Charlie Bartlett

New Releases

Taxi to the Darkside, Charlie Bartlett

New Releases

First the title: The taxi belonged to a poor bastard named Dilawar, who happened to be in the wrong part of Afghanistan at the wrong time. The “dark side” is where our esteemed Vice President Dick Cheney rather ominously informs Tim Russert, in a clip from Meet the Press, that we’re going to have to work sometimes.

As for how dark—you’ve probably already had some inkling but decided you didn’t really want to know. After all, our Congress and the national news media spent more time last week worried about who injected what into Roger Clemens’ buttcheeks than on the question of waterboarding. But Alex Gibney’s horrifying documentary won’t let you look away, building to a staggering indictment of Bush-era POW abuse (or “enemy combatant abuse,” if you must) that’s full of evidence both barbaric and revolting. The movie made me physically sick.

Dilawar was an innocent man beaten and tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in Bagram Air Base Prison, and his was just the first of many cases to be deemed homicides over these past few years. (Predictably, initial news reports claimed that Dilawar died of natural causes.) Through some shocking interviews with the deceased’s disgraced interrogators, Gibney begins to uncover a larger, more insidious pattern of barely trained young men and women shoved into impossible situations with only the vaguest set of behavioral guidelines, but unbelievable pressure to produce results. It was only a matter of time, the movie argues, before Bagram led to Abu Ghraib.

Like Charles Ferguson’s extraordinary No End in Sight, Taxi to the Dark Side won’t offer any surprises to anybody who reads the newspapers. But much like Sight, it serves as a clear and cogent autopsy of governmental short-sightedness that could be called incompetent at best, and at worst monstrous.

Gibney isn’t the filmmaker Ferguson is, as the movie’s meandering structure gets away from him sometimes—and after presenting John McCain as a hero for the majority of the picture, the final reel shoves him under the bus with offhand allegations that could’ve used a bit more journalistic substantiation. But the film is nonetheless essential viewing, demanding that we ask ourselves what it means to be an American, and wondering how much is lost when these things are done in our name.

Charlie (Anton Yelchin), recently kicked out of private school, shows up on his first day at the public high school wearing his signature blazer, which he continues to sport for about half the film. Sound familiar?

Charlie Bartlett is too much of a Rushmore knockoff to be the original it desperately wants to be. Both films begin with a fantasy sequence and use a student-written play as a major plot point—and both feature the big tough guy who really just wants to act. The bit about kids who parent the adults in their lives is by this point a teen-movie trope, but it also adds to the eerie resemblance.

All that said, Charlie Bartlett, while uneven, does have some funny, insightful moments. Charlie’s chosen route to popularity is to act as psychiatrist to his classmates, who line up to talk to him in the men’s room, with the metal stalls functioning like the partitions between priest and confessor. Charlie is a good listener, and he doles out moderately insightful pabulum about being true to oneself. But he also “prescribes” the psychiatric medications that he’s tricked a small army of shrinks into giving him by acting out symptoms cribbed from medical texts.

Charlie gets away with this fraud because his mother Marilyn (Hope Davis) is rich, manic, sweet and completely incompetent. Mirroring this dysfunctional family are Charlie’s love interest Susan (Kat Dennings) and her father (Robert Downey Jr.), the school principal who drinks too much and was happier back when he was just a history teacher. When Charlie and the principal inevitably clash, the power struggle is interesting—Charlie has much more control over the student body than the principal does, plus dad is worried he’s losing his darling daughter to this well-meaning drug dealer—but the supposed insights the characters develop are the least interesting aspect of the film.

Still, while the big plot points tend toward the obvious (teens plus drugs equal overdose), there’s a great deal of pleasure to be had from the details. The movie is filled with dark humor, and if it sometimes tries too hard for that Harold and Maude-style feel-good quirkiness, at least it’s borrowing from the classics.

Not Reviewed

An Egyptian police band gets lost on the way to the opening of an Arab Cultural Center and must spend the night in Israel in director Eran Kolirin’s debut. (Opens Fri., Feb. 22.)

Directed by Michel Gondry, Rewind stars Mos Def as a video store employee whose buddy Jack Black accidentally erases all the tapes in the shop and proposes they reenact the movies themselves. (Opens Fri., Feb. 22.)

A sci-fi thriller told in three parts from three different perspectives, in which a mysterious media signal turns humans into killers. (Opens Fri., Feb. 22.)

Larry the Cable Guy stars as a sheriff who accidentally gets involved in a high-profile criminal case when he attempts to save the star witness. (Opens Fri., Feb. 22.)

Ongoing

Adapted by playwright Christopher Hampton from Ian McEwan’s breathlessly acclaimed, doom-laden love story spanning WWII and beyond. B (S.B.)

Filmed between wars, Caramel doubles as an accidentally forlorn time capsule of a period when Beirut was inching its way back to its cosmopolitan glory and, after going to war with Israel, a utopian vision of what it could be again. The quintet of suffering but passionate women in Nadine Labaki’s slice-o’-life gather around not a kitchen or restaurant but an inner-city beauty salon. B- (M.P.)

Dream features brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell) who unwittingly find themselves turning to a one-off job that doesn’t go quite as planned. In walks millionaire surgeon uncle Tom Wilkinson with a little offer: In repayment for past and future financial aid, they’ll whack an associate of his whose testimony may send him to jail. And so begins yet another of Woody Allen’s chatty, rampantly philosophical studies in the existential despair of murder in a godless universe. C+ (M.P.)

A triumph of gimmickry from producer/huckster extraordinaire J.J. Abrams, Cloverfield’s niftiest trick is sticking exclusively to hand-held camcorder footage. The monster is caught in fragments, the chaos glimpsed on the fly—armageddon from street-level, and running. B- (S.B.)

Passing itself off as a romantic comedy despite being neither romantic nor particularly comedic, writer/director Adam Brooks’ terminally bland, brutally overlong tale of yuppie navel-gazing stars a subdued Ryan Reynolds, pushing the limits of cloying as a divorced dad with a serious case of the “poor-me”s. Sitting down one night with his movie-cute 11-year-old daughter (Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin, on hand here as a mewling prop), he decides to tell the story of how he met her mother. D+ (S.B.)

The diary of the title is a “movie” shot and edited (complete with manipulative score and ponderous narration) by a group of Pitt film students driving through Pennsylvania as the world falls apart. Why does only George A. Romero, the 68-year-old creator of zombies, know how to take the genre in new directions? B (M.P.)

In the rerelease of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s ’80s classic, a boyish opera-freak postman (Frédéric Andréi) secretly records a soprano (Philly-born diva Wilhelmina Fernandez) famous for her refusal to commit her singing to records. Around this time a pair of thugs dispense with a prostitute seeking to rat out a slavery ring, but not before she slips an incriminating tape into Andréi’s napsack. A- (M.P.)

Mathieu Almaric stars as Jean- Dominique Bauby, an Elle magazine editor and cad about town who suffers a sudden and debilitating stroke, finding himself completely paralyzed, save for one eye. B (S.B.)

A remake of the Hong Kong thriller Jian Gui with Jessica Alba as a woman who has a corneal transplant and begins seeing supernatural phenomena. (Not reviewed.)

Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan play petty criminals who attempt to rob a church and wind up spending the night with God. (Not reviewed.)

A shirtless Matthew McConaughey and the exhaustingly cute Kate Hudson charm one another for two solid hours. (Not reviewed.)

Winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and scandalously absent from this year’s list of foreign-language Oscar nominees, writer/director Cristian Mungiu’s harrowing film arrives on a tsunami of hype in cineaste circles. Set in the ’80s, near the end of Nicolae Ceausescu’s miserable reign, 4 Months keeps the camera at a discreet distance, adopting a verite fly-on-the-wall style as we follow Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), a weary student helping to arrange an illegal abortion for her simpering roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu). B (S.B.)

The twin towers of pop. (Not reviewed.)

A neighborhood bar run by longtime schemer Danny Glover has been so faithful to hiring old blues musicians that its patronage has been absconded by the loud, raucous juke joint down the street. Fathoms in debt, Glover, along with right-hand man Charles S. Dutton, hires a hot new R&B act to come in for a one-night hoedown. When the guy doesn’t show, Glover employs a recently arrived wandering musician (Gary Clark Jr.) to pretend to be him. B- (M.P.)

Average guy’s plan to woo childhood crush Paris Hilton is hindered by—gasp—her totally un-hot best friend. (Not reviewed.)

Despite its grammar-fudging title and ties to MTV Films, the Canadian How She Move plays more like a gritty little indie than most of the studio-assembled urban dance movies that precede it. It’s a genre picture, sure, but one with considerable meat on its bones and a warmer heart than most. B (Doug Wallen)

Closer in spirit to Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky and the works of John Cassavetes than any recent Tarantino knockoff, In Bruges is a shaggy, discursive trip into purgatory with a couple of ratty souls who still might be saved. Despite all the familiar hitman Indie Flick 101 trappings, the film finds its own unique tone, mixing the sacred and the blisteringly, side-splittingly profane. A- (S.B.)

Hayden Christensen stars in an adaptation of Steven Gould’s novel about a man who discovers he can teleport himself anywhere in the world. Directed by Doug Liman. (Not reviewed.)

Juno starts off questionable, even off-putting, before heading off in an unexpectedly decent direction. Just try not to wince when the title character, a suburban 16-year-old who’s inseminated by meek running fanatic pal Michael Cera, responds to a dire turn of events during the film’s second half with, “Just do me this one solid.” B- (M.P.)

Marc Forster’s splashy Hollywood adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel, which details life in Afghanistan through three decades of totalitarian regimes. C (M.P.)

Bruce Weber’s loving 1988 Chet Baker documentary gives in to its star, filming him in atmospheric, high-contrast black-and-white that either hides its decrepit subject in shadows or exacerbates the deep, deep lines covering his face. At the same time he knows this is it for Baker, jazz legend. And so, rather than a mere primer on one of the late-night brooder’s most reliable agents, Let’s Get Lost becomes its subject’s moody, coal-black death song. B+ (M.P.)

Based on a British TV movie, Mad Money stars Diane Keaton as an upper-class hausfrau whose cushy exec husband (Ted Danson) is abruptly downsized, leaving them seriously in the hole. College-educated but skilless, she gets a job cleaning toilets at the Federal Reserve Bank. There, she teams up with single mother Queen Latifah to hatch an elaborate scheme to periodically steal from the thousands of old bills destroyed every day. Money is a fluffy but low-wattage caper comedy whose fangs have been effectively whittled down. C (M.P.)

Another genre satire, this time taking aim at the likes of 300. (Not reviewed.)

Joel and Ethan Coen have at last gone back to their roots, infusing their astonishing adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel with the clockwork meticulousness and parched landscapes of their 1984 debut Blood Simple. Doggedly faithful to its source, the film follows Josh Brolin’s Llwelyn Moss, a resourceful young man who makes the rather unwise decision to run off with a suitcase full of cash he stumbled upon in the desert. A (S.B.)

Eva Longoria Parker plays a dead woman who tries to break up her former fiance’s (Paul Rudd) relationship with a new girl (Lake Bell). (Not reviewed.)

The movie version of Persepolis—Marjane Satrapi’s sharp and perceptive French-language graphic novel of her childhood and young adulthood in revolution-era Iran—is a good film, and probably a great film if you’re unfamiliar with the source. But it can never overcome feeling superfluous. B- (M.P.)

Cartoon vegetables learn how to be heroes by traveling back in time and becoming pirates. (Not reviewed.)

Sylvester Stallone’s sad, batshit-violent, unasked-for return to his second-most-famous screen incarnation has got to be one of the most violent movies ever made—the first half devoted to torture and degradation, and the second wallowing in horrific, bloody vengeance. D+ (S.B.)

Grimly funny and brazenly unsentimental, writer/director Tamara Jenkins’ follow-up to her raucous 1998 dysfunctional family comedy Slums of Beverly Hills stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as Jon and Wendy Savage, sourpuss siblings forced to face some difficult decisions once their estranged abusive father (Philip Bosco) takes a turn toward dementia. B+ (S.B.)

A movie adaptation of the popular fantasy book series in which three children find themselves sucked into a magical world when their family moves to a mysterious country estate. (Not reviewed.)

A documentary tracing the history of extreme skiing. (Not reviewed.)

This might actually be the same exact movie as the first one. We’re not sure. (Not reviewed.)

A struggling nature show tries to save itself by finding Bigfoot. (Not reviewed.)

Just when we’d all but given up hope, director Tim Burton’s gotten his groove back for Sweeney Todd, a lovingly crafted, astoundingly gory adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s renowned 1979 slasher musical. Inspired by an age-old English legend, ’tis the grim tale of wronged barber Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp), who sates his thirst for retribution by slitting the throats of his customers and tossing their corpses down a chute into the basement, where his daffy old landlady (Helena Bonham Carter) grinds up the bodies and bakes them into meat pies. B (S.B.)

Jess Weixler is a unicorn-shirt-wearing, super-Christian goody-goody high schooler who heads up a local chastity group. Unknowingly, Weixler possesses her own biological chastity belt, which rears its pointy choppers when her impatient born-again boyfriend forces himself on her in a remote, watery cave. Her evolution from nice girl to avenger of male predators takes her through a cavalcade of pervy types, most of whom wind up screaming over arterial-spraying stumps. C+ (M.P.)

Villainous oil baron Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Paul Dano’s snaky reverend begin a passive-aggressive battle of wits that drags on for decades after Plainview attempts to extract oil from beneath the town of Little Boston. A new American century takes root and thrives all around Daniel Plainview, while he violently severs relationships with everyone who cares about him, growing only more isolated and alone—until the movie boils over with a finale so grandly insane, it’s like the twisted Actor’s Studio version of Magnolia’s climactic frog plague. A (S.B.)

A sad but beautiful bridesmaid, tons of weddings, prettier-sister envy and a hunky wiseacre journalist with a hidden, weepy sensitive side—it’s all almost enough to make you believe 27 Dresses was brainstormed in the outdoor smoking area during break-time at the office of a women’s glossy magazine, so thoroughly does it pander to every stereotypical single gal’s yearnings and hangups. C- (S.B.)

Like those on the foreign-language film panel, the live action and animation shorts committees don’t go for challenging fare, and have never been hip to the avant-garde. This year’s crop—shown in two programs—is eerily close to the stereotype. Oscar ballot freaks and AMPAS completists need only apply. (M.P.)

Diane Lane plays an FBI agent who must track down a man who’s posting video of his grisly murders online. (Not reviewed.)

Vince Vaughn took four relatively unknown comedians on the road. This is the result. (Not reviewed.)

Martin Lawrence plays a hotshot Los Angeles talk-show host who returns to the deep South for his parents’ wedding anniversary and is forced to reevaluate his life. (Not reviewed.)

Based on a story by Mircea Eliade, Francis Ford Coppola’s film stars chronic scenery-chewer Tim Roth as Dominic, an elderly Romanian linguistics professor who’s on his way to commit suicide when he’s struck by lightning. The blast should’ve killed him, but it’s only made him younger. The suddenly sprightly Roth develops some mighty strange superpowers, like being able to read books simply by waving his hand over them, and the uncanny ability to make Nazis shoot themselves in the face by squinting really hard. D (S.B.)