Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

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.

Run Fatboy Run
Directed by David Schwimmer
C
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., March 28

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.

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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.