By Katey Rich
I'll admit, I've doubted Beowulf for months. Even as the early reviews came in and called it visually spectacular, I held firm, assuming that at some point it would get the Polar Express treatment and be eviscerated because of the dead eyes of its characters and the lackadaisical plot. But then my boss came back from a screening yesterday and announced that, yes, it is in fact good. And that means it will cream the other box office contenders, leaving Mr. Magorium to wallow back in the toy store, letting Fermina and Fernando die of cholera for all it cares, and allowing the tiny number of people who will be able to see Redacted this weekend depress the hell out of themselves. Yeah, Beowulf will be standing on its own this weekend, the only possible competition coming from champions American Gangster and Bee Movie and mayyyyybe from Magorium. But hey, Beowulf traveled rough seas to battle an ancient monster and his mother-- you think a 243-year old toy store owner is going to stop him now?
BEOWULF. One of the oldest English-language tales, Beowulf is the story of the titular warrior (Ray Winstone), who travels from Sweden to Denmark to battle the monster Grendel (Crispin Glover), who has terrorized King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) and his men for twelve years. Even when the monster is vanquished, however, there is still Grendel's mother (Angelina Jolie) to contend with. Robin Wright Penn, John Malkovich, Brendan Gleeson and Alison Lohman also lend their voices, and at least some of their bodies, to the film. Beowulf was made with the same motion-capture animation process used in director Robert Zemeckis' previous film, The Polar Express, by which the actors' movements are tracked with motion sensors and then translated to an animated character. This is how Winstone has been made to look considerably buffer than he does in reality, and how Jolie has been given a tail.
It looks like the critics have found in this Beowulf what I never saw when I read it back in 11th grade: it's fun. "Here lies Zemeckis' keen pop sensibility," writes The Hollywood Reporter. "The gruesome violence and male and female near nudity -- about as bold as a PG-13 rating will allow -- mixed together with ribald humor make Beowulf a waggish bit of postmodern fun." Entertainment Weekly's Owen Glieberman fell for it in 3D (650 theatres will be playing it in that format this weekend): "The film makes good on the promise of its technology. In Beowulf, the images are built to pop, and not just because swords, spears, tentacles, blood, and monster drool keep bursting out at the audience. Every shot [...] is built for maximum sculptural luster." Variety, on the other hand, cries foul over the prevalence of technical wizardry over human emotion: "A deeper moral void is evident in the way Zemeckis prioritizes spectacle over human engagement, in his reliance on a medium that allows for enormous range and fluidity in its visual effects yet reduces his characters to 3-D automatons." The review also admits, though, what all of them announce: "Pic should draw rousing biz worldwide."
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel about romantic love and longing over the course of 50 years has been universally praised since it was published in 1988, so a good number of high expectations will probably be following Cholera when it opens this weekend. Javier Bardem stars as Florentino Ariza, a young Colombian man who falls hard for Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), a wealthy young woman who returns his affection at first, but goes on to marry Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt), a revered doctor who solved the cholera epidemic in Colombia. Florentino doesn't give up, though, and over 50 years and over 600 lovers, waits for the day when he can reunite with Fermina and remind her of his unending love. Catalina Sandino Moreno, John Leguizamo and Liev Schreiber also star.
Critical response here seems to range between "Not too terrible" to "My God, what have they done?" "A very professional film that is the cinematic equivalent of a Cliff's Notes volume," writes our Lewis Beale, who also concedes that it is "a decent shot at a complex work." The Hollywood Reporter calls it "handsomely appointed" but also "an overheated melodrama with abundant complications and hammy acting." "Little more than a sudsy telenovela," grumbles The Village Voice. Slant Magazine calls it noble but "something of a failure," adding "[Director Mike Newell's] sense of scale is polite when it should be woozy, and his sense of pacing, while occasionally dramatic, never stops the heart." And wow, Reel Views has some particularly ouch-inducing comments: "Love in the Time of Cholera feels more like a comedy than a drama. It's the kind of motion picture that's crying out to be featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000."
MR. MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM. You may have been to FAO Schwarz or the Toys 'R' Us with the Ferris Wheel inside, but you ain't seen nothing yet: Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium is the world's most magical toy store, filled with everything brightly-colored and entertaining, from Slinkys that slink on their own to fire trucks that shoot water out of a hose. The owner, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman) is ready to leave the store in charge of his assistant Molly (Natalie Portman), but first she has to realize she has the power and magic within herself to take over. Helping her on her journey are a stuffy accoutant (Jason Bateman) and a lonely nine-year-old (Zach Mills) who both come to believe in the store's power and magic. Writer-director Zach Helm also wrote last year's Stranger than Fiction.
Most critics are coming down on the negative side of this mixed bag, though I went along with it, writing, "Mr. Magorium is frustrating for how much better it could have been, if the script were just a little tighter and more focused, but it provides the kind of earnest delight that's more welcome than usual this time of year." Josh Tyler at Cinema Blend liked it even better-- "It does enough to work out as a thoughtful, charming, and occasionally bittersweet experience"-- but we seem to be in the minority. "Shiny, mystifying and completely expendable," writes the New York Press, while Variety adds, "Where the movie finally falls short is in the gap between telling you a miraculous place exists and actually making you feel as if you've gone there."
MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. Noah Baumbach's follow-up to the super successful The Squid and the Whale stars Nicole Kidman as the titular Margot, a prickly, self-absorbed, Manhattan-based writer who has distanced herself from pretty much everyone in her life-- her husband (John Turturro), her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh)-- except her adolescent son (Zane Pais). When sister Pauline sets the date for her wedding to local loser Malcolm (Jack Black), Margot travels out to Long Island for the happy event, only to subsequently destroy it with her unrestrained barbs and insults. But not all is well between Malcolm and Pauline either, and before the weekend virtually all of the relationships going into it will be changed, if not utterly destroyed. Ciaran Hinds, Flora Cross and Halley Feiffer also star.
I've been genuinely surprised by the harsh critical reception Margot has gotten since it debuted at the New York Film Festival, where I saw it. I thought it did a far better job of evoking universal family relationships than Squid did, which seemed too focused to the limited subculture of the Brooklyn literati. A good number of critics, though, were entirely turned off by the nasty characters and slow plot. "This excruciating piece of ranting, empty-headed nothingness rings an alarm bell," hollers Rex Reed at the New York Observer. "Despite the presence of Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh, it's so bad it's dumbfounding." David Denby at The New Yorker also took the characters to task, saying, "They despise everybody, especially themselves, without ever being even vaguely interesting." Our Ethan Alter is kinder, noting, "Few contemporary filmmakers are as skilled at writing such unapologetically obnoxious characters [...] you have to admire the writer-director for sticking to his vision and not forcing redemption on people who don't ask for it." And Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly calls it "pleasurably painful" and says that Baumbach has "become a specialty master at blurring the line between the dysfunctionally appalling and the articulately entertaining."
REDACTED. Finally there's a fellow New York Film Festival selection, Brian DePalma's explosive, pseudo-documentary exploration of atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq. Inspired by found footage, blogs, MySpace pages and other Internet sources direct from the soldiers, he recounts a true event that occurred near a checkpoint in Iraq, in which five soldiers were accused of raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then killing her family as well. De Palma cast mostly unknowns as the soldier, and tells their story through a video diary kept by one soldier, surveillance cameras outside the camp, and documentary footage supposedly shot by a French crew.
Redacted has been getting press for a while now thanks to De Palma's outrage over censorship at the end of the film, in which he shows a montage of actual dead Iraqis and soldiers. His New York Film Festival press conference even made Fox News, and though I was lucky enough to witness it firsthand, I could never bring myself to see a movie so grim. For those who managed to catch it, some are glad they did, and others are repulsed by the violence. Our Chris Barsanti admired the film's use of multiple storytelling perspectives at first but was eventually disappointed, writing, "The film soon reveals it isn't as interested in the difference of perspective as it is in showing us in detail with extreme close-ups the crime itself and the monsters that the occupation has turned most of these Marines into." David Ansen at Newsweek calls the film "angry, powerful but problematic" and critiques the acting from the nonprofessionals: "If you're trying to make us believe we're watching 'reality' by using a faux documentary style, you need actors who never look like they are acting, and this is where Redacted stumbles." A.O. Scott compares its failures to those of Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah, but applauds De Palma for taking action in some way to expose the horrors of the war: "[It is] a painful document of its time, a record of anguish, confusion and uncertainty. And if Mr. De Palma has in the end failed to transcend those feelings or to address them with the clarity and freshness of perspective that art requires and that the times so desperately demand, the failure is hardly his alone."
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