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Candid Reviews of Movies Just Hitting The Big Screen
by Cole Smithey
Bubble Boy
Disastrous, reckless, and weighed down by the most insipid use of
soundtrack music ever Bubble Boy is a movie that manages to insult
every member of its audience simply by association. Jake Gyllenhaal is a
goofy boy with immune deficiencies relegated to a life inside a large
plastic enclosure maintained by his over protective right-wing mother (Swoosie
Kurtz), who is set on keeping him safe from the girl next door (Marley
Shelton). The road trip story follows the Bubble Boy cross-country to
Niagara Falls, in a self-made bubble suit, to stop the wedding of his true
love and confess his feelings. The movie plays like a bad cross between
Joe Dirt, Say It Isn’t So, and Freddie Got Fingered. (PG-13)
Summer Catch
Freddie Prinze Jr. continues his streak of mediocre romance movies as a
hotshot baseball pitcher with a chance to go pro out of Cape Cod’s
Baseball League. The script veers between local-boy-breaking-away drama,
jock-fueled comedy, and a class conflicting romance with Jessica Biel as a
rich girl in love with a blue-collar baseball player. Cliches abound in
this slight but entertaining feel-good sports movie where a band of
college baseball players try to get picked up by Major League scouts over
the course of a summer. Fred Ward is solid as a working class dad to
Prinze Jr. and Brian Dennehy gives the movie ballast as the baseball
team’s no-nonsense coach. (PG-13)
Tortilla Soup
Something is lost in the translation from director Ang Lee’s original
Eat Drink Man Woman to this spicy but flat American update of Lee’s
story. The cultural touchstone is now Spanish instead of Chinese in a
family of three women, played by Jacqueline Obradors, Tamara Mello, and
Elizabeth Pena, and their master chef father played by Hector Elizondo.
While their widower dad is cooking up luscious colorful dishes, his
daughters are each struggling with leaving the nest of their comfortable
home for love or money. The movie never achieves the embrace on the senses
that it strives for, and the film’d humor is muted throughout. However
Hector Elizondo gives an outstanding understated performance and Raquel
Welch is stunning as ever as an older American woman with her own agenda.
(PG-13)
An American Rhapsody
In spite of the movie’s inflated title, writer/director Eva Gardos tells
an emotionally charged story of Hungarian immigration that is touching and
historically accurate. Nastassja Kinski is an upper-class mother of two
daughters who flees Communist Hungary in the mid-fifties with her husband
and their eldest girl. Forced to leave their baby Zsuzsi behind for their
escape to succeed, the couple makes a new home in California before
retrieving Zsuzsi six years later from an elderly couple who have raised
her in the Hungarian countryside. Zsuzsi grows up in the spin of ’60s
America with burning questions about her place in the world that fire her
rebellious nature and immaturity. It’s only when 15-year-old Zsuzsi visits
Budapest alone that she discovers the reasons behind her parents’
sacrifices. (PG-13)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
World War II overflows onto the small Greek Island of Cephallonia,
bringing with it Italian soldiers and Nazi tanks. Amid the social strife
in lush settings, love blossoms between Italian soldier Nicholas Cage, in
the title role, and Penelope Cruz, as a local nurse-in-training who lives
with her father, played by John Hurt. The movie doesn’t go far enough as a
love story or deep enough as a believable article of wartime experience.
Penelope Cruz is miscast as a Greek local, and Nicholas Cage’s is
artificial and presentational compared to Christian Bale, a consummate
representational actor. The movie splinters into too many disjointed
pieces to be fully entertaining, but Nicholas Cage does indeed play the
mandolin. (R)
Happy Accidents
Writer/director Brad Anderson (Next Stop Wonderland) fails miserably at
blending genres of science fiction and romantic comedy in a movie that
comes off more like a glorified student film experiment than a feature
film. Marisa Tomei is romantic damaged goods living in Manhattan when she
meets time traveler and charmer Vincent D’Onofrio from the year 2470.
D’Onofrio becomes insistent that he has arrived to change Tomei’s destiny
to save her life. Tomei and D’Onofrio vainly attempt to compensate for the
film’s meandering plot and silly dialogue, but it’s still not enough to
make the movie enjoyable. (R)
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