'Money Never Sleeps,' 'You Again' and 'Owls' enter crowded weekend

By Sarah Sluis

Corporate raider Gordon Gekko is back in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (3,565 theatres). Oliver Stone's sequel to his 1987 film centers on young financial analyst Shia La Beouf and includes many

references to the current economic crisis. Critic Doris Toumarkine praised the movie's "snappy script," "fantastic performances all around," and "unblinking look at the high-stakes financial players�the greedy, sneaky bankers and traders and their enablers." Though the movie will have tough competition from its 3D-animated owls (see below), it's a contender for the top spot.

Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (3,575 theatres) sounds like it will appeal mainly to kids who have already seen their fair share of age-inappropriate movies to build their scare tolerance. If I put my kid shoes on, I see a movie that's very darkly lit (one of my childhood pet peeves, I hated it when characters were

obscured by shadows), scary, and confusing--kind of like the spooky animated film The Secret of NIMH, only worse. Critic Frank Lovece points out that the movie includes such "nightmare-inducers" as "genocidal ambitions, medieval slashing tools, child slavery, [and] child soldiers," all of which lead him to question the movie's PG rating. Based on a series of young adult books, the adventure centers on a group of young owls caught up in a fight of good vs. evil. The comparatively more cheerful Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs opened last year to $30 million, and Owls should come close to that figure, landing somewhere in the mid-$20 million range.

Despite the snappy premise 'my brother is marrying my high school enemy,' You Again (2,548 theatres) plays like "one more promising idea ground into bland, tasteless Hollywood sausage," according to critic Maitland McDonagh. For the under-25 females expected to turn out for the movie, however, I can't think of a more appealing premise. Everyone has a little bit of an inner geek and would love to show up the mean girl, so the idea of watching a successful Kristen Bell spar with her former torturer (Odette Yustman) should be enough catnip to put the movie in the teen-million range.

Sneaking into 700 theatres, The Virginity Hit adds a twist to the typical teen sex comedy--webcams and YouTube. But wait! 1999's American Pie also included a webcam sequence in the plot, but the teens seeing The Virginity Hit were learning their A-B-C's when that movie came out. By releasing under the radar, this comedy is aiming for a viral success fueled by word-of-mouth.

Five prominent specialty releases enter the fray today, many of them buoyed up by positive receptions on the festival circuit.

Woody Allen makes his annual directing appearance in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (4 theatres, NY/LA). The movie, which explores aging, infidelity, and faith, stirred up this observation from critic Kevin Lally: "Perhaps someday Woody Allen will again appear onscreen in a truly satisfying movie. For now, it's comforting to know this prolific writer-director can still deliver good, insightful material for the many actors who keep lining up to work with him."

James Franco stars as Allen Ginsberg in Howl (6 theatres, NY/LA/SF), a movie that melds an animated reading of the titular poem, Ginsberg's obscenity court case, and his life--each element better on its own than as part of the whole, according to Toumarkine. A murdered drug junkie comes back to life in the graphic and psychedelic Enter the Void (4 theatres, NY/LA/Chicago), directed by Gaspar No. In Buried (11 theatres), Ryan Reynolds plays a man trapped in a coffin in Iraq with a cell phone as his only tool for escape.

A moving documentary about America's failing public schools, Waiting for "Superman" (4 theatres), makes its debut. Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) directed the polemic, which inspired Shirely Sealy to speculate "if it [will succeed] in reshaping the national debate about how to fix our broken educational system."

On Monday, stay tuned for a recap of which small releases distinguished themselves, and the winners in the battle of Wall Street vs. owls vs. revenge-seeking women.

Director Zack Snyder gives sneak peak of 'Legend of the Guardians'

By Sarah Sluis

As I watched director Zack Snyder preview clips of the September release, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, at a press event at the Time Warner Center in New York, I was amazed at how far CG/3D animation has come. In 2010, How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek Forever After, Toy Story 3 and Despicable Me have enchanted audiences, including me, with their complex CG worlds. The original Toy Story 15 years ago could only render rounded, plasticized figures, and favored harsher shadows. Toy Story 3 not only had 3D, it was bathed in a soft, diffused light and introduced a furry character (fur is notoriously difficult to computer-generate).

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole pays similar attention to the visual details. The owl's feathers look soft, textured, and ruffled, something Snyder revealed took a lot of work. The lighting is dark, shadowy, and moody, bringing to mind How to Train Your Dragon's focus on candlelit Viking settings. The owls are not anthromorphic caricatures. They have a level of photorealism that's unprecedented for an animated film. Therein lies the problem.

I had a very hard time seeing the characters' expressions, or even attaching a mouth to the dialogue. Perhaps it's the years of seeing artificially noticeable mouth movements in those live-action/CG hybrids with talking dogs, but the slight movements in the owls' beaks just weren't doing it for me, and they also seemed slightly out of sync at times. Several different breeds of owls share space on the screen. While the snow-white owl had contrasting features and easily readable expressions, the chameleon-like fur on other owls obfuscated their eyes and beaks, making it difficult to parse out meaning from their faces. Did I mention all the creatures speak in Australian accents? And are constantly referring to fantasy-fueled proper nouns, like Ga'Hoole, the Pure Ones, Soren, Kludd, Ezylryb, Noctus, and Grimble?

Zack Snyder favors a fast-paced cutting style, but leaves in confusing cuts. At times, I lost the spatial

relationship of the owls when he cut from one perspective to another. I had to remind myself that I don't hate action sequences, I hate action sequences when they channel chaos over clearly articulated action. The only way that Snyder seems to be able to clarify his action is through slow motion, which he uses with some frequency--a neat addition to a kids' movie, but unfortunate in that the slow motion provides basic information that he can't seem to do at a regular pace. Watchmen was similarly confusing to view, and it doesn't seem that Snyder has improved. I have a message for Snyder: Watch Avatar. James Cameron managed to offer clear spatial relations in the flying fight scenes, and watching an action scene has never been better.

With its complicated mythology and dark setting, Legend of the Guardian bears some comparison to Lord of the Rings. Among those that have read the book, as well as fans of fantasy, Guardians will surely offer appeal. But if the finished product is as incoherent as the collection of clips I viewed, I predict a more dire future, especially among casual viewers.

What's interesting about the footage I saw was the disconnect between the style and the narrative: What made the owls so striking visually detracted from readability as characters. I'd like to see a CG film that has photorealistic characters but still manages to make the animals readable and understandable to audiences. It's also possible that I'm wrong--that audiences simply need to get used to non-cartoon like animals. A carrot: As the clips wore on, I found it easier to read the characters' expressions, and one sequence with a particularly furry character managed to come across clearly thanks to movements not only in the eyes and beak, but also the eyebrows and body stance.

Snyder's "crazy owl movie," as he calls it, has promising visuals but a confusing narrative. Watch the (less impressive) 2D trailer and decide for yourself here.