fi lmed on a set, not in his actual rolling country garden. Talking to TV vets Loach and Stephen Frears prompts the funniest of Ismailos’s unmotivated cutaways to herself, as she poses with serious-face outside BBC headquarters following stock footage of Margaret Thatcher. Interviews are extended with excerpts from fi lms, superfi cially tied in to anything being said and suffi cing to remind us of the Great Films these Great Directors oh-so-Greatly made. It’s interesting to briefl y see Liliana Cavani, but her career is boiled down to The Night Porter; other subjects can be found saying these same things elsewhere (es-pecially annoying-Aunt-of-the-New Wave Agnes Varda, an ardent autobiographer). Received ideas, creative class cheerleading, and outright schmoozing bore, but the yacht party after the Cannes screening sounds awesome! (Pinkerton) Grown Ups. (PG-13) You’ve probably seen the poster for Grown Ups, with its stars—Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Kevin James—barreling down a waterslide. Or is the verb I’m looking for “coasting”? Grown Ups begins with a fl ashback to a 1978 boys’ basketball championship, where the starting fi ve look like twelve-year-old versions of the aforementioned lineup. We catch up with the teammates thirty years later, reunited for Coach’s funeral in their New England hom town (helpfully identifi ed on screen as “New England”). Entrusted with Coach’s ashes, the boys and their families head for their old summer-getaway lodge, where they sit in Adirondack chairs by a perpetually gold-shimmering lake. The guest list includes the urn, Rock’s stock-comic mother-in-law, a dog with snipped vocal cords, fi ve men, four wives, and 10 kids. This small army becomes a gridlock of gags and plotlines, with confl icts and assigned traits dropped and hastily retrieved as needed. Maya Rudolph is the only capable comedienne among the wives; the men are either unfunny or, if given fewer lines, useless. Though the uncynical goodwill that accompanies Sandler’s work makes footing this vacation bill less enraging than the toxic Couples Retreat, it’s one of those Sandler mov-ies where the inevitable Steve Buscemi cameo passes for the highlight. While Sandler has never traffi cked in epigrammatic wit, there’s a difference between, say, Billy Madison’s “Of course I peed my pants—everyone my age pees their pants,” and this lazy stuff—the difference between smart-dumb and plain-dumb. (Pinkerton) I Am Love. (R) As unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous as its title, Luca Guadagnino’s visually ravishing third feature suggests an epic that Visconti and Sirk might have made after they fi nished watching Vertigo and reading Madame Bovary while gorging themselves on aphrodisiacs. That it works so well—despite frequently risible dialogue (“Happy is a word that makes one sad”) and a notion of feminism that carbon-dates around the time Kate Chopin published The Awakening—is a testament to the fi lm’s loony sincerity and seductive voluptuousness. Guadagnino’s “social melodrama” is anchored by the magnifi cence of Tilda Swinton, who plays Emma Recchi, the unhappy, unfulfi lled Russian wife of a Milanese industrialist and mother of three adult children whose carnal desires surface after her son’s friend, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), prepares her a plate of perfectly seasoned shrimp. There’s nothing especially novel, of course, about exploring the soul-crushing emptiness of marriage to a titan of industry. But I Am Love may be the fi rst fi lm in which the lonely heroine fi nds inspiration in her daughter’s lesberation. For all its corny social studies, I Am Love never forgets the lust that drives its narra-tive. Swinton and Gabbriellini make an extremely foxy couple, her translucent fl esh complemented by his dark hair and beard. Their assignations are all action, little talk; when Gua-dagnino focuses solely on the primal, the effect is spellbinding. Only the words get in the way. (Melissa Anderson) Inception. (PG-13) Inception is a chilling trip into the psyche . . . of writer-director Christopher Nolan, an action director who shattered the Tomatometer with The Dark Knight. Nolan’s follow-up offers more muted colors, gift-wrapped themes, and GQ leading men with stockbroker comb-backs — indicators of high-minded artistry, all. Leo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a corporate espionage expert at “extraction”: lifting secrets out of targets’ minds. Drugging them, then joining them for naptime, Cobb can drop in to guest-star in their dreams, and there pick the locks of his marks’ subconscious — often represented as an actual safebox. Cobb is planning his “last job,” a mind-cracking with the untested mission of leaving an idea in his mark’s head. The target is the heir to a corporate dynasty, Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), who must be persuaded to abdi-cate his waiting throne. Cobb explains his art as “a chance to build cathedrals, entire cities, things that never existed.” Those so inclined can follow the script’s breadcrumbs and read Inception as a metaphor for the act of artistic creation â ” but Cobb/Nolan aren’t constructing things that never existed. (Fischer Jr. dreams of a car-chase shoot-out in the pouring rain.) As for the would-be-emotional catharsis at the center of Inception, it’s based on Cobb’s choice: whether to go on per-manent vacation with his dream-memory, or to return to real life. Too bad Nolan either can’t articulate or doesn’t believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams —and his barren Inception doesn’t capture much of either. (Pinkerton) “THE BEST MOVIE OF THE SUMMER BY FAR.” A.O. SCOTT, AT THE MOVIES WRITER/DIRECTOR LISA CHOLODENKO’S“REVELATORY. THIRD FEATURE IS HER MOST FUN.” LISA KENNEDY ANNETTE BENING JULIANNE MOORE MARK RUFFALO MIA WASIKOWSKA JOSH HUTCHERSON Written by Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg Directed by Lisa Cholodenko KidsAreAllRightMovie.com AMC ARAPAHOE CROSSING 16 Parker & Arapahoe Roads 888/AMC-4FUN United Artists DENVER WEST STADIUM 12 I-70 & Denver West Blvd 800/FANDANGO 532# NOW PLAYING STARTS FRIDAY, JULY 30TH AMC FLATIRON CROSSING 14 US 36 & Interlocken Loop 888/AMC-4FUN Landmark Theatres GREENWOOD VILLAGE 5415 Landmark Place 303/352-1992 AMC HIGHLANDS RANCH 24 Broadway Exit from C-470 888/AMC-4FUN Landmark Theatres ESQUIRE 6th Avenue at Downing 303/352-1992 Regency Theatres TAMARAC SQUARE 7777 East Hampden Ave 303/368-9200 CHECK THEATRE DIRECTORIES OR CALL FOR SOUND INFORMATION AND SHOWTIMES SPECIAL ENGAGEMENTS NO PASSES OR DISCOUNT COUPONS ACCEPTED MOBILE USERS: For Showtimes – Text KIDS with your ZIP CODE to 43KIX (43549) Boulder Tnpk & 104th Ave 888/AMC-4FUN AMC WESTMINSTER PROMENADE 24 ® 31 westword.com | WORST-CASE SCENARIO | CONTENTS | LETTERS | ¡ASK A MEXICAN! | OFF LIMITS | CITY LIMITS | NIGHT+DAY | MOVIES | THEATER | ART | CAFE | BACKBEAT | WESTWORD JULY29-AUGUST4, 2010
