Judging by this week’s movies you might want to be extra careful if you travel to Berlin or Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Just Look at what Liam Neeson and Ed Helms get up to in their new films. Two comedies, one from England, the other from Malaysia, deal with important matters and most of Canada’s 10 best get a special presentation.
Here’s the list:
Unknown 3 ½ stars
Cedar Rapids 3
The Infidel 3
Sell Out! 2 1/2
Canada’s 10 Best --
I Am Number Four --
Big Momma’s --
UNKNOWN: No, it’s not Hitchcock but it’ll do for now. Not many can match the breathless suspense of the master’s best work. Still, this is a nifty paranoia thriller with an excellent cast and a good story that’ll keep you hanging on, even through some serious improbabilities and some lackluster direction. Liam Neeson stars as a scientist who arrives for a conference in Berlin along with his wife (January Jones, of TV’s Mad Men). A traffic accident and four days of coma later, she claims she’s never seen him before. Security and her new man (Aidan Quinn) have him ejected from the hotel.
Thugs start chasing him. The one person who was there the day of the accident, a taxi driver played by Diane Kruger, won’t help (initially). A fellow scientist played by the fine German actor, Sebastian Koch, (star of the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others,) doesn’t know him. The only person willing to help is a former Stasi agent, now working freelance as a people-finder. Bruno Ganz plays him and steals the show in just a few short scenes. (He was Hitler in The Downfall and in the many internet re-workings of his main speech in that film). The story complicates at every turn. There are three car chases, a rooftop escape, an assassination plot (complete with a countdown clock) and a twist revelation to keep you busy. Neeson is busy with another thriller filming right now in B.C., involving wolves. (The Ridge, Scotiabank and many suburban theatres). 3 ½ out of 5
CEDAR RAPIDS: Another white-collar work comedy, perhaps following the trail opened up by The Office, Up In the Air or even Mad Men. With a big difference, though. This one feels more like one of those wild college films or teenage romps. The folks here are adults, insurance agents who spend a weekend whooping it up at a convention. There’s fun in the recognition what sometimes really goes on, but there are also too many cheap laughs.
Ed Helms (of TV’s The Office) plays a small-town innocent who has to sub as a delegate to an insurance industry gathering. He has two orders: win the coveted Two Diamonds award and stay clear of a rival agent. Well, of course, he ends up sharing a room with him (played with great blowhard gusto by John C. Reilly). The other roommate is played by Isiah Whitlock Jr. (of The Wire.) In a fun in-joke he claims to be a big fan of that show which he puts to good use later on.
Helms, who improbably has an affair at home with his former 7th-grade teacher (Sigourney Weaver), is seduced by Anne Heche at the convention. He also smokes crack at a raucous biker party, sings O Holy Night with lyrics about insurance and exposes a convention scandal. When the humor is gentle and celebrates heartland decency, it works. The rougher scenes are tolerable. But then, right at the end, the film undoes its goodwill by throwing in a whopper of a fart joke. Who needs that? (5th Avenue Cinema and International Village) 3 out of 5
THE INFIDEL: The humor is uneven but the laughs are there if you’re ready for a cheeky look at the animosity between Muslims and Jews. It’s British, although written by an American, so we get both subtle and ham-handed episodes in a London Muslim’s culture shock.
Omid Djalili gives a wonderful performance as one of those non-observant, assimilated types who rants about a radical imam as a “fundamentalist fatty fatwah.” Complication: his son is about to marry the imam’s stepdaughter. Bigger complication: he discovers his own history. He was actually born Jewish. He can’t tell anybody but is drawn to find out what it means. He turns to a Jewish neighbor played by Richard Schiff for some lessons and gets a cynic’s overview (e.g. a swipe at folks who “renounce all material possessions but still keep the receipts.”) The jokes come steadily. They’re caustic but not mean-spirited and they do not mock religion, only the fervor of those who use it to keep people apart. The ending is a bit too convenient. (VanCity Theatre) 3 out of 5
It’s playing along with …
SELL OUT!: There are multiple targets in this satiric comedy from Malaysia – and multiple ways of firing at them. The director himself (Yeo Joon Han) appears in scene one, as a director of art films who won an obscure award but has little to say in a fawning TV interview. It’s a slap at the pretensions of the film crowd but only a warm up. Bureaucracy, corporate greed, broadcasting excesses and runaway personal ambition all get a work over.
The TV host is about to lose her show and stumbles on a new idea: a reality show that films the last minutes of dying people. The network loves it. In a parallel story a young inventor at the FONY corporation is fired because there’s no built-in obsolescence in his new soya machine. Two executives remind him of the company’s mission statement: “Make money”. The film is a bit like an extra long SCTV episode. The humor is usually of the obvious kind but still amusing. Occasionally is dips into black comedy. The performers vary. One odd thing, well maybe not so much now that Glee is a big hit on TV, the characters periodically break into song. Another odd thing. The film is subtitled all the way even though it is largely in English, and only partially in Cantonese. (VanCity Theatre) 2 1/2 out of 5
CANADA’S TOP TEN: You can catch up with the films a panel chose as our best for 2010 at Pacific Cinémathèque this week. Or at least eight of them. Barney’s Version and Incendies are playing elsewhere. You’ve got another chance to catch the very charming Modra, the creepy Splice, Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats and a lesser-known but much lauded film from Quebec, Curling. Bruce McDonald’s drama about women in rock has the last performance by Tracey Wright and you can’t go wrong with Lixin Fan's Last Train Home, the award-winning documentary about an annual migration in China.
The series also features the 10 best shorts, including films by Anne Marie Fleming and Guy Maddin. You can find times, dates and details at www.cinematheque.bc.ca/canadas-top-ten-2010.
Also playing …
I AM NUMBER FOUR: I haven’t seen this one because it screened the same time as Unknown. It’s been getting medium reviews overall but special praise for its realistic representation of teenagers. That’s even though this is a science fiction chase fantasy. Alex Pettyfer, the British actor being groomed for big things, plays an alien who escaped to earth along with eight others. The enemies from their home planet followed them down and have already killed three. Alex is target number four.
He hides by pretending he’s a typical high school student. Dianna Agron (of TV’s Glee) becomes a friend and Timothy Olyphant is a protector. Apparently the finale is an exciting battle between teens and a tattooed bunch of wildman aliens. The novel this is based on was co-written by James Frey, whose true-life drug-taking memoir a few years ago, A Million Little Pieces, was found to contain a substantial amount of fiction. (Scotiabank and many suburban theatres. Also in IMAX at Riverport and in Langley)
BIG, MOMMAS, LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON: Martin Lawrence puts on the fat suit and the wig for a third turn as the foul-mouthed, cantankerous grandmother of small-town Georgia. Actually, he’s an FBI agent you see, working in disguise to catch a murderer at an all-girls school. He takes along his stepson and witness, played by Brandon T. Jackson. Lawrence says he plays Big Momma because he loves her humor. No mention of a paycheck. The studio cancelled the media screenings it had planned. I wonder why? (International Village and several suburban theatres)
NOTE: The photos were supplied by the movie studios and are therefore the exclusive property of their copyright owners.