Short Takes for week of July 19-25, 2007

Special screenings

Baby Face

Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook. Directed by Alfred E. Green. 76 minutes. Not rated.

Stanwyck is Lilly, a gutsy young woman who uses her feminine wiles to scale the corporate ladder, amassing male admirers who are only too willing to help a poor working girl. Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Road, 507-3400. 7/24, 1 pm, free.

Anime Academy for Adults

Manga and anime discussion group for ages 18+ screens Maburaho, Negima, Full Metal Alchemist, Howl’s Moving Castle. Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Road, 507-3458. 7/21, 2 pm, free.

Directed by Andrew Adamson. 143 minutes. Rated PG.

Four kids travel through a wardrobe to the land of Narnia and learn of their destiny to free it with the guidance of a mystical lion. East Las Vegas Community/Senior Center, 250 N. Eastern Ave., 229-1515. 7/26, 2 pm, free.

Curious George

Voices of Will Ferrell, Drew Barrymore, David Cross. Directed by Matthew O’Callaghan. 86 minutes. Rated G.

Ferrell voices the Man in the Yellow Hat, a gentleman who looks after his pet monkey—an inquisitive and wonderful creature whose enthusiasm often gets the best of him. Baker Park, St. Louis Ave. & 10th St., 229-1087. 7/26, 8 pm, free.

Dale

Directed by Rory Karpf and Mike Viney. 120 minutes. Not rated.

Archival race footage, outtakes, home videos and interviews with Dale Earnhardt’s friends, family and competitors are used in this documentary on the late NASCAR legend. Regal Colonnade, 8880 S. Eastern Ave., 221-2283. 7/19, 7:30 pm, $10. Info: www.fathomevents.com.

Dancer in the Dark

Bjork, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse. Directed by Lars von Trier. 140 minutes. Rated R.

An Eastern European girl goes to America with her young son, expecting it to be like a Hollywood film. Screening presented by Las Vegas Weekly film critic Matthew Scott Hunter. Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Road, 507-3400. 7/24, 7 pm, free.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron. 141 minutes. Rated PG.

Third film in the series about the adventures of boy wizard Harry Potter. Enterprise Library, 25 E. Shelbourne Ave., 507-3760. 7/21, 11 am, free.

IMAX Theatre

Deep Sea 3D, Fighter Pilot, Mystery of the Nile, Lions 3D: Roar of the Kalahari

Call for showtimes. $11.99 each show.

Luxor, 3900 Las Vegas Blvd. S., 262-4629.

Voices of Ashton Kutcher, Martin Lawrence, Gary Sinise. Directed by Roger Allers and Jill Culton. 86 minutes. Rated PG.

A domesticated grizzly bear and a fast-talking mule deer form an unlikely friendship and must quickly rally other forest animals to form a rag-tag army against a group of hunters. Baker Park, St. Louis Ave. & 10th St., 229-1087. 7/19, 8 pm, free.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Tim Curry. Directed by Jim Sharman. 100 minutes. Rated R.

The perennial 1975 cult classic is a mix of horror, comedy and musical, featuring sex, transvestites and the Time Warp. Augmented by a live cast and audience participation. Tropicana Cinemas, 3330 E. Tropicana Ave., 243-7469. Sat, midnight, $10. Info: www.rhpsvegas.com. Onyx Theater inside The Rack in Commercial Center, 953 E. Sahara Ave., #101. First & third Sat of month, 11:30 pm, $7. Info: 953-0682 or www.divinedecadence.org.

Zathura

Jonah Bobo, Josh Hutcherson, Dax Shepard. Directed by Jon Favreau. 113 minutes. Rated PG.

Two young brothers are drawn into an intergalactic adventure when their house is magically hurtled through space because of the board game they are playing. East Las Vegas Community/Senior Center, 250 N. Eastern Ave., 229-1515. 7/19, 2 pm, free.

New this week

Angel-A **1/2

Jamel Debbouze, Rie Rasmussen, Gilbert Melki. Directed by Luc Besson. 91 minutes. Rated R. In French with English subtitles.

Hairspray ***1/2

Nikki Blonsky, John Travolta, Amanda Bynes, Zac Efron. Directed by Adam Shankman. 117 minutes. Rated PG.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry **

Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Jessica Biel. Directed by Dennis Dugan. 115 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Brenda Blethyn, Frankie J. Holden, Khan Chittenden, Emma Booth. Directed by Cherie Nowlan. 105 minutes. Rated R.

Jacob Kogan, Sam Rockwell, Vera Farmiga. Directed by George Ratliff. 105 minutes. Rated R.

La Vie en Rose ***

Marion Cotillard, Gerard Depardieu, Jean-Pierre Martins. Directed by Olivier Dahan. 140 minutes. Rated PG-13. In French with English subtitles.

Now playing

1408 ***

John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Mary McCormack. Directed by Mikael Hafstrom. 94 minutes. Rated PG-13.

As writer Mike Enslin, who pens cheapo nonfiction guides like Ten Haunted Houses and Ten Haunted Castles, Cusack uses his sarcastic, hangdog style to sell the character’s cynicism, along with his loneliness. Mike’s at New York’s Dolphin Hotel to stay in the titular room, the site of numerous suicides and natural deaths over the last hundred years or so. Once inside, Mike gets down to the business of being terrorized by the never-defined evil presence in the room. Cusack carries it all, especially when there aren’t any other actors around for him to interact with. –JB

Brooklyn Rules **

Freddie Prinze Jr., Scott Caan, Mena Suvari, Alec Baldwin. Directed by Michael Corrente. 99 minutes. Rated R.

You’ve seen this movie before. It’s about three boyhood friends living in Brooklyn who must eventually grow up and go their separate ways. They spend their nights cruising and partying and chasing girls, until the problems of adult life interfere. It’s the mid-’80s, and the influence of some guy named John Gotti is being felt throughout the city. The three guys and their disparate personalities respond in different ways, causing friction and what the filmmakers hope will be drama. These are all one-note characters in a one-dimensional story, but as written by Sopranos veteran Terence Winter and performed earnestly by the leads, it still manages to be personal and sincere. –BS

Captivity (Not reviewed)

Elisha Cuthbert, Daniel Gillies, Pruitt Taylor Vince. Directed by Roland Joffe. 85 minutes. Rated R.

A man and a woman awaken to find themselves captured in a cellar. As their kidnapper torments them, the truth about their horrific abduction is revealed.

Evan Almighty **

Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman, Lauren Graham. Directed by Tom Shadyac. 94 minutes. Rated PG.

God (Freeman, reprising his Bruce Almighty role) has set his sights on Evan (Carell), who’s left his TV job in Buffalo after being elected to the U.S. Congress. Evan’s barely had time to settle into his new house and job before the smarmy deity shows up and demands that he build an ark in anticipation of a coming flood. Predictably, the ark is less about global disaster and more about Evan learning some important lessons about making time for his family and—most relentlessly and heavy-handedly—caring for the environment. Not that what passes for humor is worth a whole lot—there’s an entire montage of Carell falling down and/or getting hit with things, and far more jokes about bird poop than should ever be in one movie. –JB

Evening **

Claire Danes, Vanessa Redgrave, Toni Collette, Patrick Wilson, Hugh Dancy. Directed by Lajos Koltai. 117 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Redgrave is the aged Ann, lying on her deathbed and attended by her two daughters (Collette and Miranda Richardson). While Ann wastes away from some unspecified cinematic illness, she flashes back to her early 20s, when she was played by Claire Danes and attending the wedding of her best friend, Lila (Mamie Gummer). While at Lila’s picturesque summer home, Ann falls in love with stoic doctor Harris (Wilson), a childhood friend of Lila’s who’s also an object of unrequited love for Lila herself and her sexually confused brother Buddy (Dancy). Koltai literalizes the symbolism and drowns everything in a sappy, overpowering score; the characters end up sounding like they’re reading dialogue from a bad novel. –JB

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer **

Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis. Directed by Tim Story. 92 minutes. Rated PG.

In the new sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, the superhero team’s problems begin when first class is overbooked. Their problems continue in the same vein. The million-dollar wedding between Mr. Fantastic and Sue Storm, aka the Invisible Girl (Alba), is over-publicized, and Sue worries about how they’re going to raise a family when they’re so famous. Their wedding is subsequently interrupted when the Silver Surfer begins blowing holes in the planet and knocking out electrical systems. Unfortunately, he’s just the minion of the planet-eater Galactus, who has now been informed that Earth is on the menu. The film hinges entirely on these gigantic, yet straightforward, simple conflicts, resulting in little or no emotional involvement in the characters. –JMA

Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato, Vincent Schiavelli. Directed by Emanuele Crialese. 120 minutes. Rated PG-13. In Italian with English subtitles.

A Martin Scorsese-produced ode to ignorance and superstition in his ancestral Sicily, Golden Door is a generic immigrant’s tale that too often mistakes blankness for mystery. The immigrants get on a boat, fight among themselves, die in a big storm, flirt innocently, disembark, get prodded in intimate areas, are tested for imbecility, muteness and the ability to manipulate wooden blocks, and so on. There are cute old people and cute young people and, yes, Charlotte Gainsbourg—but not a single character musters any sort of personal narrative. They crawl out of an Old World miasma and stride into an equally hazy America, superstitions and ignorance in hand. How uplifting. –AW

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ***

Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint. Directed by David Yates. 138 minutes. Rated PG-13.

There are at least a few significant things going on in Phoenix, which once again finds Harry (Radcliffe) at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, facing the imminent threat of Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). When you have a film series that’s seven installments long, eventually you are going to get to the placeholder chapter, and that’s where the Harry Potter series has ended up with its fifth big-screen outing. Longtime Potter fans will probably be eager to forgive Phoenix’s flaws, and even casual viewers will still find plenty to like, but the feeling of marking time, of nothing especially momentous going on in the latest incremental step toward Harry’s final showdown with evil wizard Voldemort, is fairly hard to shake. –JB

Knocked Up ***

Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann. Directed by Judd Apatow. 129 minutes. Rated R.

The wholesome values in Knocked Up are effectively intermixed with the movie’s real selling point, its outrageous humor, but it’s clear which side wins out. That makes the film either an act of subversive genius—getting stoners and slackers to appreciate the importance of parenthood—or a strangely conservative scolding in the guise of a dumb comedy. As tempting as it is to give Apatow credit for subversion, it might be safer to say that he’s really just telling his audience to grow up and accept some responsibility. That’s exactly what happens to Ben Stone (Rogen), a prototypical representative of the Apatow demographic, when his one-night stand with driven E! news producer Alison Scott (Heigl) results in an unplanned pregnancy. –JB

License to Wed *1/2

Robin Williams, Mandy Moore, John Krasinski. Directed by Ken Kwapis. 90 minutes. Rated PG-13.

You’ve seen Meet the Parents, right? Well, here comes Meet the Pastor! Instead of Robert De Niro’s intimidating paternal figure, we get Williams’ oddball religious figure, but everything else remains the same. The character is still the only thing standing in the way of marital bliss between the well-meaning would-be groom and his personality-deprived bride-to-be. There will be awkward moments with the potential in-laws and escalating slapstick abuse that culminates in the alienation of the young man’s fiancée, who must inevitably call off the wedding by the end of the second act. But when hero and antagonist finally bond, the whole debacle will end in wedding bells. It’s a tired formula even when done right, but License to Wed gets it all wrong. –MSH

Live Free or Die Hard ***

Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant, Maggie Q, Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Directed by Len Wiseman. 128 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Live Free or Die Hard is the fourth installment in the increasingly ludicrous action series about everyman New York City cop McClane (Willis) single-handedly stopping massive terrorist attacks. Criminal mastermind Thomas Gabriel (Olyphant, coolly menacing) is a former U.S. intelligence expert now bent on taking down the system he was once hired to protect. McClane’s (and the country’s) only hope against Gabriel’s crippling of the U.S. transportation, financial and utilities infrastructure is hacker/slacker Matt Farrell (Long). Wiseman seems far more interested in concocting ever-more-gigantic action sequences than in examining McClane’s personal life. But, oh, those action sequences: Using a minimum of CGI, Wiseman stages some mind-boggling stunts. –JB

The Lives of Others ****

Ulrich Muhe, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck. Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. 137 minutes. Rated R. In German with English subtitles.

Set in East Germany in pre-glasnost 1984, the film centers on an exceedingly bizarre love quadrangle. The long-term romance between successful, outwardly line-toeing playwright Georg Dreyman (Koch) and his girlfriend-muse, actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck), is thrown into jeopardy when a corpulent minister of culture turns his lustful attention to Christa-Maria. Soon enough, a favor-currying Stasi lieutenant clandestinely assigns secret-police-school instructor Wiesler (Muhe) to begin 24/7 surveillance on Dreyman. Von Donnersmarck strikes an uncommonly graceful balance between his narrative’s espionage-thriller accoutrements and love-story sentimentality, and he leavens things throughout with surprising and welcome bursts of wry humor. –MH

A Mighty Heart **

Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Archie Panjabi. Directed by Michael Winterbottom. 100 minutes. Rated R.

The title of Mariane Pearl’s memoir, A Mighty Heart, presumably refers to her late husband, Daniel, the reporter who was kidnapped and murdered by Islamic extremists in the winter of 2002. In Winterbottom’s new film adaptation, however, the coronary mightiness is all Mariane’s. Save a hasty account of the events leading up to his disappearance, the doomed man (Futterman) appears only in bittersweet flashbacks and recreated photos; the bulk of the movie depicts the efforts of his pregnant wife (Jolie) and various others to secure his safe return—efforts that we observe with sorrow, knowing they will fail. A Mighty Heart doesn’t exactly qualify as a procedural, and it certainly isn’t a thriller or a drama. Instead, it’s a hectic testament to Mariane Pearl’s courage and self-possession—the hagiography of a grieving widow who doesn’t yet know for certain that her husband is dead. –MD

Emma Roberts, Tate Donovan, Max Thieriot, Laura Elena Harring. Directed by Andrew Fleming. 99 minutes. Rated PG.

Crafty teen detective Nancy (Roberts) enters the picture fully formed (no prologue necessary). She solves a crime, negotiates with the robbers and scales down the side of a building before leaving her hometown of River Heights for Los Angeles, where her lawyer father (Donovan) has picked up some temporary work. He makes her promise not to sleuth in the big city, but Nancy has already found a mystery in their rented house. Decades earlier, a movie star (Harring) disappeared, then turned up murdered. Nancy tries to figure out whodunit and why. Fleming creates a clever, snappy, self-aware picture in which Nancy thrives. –JMA

Ocean’s Thirteen ***

George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Al Pacino. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. 113 minutes. Rated PG-13.

As in the first film, our heroes have targeted a fabulous Las Vegas casino—this one owned not by Andy Garcia’s Terry Benedict, who’s partially bankrolling the operation, but by a preening, back-stabbing mogul named Willie Bank (Pacino). Their objective isn’t quite what you’d expect, though. Ocean & Co. don’t want Bank’s vast fortune for themselves—they’d just prefer that Bank, who’s both humiliated and hospitalized their jovial mentor, Reuben (Elliott Gould), possess a whole lot less of it. For the most part, Ocean’s Thirteen reverts to the breezy, weightless antics—charismatic men plotting byzantine schemes in exotic locales—that made Eleven such forgettable fun. –MD

Once ***1/2

Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, Geoff Minogue. Directed by John Carney. 85 minutes. Rated R.

Once is a musical expressly designed for people who think they hate musicals—a movie that takes full advantage of the genre’s expressionistic power, conveying heightened emotions entirely via libretto, while at the same time remaining firmly grounded in gritty, mundane reality. Carney’s means of achieving this apparent contradiction is refreshingly simple: Both of his lead characters are aspiring musicians, and their week-long relationship is ostensibly a musical collaboration, as they jointly compose, arrange and record a demo. Nobody ever really bursts into song in Once—it’s more as if they stumble into song, tentative and uncertain, finding their confidence and their passion as they go along. This approach lacks the razzle-dazzle of the classic musical, but it has an endearingly awkward charm of its own. –MD

Paris, Je T’Aime ***1/2

Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, Gérard Depardieu, Marianne Faithfull, Ben Gazzara, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Bob Hoskins and others. Directed by various. 120 minutes. Rated R. In French with English subtitles.

Like other anthology films, the new Paris, Je T’Aime has its strong points and its low points, and no two viewers will agree on which is which. Eighteen directors participated in this tribute to the City of Lights, each assigned to a different neighborhood. Each short film runs an average of eight minutes, so even if you get stuck with a clunker, it’s not long before the next one starts. Overall, the filmmakers manage to capture a sense of wonder and romance about the city, even if the “neighborhood” concept isn’t consistent. –JMA

Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush. Directed by Gore Verbinski. 168 minutes. Rated PG-13.

At World’s End picks up, as these things tend to do, roughly where its slightly less inflated predecessor ended, with Elizabeth Swann (Knightley) allied with Captain Barbossa (Rush) and the surviving swabbies of the Black Pearl to rescue Jack Sparrow (Depp) from the very euphemistically named Davy Jones’ locker. Even if you loved The Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man’s Chest, this dour, tedious, aggressively unfunny, egregiously padded helping of celluloid fluff will only waste your time and money. –MH

Ratatouille ***

Directed by Brad Bird. 110 minutes. Rated G.

It’s a cute and well-animated movie about a Parisian rat named Remy (Oswalt) who has a taste for gourmet food and idolizes a rotund celebrity restaurateur named Gusteau (Garrett). Gusteau’s gone to the great kitchen in the sky, and his eponymous eatery has been taken over by his money-grubbing sous-chef. When Remy finds himself by chance in the restaurant’s kitchen, he inadvertently helps busboy Alfredo Linguini (Romano) create a marvelous dish and becomes a sort of culinary Cyrano de Bergerac to the nervous young man. The plot moves along familiar beats, setting up its conflicts simply and resolving them the same way. –JB

Shortcut to Happiness *1/2

Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Anthony Hopkins, Kim Cattrall. Directed by Alec Baldwin. 99 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Baldwin plays aspiring novelist Jabez Stone, who strikes a deal with the devil (Hewitt) to sell his soul in exchange for literary success. Of course, things don’t turn out as he imagined, and although he’s rich and famous, he’s lost all his friends and his writing lacks, er, soul. Enter Daniel Webster (Hopkins), who’s been inexplicably reimagined as a book publisher, although there are oblique references to his past dealings with the Dark Princess. The centerpiece of the classic story and its many previous adaptations is the trial in which Webster argues for the return of Stone’s soul, but here it’s relegated to the final 25 minutes of a 100-minute film. The rest is all Christmas Carol-style lessons about not mistreating people for the sake of your own success, stunning in its obviousness and leaden in its execution. –JB

Shrek the Third **

Voices of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Antonio Banderas. Directed by Chris Miller. 92 minutes. Rated PG.

The loveable titular ogre (voiced by Myers), already saddled with talking-animal sidekicks Donkey (Murphy) and Puss In Boots (Banderas) and married to princess-turned-ogre Fiona (Diaz), acquires a horde of new friends and foes in this latest installment. Chief among them is the supremely uninteresting Artie, cousin to Fiona, and Shrek’s choice to succeed Fiona’s late father as the king of Far, Far Away, because the ogre himself would rather not rule. What started out as a genial stab at Disneyfied fairy tales has morphed into a catch-all parody with no focus and even less bite. It’s hard to buy into the movie making fun of anything when it’s become such an easy target for mockery itself. –JB

Sicko **1/2

Directed by Michael Moore. 113 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Sicko isn’t a bad film, exactly, but anyone who’s ever seen even one of Moore’s previous screeds-cum-documentaries could probably give a fairly accurate summary of its content, sight unseen. As in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore leans heavily on admittedly affecting but patently manipulative sob stories, introducing us to various ailing Americans whose claims were inexplicably rejected, denied or even rescinded by their health insurers. Trouble is, he has fewer facts and arguments to buttress the human-interest element this time—or, rather, the problem with the U.S. health-care system is so obvious (in a word: capitalism) that even the for-Dummies version requires only a few minutes of screen time. –MD

Surf’s Up **1/2

Voices of Shia LaBeouf, Jeff Bridges, Zooey Deschanel. Directed by Ash Brannon and Chris Buck. 85 minutes. Rated PG.

Cody Maverick (LaBeouf) doesn’t fit in with his penguin kin, preferring to surf over gathering fish and tending eggs. Cody travels to fictional Pen Gu Island for a big surf competition, where he falls for a lifeguard named Lani (Deschanel) and learns totally deep life lessons from his idol, an aging surf champion named Big Z (Bridges). It’s breezy and fitfully amusing stuff, and directors Brannon and Buck make at least a token effort to break out of the monolithic computer animation pack with the mockumentary gimmick, although livening up one tired genre by combining it with another is not necessarily a formula for success. –JB

Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Jon Voight, Josh Duhamel. Directed by Michael Bay. 140 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Giant robots that beat each other up are inherently exciting, so it’s frustrating to see the filmmakers behind this behemoth actually turn such a premise into something tedious and boring, stretched out to nearly two-and-a-half hours and saddled with a tone too somber for camp and too silly to be taken seriously. Basically, there’s this thing that’s really important, and both the good guys and the bad guys are after it. Given the relative simplicity of the story and fans’ desire to see as much hot robot-on-robot action as possible, it’s baffling that Bay and his writers pace the movie so slowly, with numerous diversions and dull sidetracks delaying the inevitable Autobot/Decepticon showdown. –JB

Waitress ***1/2

Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Jeremy Sisto. Directed by Adrienne Shelly. 107 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Jenna (Russell) is an unhappily married—and very unhappily pregnant—waitress at a small-town diner who’s constantly dreaming up exotic pies and naming them after whatever crisis she’s currently undergoing. Abortion, it seems, is out of the question—the possibility is never so much as raised—but Jenna’s red-state family values don’t stop her from embarking upon a guilty, start-stop affair with her hunky but equally married new obstetrician (Fillion). This all goes more or less where you’d expect it to, but it’s hard to begrudge familiarity when it’s accompanied by such dizzy warmth and offbeat charm. –MD

You Kill Me ***1/2

Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni, Luke Wilson. Directed by John Dahl. 92 minutes. Rated R.

On paper, Sir Ben Kingsley starring in a black comedy about an off-and-on-and-off-and-on-the-wagon hitman whose Family ships him from Buffalo to San Francisco for an extended dry-out sounds more risky than Bruce Willis’ return to his comedic roots in The Whole Nine Yards. The supporting cast mesh well within the film’s laconic vibe. Yet it’s Kingsley who best mines twisted comedy out of alcoholic pathos, whether imploring the Golden Gate Bridge for guidance or furrowing his brow, steeling his jaw and making amends to those he’s “harmed” by purchasing gift certificates for their remaining family members. –JS

JMA Jeffrey M. Anderson; JB Josh Bell; MD Mike D’Angelo; MH Mark Holcomb; MSH Matthew Scott Hunter; JS Julie Seabaugh; BS Benjamin Spacek; AW Annie Wagner