Snow Angels

Capsules

Snow Angels, Run Fatboy Run, 21, Flawless

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Snow Angels

Directed by David Gordon Green
B-
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., March 28

“Do you have a sledgehammer in your heart?” asks Tom Noonan’s super-intense high school marching band coach while attempting to shepherd his flock through a lackluster performance of Peter Gabriel’s 1980s radio staple. This precious opening sequence of writer/director David Gordon Green’s fourth feature is both magnificently silly yet strangely gentle, at least until two gunshots echo in the distance.

Like his previous film, the confused backwoods-chase picture Undertow, Snow Angels finds this wonderfully distinctive filmmaker suffering growing pains, trying to wrestle his meandering, oddball sensibilities into the requirements of conventional genre forms. Adapted by Green from Stewart O’Nan’s novel, the tale is one of your standard Sundance-friendly miserablist multicharacter roundelays, as a fumbling, wide-eyed teen (Michael Angarano) copes with not just the divorce of his own parents (strikingly well-played by Griffin Dunne and Jeanetta Arnette) but also must witness the horrible fates of his beloved former babysitter (Kate Beckinsale) and her alcoholic born-again husband (Sam Rockwell).

The best parts of Snow Angels are the stray details discovered in this working-class community—tidbits that feel lived in and awkward moments allowed to really breathe. There’s plenty of comic relief from this community’s soap opera-worthy shenanigans, including unexpectedly fine work from Amy Sedaris as a harried waitress and Nicky Katt, who lets his astounding mustache deliver half the performance as her philandering hubby.

Alas, the unfortunate Rockwell-Beckinsale story strand isn’t just unbelievably depressing and difficult to watch, it also drags the movie into a sort of grim, predetermined tragedy mode that’s severely at odds with the rest of Snow Angels’ loopy humanism. Beckinsale appears a bit too movie-star polished to fit in with the rest of this cast, but she at least drops her usual plasticized veneer and seems a lot closer to a real person than she ever has on-screen before. Rockwell brings what he can of his natural goofball charm to a role that’s basically unplayable, but in the end these two aren’t people—they’re literary devices.

Which is an awful shame, because the rest of Snow Angels’ bustling community feels alive and surprising in ways that put most other movies to shame. The halting courtship between Angarano and a kooky classmate (Olivia Thirbly, so good here she’s officially forgiven for saying “Honest to blog?” in Juno) is so unforced and touching, you realize this could have been a great movie. And then the shooting starts.

Did the guy who came up with hurling second-rate Prince records at zombies really dream up a gag about a volcanic foot boil being popped in some poor guy’s face? Even for as titanic a comedic talent as Simon Pegg, collaboration is everything, and there’s a world of difference between him working with longtime pals Edgar Wright and Nick Frost and him working with Run Fatboy Run co-writer Michael Ian Black and director David Schwimmer.

In Hot Fuzz it was a treat to watch Pegg break away from his emotionally stunted slacker routine and prove he could play uptight and humorless with equal panache. Fatboy, alas, represents the fabled step back, casting him as a nervy loser who, in the film’s opening, runs out on his wedding to Thandie Newton.

Jump ahead five years and he’s making a belated attempt to win her back from her current beau (Hank Azaria, distressingly straight). Azaria’s not only wildly successful but prepping for the London marathon—a feat Pegg, for underexplained reasons, decides to perform himself, despite getting sweat-drenched after only a couple steps.

That said, the “fatboy” handle is a bit harsh, isn’t it? He’s just a tad on the girthy side, with a mild gut that could evaporate with a couple weeks of running and a yogurt diet. Pegg, in flawless shape for Hot Fuzz, didn’t exactly channel Robert De Niro in Raging Bull to prepare for the role; it looks like he simply spent a week eating burgers and catching up on Eastenders.

Watching the slightly flabby Pegg prepare for a 24-mile jog with only two weeks to spare provides a couple mild yuks, but Fatboy still feels like a third-rate Pegg knockoff inexplicably starring (and co-written by) Pegg himself, complete with the kind of thuddingly obvious metaphors (isn’t Pegg really running from himself?) Spaced and Shaun of the Dead stridently avoided.

The film’s saving grace is, oddly, Pegg’s performance. (That, and Black Books’ Dylan Moran doing a more-disreputable-than-usual twist on “the friend.”) This may be a cookie-cutter Brit romcom (if one, like Death at a Funeral, directed by a tone-deaf Yank), but Pegg plays up the patheticness of his character without ever begging maniacally for our sympathy. How much this has to do with creative indifference is up in the air.

21
Directed by Robert Luketic
D+
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., March 28

The true story of five MIT students who took Vegas for millions gets a slicked up, depressingly Hollywood-ized treatment, chock-full of dopey inventions from a Screenwriting 101 manual. Across the Universe’s simpering Jim Sturgess stars as Ben Campbell (in real life it was Jeff Ma; hmm … wonder why they changed that?), a brilliant math whiz recruited by Kevin Spacey’s oily professor to count cards in Sin City.

This dilapidated morality play, directed by Robert Luketic from a clunky script by Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb, takes forever and a day to get going. Ben’s such a boringly noble goody-goody, of course he’s not gambling for the thrill or the profit; he needs tuition money for Harvard Medical School. A sickly looking Kate Bosworth’s comely coed practically has to throw herself at this dunce before he’ll consider committing to the team so our story can finally get started.

One of those movies where the audience is always about 20 minutes ahead of the characters, 21 plods along through the expected plot developments.

Shot in smudgy-looking hi-def video, 21 goes for gloss but just comes off blurry and out of focus, which is kind of a nice match because the fuzzy indistinctness applies to the characters as well. We’re supposed to buy Ben’s transformation from a babe in the woods to some sort of criminal super-genius, even though he’s still so stupid he hides hundreds of thousands of dollars in his dorm-room’s drop ceiling.

The only surprise is that the filmmakers were able to make a true story feel so phony.

Flawless
Directed by Michael Radford
F
Reviewed by Doug Wallen
Opens Fri., March 28

We open on a diamond traveling through its long birthing process, from being panned in South African mud to being appraised and cut and fitted into a pricey ring. It’s essentially the same opening as Lord of War, with a diamond instead of a bullet. Then we have Demi Moore as an elderly woman caked in very fake aging makeup.

She’s Laura Quinn, an American who became the first female manager for the London Diamond Corporation. She’s being interviewed by a hotshot young British journalist writing about pioneering career women—as clumsy a framing device as there ever was. We cut back to London in 1960, where Quinn is the first to arrive and last to leave work every day and yet gets overlooked for every promotion.

When one of her suggestions backfires and her job is left hanging by a thread, she’s an ideal target for Michael Caine’s ambling night janitor, who’s plotting to relieve the massive company of enough diamonds to make him rich but not enough to be noticed. Falling back on his usual cockney gusto, Caine is the only thing worthwhile in Flawless, yet even he can’t save a flimsy script and the surprisingly colorless direction of Michael Radford (Il Postino, The Merchant of Venice).

This isn’t a heist movie so much as a clumsy, moralistic character study doubling as a whodunit. It drags so slowly that the first hour feels like three, and each tedious twist and double-cross slows it further. By the time that laughable reveal comes at the end—in the tradition of The Illusionist and The Usual Suspects—it will elicit groans that are louder and more lively than anything Flawless can muster.

Not Reviewed

An adaptation of the Honoré de Balzac novella, directed by Jacques Rivette. (Opens Fri., March 28.)

Yet another genre parody, from the writer of Scary Movie 3 and 4. (Opens Fri., March 28.)

Ongoing

Lucy Walker’s documentary follows six students at Tibet’s only school for the blind as they attempt to climb a Himalayan mountain. (Not reviewed.)

Brett Morgen’s prankish, exhilarating documentary about the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots and the farcical trial that followed eschews traditional doc voiceovers or talking techniques, taking a pass on long-view perspectives, to become a fully immersive present-tense experience. A- (S.B.)

The remarkable Karl Markovics plays a first-class Jewish counterfeiter nicked just as he’s about to forge his way out of 1939 Berlin. His skills spare him the worst of the concentration camps, and he eventually finds himself overlooking what will become the largest counterfeiting scheme in history. Stefan Ruzowitzky’s tale of Nazi collaboration walked off with the Best Foreign- Language Film Oscar. B- (M.P.)

Three high schoolers hire a bodyguard (Owen Wilson) to help them fight off a bully in this unfortunately timed comedy written by Kristorof Brown and Seth Rogen. (Not reviewed.)

A shot-for-shot, almost word-for-word English-language remake of Michael Haneke’s 1998 Austrian film of the same name, Games stars Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as a cheerful wealthy couple headed to their lush vacation home for a relaxing weekend with their chipper young son (Devon Gearheart) in tow. Trouble arrives with an unexpected house call from two somewhat distressingly polite young men calling themselves Peter and Paul, both dressed in white and inexplicably wearing gloves. B- (S.B.)

Ira Sachs’ wannabe black comedy attempts to address the spectacularly unoriginal notion that, just under the shiny surfaces, those wacky 1950s were hardly as picture-perfect as they might’ve looked. Chris Cooper stars as Harry, a prosperous businessman trapped in a pleasantly dull marriage to wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson). The trouble with Harry is that he’s suddenly fallen head-over-heels in love with his mistress (Rachel McAdams). Thinking rather highly of himself, Harry assumes poor Pat would be despondent and ruined for the rest of her days were he to walk out. So obviously the logical, most humane course of action is to poison her. C- (S.B.)

As a blustery American singer and actress vying for starring roles and social ascent in the ’30s-London-set Pettigrew, Amy Adams is a terrifying force of nature. Francis McDormand plays a frumpy but resourceful governess who cons her way into becoming Adams’ “social secretary.” Pettigrew may be ultra-super-mega fizzy, but there’s an undertow of melancholy, even despair. B- (M.P.)

Two-time Oscar nominee Djimon Hounsou? Talk about slumming. (Not reviewed.)

Adapted by The Queen’s screenwriter Peter Morgan from a novel by Phillipa Gregory, it’s no surprise that The Other Boleyn Girl is perfectly dreadful. Riddled with loud unintentional laughs and inexplicable filmmaking decisions, it rivals Elizabeth: The Golden Age as far as bodice-ripping, historically nonsensical lunacy goes. D+ (S.B.)

Gabe Nevins stars as Alex, a sad-eyed and troubled young skateboarder who alternates between blocking out and coming to terms with his complicity in the accidental death of a security guard near a skatepark in Gus Van Sant’s fragile, deeply felt new film. A- (S.B.)

Semi-Pro concerns Will Ferrell’s Jackie Moon, the owner/coach/player of an all-but-talentless ABA team not only about to be terminated by the devouring NBA but also located in a pre-Roger & Me Flint, Mich. This is still the kind of movie that features a “Free Gerbil Night,” as well as more gags about plaid, disco, fondue, coif flips and afros than 20 Anchormans. And yet one can imagine a more acidic—and even funnier—comedy being made from the same material, if only its star could be bothered. C+ (M.P.)

Joshua Jackson stars in this remake of a Thai thriller in which a couple sees a ghostly presence in some photos after a terrible accident. (Not reviewed.)

A 12-year-old girl (AnnaSophia Robb) hits the road with her uncle (Nick Stahl) after her mother (Charlize Theron) abandons her. (Not reviewed.)