  
| 
| ||||||||||||
  EW review: So-so 'Slevin'Also: Minor 'Friends,' don't follow 'Lead'By Owen Gleiberman  Lucy Liu and Josh Hartnett in "Lucky Number Slevin," a twisty thriller that's too clever by half, says EW. YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- "Lucky Number Slevin" is not exactly an inviting title for a booby-trapped hipster gangster thriller -- it looks like a misprint and sounds, when you say it aloud, as if it were being uttered by Sylvester the Cat. The awkwardness is hardly incidental, though. Like everything else about this scrambled-time-frame, hoodwink-the-audience, so-clever-it's-too-clever-by-half contraption of a movie, that pesky title is meant to noodge your brain, to leave you with a nattering question -- what the hell is slevin? -- instead of an answer. Here are some of the questions you may have: Not really, and that's a problem. With its double-cross enigmas folded into blood, guts, and bullets, "Lucky Number Slevin" wants to bend your brain the way that "Pulp Fiction" and (for some) "The Usual Suspects" did. In any given scene, we're supposed to be reacting on two levels at once: to the punchy immediacy of vicious happy-talk criminals, and to the mildly intellectual crossword-puzzle suspense of figuring out how the bizarre scenario fits together. Lest we forget that it's all in good fun, there are scenes like the one in which Slevin and the sexy coroner next door (Lucy Liu) bond over their love of James Bond flicks, riffing on the various actors who played Blofeld -- a pop debate in the Tarantino tradition, except that the trivia in question is far too standard-issue. Jason Smilovic's script, which keeps you guessing just enough to keep you occupied, has been staged with aggressive finesse by director Paul McGuigan, and Hartnett, who worked with McGuigan once before (in the truly romantic -- and far superior -- puzzle mystery "Wicker Park"), knows how to use his pie-eyed boyish lethargy to maximum duplicitous effect. It's amusing to see Kingsley do what looks like a winking impersonation of overcooked De Niro. Yet "Lucky Number Slevin," for all its game invention, is less "Pulp Fiction" than an Elmore Leonard knockoff crossed with "Deathtrap": a thriller that holds less interest -- and less water -- the more it reveals about what's actually going on. EW Grade: B- 'Friends With Money'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum Frank talk about money is the last taboo, a prohibition with a particularly weird effect on women. The same brassy babe who will describe her sex life in fearless gynecological detail gets all demure when it comes to describing her financial bottom line, even to her closest friends. And how she feels about that money -- whether it's a lot or a little, whether earned or bestowed, and whether she envies Friend X's suspected greater wealth or knows with smug satisfaction that she's better off than Friend Y -- is more likely to remain a secret than her kinkiest bedroom fantasy. Writer-director Nicole Holofcener, whose previous two features, "Lovely & Amazing" (2002) and "Walking and Talking" (1996), also offer insights into neurotic gynocentricity, appreciates this peculiar twist in female wiring. And she seizes on the subject with sisterly rue, donating the best moments in "Friends With Money" to a dissection of feminine net-worth envy. To be clear, Holofcener is talking about bank-account competition in Los Angeles (where wealth loves to preen) among an elite quartet of uncommon women who will never have to take the bus in their own City of Tangible Goods. Not even Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), by far the most struggling of the foursome in Holofcener's setup and ostensibly the chick around whom the three more affluent friends cluck, is that poor: A former teacher at a tony private school, she quit her salaried position for unspecified reasons of malaise and is currently self-employed as a freelance housekeeper, relieving dull hours spent with a vacuum cleaner with more exciting moments spent with a vibrator found in a client's bedside drawer. Or as one friend bluntly puts it, ''She's unmarried, she's a pothead, and she's a maid.'' Christine (stalwart Holofcener muse Catherine Keener) frets about her pal to husband David (Jason Isaacs), Christine's status-conscious partner in lucrative screenwriting and floundering marriage. Franny (Joan Cusack), the girlfriend happiest in motherhood and marriage (to Greg Germann as appreciative hubby Matt) and most cushioned by wealth, worries about Olivia with gentle distraction when not working out with a personal trainer or looking for worthy causes on which to bestow big bucks. Meanwhile, Jane (Frances McDormand), a successful fashion designer married to supportive, ambiguously gay Aaron (British theater director Simon McBurney) -- irresistible in his excitement about cashmere and "Nip/Tuck" -- doesn't so much worry as fume about injustice everywhere: In her early 40s, she's so sick and tired of life's daily frictions that she can't be bothered to wash her hair. (In an excitingly offbeat cast, McDormand stands out, loose and lively.) Back, though, to Olivia and that vibrator. The Friend Without Money also likes to hoard free samples of pricey face creams, she dates a loser (conveniently, he's Franny's trainer) who treats her shabbily, and she persists in phone-stalking a married man with whom she had a brief affair months ago. This adult woman in her 30s, in other words, acts out like a kook (to put it kindly), and occasionally like one of those crazy girls on gently transgressive cable TV-type fare like "Sex and the City" or "Six Feet Under." Holofcener, by the by, has directed multiple episodes of both. And therein lies the movie's fault line. Introducing "Friends With Money" when it opened the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, fest head Geoffrey Gilmore praised the pic as a superior example of Sundance quality, and a sterling specimen of quirky Amerindie moviemaking at its most polished (and female-powered, too!); he also hitched the festival's wagon of reputation to the filmmaker's stardom, noting that Holofcener is an alumna of the Sundance Institute who premiered her first feature, a film lab project, in Park City. There is, indeed, a discernible clarity to the actual filmmaking here, and an attractive feminine wit evident in the artistry. But there is also a manufactured symmetry, an every-gal's-got-issues roundness, an HBO sitcomitude to the movie that undercuts its own observational intelligence. It might not have been as easy for the scriptwriter to contrast Olivia with her richer friends for comic effect had the Bridget Jonesy singleton only been an ''average'' working girl, i.e., holding a decent, unexceptional job. And a less pitiable Olivia might have been less satisfying for Aniston, since the actress seems hell-bent on playing women who haven't been granted the happiness they by rights deserve. Such a ''real'' Olivia with wallet issues would, however, have explained how the foursome could be friends in the first place. She might have pushed the movie from the territory of Carrie Bradshaw to that of Edith Wharton. She might have inspired a less predetermined Sundance indie. Or is that, too, taboo? EW Grade: B 'Take the Lead'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman In "Take the Lead," an inner-city-delinquents-learn-how-to-tango rouser (it's "Dangerous Minds" trying to be "Mad Hot Ballroom"), the most entertaining sequence -- I dare say the only entertaining sequence -- is a dance montage that's the purest kitsch. At a public high school in Manhattan, a bunch of detention kids get taken under the wing of Antonio Banderas, who turns them on to the glories of ballroom dancing. They are, of course, hostile at first, until they begin to ''combine'' Banderas' classical approach with their own hip-hop moves. The highbrow/street connection derives from the audition sequence in "Flashdance," where Jennifer Beals showed those ballet stuffed shirts how to break-dance, but the bad joke in "Take the Lead" is that no one connected with the film apparently figured out how the ballroom/rap fusion should look. In the montage, we see the kids do a bit of vintage swing, then pure hip-hop, then back to swing. The only real fusion on display is the filmmakers' naked desperation to fuse demographics. Antonio Banderas is a charming and talented man, but in "Take the Lead" he lays on the old-world panache so thick -- the accent, the flowery courtliness, the romance of romance -- that he comes off like Dracula's metrosexual cousin. The kids are the usual walking one-note cartoons (goofy white dreadlocked kid, humongous black shy guy, chicks so ''sassy'' they should form a band called the You Go Girls), and the movie makes them into champion dancers without ever showing you how they got good at it. ''Faith'' has rarely taken anyone so far, so blandly. EW Grade: D+ 'Brick'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum Writer-director Rian Johnson's clever and confident feature debut "Brick" makes a persuasive argument for the similarities between the heightened sinister twists and arcane hard-boiled dialogue of a Dashiell Hammett story and the regular sinister twists and arcane hard-boiled dialogue of Southern California high school life. As Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) follows up on an SOS phone call from an old girlfriend ("Lost's" Emilie de Ravin), the teenage gumshoe talks the talk of Bogart's Sam Spade. ''Keep your specs peeled,'' he tells his legman, a brainy loner (Matt O'Leary) who hangs out by the school's brick walls, noodling a Rubik's Cube. But Brendan also walks the walk of one who meets colleagues in the kind of joint where a mom pours orange juice -- he's a skinny, mop-headed, argot-spouting teen in wire-rimmed glasses who can make the sentence ''She knows where I eat lunch'' sound tough, even though he probably means the school cafeteria. Soon the ex is found dead, and Brendan is punch-in-the-face deep in a mess involving drug dealers, thugs, junior vamps, and a neighborhood crime boss (''he's old -- like, 26'') called the Pin, played with lustrous, loony pallor by Lukas Haas. (The Pin appears to live in his parents' paneled basement.) Brick is all about style and sass, sure -- the photographic beauty with which Steve Yedlin blesses the banal scenery in this low-budget indie outlasts the convolutions of the plot. But Johnson also grabs hold of a fundamental truth and seduces us with it: The schoolyard can be the noir-est burg of all. EW Grade: B+ Click Here 
|
| ||||||||||||
| © 2007 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines. Contact us. Site Map. |
 |
|
to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly
External sites open in new window; not endorsed by CNN.com
Pay service with live and archived video. 
