A non-profit newsroom, powered by WNYC.

Weekend Movie Forecast: Up or Drag Me to Hell

11 photos

The big release this weekend is obviously Pixar's latest confection, a lavishly animated adventure called Up, which nominally concerns an elderly man who tries to escape the mundane via balloons, and the cheerful boy who unexpectedly tags along for the ride. <a href="http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2009/05/down_with_up.php">Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells says</a>, "It's about as good as this sort of thing gets. And yet it's a fairly square and tidy thing as the same time. It's not meant as a putdown to say that Up is too immersed in buoyant punchiness and mainstream movie-tude, which basically boils down to Pixar's always-front-and-center task of giving the family audience stuff to laugh at and go 'oooh' and 'aahh' about, to finally matter all that much. It's too entertaining, in put it another way, to sink in all that deeply."And yet it's almost too good for the family market. You just know there's a significant sector of that crowd that will be saying to each other after they see it, 'What's with the old guy? Where was the truly-over-the-top fantastical stuff? Where were the cheap junk-food highs? Why didn't it throw in a little toilet humor to round things out? Why didn't they go with a manic-nutso chase sequence of some kind? You know...why didn't they thrill-ride it a bit more'"I'm not saying that people who like lowbrow entertainment talk like this (if they did they wouldn't be lowbrow) but if they did they'd probably continue the thought by saying, 'It's not like we don't appreciate quality-level movies but Up is almost too nutritious for us. It's good stuffâbright, funny, lots of fun and amazing-lookingâbut it feels like it was made by people who went to college and eat vegetables and exercise two or three times a week, unlike us.'"

Gothamist

Then there's Drag Me to Hell, in which Sam Raimi returns to his "Evil Dead" roots and Alison Lohman stars as a loan officer at a California bank at war with demons or something. Entertainment Weekly's <a href="http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20281263,00.html">Owen Gleiberman calls it</a> "a delirious psych-out of a horror film... a candy-colored ghouls-gone-wild nightmare that treats every shock as a joke â or, at least, as an invitation to crack up at your own gullibility...Raimi's operating model is the fun house, with its jack-in-the-box terrors, but he doesn't just toy with the audience. He plays it, like a maestro. He orchestrates a tongue-in-cheek symphony of fear... the most crazy, fun, and terrifying horror movie in years."

Gothamist

Academy Award-winning Japanese film Departuresâthe movie that made many of us lose this year's Oscar poolâis getting distributed to the public at last. The story concerns a young cellist who decides to return with his adoring wife Mika to his hometown in Japan's far north. "Searching for work, he responds to a cryptic classified ad for work in 'Departures' only to find out that the position is in the field of 'encoffining,' the ritual preparation of a corpse before it is placed in a casket for cremation." Ella Taylor at <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-05-27/film/it-s-hard-to-stay-mad-at-surprise-oscar-winner-departures/">the Village Voice says</a> "Departures is built for simplicity, and, if nothing else, the appeal to decency and integrity of this sweetly old-fashioned tale make it a must for Bernie Madoff's prison Netflix queue. Amid the culture of cheating and heedless one-upmanship that has brought the globe to its knees, it's a lovely thing to meet a movie that refuses to divorce what it means to be a professional from what it means to be a mensch."

Gothamist

What Goes Up stars Steve Coogan as "a morally challenged New York reporter" assigned to a small American town to cover the hoopla surrounding the first teacher in space on the doomed 1986 Challenger mission. Along the way, he "learns life lessons" from a group of dysfunctional students, like Hilary Duff. Still reading? <a href="http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/74957/what-goes-up-film-review">Time Out's David Fear</a> has written one of many pans: "Perhaps itâs best to talk about what should go down in Jonathan Glatzerâs black comedy... Thereâs the filmâs extreme copycatting of a certain generic, Sundance-approved templateâthe one that perpetuates the notion that quirky characters plus slightly left-of-center jokes somehow equals deep insight into the human condition. It doesnât, alas, and if What Goes Up is what we can expect in the post-Juno era of alt-dramedy programming, then burn, Indiewood, burn!"

Gothamist

Set in post-genocide Rwanda, Munyurangabo follows two young men as they make their way from Kigali, the Rwandan capital, to the farm where one of the boy's parents live. His guest brings a machete along. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/movies/29muny.html?partner=Rotten%20Tomatoes&ei=5083">A.O. Scott at the Times</a> says the film "allows weighty themes of vengeance, justice and forgiveness to hover around the characters and their actions rather than trying to dramatize them too pointedly. As a result Munyurangabo at times drifts from oblique understatement toward inscrutability and vagueness. But it also conveys a powerful sense of individuality and place, bringing home the sensual and material reality of Rwanda, a country that functions, for many in the West, as a near-abstraction, a synonym for unimaginable cruelty. Unlike Terry Georgeâs earnestly melodramatic Hotel Rwanda, [director Lee Isaac] Chungâs film, the first narrative feature in the Kinyarwandan language, leaves the violence off screen and in the past. But the enormity of the 1994 massacres â during which at least 800,000 Tutsis and dissident Hutus were killed, many by their own neighbors acting on the orders of the Hutu nationalist government â is if anything underscored by the absence of graphic physical evidence."

Gothamist

The documentary Pressure Cooker is a heartfelt tribute to a tough Philadelphia high school teacher Wilma Stephenson, who gives disadvantaged students boot-camp training in the kitchen to help them compete for a prestigious scholarship to a culinary institute. <a href="http://www.nypost.com/seven/05272009/entertainment/movies/has_all_the_right_ingredients_171148.htm">The Post's V.A. Musetto</a> calls it "that rare commodity: a film with only good things to say about public schools... Pressure Cooker is both a tribute to a teacher who actually cares and kids who actually want to learn. Would that there were more people like them."

Gothamist

The dramedy Call Center concerns the Detroit employees of a call center that's being outsourced to India; instead of training their replacements when they arrive from the subcontinent, the Americans go on the offensive to try and undermine the move. <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-05-27/film/offshore-isn-t-potent-enough-to-be-a-lukewarm-button-movie/">Aaron Hillis at the Village Voice</a> isn't the only critic who hates it, but his review may be the most inspired: "Trained by the pissed-off workers they're about to replace, the trio experiences dramatic tension of a junior-high cafeteria caliber, as the Americans gently sabotage (prank calls!), humiliate ('Bring us coffee!'), and make xenophobic retorts like 'But we're American, Pedro.' [Director Diane] Cheklich and her co-writers seem as if they're consciously not taking sides on such a complex issue, but that only means both cultures are depicted as myopic caricatures, and . . . [With apologies, the Voice has outsourced the rest of this review to Mumbai] . . . it's a good movie, and I like all the time."

Gothamist

"NO! DAD! WHAT ABOUT YOU?" John Hughes's landmark '80s coming-of-age movie The Breakfast Club <a href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Films/films_frameset.asp?id=41274">screens at the Sunshine</a> this weekend at midnight.

Gothamist

Load up on garlic; Joel Schumacher's 1987 teen vampire hit The Lost Boys <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/films/the-lost-boys/">screens at IFC Center</a> this weekend at midnight.

Gothamist

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's critically-acclaimed, award-winning film LâEnfant, about a young man who sells his newborn, screens at the Walter Reade Theater Saturday as part of a retrospective encouraging film-goers to, well, go "beyond L'Enfant." Those wishing to do so can peruse the other screenings <a href="http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/dardenne/program.html">here</a>; reviewing the series <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/movies/24darg.html">Manohla Dargis at the Times</a> writes that "the Dardennes hold a mirror to a world rarely seen by Hollywood and its commercial ilk. It is a world of commonplace injustice that the Dardennes transform with their reverence for the miracle of everyday grace."

Gothamist

Akira Kurosawa's seminal 1950 masterpiece Rashomon, which challenges the notion of absolute truth by dramatizing a rape and a murder from differing perspectives, <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/rashomon.html">is at Film Forum</a> for a two week run through June 11th.

Gothamist

Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>Up</em> or <em>Drag Me to Hell</em>