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

..Wilmington on DVD ..Review by Kim Voynar ..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Page

High School Musical 3:
Senior Year
plus reviews of What Just Happened?
and Changeling

______________________________________

High School Musical 3: Senior Year
(One-and-a-Half-Stars)
U. S.; Kenny Ortega

I haven’t seen the first two movies in the Disney Channel-derived franchise, but this frenzied, witless, campily awful show about high school hunks, hunkettes, and little Bobbie Fosses all cavorting together in their last shot at a high school musical together is so bad you can hardly believe your eyes as you watch it -- and I say that in full knowledge of the fact that it grossed 42 million dollars last week and even got a good rating on the Rotten Tomato-meter. Eccccchhh! Be very afraid: If both the public and (some) critics really like obvious dreck like this, then the Republicans have a chance.

The songs (David Lawrence) are catchy and the performances energetic. But the writing (Peter Barsocchino) reeks -- even on the preteen level at which this is pitched. And the acting, by an enthusiastic and musically gifted young cast which includes Zac Efron (the basketball bombshell), Vanessa Anne Hudgens (the girl who almost gets away). Ashley Tisdale (the nasty blond bimbo called, I swear, Sharpay) , and Lucas Grabeel (the choreographer with a hat) hit a peak of jaw-dropping, senselessly confident hamminess and awfulness.

It probably ain‘t their fault. After all, they’re kids, and they can be led astray. (Unfortunately, poor habits amply rewarded become lasting examples.) But every scene is bad, and then some of them turn into mediocre musical numbers. The cinematography looks greased. (Not Greased.) Parents flutter around, trying to aid the assignations.

The coup de grace is the final show -- apparently lacking a script and attended, we are assured, by talent scouts from Julliard -- a weird theatrical enterprise that unfolds like some demented nightmare. The star vanishes and says he might arrive by the second act -- which he does, dragging onstage the ex-leading lady. Understudies wander on, changing the routines or actually competing with their counterparts. All of a sudden, the director changes the finale into commencement. Is this schlock surrealism? The past glories or absurdities of Busby Berkeley and Stanley Donen (Royal Wedding) are stomped on. And all the while, those Julliard scouts smile like idiots and applaud their heads off.

At least the success of this musical turkey (directed by Kenny Ortega, whose Newsies I actually liked), might spur more movie musicals. But where are Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney when we really need them?

______________________________________

What Just Happened? (Two-and-a-Half-Stars)
U.S.; Barry Levinson

Producer/director Barry Levinson and producer/writer Art Linson’s lightly veiled reality-based poke at Hollywood and how it can drive a well-meaning producer crazy -- with the title shortened from Linson‘s Hollywood memoir What Just Happened: Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line -- has such an excellent cast (topped by fellow producer Robert De Niro in the Art Linson-ish role of Ben, the story’s smart, harassed moviemaker) that it’s a crying shame it tends to fall apart. But What Just Happened? is exactly what I felt while walking out after the movie’s spectacularly unsatisfying ending.

As with many movies, the problem here lies in the script. The three main threads, not too well-woven, include Ben‘s attempts to get back in good graces with his alienated ex-wife Kelly (Robin Wright Penn), a rapprochement complicated by a randy screenwriter (Stanley Tucci) with a florist drama script -- and also Ben’s production problems with Bruce Willis, fearlessly parodying himself as "Bruce Willis," the recalcitrant star who refuses to shave off a heavy beard he’s grown for one of Ben‘s movies, even though his nervous agent, Dick (John Turturro) and angry executives think Bruce now looks like Grizzly Adams.

Last of the threads: Ben‘s headaches with his new movie, "Fiercely," a neo-noir thriller so artsy that star Sean Penn (as himself) not only dies at he end, but the killers shoot his dog -- to the consternation of the test audience and studio head Lou (Catherine Keener). She demands big changes -- which the vain and mercurial Brit director Jeremy Brunell (Michael Wincott) rages and dawdles over before the film‘s imminent Cannes premiere. (What Just Happened? was a closing night Cannes entry.)

Scenarist Linson has some juicy characters and sometimes sharp dialogue, but he hasn’t re-imagined or repopulated these “bitter tales” enough and his story structure is too loose. (Perhaps he needed a collaborator.) There are few surprises in his resolutions, not enough conflict between Brunell and Ben, not enough Cannes color and characters or opening night tension over the movie (a great opportunity slipped away). And we could even use more of an explanation for Bruce’s attachment to his ZZ Top look.

I’m not happy about my reaction to this movie. It had a lot of promise; like Terry Malloy, it could have been a contender. And De Niro, by the way, is very good. He gives an almost Spencer Tracy-ish performance as Ben, and he’s very well supported by everyone, especially Wincott, a real raw-edge, blowup specialist. (I still remember Wincott’s blazing Talk Radio turn). It just goes to show: Making movies is no snap.

______________________________________

Changeling (Four Stars)
U. S.; Clint Eastwood

Is Angelina Jolie too beautiful for this movie? Too dark-eyed lovely and sensuous-lipped seductive to play Christine Collins, a real-life single working mother in Los Angeles in the ‘20s, who loses her son mysteriously and becomes involved in a living, waking nightmare?

Of course movie stars are almost always better-looking than the natural prototypes of the characters they play; if they acted only the roles they were physically suited for, they’d only be playing other movie stars, or maybe TV news anchors, gigolos and hookers. In any case, Jolie, looks or not, is a perfect member of a great ensemble in Clint Eastwood‘s latest film, a neo-noir set in a sort of Dashiell Hammett-land. Her beauty gives her more empathy, because, as Pauline Kael once observed about stars in general, “we love to look at (her).”

Changeling, a true-life tale that’s one of his most powerful, is another very fine late-career movie from Eastwood, we get a scary look at the real life noir side of old Los Angeles: the fascinating story of a real-life Los Angeles woman plunged into an incredible but all-too-plausible nightmare. We can trust Eastwood to grasp fully the topography of the nightmare and to make it blood-chillingly clear. He does.

Here it is: In 1928, Collins, a single working mother and telephone company supervisor, arrived home late one day (not her fault) to find that her nine-year-old son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) had vanished. Distraught but still on top of things, she turned to the police -- then unfortunately in the grip of citywide corruption and venal police chief James E. Davis (Colm Feore) -- and after doing little for a while, the cops suddenly inform her, after pressure and bad publicity, that they've found Walter in Dekalb, Illinois.

But the boy the police bring to her isn't Walter -- even though, amidst hoopla at the train station, though he claims to be. And when she tries to tell this simple, indisputable fact to the head of the investigation, Capt. J. J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), a natty chap with a phony line of smooth patter -- Jones becomes testy, then enraged, and then finally has her committed to the L. A. psychopathic ward, where she is told by the head doctor that she has to sign a statement affirming the false child as Walter, or stay in the psycho ward and face possible electro-shock "therapy."

That's just the beginning of this true chronicle of persecution, ineptitude, public crime and private depravity, dug out of the L.A. files just before they were slated for burning by screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski. Eastwood, who also produced and wrote the music, tells it like a horror story, in grim, stark, unsunny images (by cinematographer Tom Stern and designer James J. Murakami) that almost suggest that other changeling-child horror story, The Exorcist.

And before the tale is done, we've also been introduced to the fiery anti-Davis crusading minister Gustav Breigleb (John Malkovich), shown many levels of the deeply entrenched '20s-'30s L. A. corruption, and met one of the scariest boyish movie serial killers since Anthony Perkins' grinning murderous man-child Norman Bates in Psycho -- Jason Butler Harner as the genial, maniacal chicken coop man Gordon Northcott.

As in Mystic River, Eastwood uses the theme of child-abduction (and probably both sexual and physical assault) -- first of Walter at the hands of person or persons unknown, and then of Christine at the hands of the police, the city and a medical bureaucracy -- the better to throw into sharper relief his frequent themes of corruption, outsiders, and personal and societal morality. There’s always been an irony about the ways liberal critics, including this one, have championed the more conservative Eastwood especially throughout his later career.

But one of the reasons is that many of us come from a ‘60s generation almost as suspicious of government and its motives as the old Barry Goldwater right. I feel right at home in an Eastwood movie where one of his outsiders stands alone against a sadistic mob, where one of his solitary mavericks is surrounded by corruption and has to fight improbably back. Like Christine. That’s a conservative theme. But it can also be a liberal one -- indeed, it most often is one, as in Bill Clinton’s favorite movie, High Noon, directed by the liberal Fred Zinnemann and written by the blacklisted Carl Foreman.

Indeed, one of the strongest scenes in Changeling and in Jolie‘s performance. is the sequence of her incarceration in the mental hospital, with the cold-eyed head physician not even bothering to mask himself as he demands that she sign a release and an acknowledgment of her false son, in order to go free. This is a scene that makes you almost shake with rage, and that takes you to the core of both character and director. Conversely, when Malkovich as the furious Rev. Breigleb breaks in, demanding the truth of Christine’s whereabouts, he expresses that pent-up anger we all may feel.

Innocence is attacked; corruption is assaulted in return. After his great 2006 World War II diptych of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, Changeling shows Eastwood again at the top of his directorial form -- and the cast and most of his regular company, including cinematographer Stern and editor Joel Cox at the top of theirs. This is a portrayal of governmental despotism and private rottenness that should rouse anger, terror and pity, a noir unveiling, a story to remember. It’s more prime stuff from Clint.

______________________________________

 

Read Michael Wilmington's DVD Reviews of the Week: Tuya's Marriage, Knife in the Water, Journey to the Center of the Earth -- plus, this week's box set picks ...

- Michael Wilmington
October 30, 2008

Recent Columns
10.23.08 - Changeling, Happy-Go-Lucky, Rachel Getting Married, I've Loved You So Long
10.16.08 - W., The Secret Life of Bees, Sex Drive, Filth and Wisdom,
10.10.08 - Body of Lies, Flash of Genius and The Express,
10.03.08 - Blindness, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
09.26.08 - Miracle at St. Anna, The Lucky Ones, Eagle Eye, Nights in Rodanthe

 

.