RUN, FAT BOY, RUN

By Chad Greene

January 14, 2008 3:00 AM

Shoots self in the foot with the starter’s pistol

For Dennis (Simon Pegg), the sweating begins before the running. Instead of walking down the aisle toward his gorgeous—and prodigiously pregnant—girlfriend Libby (Thandie Newton), he gets cold feet (and the aforementioned hot forehead) and sprints away instead, leaving her standing in the street clutching her baby bump.

Not exactly the most charming of introductions to the lifelong loser that David Schwimmer—yes, that David Schwimmer—wants us to root for in his directorial debut. Even with a talented comic actor like Pegg playing the dodgy daddy (and reworking a script by State and Stella alum Michael Ian Black), that’s a tremendously difficult task for a first-time filmmaker—one that, unfortunately, Schwimmer can’t quite accomplish here.

Compounding the problem is the fact that Dennis doesn’t try to change directions and run—quite literally, by entering the same marathon her smarmy man (Hank Azaria) is training for—back into Libby’s arms until five years after abandoning her at the altar. When he hears the harebrained plan, even Dennis’ best friend Gordon (Dylan Moran, delightfully limning drunken dissolution) scoffs.

“Dennis,” he exclaims, “you left her at the altar when she was pregnant!”

“But that was ages ago,” Dennis says.

Maybe for him it was, but for the audience it hasn’t been that long at all—a matter of minutes. That’s the fundamental flaw that Schwimmer cannot sprint past in Run, Fat Boy, Run, despite amusing supporting turns by Moran and Harish Patel as Dennis’ softy of a landlord, Mr. Ghoshdashtidar. It’s as if Schwimmer managed to shoot himself in his foot with the starter’s pistol.

Distributor: Picturehouse
Cast: Simon Pegg, Thandie Newton, Hank Azaria, Dylan Moran, Harish Patel and India de Beaufort
Director: David Schwimmer
Screenwriters: Michael Ian Black and Simon Pegg
Producers: Robert Jones and Sarah Curtis
Genre: Comedy
Rating: PG-13 for some rude and sexual humor, nudity, language and smoking
Running time: 95 min.
Release date: March 28, 2008

The Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage de ballon rouge)

By Shlomo Schwartzberg

January 18, 2008 3:00 AM

Taiwanese master makes a banal tribute to a French classic

For the first time, the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien (Three Times, Café Lumiere) has made a movie set outside of Asia. The project, alas, is of little interest.

Loosely based on the 1956 French short film Le ballon rouge, which followed a boy and his red balloon around Paris, Le Voyage de ballon rouge situates that film’s main character within a larger canvas. The boy, Simon (Simon Iteanu), is the son of Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), a French puppeteer who hires a Taiwanese film student Song (Song Fang) to take care of her son while she’s at work. As Song begins to bond with Simon, we also are privy to Suzanne’s problems with her boyfriend and her tenant, who’s late with his rent.

Meanwhile, the red balloon, which has escaped the clutches of another little boy, floats around Paris, taking a trip on the subway, edging the frame as Song and Simon traverse the city, finally perching overtop the window of Suzanne’s apartment, almost like another character in the film. As a symbol of … something, though one is hard-pressed to say what, the red balloon doesn’t really work. Worse, it highlights the dullness of the story that it's wrapped around. Binoche, at her most overwrought, gives a dreadful performance while Fang and Iteanu give very flat ones.

At its most laughable, the balloon, which ought to have deflated by now, keeps popping up in every second scene, and one starts to wonder why Hou even bothered with this film. Even his usually lovely and effective long takes come across here as merely gimmicky, illuminating little of real emotional import. Hou’s films can be tedious or, more often, sublime. Le Voyage de ballon rouge is merely banal and trite.

Distributor: IFC
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu, Song Fang and Hippolyte Girardot
Director/Screenwriter: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Producers: François Margolin and Kristina Larsen
Genre: Drama; French- and Chinese-language, subtitled
Rating: Not yet rated
Running time: 113 min.
Release date: April 4, 2008
Reviewed: Toronto International Film Festival 2007

A Great Film on the Anatomy of a Disappearance

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t ever seen it, Stanley Jaffe’s much underrated theatrical feature Without a Trace incorporates an unusual resolution that prompted many critics to pan it, upon its release back in late 1983. I both disconcur with that initial response and admire the film for admirably tackling a difficult narrative problem. In discussing this film, there is absolutely no way for me to avoid revealing the ending here. Therefore, major plot spoilers will follow – and anyone who wants to keep the film’s suspense or final revelation intact should avoid reading my essay.

Something of an unofficial companion piece to the equally superb made-for-TV movie Adam, Without a Trace opens on a crisis: a 6-year-old Manhattan boy named Alex Selky embarks on a two-block walk to school one morning and doesn’t come home that afternoon. As his grief-wracked mother, Columbia University professor Susan Selky (Kate Nelligan) joins forces with a NYPD detective named Al Menetti (Judd Hirsch) and begins to exercise the various options in an attempt to locate her little boy, their attempts prove useless and fruitless. Eventually, after months and months with no success, a haunting call from an elderly woman leads Menetti to Connecticut, where Alex turns up, shell-shocked but very much alive, and held at bay in a decrepit house by a grotesque older man who has kidnapped the tyke and used him as a caretaker for his invalid middle-aged sister.

CLOVERFIELD - THE AMG REVIEW

A much-debated source of cinematic speculation ever since the mysterious, untitled trailer debuted before Transformers in the summer of 2007, producer J.J. Abrams’ attempt to create an iconic American movie monster combines Godzilla-style mayhem with Blair Witch Project-style storytelling in a way that’s sure to rattle both monster movie fans and disaster film junkies alike. Presented as found footage discovered by the U.S. government in “the area formerly known as Central Park,” Cloverfield opens as New York couple Jason (Mike Vogel) and his girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas) prepare a warm going away party for Jason’s brother Rob (Michael Stahl-David) – a promising young professional who has recently accepted a high-profile job offer in Japan. As the party gets underway, Rob’s mentally deficient best friend Hud (T.J. Miller) wanders the room on a mission to videotape as many fond farewells for his soon-to-be-departed pal as possible. When, in the middle of the party, the lights flicker out and a massive explosion rocks midtown Manhattan, the group quickly discovers that they are dealing with a destructive force the likes of witch mankind has never seen – leaving Hud with the camera still in hand, ready to capture the entire ensuing ordeal. Reviewing a film like Cloverfield is a trick endeavor if one chooses to respect the remarkable lengths that producers of the film went to in order to keep the primary aspects of the plot a secret, yet by placing the film in a historical context (both cinematic and otherwise) it’s easy to see why it is so effective in rattling viewers who are capable of stomaching the disorienting camerawork. (Note: viewers who suffer from severe motion sickness will either want to take a healthy dose of Dramamine and set a safe distance for the screen, or simply wait to watch the film when it comes to home video.)

Cloverfield’s familiar but intriguing means of folding fictional horror into a very real cultural context can be easily understood with just a little historical perspective. On August 6, 1945, mankind officially entered the nuclear age when the United States Army Air Force unleashed the fury of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima (dropping yet another on the western Kuyshu city of Nagasaki within the course of the next seventy-two hours). Just nine short years later, Japanese filmmaker Ishiro Honda tapped into the atomic fears that plagued Eastern society in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to give birth to one of the most instantly-recognizable monsters in movie history – Godzilla. Though the version of Godzilla that ultimately reached American shores had a decidedly campy slant thanks to a particularly shoddy dub job and the awkward insertion of additional scenes featuring well-known English-speaking actor Raymond Burr, Honda’s original cut of the film was a much different, and decidedly grimmer affair. At the time, the citizens of Japan were still reeling from the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a similar manner that contemporary Americans are still reeling from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Godzilla embodied everything that their now post-nuclear society feared most – namely wide scale destruction and the as-yet-to-be-determined effects of nuclear warfare. While the titular character gained popularity around the world in the following decades, the fact remained that Godzilla was a distinctly Japanese creation – a sort of cautionary mascot for the atomic age. Compelled by the prospect of creating an American counterpart to Godzilla, producer Abrams called upon a creative team that included screenwriter Drew Goddard and director Matt Reeves[AMGID=P347581] to make that concept a reality. The result is a film that, despite suffering a few minor flaws in terms of storytelling, accomplishes that lofty goal in a manner that is at once deeply unsettling, highly entertaining, and consistently thrilling once the action gets underway.

The greatest strength that Cloverfield possesses is its ability to recreate that suffocating feeling of dread that washed over American just after the fall of the Twin Towers. The film’s early scenes of destruction eerily parallel the amateur footage that saturated the media following 9/11 depicting massive clouds of debris swallowing up entire city blocks, and confused citizens wandering the streets in a dreamlike haze. While some may argue that Cloverfield loses a few points for originality once the viewer grasps the true nature of the disaster and the primary plot gets underway, the breathless pacing of the film ensures that the viewer isn’t likely to be bored for any more than a few moments throughout its scant eighty-five minute running time, and there are enough surprises to keep even the most demanding viewer giddily off-guard. A tense scene in a subway tunnel makes masterful use of both sound and the night-vision function on your typical consumer-grade video camera, a treacherous trip across a collapsing rooftop is dizzying not just for the shaky camera work, and a final confrontation involving a helicopter and a close brush with the source of the widespread destruction will no doubt satisfy monster movie addicts who feared that they might not get a good look at the “terrible thing” given the film’s handheld production style. While the actors are all commendably natural, it’s a saucer-eyed Lizzy Caplan that truly stands apart from the pack as a girl intensely traumatized by the horrors she has just witnessed, yet somehow able to muster the courage of a hero when the situation demands it. While her prickly zinger in one subterranean scene feels just about as forced as the film’s predictably ironic coda, that’s a small complaint to register for film that delivers as many grimly enjoyable, panic induced jolts as Cloverfield does. In an era when internet hype and creative marketing can effectively build a film up so much that it’s impossible to meet expectations on opening day, odds are that viewers who settle into their seats knowing what to expect both thematically and aesthetically aren’t likely to walk away disappointed.

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