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

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past , and Hunger
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X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Three Stars)
U. S.; Gavin Hood (2009)

The question of the day, in a world beset with war, pandemics, economic collapse, crazed cable news-slingers and other problems up the wazoo: Where did Wolverine -- the sullen, steel-taloned superhero of the X-Men gang played by Hugh Jackman -- come up with his retractable claws, his superpowers  and his surly disposition?
     
Where indeed? If you’ve been pondering this puzzle, and don’t have a big back file of X-Men mags to help solve the mystery, this Marvel Comics movie spectacular should fill in some of the blanks. It’s big, fast, jazzy-snazzy and full of violence -- and it has lots of shots of Logan/Wolverine talons shooting in and out of his hands and slashing into bad guys.
     
It also has some ferocious villains -- topped by Liev Schreiber as Wolverine’s equally bad-tempered and dangerous bro‘, Victor Creed/Sabretooth, and Danny Huston as their nefarious military scoundrel/boss commander Stryker. (Sgt. John Wayne’s last name in Sands of Iwo Jima, as you’ll remember.) Wolverine shows the horrifically-equipped brothers fleeing polite society and their unlucky family during the 19th century, then somehow battling their way through the Civil War, World Wars I and II and Vietnam, and eventually (post-Vietnam) falling into the clutches of Stryker and his elite commando/killer squad, Team X. Their battle buddies include gabby “perfect” sword-slinger Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), blast ‘em blobbo Fred Dukes (Kevin Durand) and constantly vanishing and reappearing teleporter John Wraith (Will.I.Am).
   
Stryker may be a demanding commander, yet they’re a crack team, brothers in arms with weapons sometimes shooting out of their arms. Still, after one massacre too many, Logan has had it. He quits the bunch, to Victor’s extreme displeasure, and high-tails it for Canada, the life of a carefree lumberjack, and connubial bliss with fetching schoolmarm  Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). But this actionless idyll is suddenly broken by the reappearance of Stryker -- who is holed up at Three Mile Island of nuclear accident ill fame, hatching all kinds of evil schemes. One of them: his insane but obviously lucrative plan to make Logan an even deadlier, sharper, better equipped Wolverine. That he does, before Logan escapes again, this time even angrier and in the nude.
     
Mayhem ensues, beginning with the slaughter of a nice homey old couple whose only mistake was to show up in the wrong movie --and climaxing in a Three Mile Island duel-to-the-death.
       
Jackman, the Australian music/action/dramatic star and this year’s surprise hit Oscar Show host,  is a gifted lead with a great glower and squint. From some angles, he looks like a younger Clint Eastwood and he sounds a bit like the younger Mel Gibson. And, as previous “X-Men” movies, and last year‘s Baz Luhrmann Down Under epic Australia have demonstrated, Jackman can really hold the screen. Huston and Schreiber are good, nasty, let’s-hear-it-for-Evil  heavies. Also, South African-born filmmaker Gavin Hood, who made the excellent Tsotsi, has a gift for both action and psychology and a flashy visual style. Technically and technologically, on its own terms, Hood’s new assignment, this roaring, slashing big-studio big-action adventure-sci-fi-fantasy, has a lot going for it.
   
But I got a little tired of Wolverine, despite an okay script by David Benioff and Skip Woods. It certainly delivers the goods, but these goods have been delivered all too many times before. The movie could use something different or special, and I don’t mean heavy metal talons coming out of Wolverine‘s ears and bum. Comic book movies, especially Marvel or DC ones, can afford to throw us different curves. They can give us the grand noir style of The Dark Knight, the psycho-adventure of Spider-Man, the wit and human feeling of Iron Man or the sweep of the first two X-Men. Instead, Wolverine keeps retracting its nails and repackaging the same old super-spectacle, the same old Biff! Bam! Crash! Zowie!
     
Am I being too finicky? Perhaps. But Hood, Benioff, Jackman, Schreiber and Huston -- and Marvel -- have more strings to their bows and more talons in their quiver than this heavy scratcher. Besides, having retractable super claws isn’t exactly my favorite fantasy -- unless there‘s a manicure scene.
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Ghosts of Girlfriends Past  (Two Stars)
U.S.; Mark Waters (2009)
     
This one is just a glossy, giddy, smart-alec misfire. From director Mark Waters and the writers who committed Four Christmases, it‘s an expensive, showy update of the great Charles Dickens’ endlessly remade and recycled Yuletide classic A Christmas Carol -- in which, this time, the Scrooge is a cynical serial seducer and bed-hopping star photographer named Connor Mead (Matthew McConaughey).
     
Connor, after breaking up with three women at once on a conference call, shows up at the wedding mansion as best man for his younger brother Paul’s (Breckin Meyer) wedding, and proceeds to hit on everybody in sight, to badmouth monogamy and marriage, to keep falling asleep and having nightmares, and to generally make himself obnoxious to political correctionists and wedding junkies.
     
Don’t fret though. Thanks to the spirit of Charles Dickens, the ghosts of Connor‘s girlfriends past, present and future, are about to materialize and show this sexist sexual miscreant the off-colorful consequences of his evil ways. They’re about to sneak into his dreams and up his bed and recount how he got to be such a super-lech: It’s all the fault of swingin’ killer-diller playboy Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas) who gives Connor superstud lessons. The ghosts also show how, after youthful disappointments, Connor has made an erotic pig of himself. And finally they show how he can straighten himself out in time for a “God bless us, everyone!”-style happy ending. (Old girlfriend, lost love and main disappointment Jenny, played by Jennifer Garner, is conveniently around to help out.)
   
I once knew an actual champion Don Juan -- he was my college best friend -- and McConaughey’s Connor continuously breaks both of this  guy’s main rules. Number One: Always talk to a woman exactly as you’d talk, on friendly terms, to a man. (Connor isn’t friendly and he always telegraphs his come-ons, while acting like an asshole.) And Number Two: Never, never talk to a woman about another woman -- ---- much less brag endlessly about conquests, like Connor. Connor doesn’t smile or joke enough to be a real ace heart-snatcher, he isn’t considerate, charming or funny, and he’s too open about his own bad behavior, as if the entire world were his frat boy chum.  So misogynist Connor may be getting by on his looks, money and fame, but I  just don’t believe him.
     
The movie looks pretty good: a bejeweled stinker. But the women tend to have shallow parts, like bridesmaids Deena, Donna and Denice, and there are no real laughs, except the ones supplied by Douglas as lewd old Uncle Wayne, an aging superstud whom I did buy. (Douglas’ old Fatal Attraction beleaguered wife Anne Archer is also around, and Connor hits on her. Unsuccessfully.) Douglas, pulling out his old Gordon Gekko reptilian super-charm, manages to easily steal the entire movie. (Lust is good!)
   
Uncle Wayne could have stolen more than that. Other than rewriting Connor’s part completely, the best cure for what ails The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past would have been to junk the original lineup and have Douglas play the lead, while putting  McConaughey in the nice guy groom role, for which he‘s much better suited, and have Catherine Zeta-Jones replace Jen Garner, who then could have slid into the rewritten bride part. (The loss of Lacey Chabert’s constantly hysterical Sandra, the movie’s worst-written role, would have been another plus -- and a break for Chabert, who could have grabbed something else.)
     
But that switch, which would have definitely made a much better, much funnier movie than this one, probably would have flunked the youth-rules studio green light test and Hollywood’s unspoken ageist credo about who carries films. Bad rule. As it stands, even if Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn showed up in Wedding Crashers-role cameos, it couldn’t have saved this mostly flavorless one-plum pudding of a movie.

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Hunger (Four Stars)
U. K.; Steve McQueen (2008)
     
Harshly physical and scarringly violent, this stark drama about the 1981 I.R.A. hunger strike at Maze Prison in Belfast, and the death by starvation of strike leader Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), isfull of ugly brutish deeds in incongruously beautiful images. From the first moments, when the film plunges us into the famous H Block cells, where the walls of one cell are decorated with abstract shit paintings -- to the systematic beatings and humiliations, the threats, the assassination of a prison guard (Stuart Graham), and the slow awful wasting away of Sands during his strike, the movie bombards us with nearly unbearable visions of an awful time, while inspiring inevitable connections to our current debates about torture and extreme prison abuse.
     
This is the first feature movie by artist Steve McQueen (no relation to the late American superstar) and it’s a heavily praised and awarded picture: winner  of the Camera d’Or for best first film and the FIPRESCI prize as Cannes and the Best Film and Actor awards at Chicago. The opening struck me a bit too weirdly photogenic: both the actor (Brian Milligan) and the images. Then the movie, and artist McQueen’s painterly style, started to take hold, shock and wear me down.

Its best scene is its most austerely visualized: a two-shot, one-take, 22-minute-long sequence of Sands talking starvation ethics and strategy at a visitor’s table with a tough priest, Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham). The ending is devastating. Even if McQueen never completed another movie, he’d have a place in Irish film history for this one. (At The Music Box Theatre in Chicago.)

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 Is Anybody There? (Expanding this Week) (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
 U. K.; John Crowley (2009)

I saw Caine again recently in a snatch of 1966‘s Alfie on TV recently, and I had to marvel myself at his immense simpatico with the camera, at the way he effortlessly chats up the audience and how, endowing this selfish but charming London seducer with his blond good looks and pleasing manner, he was able to draw us right into the world of the movie.      
...More on this review from 4.16.09

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs

- Michael Wilmington
April 28, 2009

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