Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>The Hurt Locker</em> Vs. <em>Transformers</em>
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<p>Starting on Saturday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center brings favorite films <a href="http://filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/back.html">"Back By Popular Demand."</a> Acclaimed war drama and Golden Globe nominee <em>The Hurt Locker</em> screens on Sunday and next Wednesday; other selections include Tarkovsky's <em>Solaris</em>, Orson Welles's <em>Macbeth</em>, and the recent French-Belgian film <em>Seraphine</em>, whose star was just named best actress by the LA Film Critics Circle.</p>
<em>Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen</em> is open and will be screening for much of the summer, but that won't stop geeks <a href="http://gothamist.com/2009/06/24/transformers_screening_causes_theat.php">from killing each other</a> to get tickets this weekend. We survived an IMAX screening on Monday night (barely) and have to say [spoiler alert!] that Michael Bay's latest opus did not fill us with dispiriting, soul-crushing sadness. The action scenes are exciting, the special effects are stunning, the crotch jokes are abundant, and Megan Fox is Maxim hot. Which is to say, it's just about perfect for the 13-year-olds for whom it's made, while also appealing to all the Gen Xrs still savoring their permanently arrested development. (Two guys in their late 20s were <em>literally</em> on the edge of their seats next to us during the screening.) Also, Bay gave <a href="http://gothamist.com/2007/09/07/john_turturro_d.php">Brooklyn's John Turturro</a> a bigger role in this one, and he mercifully provides the movie's sole human touch.<p></p><a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/transformers_revenge_of_the_fallen/">Most critics are derisive</a>, but again, this is obviously a puerile-minded movie made for adolescents and ought to be evaluated on those terms. Adults should keep that in mind or just go see <em>The Hurt Locker.</em> But it's worth noting that there is a bit of controversy brewing over two of the film's Autobot characters, Skids and Mudflap, which <a href="http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2009/06/michael-bay-paramount-wish-transformers.html">the Playlist accurately describes</a> as <strong>"the modern Al Jolson, jive-talking 'black robots' that have faces resembling monkeys, gold cap teeth and are illiterate minstrel, bumbling fools."</strong> <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2009-06-24-transformers_N.htm?csp=34">Bay defends the characters</a> thus: "We're just putting more personality in. I don't know if it's stereotypes â they are robots, by the way... Listen, youâre going to have your naysayers on anything. Itâs like is everything going to be melba toast?" Not on Bay's watch!
<p>Havana Markingâs documentary <em>Afghan Star</em> concerns the controversial final episodes of one recent season on the insanely popular Afghanistan TV show of the same name, which brings American Idol-type competition to a country where, under the Taliban, it was a crime to dance, listen to music, or watch TV. These things are no longer illegal, but female contestants on the show, watched by some 10 million people, still face death threats. The Onion's <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/afghan-star,29672/">Noel Murray says</a> "<em>Afghan Star </em>offers a reminder of how much has changed in Afghanistan from the late â70sâwhen Kabul was a secular-oriented city with co-ed universities and a thriving nightclub sceneâto the rise of the Taliban. Yet even during the countryâs most repressive era, people would watch TV or listen to music in secret, and today, some are eager to turn back the clock. <em>Afghan Star </em>features a scene of a young girl using her smuggled Barbie dolls to act out moments from the show, and a later scene of her mother appearing at the series finale with her head uncovered."</p>
<p>When we saw the preview for <em>My Sister's Keeper</em>, a melodrama about two parents who genetically engineer a child whose organs they can harvest to save their other leukemia-afflicted daughter, we thought it had to be a wickedly risky black comedy. After all, the engineered daughter ends up rebelling and hiring a lawyer, played by Alec Baldwin, to protect her organs in court. But apparently <em>My Sister's Keeper</em> is for real. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/movies/26sister.html?ref=movies">A.O. Scott at the Times</a> writes, "The prospect of a childâs death is so awful that to broach it in a movie or a book requires a special measure of caution and sensitivity. <strong>Or so you might think."</strong></p>
<p>In <em>The Stoning Of Soraya M.</em>, the title character refuses to divorce her abusive husband because he won't leave her enough money to feed her children, so he spreads rumors that she's adulterous, and you can probably guess what happens after that. It's based on a horrible incident that happened in small-town Iran. <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-06-24/film/a-particularly-appaling-application-of-sharia-law-in-stoning-of-soraya-m/">The Village Voice's Vadim Rizov</a> says director Cyrus Nowrasteh "gives the proceedings more flair than is usual for the explicitly didactic: If his ideas (the camera rocketing on the stones thrown at Soraya, as if they were <em>Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves'</em> arrows all over again) are bad, at least he's trying. <strong>But this is basically self-congratulatory fare for people who feel more "politically conscious" when reminded that women in the Islamic world can have it rough.</strong> Right now, you're better off just watching the news."</p>
Manohla Dargis is simply scathing in her dismissal of Surveillance, "a would-be transgression that tries to squeeze dark laughs from the spectacle of human suffering," and doubts it "would be taking up space in theaters if its director were not the daughter of a name filmmaker. Jennifer Lynch, spawn of David, has made one other feature, a 1993 botch-up titled Boxing Helena, about a surgeon who turns the object of his desire into his own Venus de Milo by amputating her healthy legs and arms... If it seems unfair to compare her with her father, Ms. Lynch, much like Sofia Coppola, makes it easy. As the story jumps among different versions of what happened â insert obligatory if misleading Rashomon reference here â the pace slackens even as the drip, drip, drip of blood turns into a geyser."
It's worth nothing that Melissa Anderson at the Voice passionately dissents.<p>Director Stephen Frears (<em>High Fidelity, The Queen</em>) is back with <em>Chéri</em>, which features a screenplay written by Frears's <em>Dangerous Liaisons</em> scribe Christopher Hampton, adapted from two novels by Colette. Set in Paris pre-WWI, the movie concerns a stormy romance between young Chéri (Rupert Friend) and a retired courtesan Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer). The trouble starts when Chériâs mother (Kathy Bates), a rival of Léa, plots to separate the pair by arranging a marriage between her son and Edmée (Felicity Jones). <a href="http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2009/06/26/cheri/index.html">Salon's Stephanie Zacharek says</a> it's "a perfect example of a movie that gets many of the details right and the vibe all wrong. Despite the movie's lavish trappings (and the fact that it was filmed on location in France), Chéri is all efficiency and no luxury. It clicks along like clockwork when it needs to be languorous... The whole enterprise is far too jolly and jaunty, and while Colette's writing may be many things, 'jolly' and jauntyâat least in the English senseâit is not."</p>
<p>Italian drama <em>Quiet Chaos</em> is about a recently widowed father of a 10-year-old girl reeling from the accidental death of his wife, who abandons work and spends his days loafing in a small park near his daughter's school. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/movies/26quiet.html?ref=movies">A.O. Scott at the Times</a> says director Antonello Grimaldi's film "demonstrates that the sad-dad melodrama is a global (or at least a midlevel European art film) phenomenon. If the film is less maudlin and more psychologically astringent than most American specimens, this is partly a matter of Mr. Grimaldiâs restraint and partly thanks to Nanni Morettiâs sharp and unpredictable turn as the dad in question...At its best <em>Quiet Chaos</em> lives up to its name, enmeshing its protagonist in a complicated, lived-in reality that obstructs his attempts to clear his head and organize his feelings."</p>
<a href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Films/films_frameset.asp?id=65624">The Sunshine screens</a> futuristic horror rock opera <em>Repo! The Genetic Opera</em> at midnight this weekend. Here's what you're signing up for: "In the year 2056âthe not so distant futureâan epidemic of organ failures devastates the planet. Out of the tragedy, a savior emerges: GeneCo, a biotech company that offers organ transplants...for a price. Those who miss their payments are scheduled for repossession and hunted by villainous Repo Men." Anthony Stewart Head (TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), world-renowned opera singer Sarah Brightman (Broadway's <em>Phantom of the Opera</em>), Paris Hilton, and Paul Sorvino (GoodFellas), all make appearances.
<p>Sterling Hayden doesn't deny you his essence in Stanley Kubrick's 1956 noir<em> The Killing</em>âhis second featureâabout an elaborately-planned racetrack heist that doesn't end well. <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/films/the-killing/">The IFC Center is screening</a> it this weekend at midnight as part of their <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/series/waverly-midnights/kubrick/">Kubrick series</a>. </p>
<p>The inimitable John Hurt and the great Richard Attenborough star in Richard Fleischer's <em>10 Rillington Place</em>, a 1971 film about a once-notorious serial killer case, <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/rillington.html">screening at Film Forum</a> through next Thursday. <a href="http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/75875/10-rillington-place-film-review">Time Out's Keith Uhlich</a> calls it an "underseen gem." Portraying killer John Reginald Christie, Richard Attenborough "is just exaggerated enough to remain credible...He remains a nondescript loner whom Fleischer and Attenborough insist we pay attention to, even as he slowly shatters the existence of his illiterate boarder (Hurt, doing the definitive take on âtwo sandwiches short of a picnicâ). When Christie thereafter spirals into an undistinguished purgatory, the film gains in methodical momentum."</p>