EW review: 'Happy Feet,' affable movie

By Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly

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(Entertainment Weekly) -- Why was Mumble the emperor penguin (Elijah Wood) born to tap-dance rather than sing like the rest of his ilk in "Happy Feet," a moderately adorable, musically wacky, ecologically activist CG family comedy from George Miller, the guy who made "Babe"? Because Mumble is, you know, different but special in a "March of the Penguins" kind of way.

Why was Robin Williams hired to voice two ethnic-accented fellow birds? Because once he kibitzed as a genie in "Aladdin," and now, alas, he can't be stuffed back into the freaking lamp.

EW Grade: B

'Fast Food Nation'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

"We all have to eat a little s--- from time to time." That's Bruce Willis philosophizing, as a Colorado cattle supplier unperturbed by reports of poop in the patties in "Fast Food Nation."

The cattleman's viewpoint, expressed to a marketing exec (Greg Kinnear) of an extremely McDonald's-like fictional burger behemoth, is one of capitalist pragmatism. But it's also served with a tasty ground-up heaping of outrage and irony, then chewed over by Kinnear (the new official mascot of put-upon American family men).

And that's the "Fast Food Nation" appeal, first of Eric Schlosser's 2001 expose that turned millions off their Big Mac feeds (at least for a week) and now of this freewheeling dramatized adaptation by filmmaker Richard Linklater, which asks and answers the question, Dude, do we really have to eat s--- to have it our way? S---, no.

Even the most ardent advocate of supersizing is likely to know already that the behind-the-counter world of Quarter Pounders and Whoppers isn't pretty. But the movie's muckraking power -- loosely wielded, in slackerish tones pitched for reception by the text-message generation -- lies in piecing together how that poop gets into those patties, with a logic that can't easily be shrugged off.

For a change, the interwoven ensemble approach to storytelling works even though handled by someone other than Robert Altman. (It helps that Linklater, who extends "Babel"-icious plot twining to the illegal Mexican immigrants working the slaughterhouse jobs no one else will take, doesn't strain farther around the world to tie in, say, a deaf Japanese teenager.)

Naturally, a subject this right-on draws a right-on cast. Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, and Ethan Hawke pitch in. And in the ripe Mexican subplot -- featuring Bobby Cannavale, Luis Guzman, and Wilmer Valderrama -- Catalina Sandino Moreno makes her post-"Maria Full of Grace" debut. She looks lovely even when stained with cow blood, while the horrors of the killing-floor conditions in which she works argue for a salad after the show.

EW Grade: B+

'For Your Consideration'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Dust off the mantel, book the Botoxologist, do whatever it is that needs to be done when buzz rises to a supersonic whine as the awards season looms: The astute, Oscar-loving/Oscar-tweaking showbiz satire "For Your Consideration" is a shoo-in to sweep every trophy available in the competitive category of best coif in this crazy business we call show.

Truly, the level of tender, ruthless, inspired, lethally accurate study that has gone into the follicular expression of each and every character in Christopher Guest's latest hilarious cultural corrective is something inspiring to behold.

Eugene Levy (who co-wrote with Guest) goes for a tragically thinning Caesar cut as schlock agent Morley Orfkin. As magnificently ignorant and self-involved "Hollywood Now" TV cohost Chuck Porter, the incomparable Fred Willard sticks to a bleached and tufted faux-hawk. Guest himself favors a cloud of frizz hoping to pass for "Eraserhead" cool to play Jay Berman, shlubby director of an indie period-piece drama infelicitously titled "Home for Purim."

The movie within the movie gathers a Jewish family -- including father, son, and lesbian daughter (Parker Posey) -- for the favorite holiday of the dying matriarch, Esther Pischer. (In Yiddish, "pisher" means "bed wetter" -- and, more broadly, a nobody.) The production is barely on the radar of the studio honcho (Ricky Gervais, British guest of Guest).

But then veteran actress Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara), who plays Esther, is mentioned in some blip on some blog as being Oscar-worthy. And soon the whole dum-dum production is twisted by hurricanes of hype, gusts that blow into enterprises as blithery as the Ebert/Roeper-like TV show "Love It/Hate It," and as blathery as a "Charlie Rose"-like chin tugger.

Soon enough, the buzzed-about actors have been cosmetically restyled, and the Jewishness has been steamed out. (Seriously, laurels and swag ought to be handed over to O'Hara for her brilliant portrayal of aging-actresshood.)

"For Your Consideration" doesn't have the universal appeal of Guest's "Best in Show" or "Waiting for Guffman"; the work is more inside baseball, more like "A Mighty Wind," with its loving eye roll in the cultish direction of folksingers and their Birkenstocks. But something about that specialized self-mockery moves and tickles me even more, I think -- the precision of the skewering, the scholarship in the details.

By now the Guest rep company (also featuring Ed Begley Jr., Jennifer Coolidge, Michael McKean, and Larry Miller) runs with such economy of movement that a simple Mary Hart-felt squaring of the shoulders by Jane Lynch as "Hollywood Now's" cohost reduces me to tears of joy -- and this from a showbiz junkie at a magazine that has already run its first Oscar predictions before Thanksgiving.

So if you like EW, you'll love "For Your Consideration." And you can quote me.

EW Grade: A-

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