Despite epic plot, '2012' is not worth the wait
Published Friday November 13th, 2009
Opening this week: 2012 and Pirate Radio.
* A Christmas Carol - Lionel Barrymore. Alastair Sim. Laurence Olivier. Albert Finney. George C. Scott. Bill Murray. Michael Caine. Mr. Magoo. Scrooge McDuck. Of the many to play Ebenezer Scrooge, Jim Carrey now adds his name, starring in Disney's new 3-D animation version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The appeal of the part is clear: You get villain and redemptive hero rolled into one, plus you spend most of the movie in your pyjamas. But the allure of Scrooge alone wasn't enough for Carrey. In this latest incarnation of Dickens' Christmas fable, Carrey plays not only the penny-pinching miser, young and old, but also the three ghosts that visit him: the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. On the whole, the film feels suffocated by its design, and the liveliness of Carrey and the rest of the cast (including Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Cary Elwes) struggles to shine through. ** out of four. Rated PG
* Amelia - It is the summer of 1937. In a cockpit, Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) looks beatific. Freckled, with hair cowlicked, the legendary aviator gazes out. Her thoughts, her voice-over, send us back to a time when a plane's flight above a Kansas field established her passion for flight and fueled her destiny. Flash forward. Amid great fanfare, Earhart, the first woman to make a solo flight across the Atlantic, poses on the wing of her silvery Fokker Electra. Nearby stands her husband, publisher George P. Putnam (Richard Gere). Earhart is set to embark on a globe-traversing flight. The plane lifts. The score swells. But Amelia sputters more than it takes flight. It's not for lack of trying. The film is mindful of the rich tensions in the iconic American's story, yet the movie is as conventional a biopic as Earhart was an unconventional woman. ** out of four. Rated PG
* Couples Retreat - This is what life might have been like if the guys from Swingers had grown up, moved to the suburbs and turned into lame, sitcommy clichés. Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn team up again, on screen and on the script (along with Dana Fox), for this broad comedy about four couples who go on a tropical vacation together. In theory, they're all there to support their friends Jason (Jason Bateman) and Cynthia (Kristen Bell) as they try to save their marriage through the couples' counselling the resort offers. Little do they know they'll get sucked into agonizing therapy sessions that reveal their own rifts. You wouldn't mind getting voted off this island. *½ out of four. Rated PG.
* Law-Abiding Citizen - A man who witnessed the murder of his wife and child orchestrates his revenge in a series of high-profile murders from his jail cell. Starring Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Leslie Bibb and Viola Davis. * out of four. Rated 18A
* Michael Jackson's This Is It - Watching Michael Jackson's This Is It will have fans grieving once again, but this time, it won't only be for the fallen King of Pop, but for what we lost - a brilliant entertainer who gave every inch of his body and soul for what might have been one of the most spectacular comebacks of all time. Jackson never got to complete that comeback, dying days before his London concerts were to begin in July, but This Is It, culled from hundreds of hours of rehearsal footage for those shows, does it for him. Even though it's been well edited, the amazing performances Jackson delivers in this film are not a result of camera magic, but Jackson's own. ***½ out of four. Rated PG.
* Paranormal Activity - The no-budget ghost story Paranormal Activity arrives 10 years after The Blair Witch Project, and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork. Like its predecessor, Paranormal Activity has been making waves through a viral marketing campaign that has been building positive buzz through early, sold-out college town screenings and Internet chatter. Paranormal Activity opens with a title card, thanking the families of Micah Sloat and Katie Featherstone as well as the San Diego Police Department, an immediate signal that the "found footage'' we're about to see won't have a happy outcome. Micah (Micah Sloat) has bought a video camera to document the "weird (stuff)'' that has been happening in the two-story San Diego home he shares with his girlfriend of three years, Katie (Katie Featherstone). Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads. ** out of four. Rated 14A.
* The Box - Cameron Diaz and James Marsden have a terrible moral dilemma in Richard Kelly's The Box: Press a button on a mysterious container, they'll get $1 million, and someone they don't know will die. The Box is like a magician's prop: It gives the illusion that it's full of stuff - ideas, portents, clues, meaning - when actually, it's as empty as the heroines' heads in Diaz's Charlie's Angels flicks. Diaz and Marsden play Norma and Arthur Lewis, a Virginia couple living a decent life with their young son in 1976. Arthur is a NASA engineer who worked on the Mars Viking landing, while Norma is a private-school teacher. Just as some financial setbacks hit the family, ominous stranger Arlington Steward (Frank Langella, stuck with a horrible facial disfigurement from a lightning strike), turns up with the box, the button and the deal. The director and his cast treat all this ridiculousness with such gravity that the dam thankfully bursts and the hammy dialogue and performances provoke laughs as The Box shambles toward its demise. * out of four. Rated 14A.
* The Fourth Kind - The flat-lining, alien-abduction thriller The Fourth Kind offers a close encounter that buries an interesting idea under a barrage of gimmicky, carnivallike hokum. The movie's unwieldy mix of degraded pseudo-documentary footage and Unsolved Mystery-style re-enactments is as unconvincing as it its distancing, making the small charms of Paranormal Activity all the more apparent by comparison. * out of four. Rated 14A.
* The Men Who Stare at Goats - A fun tone is undermined by disjointed storytelling in this film by George Clooney and it all starts with the disclaimer that opens the movie: "More of this is true than what you might imagine." This wry comment serves as a nod and a wink from the filmmakers, a licence to do what they will to Jon Ronson's amusing nonfiction account of the U.S. military's hush-hush research into psychic warfare and espionage. What Clooney's producing partner, first-time director Grant Heslov, and his colleagues come up with is a hit-and-miss fictional narrative on which to string some of the brightest anecdotes Ronson uncovered about efforts to create warrior monks who try to walk through walls or glare animals to death. It is a loosely connected journey from one absurdity to the next, sprouting offshoots and asides, great stand-alone burlesques and dramas that don't lend themselves to a cohesive film. Delivered with goofy gusto by Clooney and co-stars Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey, Goats is fitful, undemanding and, ultimately, lightweight humour. **½ out of four. Rated 14A.
* 2012 - It's the end of the world as we know it, by way of the P.T. Barnum of the apocalypse, Roland Emmerich (Independence Day). This epic adventure is about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and and offers the chance for heroic struggle to the survivors. With John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover and Woody Harrelson. In the end it's just big, loud and dumb. *½ out of four. Rated PG.
- With files from The Canadian Press, the Washington Post, The Associated Press and the New York Times news service.
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