NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: 1 STAR

No, you're not dreaming. Freddy Krueger is back. Twenty six years after he first started knocking off the sleep deprived kids of Springwood, Ohio the baddie who gets you when you are most vulnerable—when you’re asleep—is using his iconic claw hand to terrorize a new batch of kids.

Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Freddy had a run in with the local townsfolk and is now taking revenge on Springwood’s children. Unlike the Pied Piper, Freddy was a suspected pedophile who was hunted down and burned alive by a mob of angry parents. Now, years later he’s getting even, passing like a virus through the dreams of his murderer’s high school age children, all of whom have the same puffy, darkly circled eyes of people who drink way too much Red Bull. When Mr. Sandman comes bad things happen. The kids soon become daydream believers as one by one the dreamy Freddy becomes a reality and kills them while the doze.

Like the originals—there were eight “Nightmares” in total—the “Nightmare on Elm Street” reboot alternates between reality, scenes of spurting blood and is-it-a-dream-or-not-sequence? sequences. Drowsy teens wander aimlessly doing all the stupid things kids do in these kinds of movies, like go into creepy old attics late at night and, in a technological update, allow their computers to enter Sleep Mode—Oh no! The scariest thing about the movie, however, is the acting.
 
The actors aren’t aided by a script that has a teacher nonchalantly say, “Are you OK Miss Fowles?” after a student lets loose with a blood curdling scream in class but even though the script is loaded with clunkers it deserves better than it receives here. The acting is classic b-movie horror technique. Each of the teens seems to have talen lessons in how to exchange horrified meaningful looks with wide (although very puffy) eyes while spewing lines like “Just don't fall asleep! If you die in your dreams you die for real!”

The acting is uniformly cringe worthy, although Jackie Earle Haley, who is making a career playing these kind of unpleasant characters in movies like “Shutter Island” and “Little Children,” is suitably menacing as Freddy. Unfortunately in reinventing Freddy’s back story the film focuses on his nasty er… pastimes with the kids. A scene with Nancy (Rooney Mara) dressed in a little girl’s dress isn’t scary, it’s just creepy. And not creepy in a good b-movie way, I mean creepy in a perverse NSFW way.

By and large the surreal CGI effects—like Freddy emerging from a wall—aren't as effective as original director Wes Craven's decidedly lower tech effects. This is a remake, and not a very good one, that rehashes many of the images from the other “Nightmare” films, leaving the new film with a “been there, done that” feel for anyone familiar with the other movies. Of the new set pieces some are ridiculous—like the clawed hand in the bathtub tentatively attacking Nancy—and some are cool—like the indoor snow storm, but none have the oomph of the original.

Ironically without the thrills and chills of the original “The Nightmare on Elm Street” redux is a sleep inducing exercise in how NOT to revitalize a movie franchise.

NINE: 3 ½ STARS

“Nine,” the latest Broadway to big screen outing from director Rob Marshall, is by turns breathtaking and frustrating. A cinematic remounting of the 1982 Tony award-winning musical (which was itself inspired by Federico Fellini's classic “8 ½”) about an Italian film director in the throws of a mid-life crisis is heavy on the glamour—Kate Hudson’s character tells the director that in his movies “every frame is like a postcard” and that is certainly true here as well—but not heavy enough with story.

When the movie starts world-famous filmmaker Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) is mentally blocked. His latest opus “Italia” is only ten days away from the beginning of production and he has yet to have an idea for the film, let alone write a line of dialogue. Edging ever closer to a nervous breakdown, his entanglements with a variety of women, including his mistress Carla (Penélope Cruz), wife Luisa (Marion Cotillard) and mother (Sophia Loren), only push him further down his self made rabbit hole.

The first question everyone has about “Nine” is, “Can Daniel Day Lewis sing?” The answer, in a word (actually a few words) is, no, not really. He speak-sings his two songs in a strange baritone that sounds more like a drunk uncle singing with the wedding band than a big-budget musical star, but I can forgive the singing because his brooding presence anchors every scene in the film. In a movie as cotton candy light as this you need something or someone to affix the story to and Day-Lewis is it.  

Marshall takes the movie’s thin premise and stretches it to feature length, keeping the eye interested with stylish camera work, scantily clad dancers and great 1960s Italian locations, fashions and period decoration, but he may have taken the words of one of his characters a bit too seriously. “Style is the new content,” coos Stephanie (Kate Hudson). If that is true then “Nine” is the most substantial movie of the year, meaning that it is great to look at, but somehow, the story doesn’t really connect.

If you are just going for the music however, you won’t be disappointed. Marshall has cut several of the tunes from the original score, added several others (by original Broadway composer Maury Yeston) and wallpapered the movie with memorable songs, set pieces and choreography. Highlights include Fergie’s ode to roaming hands, “Be Italian,” “Cinema Italiano” Kate Hudson’s exuberantly fluffy 60’s pop number and “A Call from the Vatican,” Penelope Cruz’s steamy phone sex song.  

“Nine’s” glossy veneer over powers whatever story there is but its panache and energy will keep your eye entertained.

NINJA ASSASSIN:
ACTION: 4 STARS
ACTING AND EVRYTHING ELSE: 2 STARS

If you are the type of person who would go see a movie called “Ninja Assassin” then you’ll probably enjoy “Ninja Assassin,” and judging by the audience I saw it with, ditto if you own a UFC jacket.

Like all great ninja movies “Ninja Assassin” (maybe the best movie title this year) is about revenge. Raised by the Ozunu Clan on a ninja farm run by the evil master (Shô Kosugi) Raizo (Korean pop star Rain) breaks free from his clan after the brutal murder of one of his fellow ninja disciples. He spends his days training and plotting revenge. Meanwhile in Berlin, Europol agent Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris) is tracking a series of ninja murders that seem to be linked to the Ozunu Clan. Together they may be able to take down the evil ninjas, exacting justice and revenge!

“Ninja Assassin” is an amplified version of the cheapo ninja films of the 1980s. It has all the earmarks of the classics of the genre like “Enter the Ninja” and “Pray for Death,” that is: stiff acting, loads of mysticism, slow motion fight scenes, a simplistic good vs. evil plot and buckets of blood. In fact the blood budget on “Ninja Assassin” could finance well, dozens of other, more worthwhile endeavors. The special effects are better than in the earlier films, but for all intents and purposes this could be a relic from the heyday of ninjitsu flicks. It even co-stars Shô Kosugi, the godfather of the modern ninja film.

The term slice-and-dice hardly does the carnage on display in “Ninja Assassin” justice.  There are more blades flying here than in that Slap Chop infomercial with the Shamwow guy. The first unbelievably bloody killing happens about three minutes in and is followed by a body count that would make Rambo envious.

Go for the action, which is pretty much state-of-the-ninja-art. There’s nothing here that rivals Quentin Tarantino’s House of the Blue Leaves sequence in “Kill Bill” for sheer manic fun, but when the throwing stars are flying and the blood is squirting, “Ninja Assassin” is a lot a hoot, it’s only when the characters start talking that things get dull. Partly it’s the wooden acting, but mostly it’s because the screenwriters feel they have to over-explain everything. When Raizo helps Mika escape from the marauding ninjas heading her way, he explains they can follow her scent. He tells her to undress, shower without soap and change into new clothes. It’s pretty clear what’s happening, but in the world of “Ninja Assassin” his obvious instructions lead her to ask, “This is for our scent, right?” Yes genius, it is. Everyone in the theatre knew and so should you.

It’s a dark movie—both in tone and visually—but there is the odd laugh here and there. There are visual ninja jokes—a car parked at a no-tell motel parking lot, riddled with dozens of throwing stars, is hilarious—and when a government official says of Raizo, “He doesn’t look like a killing machine to me, he looks like he belongs in a boy band,” it raises a laugh given star Rain’s background as a pop star.
 
Despite some silly dialogue and low light action—ninjas exist in the shadows, we’re told, so all the fight scenes are shot in the dark and it is sometimes hard to tell what is going on—“Ninja Assassin” is bloody good fun, emphasis on the bloody.

NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: BATTLE OF THE SIMTHSONIAN: 1 ½ STARS

Night at the Museum was a mammoth hit in theatres in December 2006, ruling the box office for three weeks, taking in almost $200,000,000 in the process. Starring Ben Stiller as an unemployed man who takes a job as a night watchman at a natural history museum only to discover that the displays come alive when the sun goes down, the movie mixed Jumanji with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the usual Stiller shtick. Remarkable it was not, but no chance to make wheel barrels of cash ever goes unanswered in Hollywood, so this weekend Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, a bigger, louder riff on the first film, opens at a theatre near you.

As the movie begins the Museum of Natural History has been closed for renovations with many of its older exhibits being sent to deep storage in the federal archives under the Smithsonian in Washington.  When Larry Daley (Ben Stiller), the former heroic Natural History night watchman, now a workaholic inventor and infomercial star (he’s the Sham Wow guy without the hooker scandal), returns to find out that his beloved “shabby stuffed monkeys and ratty displays” are being discarded in favor of high-tech interactive exhibits he vows to do something about it. Breaking into the Smithsonian’s storage area he   clashes with the evil Pharaoh Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria), and his band of despicable henchmen (Al Capone and Ivan the Terrible) who plan on using a golden tablet to awaken an ancient army and take over the world. Enlisting aviatrix Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams) to maintain order, Larry tries to unravel the mystery of the tablet before it is too late.   

Night at the Museum redux is a carbon copy of its successful predecessor. The location has changed, but little else is different. The screenwriters couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a new style villain, so we have another Pharaoh, this time the comically evil brother of the first movies’ Ahkmenrah.

Luckily for us, though, the wicked sibling is played with verve and a great Boris Karloff accent, by Hank Azaria, who is one of the high points in these otherwise very familiar proceedings. He gives the weak script—it’s more a premise than a story—some life, hamming it up and earning most of the film’s laughs.

Other than that there’s plenty of kid friendly slapstick and computer generated thrills, but no amount of CGI could make up for the lack of spark between leads Ben Stiller and Amy Adams.

He’s in family friendly mode here—all the usual square-peg-in-a-round-hole edge that informs his best work is gone—and she is simply doing a sassy dame impression, à la Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey. Together they romp through the museum, jumping in and out of classic photographs and battling the great warriors of history, but it all feels a bit been there, done that.

NEW IN TOWN: 1 STAR

New in Town is a romantic comedy in the mould of every other romantic comedy made since Harry met Sally all those years ago. The genre is so familiar that saying upfront that Renee and Harry end up in a clinched embrace as the credits roll isn’t a spoiler, it’s a given. The trick with these kinds of movies is to make the journey, how the unlikely couple gets together, different and interesting.

Renée Zellweger is Lucy Hill, a Miami based business consultant sent to oversee the restructuring of a manufacturing plant in the snowy Minnesota town of New Ulm. She’s a fish out of water that’s never seen snow up close and personal and thinks that you light a fireplace with a switch on the wall. “I’m stranded in this frozen wasteland,” she says. She looks down on the townsfolk and their quaint Fargo-esque accents and is determined to do her job and “not get personally attached to this town or anybody in it.” Her icy attitude begins to melt as she warms up to Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick Jr.) a handsome local man. Then when she's ordered to close down the plant and put the entire community out of work, she's forced to re-evaluate her big-city values.

To freshen things up the screenwriters have set the action in Minnesota, perhaps the least sexy of all 50 states. Any list of dream rom com locations begins with New York, is rounded out by Paris with London coming in a close third. The good state of Minnesota is unlikely to make the cut, and unfortunately New In Town won’t do much to change that state of affairs.

Actually shot in Manitoba, the film is placed against a backdrop of snow and ice, only occasionally finding a modicum of warmth as the relationship between Renee and Harry heats up, and even then its predictability is likely to leave you as cold as the setting.

The location isn’t the movie’s only problem. Early on it’s clear that there aren’t any characters here, just clichés. The people of New Ulm are the kind of stereotypical small town folks that only exist on the big screen. They’re unsophisticated gullible rubes, too nice for their own good and prone to colorful phrases like “Oh for cryin’ in a beer cheese soup.” (I don’t know what it means either....)

Zellweger is a cold blooded shark in Manolo Blahniks, a stuck up city snob straight from Central Casting. Connick isn’t required to much more than smile and look rugged in his plaid shirts. At least he pulls off the smile.

Most shocking is J.K. Simmons as plant foreman Stu Kopenhafer. Simmons is a great character actor who was the best and funniest thing in Burn After Reading, the most recent Coen Brothers film, but this is the most blatant “for the paycheck role” of the year so far.

Couple clichéd characters with predictable situations and you have New In Town, a forgettable movie that will raise the occasional laugh from generous audiences, but is probably best regarded as a rental.

NOTHING LIKE THE HOLIDAYS: 2 STARS

In the first thirty minutes of Nothing Like the Holidays, a new seasonal film starring Alfred Molina and John Leguizamo, many story lines are introduced. There is a troubled Iraq vet back for Christmas for the first time in three years, unresolved feelings about a former girlfriend, accusations of infidelity and racial stereotyping. It may not sound like it, but it’s also a comedy. It’s Coming Home, Home for the Holidays, The Family Stone with a hint of Lucy and Ricky all rolled into one stale Yule Log.

 Like many Christmas movies that came before it, Nothing Like the Holidays treats the Yule season as a cinematic excuse to showcase a family who loves one another but doesn’t get along. In this case it is the Rodriguez family gathering in Chicago at their parent’s home to celebrate the season and brother Jesse’s (Freddy Rodriguez) safe return from Iraq. Over the course of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day it is uncovered that sister Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito), an actress, isn’t exactly setting the Hollywood studios on fire; that brother Mauricio (John Leguizamo) and his uptight wife Sarah (Debra Messing) aren’t as happy as believed and the parents, Anna (Elizabeth Peña) and Eduardo (Afred Molina), are getting a divorce after thirty-six years. Will the healing power of the season bring them together, or will this be their last Christmas together?

Nothing Like the Holidays is an average TV Christmas movie re-gifted for the big screen. The basic themes and plot devices are nothing we haven’t seen done before and better in The Family Stone, This Christmas or Home for the Holidays. The big twist is cultural—this time the family in question is Puerto Rican! The loud and boisterous family gives the film some energy, but the situations are so predictable that the film struggles to maintain the audience’s interest.

Former Oz star Luis Guzmán is the film’s comic relief. When he wonders why his brother and his waspy wife haven’t produced a “Sorta Rican” it provides the film’s best line, but too often the comedy gets in the way of the drama and visa versa. Tender moments collide with slapstick and it makes for uneven viewing.

Adding some weight to the cast is Alfred Molina, who, despite an ever shifting accent brings warmth to the role of the family patriarch and Elizabeth Peña who makes the most of her limited role as the mother. Of the rest of the cast John Leguizamo sleepwalks through his part as the hotheaded attorney son while, as his wife, Debra Messing does her best to bring some of her sitcom chops to a very thinly written character.

Despite its good intentions Nothing Like the Holidays is something like a lot of other movies we’ve seen before, and might be best seen next year when it can be rented from the bargain bin. 

NOBEL SON:
0 STARS FOR 99% OF THE POPULATION
4 ½ STARS FOR MASOCHISTS

At the movies it usually takes at least thirty minutes before my Crap-O-Meter starts ringing, but Nobel Son set off alarm bells right away. The film, which stars Alan Rickman as an arrogant Nobel Prize winner embroiled in a convoluted kidnapping plot, had me squirming in my seat from the clumsy opening scene. It’s one of those movies that has “suck” written all over it in large letters.

The elaborately plotted, but completely unbelievable story involves everything from kidnapping to cannibalism to spoken word poetry to molecular science and a foul mouthed animatronic mall Santa.

Not only is the story far fetched and overly complicated but there isn’t a single believable character anywhere to be found. The characters are also far less interesting than they (or the movie) believe them to be.

Alan Rickman’s is a bigheaded Nobel winner who cheats on his wife with students, and he’s such a lowlife that he then has the gall to give the girl in question bad grades. “When you do “D” work,” he tells her while they are having sex, “You get a “D.” The performance is so over-the-top it makes Mr. T look like Laurence Olivier.

Also unwatchable is Danny DeVito. His take on the formally obsessive compulsive Gastner is the most annoying performance in a career comprised of annoying Danny DeVito performances.

Nobel Son mistakes snappy editing and frenetic sound design for style and an overwritten script for true, entertaining dark hearted comedy.

THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2 DISC COLLECTOR’S EDITION: 4 STARS

Imagine if our collective image of Santa Claus had been shaped by Allegory of Gluttony and Lust painter Hieronymus Bosch instead of some nameless commercial artist at Coca Cola and you’ll get an idea of the dark edge of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. The jolly fat man in the red suit is gone, hijacked by a skeleton in a pinstriped suit.

Although Tim Burton’s name appears above the title The Nightmare Before Christmas was actually directed by stop motion animation legend Henry Selick, but make no mistake every frame of the film bears Burton’s twisted imprimatur. Originally conceived while he was working as an animator on much tamer fare for Disney in the early 1980s, the story of the mayor of Halloweentown who kidnaps and impersonates “Sandy Claws” to bring his own brand of good will to the world, percolated in his head until 1993 when he was powerful and famous enough to get the film made the way he envisioned it. The result is a wonderfully twisted holiday story that is plays like an offbeat Rankin / Bass production.

The film is really wonderful, with creepy songs by Danny Elfman, amazing stop motion visuals (more than 120 animators worked on the project) and warped humor that should appeal to most of the members of the family. Note though, that The Nightmare Before Christmas is a tad too dark for smaller children. It’s a Disney release but it is one of the rare ones that isn’t meant for the entire family.

The Nightmare Before Christmas has been released several times on DVD but this package includes some extras that are worth the shelling out a few additional dollars for. This Special Edition contains the usual stuff—a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film and theatrical trailers—but it also offers up two Tim Burton shorts, Vincent and Frankenweenie; Tim Burton’s original poem narrated by Christopher Lee and all new audio commentaries from Burton and Selick. It’s a great package and highly recommended. 

NIM’S ISLAND DVD: 1 ½ STARS

Nim’s Island is a fantasy film aimed at the under ten crowd. Based on the popular Wendy Orr kid-lit novel of the same name, it is a gentle fantasy-adventure story featuring an all-star cast including Jodie Foster, Gerard Butler and Abigail Breslin.

Nim (Breslin) is an 11-year-old who lives with her marine biologist father Jack (Gerard Butler) on an uncharted Pacific island. They are the Swiss Family Robinson for a new generation. When she isn’t dancing or playing soccer with best friend, a sea lion, she passes the time reading adventure novels about a fictional character named Alex Rover written by a phobic San Francisco author also named Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster). When Jack is lost at sea, abandoning Nim on the lonely island, she turns to the only person she thinks can help—her heroine Alex. Thinking she is e-mailing her hero she actually is in touch with the neurotic author who drops everything to come to the rescue. As they work together to find Jack they overcome their fears and Alex becomes the mom Nim never had.

Nim’s Island will likely entertain young girls born after 1998 but may be a tough sell for anyone over the age of ten. Bogged down by bad dialogue, lame action and blatant product placement—Apple Computers anyone?—the whole thing feels lackluster despite the efforts of the cast.

Abigail Breslin sparkles in the lead role, but doesn’t have the depth of personality she usually shows while Jodie Foster gives her worst performance to date. She’s a great actress but her efforts to inject some life into the proceedings fall flat as she proves once and for all that she has no gift for slapstick. Butler fares best of all in a double role that is both charming and fun.

Nim’s Island is an unremarkable movie that does have good values for kids but suffers from a predictable story and a misguided performance from Foster.

NEVER BACK DOWN: 2 STARS

For those not up on their hand-to-hand combat sports, mixed martial arts is the hot new trend, but it’s not exactly new. Early forms of the art date back at least to the late 19th century and it enjoyed some popularity in the late 1960s and early 70s with the emergence of Bruce Lee and his practice of blending various martial art styles. In recent years, however, MMA has changed from its brutal anything-goes roots to a kinder, gentler sport with safety rules and far fewer fatalities.

Since the implementation of these changes, the sport has grown swiftly, to the point of setting pay-per-view records, so it was just a matter of time until modern MMA made its big screen debut.

Set in Orlando, Florida Never Back Down—a title so generic it could have been plucked from the Jean-Claude Van Damme reject pile—sees new-kid-in-town kid Jake Tyler (Life As We Know It’s and Tom Cruise look-a-like Sean Faris) become a trouble magnet. After taking a beating from bully Ryan “The Beat Down King” MacDonald (Cam Gigandet) Jake is convinced to join an underground fight club where he will learn the art of mixed martial arts from mentor and coach Jean Roqua (Blood Diamond’s Djimon Hounsou). Whether Jake uses his newfound skills in the ring to become a better person, or simply to eek out revenge on his tormentor Ryan is at the crux of the plot.

Story wise its one part Karate Kid mixed with two parts Save the Last Dance. Action wise its Fight Club lite, a teen friendly genre film that has just enough blood and guts to keep the boys in the crowd interested, but not enough to earn the deadly R rating.

The look of the movie is pure 1990s music video, with montages galore, loads of slo mo and even some dry ice effects. It’s appropriate that Never Back Down resembles a music clip because it has as much insight to teen angst as a Weird Al Yankovich video. Don’t let the pumped-up production value or the abundance of pretty people fool you, this is drive-in teen exploitation fare with a story we’ve seen many times before.

Never Back Down is simply an overwrought teen genre picture that flies along when it sticks to the teen gladiator action, but gets very silly when it attempts to adds layers of character or plot.  

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN: 4 ½ STARS

The Coen Brothers have spent most of their careers as critical darlings, the favorites of people like me who love the offbeat sensibility they bring to their films. Their classic work, which includes O Brother Where Art Thou, Barton Fink and of course, the Oscar winning Fargo dates back to the early eighties with their breathtaking debut Blood Simple.  
The new millennium, however, hasn’t been kind to the brothers or their fans. An attempt at romantic comedy, Intolerable Cruelty, lacked both romance and comedy and The Ladykillers was an ill advised remake of an Ealing Studios classic. Happily, they found their footing with their new film, an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel No Country for Old Men, featuring a serial killer with a Beatles haircut, a title borrowed from the first line of W. B. Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium and some of their best work in years.

The story begins when down-on-his-luck Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hunting near the Rio Grande, stumbles across the site of a drug deal gone wrong. Bullet-ridden dead men litter the landscape, and a several kilos of heroin and a suitcase stuffed with two million dollars in cash have been abandoned. When Moss makes off with the money his life and the lives of those around him are changed forever.

In hot pursuit of the runaway and the cash are disillusioned Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who vainly tries to contain the situation, a cocky bounty hunter played by Woody Harrelson and an enigmatic killer named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem).

Bardem’s performance as Chigurh (ironically pronounced “Sugar”) is the film’s secret weapon. The movie is top heavy with good performances—Jones is at his world-weary best while Brolin continues his comeback winning streak with another strong outing—but it is the quiet menace that Spanish actor Bardem brings to the film that gives it is oomph. His diabolical killer cavalierly flips coins for people’s lives, speaks in a monotone when he does speak, but usually he just lets his weapons—like a pressurized air gun usually used to stun and kill cattle—do the talking for him. His near catatonic countenance, Prince Valiant haircut and seeming indestructibility make him the best and strangest on-screen villain of the year.    
The Coens have faithfully adapted McCarthy’s novel, keeping the dark humor, unbearable suspense and high body count—the ultra-violence would make David Cronenberg proud—while at the same time tightening up their notoriously loose narrative style. This is muscular filmmaking, highly structured but not predictable; it’s well paced and suspenseful. Couple the terrific story with great performances and beautiful New Mexico photography and the result is not only their best film since 1996's Fargo, but also one of the best of the year.

THE NANNY DIARIES: 2 ½ STARS

A few months ago promo items for The Nanny Diaries started popping up everywhere. A poster at the Cineplex. The tie-in novel at the book store. Scarlett Johansson’s face was all over the place, but where was the movie? Well, it was moved from a prime early summer slot to late August, traditionally the dumping ground for troubled movies. Rumors flew around the internet that the movie was a bomb; that they did massive reshoots to salvage the allegedly messy movie. The studio spin on the delay was that an August release put the film in a better position come awards time. I can tell you two things: The Nanny Diaries is no where near the disaster that internet pundits were predicting, but it ain’t going win any awards either.

The story is a roman a clef written by two former Manhattan nannies masquerading as an anthological study of that city’s Upper East Side Clan. Johansson plays Annie, a university grad with a degree in finance and a minor in anthropology who decides she needs some life experience before she sets off for a career in banking.

After a chance encounter in Central Park with Mrs. X (Laura Linney), who mistakes the name Annie for the word Nanny, she’s hired to look after young Grayer (Nicholas Art) a sweet but spoiled rich kid. Mr. (Paul Giamatti) and Mrs. X are the poster couple for dysfunction, absentee parents who feel it is more important to attend a seminar on childrearing with their Park Avenue friends than actually stay home with their kid. They treat Annie like a child rearing machine, not a person, rarely giving her any time off and forbidding her to date. But before you can say Nanny 911 a rich, handsome law student (Chris Evans) sets his sights on Annie and things become strained on the Upper East Side.

There are no surprises in The Nanny Diaries. Everyone learns appropriate life lessons regarding the error of their ways, and somehow you know that young Grayer will end up in good hands. Lurking inside the mushy chick lit story is a class struggle between the pompous rich and the wise people who rely on them for a paycheck. It’s been done before and better, but while The Nanny Diaries doesn’t really rise much beyond the level of a Saturday night sitcom, it does offer some mild pleasures.

There are laughs scattered throughout, and although they become fewer and further between as the minutes tick on, Johansson’s deadpan anthological voice over in the film’s opening moments is amusing and peaks interest in the story to come. The movie doesn’t live up to the promise of the opening, but a bit of magic realism with a bank logo that comes to life to convince Annie to become Mary Poppins for the summer is imaginative and fun.
 
The cast is a little higher end than you might expect, given the lowered expectations of the story. Johansson slides by with her usual pout firmly in place, but does sparkle in some of the film’s lighter moments.

Laura Linney could play Mrs. X in her sleep. She doesn’t stretch here, but does offer up some great moments of withering condescension and contempt. The role becomes less interesting when she tires to bring some real character to the script’s thinly written caricature. As a Cruella de Ville Jr. she’s all surface, but it’s an entertaining surface.

The biggest surprise is Paul Giamatti in the small supporting role of Mr. X. He’s clearly only here because the directors, Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, were the team behind his breakout hit American Splendor. That’s the solitary reason I can see for such an interesting, talented actor to take such a characterless and underwritten role. He does the best he can with what he’s given, but as Mr. X he’s simply a stereotype of the cheating workaholic we’ve seen so many times before.

The Nanny Diaries is formulaic, predictable stuff, but is very nearly saved by Johansson and Linney’s winning performances.

NO RESERVATIONS: 2 ½ STARS

No Reservations succeeds because of one of the performance by its two Oscar nominated females. No, it’s not Catherine Zeta Jones as the control freak chef who makes this one worth while, it’s the sweet performance of eleven-year-old Abigail Breslin, a child actress so unpretentious and natural that she steals every scene she’s in. Audiences loved her as Little Miss Sunshine and she is the reason to go and see No Reservations.

In this remake of the marvelous German film Mostly Martha, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Kate Armstrong, a well-respected chef at a trendy New York City bistro who adopts her niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin) after her mother is killed in a car accident. Kate’s entire reason for being is the kitchen, and the new-found role of mom disrupts her carefully arranged life. She also seriously lacks kid skills. For their first meal together Kate serves Zoe a fish, complete with the head. In her restaurant it probably sells for $35. The problem is you couldn’t pay a kid to eat it.  

When the owner of her restaurant brings in a new sous chef in the form of the boisterous Nick Palmer (Aaron Eckhart) sparks fly—both professionally and romantically.

The odd couple doesn’t mesh at first, but this is a romantic comedy, so soon enough rivalry becomes romance and they bond over food and their shared affection for Zoe. Kate struggles to figure out that there is no perfect recipe for life and to find true happiness she must look past her four burner.    

Zeta-Jones and Eckhart are perfectly acceptable romantic leads for a film like this. She’s gorgeous, he’s blandly handsome, but they don’t seem to have much in the way of romantic chemistry. Better are the kitchen scenes where they prepare beautiful, expensive food with the care and precision usually ascribed to diamond cutters or heart surgeons. The pair only seem to have any real connection on screen when they are ladling sauces.

The connective tissue here, the thing that brings it all together is Breslin, a scene stealer with expressive eyes and a knack for underplaying her roles. She’s so effective because she seems like a real kid and not the Hollywood version of what a kid in her situation might be like. There’s not a precocious moment in her performance.

No Reservations director Scott Hicks is best known for making big serious movies like Shine and Hearts of Atlantis, and he struggles here. The movie looks great and has a great sense of place—you’ll want to fly to New York for dinner right after the movie—but his pacing of the paper-thin and obvious opposites attract plot is out of whack. The movie is only an hour and forty-five minutes but feels much longer.

No Reservations—come for the story, stay for Abigail Breslin!

NARC

Narc is the kind of movie that makes you forget the dark patches on both Jason Patrick and Ray Liotta’s resumes. You remember Patrick in Rush, and forget about Liotta in Operation Dumbo Drop.

The story is simple enough, and almost clichéd. When the trail on a murder investigation of a policeman goes cold, an undercover narcotics officer, Detective Sgt. Nick Tellis (Patrick), is teamed with loose-cannon detective Henry R. Oak (Liotta) to solve the case. It’s old hat – the good cop teamed with a out-of-control cop – we’ve seen it in movies and on television for as long as there have been police dramas, but when it is treated with the kind of conviction and intensity that Liotta and Patrick bring to their roles it seems fresh and compelling. Both play cops who cross the line into unlawful behavior in order to do their jobs, and have both become tainted by their experiences. Narc explores what happens to a good cop when he is forced to break the law.

Visually director Joe Carnahan captures the feel of the mean streets, using a grainy film stock and handheld cameras to underline not only the dirt, but the energy of the street and the sleazy underbelly in which these two men operate.

Narc is a great cop movie, but it has a generic title, and a grainy feel to it that I don’t think audiences will connect with because they want to see something glitzy, something happy, something that is going to make them feel a little better. Hopefully it’s the kind of movie that will build a nice cult following on DVD.

NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VAN WILDER

The National Lampoon movie brand name is back with a vengeance after almost a decade in mothballs. Like the movie that started it all, Animal House, Van Wilder is set at a college and is filled with the kind of gross-out humour you expect (and some you don’t) from National Lampoon, but it also has a lot of heart. Van Wilder is a good guy, and as played by the Canadian-born Ryan Reynolds is the most likeable lead in a Lampoon movie to date. The film is stuffed with questionable sight gags, and pooh jokes that will make 14 year-old boys laugh hysterically, but it is Reynold’s charismatic performance that really sells this piece. Without him this would be a much lesser movie, but luckily he’s here and his performance turns Van Wilder into one of the funniest films to come down the pike in a while. Look for cameos by Erik Estrada and Animal House alum Tim Matheson.
THE NEW GUY

This teen flick about a goofy kid who tries to get expelled from one school so he can re-invent himself as the tough guy at another is an average comedy made special by two performances. DJ Qualls (from Road Trip) as the goofy Dizzy Harrison is so likeable it’s hard to find fault, and Eddie Griffin, as Diz’s cool-school tutor, hands in a performance that you will either hate, or find extremely funny. Me, I laughed. The story is unremarkable and silly, but like National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, another inane movie redeemed by its star, The New Guy is saved by the charismatic Qualls. This film won’t change the world, but it probably will make a star of the Tennessee born actor.
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

The main thing that this movie suffers from is that it has been condensed to an almost absurd degree. The copy that sits on my shelf clocks in at over 900 pages, written by Charles Dickens with great energy and humor. Director (and frequent Woody Allen collaborator) Douglas McGrath trims the story down to a commercial length, and revs up the pace to an astonishing degree. This film seems like it is in a hurry to get to the closing credits, which in one sense is great because it’s not very good.
The movie begins with Young Nicholas (Charlie Hunnam) and his family enjoying a comfortable, idyllic life. The idyll comes to an end when Nicholas's father dies, leaving the family bankrupt. Nicholas, his sister and mother journey to London to seek help from their Uncle Ralph (Christopher Plummer), but Ralph's only goal is to separate the family and take advantage of them. Nicholas is sent to teach at a ramshackle school run by the merciless Wackford Squeers (Jim Broadbent). Eventually, Nicholas runs away with schoolmate Smike (Jamie Bell), and the two set off to bring the Nickleby family back together.
There are some good elements. Christopher Plummer is worth watching as the wicked uncle. Nathan Lane is interesting. Dame Edna as his wife is fun to watch, but by and large the film is beige. Just average. In the title role of Nicholas is Charlie Hunnam a British television actor who made his name on Queer As Folk, and unfortunately he’s not very interesting. As the central character you have to want to watch him. You have to care about his character. You have to want him to succeed. You have to want him to marry the right girl. You have to want all that for him, and you don’t.

The problem is that while you are traveling with him you meet all sorts of characters that are far more interesting than the central character. You want to say, ‘Nick, you go on. We’re going to stay here for a while.’

Historical drama doesn’t have to be this dull. Dickens is brimming with juicy characters and interesting plots, if only the filmmakers had trusted the source material, a book that has been delighting people since 1839.

NANCY DREW: 2 ½ STARS

The opening scene of Nancy Drew: Mystery in the Hollywood Hills answers many questions.

Firstly: Is it possible for a relative of a movie superstar to make a credible debut in a summer movie? (Yes! Emma Roberts, daughter of Eric, niece of Julia has the right balance of all-American girl and chutzpah needed to bring the beloved literary character Nancy Drew to life.Like her famous aunt, she's all eyes, teeth and lips, but the perpetual look of astonishment on her face serves her well here. I don't know if she can do anything else, but she pulls this off.)

Secondly: What's in Nancy Drew's Slueth Bag? (Everything you need to solve crimes. It's so well equipped McGuyver would turn green with envy.)

Thirdly: Whatever happened to Chris Kattan? (His regular spot on Saturday Night Live now a dim memory, apparently he now passes the time making cameo appearances in kid's movies.)

In the updated Nancy Drew the girl detective and her father leave their comfortable home in River Heights, where Nancy has a reputation for landing the bad guys when the police can't, and move to big, bad Los Angeles. When a 911 operator laughs at her for calling in the robbery of her moccasins and notebook Nancy discovers that LA isn't nearly as friendly as her hometown.

Father and daughter move into a house that looks like Gloria Swanson's mansion from Sunset Boulevard, where, years before its former owner, movie star Dehlia Draycott, died mysteriously. The case was never solved, but that may change when super sleuth Nancy Drew moves in upstairs.

Nancy, despite promising her father that she'll hang up her sleuthing bag, figures if she has to move to a new town she may as well have something to keep her mind and sleuthing skills nimble. As she slowly uncovers the sordid details of the case it becomes apparent that there is an evil force who would rather have the case stay just as it is—unsolved.

It's basically the plot of many of the books, so there's nothing new there, but the filmmakers have added in some tame action scenes and a chaste love interest to spice things up. It's solid tween entertainment, although to really grab the 8-12 year-olds the pace should have been picked up a bit. The story may have been updated to include cell phones and designer clothes, but the pacing is pure old-school Nancy Drew.

The new Nancy Drew is amiably good-natured with enough going on to keep the tweens happy, but might not be action oriented enough for older teens and will certainly seem stiff to adults.

NORBIT DVD:
MINUS 3 STARS (ONE FOR EACH CHARACTER EDDIE MURPHY PLAYS)

This is the movie that probably cost Eddie Murphy his Oscar. He was nominated for his tour de force performance in Dreamgirls but had the misfortune to have Norbit open in theatres the week the Academy voters were casting their ballots. All the goodwill Murphy accumulated with Dreamgirls evaporated into the ether as soon as the Oscar taste-makers got a load of him dressed as an aggressive 300 woman and the award went elsewhere.

Apart from the first ten minutes or so Norbit is a laugh free zone; a movie that mistakes prosthetics for humor. Murphy mines whatever comedy is buried under all the make-up he wears as he plays three different characters—the nerdy Norbit, his obese wife and an old Chinese restaurant owner—but the jokes are few and far between.

Norbit gives the word “lowbrow” new meaning.

NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM DVD: 2 ½ STARS

Night at the Museum was a mammoth hit at the theatres this past December. It ruled the box office for three weeks and took in almost $200,000,000. Not bad for a movie that co-stars Andy Rooney and Dick Van Dyke, two actors more suited to the dinner theatre circuit than blockbuster movies.

Starring Ben Stiller as an unemployed man who takes a job as a night watchman at a natural history museum, the movie mixes Jumanji with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the usual Stiller shtick. Alone in the cavernous building at night, with only the handwritten instructions left by the old watchmen (Rooney and Van Dyke, along with Bill Cobbs), he discovers the true meaning of the old phrase, “They only come out at night.” He is flabbergasted to learn that once the sun goes down and the museum closes, the exhibits come to life. Giant dinosaur skeletons roam the foyer, wax statues walk and talk, and a reanimated stuffed monkey tears up his precious instruction sheet, leaving him to deal with the nightly chaos on his own. Like Bill and Ted he is assisted by some figures from the past, in particular a wax statue of Teddy Roosevelt (Jumanji star Robin Williams) who spouts sage advice. 

Night at the Museum has some amazing computer generated imagery, a few good gags, but fails to really set the imagination loose. Instead of concentrating on the story—the source material, a book by the same name by Milan Trenc, is only 32 pages long—director Shawn Levy fills the screen with pandemonium hoping that flashy computer tricks will mask the holes in the story.

Stiller does what Stiller does—slapstick with an amiable edge, but like they say, “You should never act with animals or kids.” In this case Stiller might want to add “Giant reanimated dinosaur bones” to that list. There’s too much going on and Stiller, along with the story gets lost in the mix.

Night at the Museum is a fanciful story that, in execution, isn’t as interesting as the idea.

THE NAMESAKE: 3 STARS

In the two decades since director Mira Nair made a splash with her debut film, the Oscar nominated Salaam Bombay, she has made richly textured movies like Monsoon Wedding and Mississippi Masala that examine family and intimate relationships. Her latest film, an adaptation of the popular Jhumpa Lahiri novel about two generations of a Bengali family is an almost epic work about the immigrant experience.

The sprawling story begins in Calcutta in the late 1970s with an arranged marriage between Ashoke, a survivor of a recent train accident, and Ashima. The couple settle in a cold-water walk-up in New York City and begin to assimilate to a new way of life and one another.

Soon they start to raise a family. Their first child, a boy, is named after Ashoke’s favorite writer, the Russian Nikhil Gogol. The name is loaded with meaning for both father and son, carrying a weight that becomes one of the major themes of the film.

Gogol, who later changes his name to the more American-sounding Nick, becomes the focus of the film. He rejects the traditions of his background, preferring the more cosmopolitan lifestyle offered by Manhattan and his WASPy girlfriend. A death in the family forces him to reevaluate his choices.

That’s the Cole’s Notes version of the story. Nair has reduced Lahiri’s 300 plus pages to two hours of screen time but still manages to cover a lot of ground. At its core, though, this is a movie about assimilation—the parents must come to grips with their new country and their children must find a way to live in America without denying their cultural background.

Gogol’s internal struggle is well presented by Kal Penn, an actor best known for outrageous comedy roles in films like Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Epic Movie. He delivers a remarkably restrained performance as he portrays the character from geeky teenager to self-assured young man.  
 
We’ve seen this sort of thing on-screen before, but Nair’s brings a sensitivity to the film that brings the characters alive. Gogol’s struggle with his identity could have been hackneyed in less capable hands, but the director’s nimble touch and heartfelt treatment of the material rings true.

THE NUMBER 23: 1 ½ STARS

Julius Caesar was allegedly stabbed twenty-three times when he was assassinated. Psalms, the longest book of the Bible, is the 23rd book of the Old Testament. The regular human body temperature is 98.6 (9+8+6=23). According to the Dr Pepper company website, the soft drink "is a unique blend of 23 flavors". The new Jim Carrey movie is the 23rd project Joel Schumacher has directed, counting both his film and television work. Throughout history the number 23 has been associated with mystery. Numerologists believe that like the digits 7 and 13, which also carry some baggage, the number 23 has a notorious past. Is it all coincidence or is there really an enigma surrounding the numeral?

In the new psychological thriller, The Number 23, Jim Carrey plays dogcatcher and happily married man Walter Sparrow, who is convinced that the number has a grip on his life. His life seems ideal until the day of his thirty-second birthday when a strange dog leads him on a chase to a mysterious cemetery, biting him on the arm before disappearing.

The incident with the dog makes him late to pick up his wife after work. She kills time by browsing through a used bookstore where she finds a book called The Number 23. She buys it for him and soon he becomes obsessed with the novel, seeing similarities between his own life and the story’s main character. Soon he is consumed by it, seeing the influence of the mystical number everywhere and it leads him down a rabbit hole that threatens his sanity and the well being of his family.

If you’re a fan of Carrey’s comedies, then maybe you should stay home and rent Dumb and Dumber instead of laying down your cash for this overly dramatic and campy thriller. Carrey’s “man on the brink” routine isn’t believable, and 23 minutes into the film I knew his overblown performance was pushing it off the rails. Sparrow is a dual role. Regular obsessed guy with a nice family before cracking open the book; grimacing tattooed alter ego afterwards. Neither characterization rings true. He seems out of his league, and no amount of mugging for the camera is going to fix this monumental piece of miscasting.

The story is kind of silly, but that hasn’t stopped other supernatural thrillers from taking flight. The thing that grounds The Number 23 is the complete lack of reasonable human behavior in the story. Instead of reacting with fear or alarm that the family’s breadwinner has lost his mind, his wife (played by Virginia Madsen) and young son totally play along. I don’t know about you, but if my dad asked me to go and dig up a skeleton with him, I might ask a few questions first.  

Joel Schumacher directs with his usual stylish eye for detail, but his technique is no match for this overacted hokum. 

NOTES ON A SCANDAL: 4 STARS

Remember the song Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order? Well that song could have been the inspiration for the new Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett film Notes on a Scandal. Actually the movie is based on the controversial 2003 Zoë Heller novel about Sheba Hart, a high school teacher played by Cate Blanchett, who has an affair with a student and the lonely, spinster teacher who chronicles the liaison and subsequent fallout.

So far it sounds like a riff on the Mary Kay Letourneau story, but this story is deeper and more involved than that. Take parts of Letourneau’s story, add a dash of Fatal Attraction and you have Notes on a Scandal. Judi Dench plays Barbara Covett, the narrator, a woman obsessed with the Blanchett character. By agreeing to become Barbara’s friend, Sheba gives into blackmail so she can avoid the scandal that would follow if the news of her affair became public. Unfortunately for Sheba Barbara isn’t only looking for a casual friendship.

The movie employs a technique that usually falls flat—the use of a narrator all the way through a film—but Dench adds a delightful dash of coldness—she describes Sheba’s son, who has Down’s Syndrome as “a tiresome court jester”—and bitterness in the reading that illuminates her dark secret.  

Notes on a Scandal is mean spirited, and slightly sordid, but is elevated by Dench and Blanchett’s terrific performances.

THE NATIVITY STORY: 2 ½ STARS

Director Catherine Hardwicke’s last two films, Thirteen and The Lords of Dogtown, were edgy examinations of teenage life that dealt with young people in crisis. Her latest film, The Nativity Story, revisits the theme, but this time her young protagonists, Mary and Joseph, have larger issues than acne or a spotty report card.

Hardwicke draws on the gospel of Matthew for the story of the Immaculate Conception and the reaction of Joseph, her family and neighbors in Nazareth who, at first, were skeptical of Mary’s claims that she was pregnant with the Son of God. It’s an interesting and realistic interpretation that should open up the story to further character exploration and dramatic possibility but unfortunately Hardwicke pulls back.

Unlike her previous films that brim with energy, The Nativity Story is staid, as though she was overwhelmed with piety for the story. She is faithful to the bible—apart from using the Three Wise Guys… er Men as comic relief—and adds in some interesting period details, but it never feels like we’re watching a movie about real people. Nor does it feel like we’re watching an epic tale. Hardwicke rests somewhere in the middle, closer to mundane than interesting.

The acting brings to mind Sunday School Christmas Nativity plays and suggests that perhaps the Oscar nod that young Australian actress Keisha Castle-Hughes, who plays Mary, received a few years ago might have been a tad premature.  

The Nativity Story is a well meaning, but dry attempt to tell the story of the birth of Christ.