'The Box' is empty
Published Friday November 6th, 2009
Opening this week: A Christmas Carol, The Box, The Fourth Kind and The Men Who Stare at Goats, with a Saturday matinee of the Metropolitan Opera's Turandot.
* 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. Carrey's zest for the undertaking comes through clearly enough - after all, the rubber-faced Ace Ventura and Man on the Moon actor has always been a contortionist. His Scrooge is exceptionally gaunt, topped by limp white hair, and features a downturned mouth below an Ichabod Crane nose. But 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. HH out of four.
* 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. H½ 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. H 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. HHH½ 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). The entire film takes place at the couple's cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. HH out of four. Rated 14A.
* Saw VI - Special Agent Strahm is dead, and Detective Hoffman has emerged as the unchallenged successor to Jigsaw's legacy. However, when the FBI draws closer to Hoffman, he is forced to set a game into motion, and Jigsaw's grand scheme is finally understood. Rated 18A.
* 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 with a bad Southern accent that comes and goes and a gimpy foot resulting from medical negligence. 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 movie then wallows through superficial soul-searching and sermonizing as the Lewises make their choice, graduating from a Twilight Zone episode to an instalment of The X-Files in its post-Mulder death throes, when the show turned to rot. The director and his cast treat all this ridiculousness with such gravity (Diaz bears an unbecoming scowl through almost the entire movie) that the dam thankfully bursts and the hammy dialogue and hammier performances provoke laughs as The Box shambles toward its overdue demise.
* 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. H out of four. Rated 14 A.
* 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. The priceless opening scene - recreating the start of Ronson's book as a general attempts to displace his molecules and run through his office wall - promises a Catch-22 or Strangelove-style satire. But the book 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. HH½ out of four. Rated 14A.
* Where the Wild Things Are - Where the Wild Things Are, the book, is just 339 words long. But in turning it into Where the Wild Things Are, the movie, director Spike Jonze has expanded the basic story with a breathtaking visual scheme and stirring emotional impact. It's a gorgeous film: This may sound contradictory, but it's intricate and rough-hewn at the same time, dreamlike and earthy. What keeps it from reaching complete excellence is the thinness of the script, which Jonze co-wrote with Dave Eggers. The beloved and award-winning children's book, which Maurice Sendak wrote and illustrated 45 years ago, still holds up beautifully today because it shows keen insight into the conflicted nature of kids - the delight and the frustration that can often co-exist simultaneously. HHH out of four. Rated PG.
- with files from The Canadian Press and The Associated Press
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