..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Prince Caspian
and How The Garcia Girls
Spent Their Summer
Plus Ratings Of This Week's DVDs, Including An Extended Look At Youth Without Youth

The Chronicles Of Narnina: Prince Caspian (Three stars)
U.S.; Andrew Adamson

Prince Caspian, the second of the Walt Disney Studio & Walden Media's lavish, no-expense-spared adaptations of C. S. Lewis' classic '50s children's series "The Chronicles of Narnia," -- once again directed and co-written by Andrew (Shrek) Adamson -- is even more spectacular than the first (2005's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), though not as charming or as magical. That earlier film, based on the second Narnian novel, was a bang-up chase film, with a ferocious climactic battle, but it was largely devoted to the establishment of the wondrous fantasy world that the four Pevensie children stumble upon in the back of an old wardrobe at kindly Professor Jim Broadbent's digs: the Narnian land of perpetual winter ruled by the evil White Witch (Tilda Swinton) and challenged by the forces of the heroic lion Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson).

This one, based on the fourth book in the series, and once again directed and co-written by Adamson, is set several centuries later in Narnia time, but only a year or so by London's clocks. The four Pevensie kids are back -- stalwart Peter (William Moseley), faithful Susan (Anna Popplewell), troubled Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and the absolutely delightful little Lucy (Georgie Henley, now 12) -- and so is Aslan, and for one brief horrific scene, Swinton's wily White Witch. But much of this movie is consumed with two huge, terrifyingly bloody battle scenes, and the preparations for them -- not to mention smaller fights and duels galore.

Those big bloody brouhahas involve the meanest-looking catapults I've seen in some time backed by lots of sneering villainy from Sergio Castellitto as double-dealing King Miraz and Pierfrancesco Favino as his dour General Glozelle, vented against the rebellion of pretty boy Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) and the Narnian creatures. And they create a mood far more continuously violent, though not necessarily more exciting, than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe's.

There are magical forest scenes and wondrous beasties and creatures and there are some marvelous new characters -- including Peter Dinklage as the gruffly heroic dwarf Trumpkin, who scowls and glares and plunges into battle like a tiny Viking. But Prince Caspian will probably have much more depth for audiences who have seen the first.

By the way, one thing I really missed this time around were those brave, but homey bickering beavers voiced by Ray Winstone and Dawn French who guided the Pevensies in Witch I realize we keep leaping ahead through centuries of Narnian time in these stories. But couldn't those beavers somehow get a return engagement ?


How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer (Three stars)
U.S.; Georgina Garcia Riedel

How The Garcia Girls Spent their Summer rolled by me like a lazy June-July-or-August day where nothing much happens but work, sleep, meals, a little flirtation, maybe a little sex, and the sun beating down. But afterwards it stuck.

After all, isn't that pretty much what occupies most of our summer days? If not our movies? A quiet but sexy little show from first-time feature-maker Georgina Garcia Riedel, this picture sneaks into a small Arizona border town and peels back the layers of the story of the Garcia family: three generations of feisty Mexican-American women who all have problems with men. It's a town and place so well realized by writer-director-producer Riedel that, as we watch, the heat, dust and sunlight almost get in our eyes as well.

At the center of the hot season is America Ferrera, the smiling, appealingly up-front star of Real Woman Have Curves and TV's Ugly Betty. Ferrera plays Blanca, a teenager who takes her elder's affairs with a grain of salt and much tolerance, but gets tangled up herself in a happy/unhappy fling with smitten garage guy Sal (Leo Minaya). Meanwhile, Mom Lolita (Elizabeth Pena) gets smashed and weeps over her loneliness (a terrific scene, with what seems real tears), then undergoes all-out seduction by the local married tomcat philanderer Victor (Steven Bauer), under the sympathetic, desiring eyes of her butcher shop boss Jose Luis (Rick Najera).

But it's the seemingly propriety-conscious grandmother Dona Genoveva (Lucy Gallardo), who gets the whole ball rolling at the start, by buying a car despite her lifelong inability to drive. Soon, a helpful neighbor -- macho grandpa Don Pedro (Jorge Cervera Jr.) -- offers to teach her driving and the rules of the road, igniting that love story as well. It's the only one of the three liaisons that really looks like fun.

I liked this movie, and so apparently did a number of festival audiences and prize juries. (It's almost a model American indie festival film.) Riedel writes well, directs her actors better, and, thanks to cinematographer Tobias Datum, shoots it all so quietly and unobtrusively, that the screen tends to slip away. Like Yasujiro Ozu, she likes to set a scene with a few empty tableaux; like Lumet, she gives her all for the cast. They respond with intelligence, humanity and sometimes a little sass. (Bravo to the whole bunch, especially Ferrera, the oldsters and Bauer).

Ferrera is the magnet here, with her knowing grin and flair for just sliding in and inhabiting every scene without apparent effort. Still, the most affecting (and brave) player here is really 70-something Gallardo, who, decades ago was one of the discreetly charming but spooked ensemble in Luis Bunuel‘s The Exterminating Angel -- the one about the rich bourgeois partygoers who just couldn't leave the party. That's more my idea of a Mexican art film, but I‘m happy to see the Garcia girls break out of the festivals and smash a few proprieties.

Son Of Rambow (Two and a half stars)
U.K.; Garth Jennings

Opening wide this week: A nice little movie about two British school kids falling in love with Sly Stallone's Rambo in First Blood, and trying to make their own inept camcorder pastiche. It gave me a fairly good time, but I'm a little mystified at its high critical reception in some quarters. It's better directed than written (both jobs by Jennings) -- but in both cases, it's over-flashy and shallow, a bratty movie about movie brats.

Maybe I'm a cynic, but I also found the relationship between the two kids -- Will Proudfoot as repressed introvert/artist Bill Milner and Lee Carter as rich rebel/bully Will Poulter -- filled with more sadomasochism than boyish fun or sentiment. Maybe I was puzzled at the choice of a pompous French kid as the big villain -- which seems like a steal from Bill O'Reilly's cultural cheat-sheet. And maybe I'm remembering what happened in Rambo: First Blood, Part 2.


MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASE

Youth Without Youth (Three stars)
U.S.-Romania; Francis Ford Coppola, 2007 (Sony)

This pretty, enigmatic romantic fable from Francis Ford Coppola got a bashing it really didn't deserve from critics -- which proves again that the Godfather movies (and Apocalypse Now) remain Coppola‘s Citizen Kane. As with Orson Welles and “Kane,” nothing Coppola does afterwards seems to measure up to his masterpieces, so everything he subsequently does is wrongly under-rated.

Critics though, should have applauded more the effort and ambition behind Youth Without Youth, adapted from a curious but provocative novella by Romanian writer Mircea Eliade. This after all, is the kind of offbeat, art-obsessed, politically savvy, non-formula movie you'd expect from the maker of films like The Rain People, The Conversation and Rumble Fish -- rather than, say, Gardens of Stone or Jack -- something bizarre, experimental, risky and way out of the ordinary. (There's even a copy of Finnegan's Wake on one table.)

“Youth” is strange to the max, though I disagree that it's hard to follow. It's the story, staring in 1938 and looping around Phil-Dickishly through several decades, of a 78-year-old linguistics professor named Dominic (bitingly acted by Tim Roth), whose age goes into reverse after he‘s struck by lightning (or something) in the street, changing his appearance to 40 and sending him on a curious road involving good doctors (played by Bruno Ganz, an angel in Wings of Desire and Hitler in Downfall), vicious Nazi doctors, temptresses with swastika leg garters, and Dominic's own long lost love Veronica/Laura (played by Alexandria Maria Lara, who was Hitler‘s secretary in Downfall). She also is retreating from the laws of biology, but, like Robin Williams in Jack, in the wrong way.

The Sony DVD missed a good bet by not assembling Coppola‘s original cut, which as an hour longer and involved a now abandoned subplot about the student radical movement in the ‘30s. The loss of that chunk, which master editor Walter Murch finally abandoned, might explain the empty feel of “Youth,” around the middle -- and the lack of a payoff for its political sections. But I‘m glad Coppola is back, that he's still blazing away, trying something really different. He may not make another Godfather I and II(and III) or another Apocalypse Now (Redux). But, like Verdi, he should always be working.


The Great Debaters (Three stars)
U.S.; Denzel Washington, 2007 (Weinstein/Genius Products)
The genuinely inspirational story of how future African-American leader James Farmer, Jr. (played by young Denzel Whitaker) learned how to debate with the best, becoming a member of a legendary college team, told with feeling and non-showy clarity by director-actor Denzel Washington (he's the teacher-coach, Melvin Tolson), with a cast that includes the younger Denzel‘s dad, Forest Whitaker. (He‘s James Farmer, Sr.).

CLASSIC RELEASE

The Fire Within (Le Feu Follet) (Four stars)
France; Louis Malle, 1963 (Criterion Collection)
Except for “Lacombe, Lucien,” Louis Malle was never better than with this great, somber, updated adaptation of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's roman a clef about his surrealist poet buddy Jacques Rigout and his suicide. The movie has a legendary performance by Maurice Ronet (Purple Noon, The Cousins) as Alain Leroy, the Rigaut character. (In French, with English subtitles.)

BOX SET

Indiana Jones: the Adventure Collection (Four stars)
U.S.; Steven Spielberg, 1981-84-89 (Paramount)

Modern Hollywood blockbuster-making at its peak.

Includes: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1981) Four stars; Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Spielberg, 1984) Three stars; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg, 1989) Three and a half stars.

- Michael Wilmington
May 15, 2008

May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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