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Weekend Movie Forecast: Julie & Julia & G.I. Joe

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Nora Ephron's ode to ladies who cook, Julie & Julia, is <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/julie_and_julia/">getting mixed-to-warm reviews</a>. The film is based on Queens resident <a href="http://gothamist.com/2005/11/08/julie_powell_author_julie_julia_creator_the_juliejulia_project.php">Julie Powell</a>'s charming book Julie & Julia (which was based on her blog) about cooking every recipe from Julia Child's Mastering French Cookingâas she tries to figure out her lifeâand Child's wonderful posthumous memoir (co-written with nephew Alex Prud'homme) My Life in France. Basically, critics feel the Julia Child part of the movie is heavenly, with Meryl Streep portraying the culinary figure during her formative years in France, with husband Paul Child (played by Stanley Tucci), while the Julie Powell part is undercooked.The <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/movies/07julie.html">NY Times's A.O. Scott writes</a>, "Together, their mastery of the art is so perfect that even quiet, transitional scenes between them are delightful...If only Mr. Tucci and Ms. Streep were in every movie, I thought to myself at one point, as, in a state of rapture, I watched them sit still on a couch looking off into space. The problem is that when they arenât on screen in this movie, you canât help missing them. Ms. Adams is a lovely and subtle performer, but she is overmatched by her co-star and handicapped by the material. Julia Child could whip up a navarin of lamb for lunch, but Meryl Streep eats young actresses for breakfast. Remember Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada? Amanda Seyfried in Mamma Mia!? Neither do I."

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Paramount didn't screen G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra for the mainstream media, just a handful of pushover fan-boy bloggers, so professionals <a href="http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1915188,00.html">like Time's Richard Corliss</a> were reduced to attending a midnight screening with the general public on Thursday. With pans like this, who needs critics? "As the old line goes about some long-ago lemon: The movie wasn't released â it escaped. Now that I've seen the movie, I understand the Paramount bosses' urge to suppress it... Director Stephen Summers, who did the Mummy trilogy, has no skill with actors and little more with the manipulation of real and virtual hardware. We know the theme will be 'War is swell,' but the film plays like a long slog in the Big Muddy."At the end, a new villain rises and an old bad guy assumes a position of great power. 'This has only just begun,' one of them says, explicitly promising or threatening a sequel. Will there be more of the same? It doesn't matter to me, or I to the filmmakers; my G.I. tract, in fact the communal contumely of critics, is irrelevant to box-office performance."

Gothamist

Hey, have you heard about this new movie Cold Souls? It stars Brooklyn Heights resident Paul Giamatti, a phenomenal actor, as Paul Giamatti, an okay enough actor who pays to have his soul extracted and stored in a warehouse. It's a comedy, and <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/08/10/090810crci_cinema_lane?currentPage=1">The New Yorker's Anthony Lane</a> says, "I canât get enough. To take a big, bewildering concept and treat it as a small, scuffed item of everyday use demands the kind of witâliterate and levellingâwith which recent movies have all but dispensed. For too many directors, the merest hint of sci-fi means a possible end of the world, with a hero nicely poised to save the day; for Sophie Barthes, the writer and director of Cold Souls, Paulâs great loss doesnât even mean the end of his job. On the contrary, he is freed up to ham his way through Chekhov with unfeigned delight, and he must be the first Vanya on record who not only admires Professor Serebryakovâs wife but cops a feel of her ass."

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We gotta say, we caught the trailer for A Perfect Getaway a while back and it looked like good, clean, dumb suspenseful fun. It's even got Steve Zahn! The preview did a great job of capturing that awkward situation where some new people you don't really like ask if you object to their company, and you're sort of pressured into welcoming them along. In this case, the hangers-on are joining a young couple on a Honeymoon hiking trip on Hawaii, and they're gradually revealed to be not only annoying, but dangerous. Then "a brutal battle for survival begins." Definitely!Here's Manohla Dargis, of all people, <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/movies/07perfect.html?ref=movies">to reinforce our first impression</a>: "Do you suffer from blockbuster bloat? Do wisecracking guinea pigs give you the willies? Are you sick of ugly truths and icky, shticky juvenilia? Are you in the mood for mean, lean entertainment, some gratuitous R-rated nudity, totally unnecessary bloodletting and a slam-bang twist of the narrative knife? A B-movie-style throwback thatâs consistently diverting and blissfully free of morals and messages, A Perfect Getaway is just the thing for the summertime movie blahs: itâs a genuinely satisfying cheap thrill."

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Awww, Paper Heart is a mockumentary starring actress Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up) and Michael Cera (Arrested Development the MovieâTake It and Like It, PUNK). It has to do with Yi, playing herself, and her revulsion with Hollywood relationships, which gets challenged when her and Cera get romantic. The Washington Post's <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/paper-heart,1157809/critic-review.html#reviewNum1">Ann Hornaday says</a> "the faux naivete really begins to grate when Yi 'meets' actor Michael Cera and they embark on what purports to be their real-life relationship, but is really a coy, fictionalized version thereof. Yi and Cera may or may not have been or continue to be a real-life couple; they've kept their status ambiguous, most likely for marketing purposes. "The real question is, How do people in their mid-20s continue to get away with talking in baby voices? And the next question is, How do we make them stop? Unlike the sublime (500) Days of Summer, which also had to do with young romance, ambivalence and rethinking the notion of happy endings, Paper Heart never transcends its twee, hyper-self-aware niche. The degree to which viewers will enjoy Yi's ramblingsâliteral and verbalâis no doubt directly proportional to their enjoyment of the fey, studiously awkward persona she's developed in her stand-up act and movie roles."

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<a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/beeswax.html">Film Forum presents</a> the premiere of Beeswax, Andrew Bujalski's indie about "families, real and imagined, taking care of each other when they want to, when they need to, when they ought to." Whatever that means. <a href="http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/08/06/beeswax/index.html">Andrew O'Hehir at Salon</a> writes that the genre normally associated with Bujalski, mumblecore, "has had a short and unhappy life as a film genre, and it's time to shoot it in the head... If I try to sell you on Andrew Bujalski's strangely seductive and beautifully constructed new film Beeswax by discussing it as mumblecore, I'm only poisoning the water. I might as well close the deal by saying that it stars Orly Taitz and contains high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food dye. (Just to be clear: Kidding.)"By setting his story in and around a struggling vintage boutique in Austin, Texasâthe heartland of indieness and setting of Richard Linklater's genre-defining SlackerâBujalski is subtly but deliberately challenging viewers to look beneath surface codes and signals at the human and social reality they contain...When you realize that the supposed Ã¼ber-hipster of American film has made a sweet-tempered movie about a small-business owner stuck in a partnership that's gone sour, the true radicalism of Beeswax comes into focus."

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Tonight <a href="http://rooftopfilms.com/">Rooftop Films screens</a> Canary on the roof of the Old American Can Factory, with a free Sangria reception in the courtyard to follow. Alejandro Adams's film is described as a "subtly horrifying, naturalistic contemporary sci-fi dystopian film about an organ harvesting company, the media attention that surrounds it, and the banality of ethical squirrelliness." <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-08-04/film/canary-s-wringing-future-is-now-dystopia/">Jim Ridley at the Voice</a> raves, "Micro in budget, macro in ambition, accomplishment, and scope, Adams's slyly withholding film prompts multiple viewingsâand deserves them."

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Comic horror flick homage I Sell the Dead concerns 18th century grave robbers Arthur Blake and Willie Grimes. Sentenced to death for their corpse filching, Blake opens up to visiting clergyman Father Duffy, recounting fifteen years of adventure in "the resurrection trade." <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/i-sell-the-dead,31376/">The Onion's Noel Murray</a> gives it a grade B, writing, "Writer-director Glenn McQuaid uses a nested structure for I Sell The Dead, letting one story unlock still more stories. In some of the flashbacks-within-flashbacks, McQuaid plays with the style by using cartoons for backdrops, or the kind of forced perspectives and mood lighting common to the old Hammer horror films. I Sell The Deadâs low budget is well-deployed, with a few good locations (shot on Staten Island!) and some skillful makeup effects making the movie look and feel, if not top-shelf, then at least not cut-rate."

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Based on a 2002 bestselling novel by ZÃ¼lfÃ¼ Livaneli, Bliss concerns a 17-year-old Turkish girl whose family holds her responsible for her own rape and enlists her cousin to carry out an "honor killing." The Village Voice's <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-08-04/film/brutal-misogyny-meets-calcified-constructs-in-bliss/">Melissa Anderson writes</a>, "If you missed June's The Stoning of Soroya M., here's another chance to be reminded of murderous misogyny in another Muslim communityâthis time, in Turkey... The conflicted brute can't bring himself to murder Meryem, and soon, the two join Irfan (Talat Bulut), a sociology prof they meet while working at a fish farm, on his yacht in the Aegean (filmed quite prettily by Mirsad Herovic) so that enlightenment can be taught as characters calcify into constructs. "Though calling out the abominable oppression of women, even in a vehicle as didactic as Bliss, serves at least some redeemable purpose, the mission is more than a little compromised when it's suggested that Meryem could find happiness with Cemalâthe man who, after he decides not to kill her, settles on verbally and physically abusing her."

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John Flynn's 1977 revenge flick Rolling Thunder stars Tommy Lee Jones, Dabney Coleman, and William Devane as a Vietnam vet determined to track down the men who killed his wife and child. It's being screened <a href="http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/schedule/">at Anthology Film Archives</a> as part of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0527350/">William Lustig</a>'s "Buried Treasures" series, featuring nine-films curated by the Bronx-born, Jersey-bred director/producer. Nick Pinkerton <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-08-04/film/william-lustig-s-buried-treasures-at-anthology/">at the Voice has more</a>.

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BAMcinematek's <a href="http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=1409">celebration of Cary Grant</a> continues this weekend; <a href="http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=1414">on Saturday they'll screen</a> George Stevens's 1942 film The Talk of the Town, starring Grant as an activist-turned-prison-escapee hiding with a former classmate (Jean Arthur), just as a famous lawyer arrives to spend the summer at her home.

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Besides being a Vietnam veteran, the screenwriter of Apocalypse Now, and an inspiration for Walter in The Big Lebowski, John Milius also directed a little movie called Red Dawn, the Reagan-era classic about Colorado teens combating Soviet-led paratroopers dropping in for World War III. Patrick Swayze, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, anyone? <a href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Films/films_frameset.asp?id=1819">The Sunshine screens it</a> this weekend at midnight.

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Well, ain't that a kick in the head! This weekend at midnight <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/films/barton-fink/">the IFC Center screens</a> the Coen Brothers' 1991 classic Barton Fink, starring John Turturro as the titular playwright struggling to write a wrestling picture in Hollywood while living next door to an eccentric insurance salesman, played with sweaty abandon by John Goodman.

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Film Forum's four week "<a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/britnoir.html#87">Brit Noir" series</a> kicks off this weekend with The Third Man, Carol Reed's post-war pretzel starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. This one that demands to be seen on the big(ish) screen.

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Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>Julie & Julia</em> & <em>G.I. Joe</em>