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Review: The Lodger

By Nick Schager (Subscribe to Nick Schager's posts), Posted Jan 24th 2009 4:32PM
Filed under: Cinematical


The modern serial killer thriller, as established in 1991 by Jonathan Demme's expert The Silence of the Lambs and then further in 1995 by David Fincher's superb Se7en, has deteriorated into an uninventive collection of familiar tricks, tropes and tiresomely murky cinematography. If regurgitation has become the genre's guiding principle, there are far worse sources to plagiarize than the canon of Alfred Hitchcock, which is more or less what first-time writer-director David Ondaatje does with The Lodger, a modern update of the 1913 Marie Belloc Lowndes-penned mystery that was the basis for Hitch's 1927 silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Predictably, the results aren't nearly as inspired when viewed in direct comparison. Worse still, they're also not inspired when viewed through the prism of the past two decades' worth of likeminded cinema (and the network-TV behemoth C.S.I.). Stolidly including every cliché in sight while failing to keep things tense or intriguing, it's a film that deviates not an inch from its rickety template and, consequently, disallows its sturdy cast from maneuvering in ways that might bring some novelty to the cat-and-mouse tale.
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Review: Inkheart

By Nick Schager (Subscribe to Nick Schager's posts), Posted Jan 22nd 2009 9:02PM
Filed under: New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Family Films, Movie News, Reviews, New Releases, Cinematical



Inkheart is a scattered collection of ideas, most of them cavalierly mixed together and barely fleshed out. Director Iain Softley's adaptation of Cornelia Funke's 2004 best-seller is a fantasy film built from spare parts - deliberately so, as it involves a hero known as a "silvertongue" who, by reading aloud, can bring fictional characters and objects off the page and into the real world. Shortly after the birth of his daughter, bookbinder Mo Folchart (Brendan Fraser) unintentionally transports villains from the titular swords-and-sorcery novel into our universe, and sends back in their place - because this supernatural gift is of a tit-for-tat variety - his wife Resa (Sienna Guillory). Determined to set things right, he sets out to find a copy of the rare "Inkheart," a quest that years later leads him and pre-teen daughter Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett) to Europe. There, they discover not only the highly sought-after paperback but also trouble in the form of Dustfinger (Paul Bettany), a fire-dancer who, eager to return to his book world, hands Mo and Meggie over to chief "Inkheart" scoundrel Capricorn (Andy Serkis), who's using silvertongues to make himself rich, collect famous literary creatures (a tick-tocking crocodile, winged monkeys, a unicorn) and usher into our dimension the monstrous Shadow.
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Review: Paul Blart: Mall Cop

By Nick Schager (Subscribe to Nick Schager's posts), Posted Jan 16th 2009 10:03AM
Filed under: Comedy, Sony, Theatrical Reviews, Reviews, Cinematical

Paul Blart (Kevin James) is fat, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop doesn't want you to forget it for a single second. Of course, it's hard to lose sight of this fact, given that portly star James is in every scene, and seems to have packed on even more poundage since his days on the late CBS sitcom The King of Queens. Yet more fundamentally, his girth is an issue because it's at the center of almost every joke in Steve Carr's film. During an obstacle course test for the New Jersey State Police department, Paul has gross sweat stains in the man-boob and belly button areas. Depressed over his widowed life and medicating his hypoglycemia with constant sugar fixes, Paul chows down on mom's blueberry pie slathered with peanut butter ("It fills the cracks of the heart"). Carrying out his workaday routine as a security "officer" at a West Orange, New Jersey mall, Paul clumsily smacks into a minivan while riding his job-issued Segway personal transporter, has a fistfight with an overweight shopper, crashes through ceilings, and fails to fully hoist himself into (and then causes to collapse) a store air duct. Then, in his off-hours, he drunkenly flails his enormous frame about a dance floor.
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Review: Seven Pounds

By Nick Schager (Subscribe to Nick Schager's posts), Posted Dec 18th 2008 9:02PM
Filed under: Drama, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Movie News, Reviews, New Releases, Cinematical


There are plenty of movie stars (including one currently headed to theaters donning an eye-patch) whose acting skills amount to riffing on a one-dimensional celebrity persona. And then there are those valuable few like Will Smith, who actively seek out roles -- often in so-so mega-blockbusters -- that challenge their range and demand more than simply endearing smirks and cutesy quips. For Smith, this has resulted in a career at once box-office lucrative and critically respected, with his performances in work as varied as 2007's post-apocalyptic sci-fi actioner I Am Legend and 2006's true-life melodrama The Pursuit of Happyness exhibiting equal amounts of intensity and nuance. Smith can do macho bluster and ladies' man charm in his sleep, yet what elevates him above most of his marquee brethren has always been an ability to lace such outsized qualities with a strain of vulnerable fallibility. He's a figure at once larger-than-life and still relatable, a hero capable of revealing, in ways more subtle than the chaos that frequently surrounds him, mortal tenderness and uncertainty.

Having, with The Pursuit of Happyness, already proven himself capable of bringing raw sensitivity to mawkish material, there was modest reason to hope that Smith might again pull off the same feat in his second collaboration with that film's director, Gabriele Muccino. No such luck. Seven Pounds is misguided mush from the moment go, a deliberately muddled bit of inspirational pap that masks its inherent silliness with structural obliqueness and, worse still, affords Smith scant opportunities to infuse his character with authentic humanity.
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Review: Gran Torino

By Nick Schager (Subscribe to Nick Schager's posts), Posted Dec 12th 2008 1:20PM
Filed under: Drama, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Movie News, Reviews, New Releases, Cinematical


Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is a son of a bitch, and a particularly racist one at that. Having just endured his wife's funeral, Walt wants only to scowl and growl in solitude, left alone to simmer and seethe over past Korean War traumas and at the proliferation of Asian "swamp rats" and "zipperheads" who've infiltrated his Michigan community. But no, instead he's forced to suffer the grating company of his two idiot sons - the younger one even sells Japanese cars, which Walt, a lifetime Detroit car factory employee, takes as a direct insult - and their selfish, disrespectful kids, one of whom shows up to the services in a football jersey and another decked out in a midriff that reveals a belly button ring. Pesky, no good brats - grrrr. And then, once those blood-related twits have finally left him to his own grumpy devices, his tranquil, solitary existence is rudely interrupted by quiet, teenage next door neighbor Thao (Bee Vang), who has the nerve to try to steal his prized mint-condition 1972 Gran Torino. It's enough to make a man pick up his well-oiled wartime rifle and shoot some minorities, a plan Walt fails to complete (but not for lack of trying) and then ditches after discovering, a couple of nights later, Thao and his family being harassed by some local gangbangers.

What follows in Gran Torino, Eastwood's second directorial effort this season (after Changeling) and supposedly last starring gig, is in a certain sense merely old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama, as crotchety Walt slowly warms to, and protects from thugs, his non-Caucasian surrogate-family neighbors -- who are Hmong, an ethnic group from the mountain regions of Laos, Thailand and China -- while at the same time finding inner peace through open-minded compassion.
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Review: House of the Sleeping Beauties

By Nick Schager (Subscribe to Nick Schager's posts), Posted Nov 13th 2008 6:03PM
Filed under: Drama, Theatrical Reviews, Reviews, Cinematical

In a gloomy urban German nowhereland, morose 60-something Edmond (Vadim Glowna) walks the streets alone, the surrounding prison-bar railings and angular staircases framing his solitary stroll as well as mirroring his feelings of being trapped by his past. Did his wife and daughter die accidentally in a car crash or was it suicide, he wonders, a depressing, unshakable fixation that spurs an old friend of his, Kogi (Maximilian Schell), to recommend that he visit a clandestine establishment where elder gentlemen can sleep alongside slumbering young women.

These heavily sedated sleeping beauties cannot be awakened nor do they remember their nocturnal rendezvous, a situation that hints at deviant sex but, for Edmond, merely provides an opportunity to freely talk about love, life, transience, his deceased spouse and child, and his mother, all topics which he expounds upon while lying naked next to his comatose companions. Is, as he wonders, the mysterious proprietor of this business, Madame (Angela Winkler), the "bringer of death"? Are the dead bodies of certain girls being surreptitiously removed from the premises in the back of a car? Is Kogi somehow mixed up in Madame's strange enterprise, which cautions clients against forming emotional attachments and forbids them outright from following the ladies during the day?
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Review: Gardens of the Night

By Nick Schager (Subscribe to Nick Schager's posts), Posted Nov 7th 2008 7:03PM
Filed under: Cinematical

Damian Harris spent the better part of two decades researching child abductions for Gardens of the Night, a fictional saga about one young girl's ordeal after being snatched away from her parents at the tender age of 8. That dedication to getting the details right, however, doesn't save his film from missteps typical to stories about such topics, as the tendency to exploit lurid material for dramatic purposes is something he can't avoid. Still, as a serious-minded attempt to trace both the literal and psychological means by which abductors carry out their plots, Harris' tale is not wholly without merit and, with regards to its portrait of kid-snatcher Alex (Tom Arnold), occasionally flirts with complexity. Generally refusing to simplify characters or scenarios, his film strives to burrow into the mind of captured 8-year-old Leslie (Ryan Simpkins), who - in an extended flashback instigated by 17-year-old Leslie's (Gillian Jacobs) lies about her family history to a teen center counselor (John Malkovich) - is tricked into trusting and traveling with Alex and his skuzzy teen cohort Frank (Transamerica's Kevin Zegers) while on her way to school one average, sunny day.
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