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

..Kim Voynar Review of Twilight ..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Page

Twilight
plus reviews of Bolt and Quantum of Solace ______________________________________

Twilight (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Catherine Hardwicke

Love hurts. Especially when it’s mingled with blood or money.

I haven’t read Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling teen vampire novels, but this would-be ultra-romantic movie -- made by Catherine Hardwicke, a director I’ve admired in the past -- didn’t get my veins pumping or awaken any insatiable hungers.

The movie is about an ordinary high school girl from a broken home, Bella (Kristen Stewart) who enters a new school in her police chief dad‘s (Billy Burke) Northwest small town and finds herself befriended by local cuties and also the impassioned desire-object of the disturbingly handsome Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who looks like a Ralph Lauren ad and acts like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Despite warnings from everybody, including Edward, Bella falls in love. And the trouble begins -- not from Edward’s friendly vampire family (dad Peter Facinelli and his teenage kids, including Nikki Reed, who co-wrote Thirteen with Hardwicke), but from a trio of renegade bloodusckers that shows up, including vampy Victoria (Rachelle Lafevre), Laurent (Edi Gathegi) and the vicious and seemingly unstoppable James (Cam Gigandet).

It takes about half the movie for it to really get going -- and then the thrills are fairly typical big-studio heartstoppers: aerial love scenes, Hong Kong-style flying fights and a super-baseball game, interspersed with family arguments and high school antics intended to ground the fancifully grisly stuff in some kind of shopping mall reality.

When Hardwicke and Reed (along with Evan Rachel Wood and Holly Hunter) made Thirteen, they hooked us by their honesty; the movie depicted teenagers with a fierce candor, and when it delved into the wild side, it didn’t sensationalize. Hardwicke tries to bring that kind of veracity to Twilight to counterbalance the vampire stuff. But it doesn’t work.

The story is a romanticized teen masturbation fantasy, better written and acted than usual, but not particularly compelling or surprising. Buried under here perhaps is a more realistic story about a displaced teen girl who falls in love with a rich handsome drug addict, but what Meyer fan wants that? Blood’s the thing, and so is high school desire. Also, I didn’t think the casting of Kristen Stewart, so good in Into the Wild, summons up the right teen Joan Fontaine-in-Rebecca mode that might work best. Will it mop up anyway? Blood will tell.

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Bolt (Three Stars)
U.S.: Byron Howard, Chris Williams

Can the old archetypically moving story of Lassie Come Home -- the incredible dog that goes cross country to rejoin a beloved master -- meld amicably with cartoon show biz satire and backstage movie pyrotechnics in an all-out 3D funny-animals cartoon feature? It does in Bolt, which is a better, and funnier, movie than you might think. Directors Byron Howard and Chris Williams and writers Williams and Dan Fogleman imagine an intrepid dog named Bolt (voiced by John Travolta) and his loving mistress Penny (Miley Cyrus), who are the stars of an unlikely TV series where Bolt is a superdog, and Penny his on-and-offscreen mistress, and where Bolt has been conned into believing that all his fantasy heroics are actually happening.

That’s not such a hot premise. But once Bolt and Penny are separated and Bolt starts to fight his way back through the fly-over zone from New York to L. A., the show becomes amusing -- thanks to some stellar 3D effects and character animation, and voice characterizations by Travolta, Susie Essman (a wow as the feline cynic Mittens) and Mark Walton as the irrepressible hero-worshipping hamster Rhino. The result is a kind of hopped-up cartoon Incredible Journey. Yet it got to me. And I suspect it will get to kids and stray adults too.

In general this year, feature cartoons have been better bets than a lot of the live action stuff -- and Bolt follows the trend. The songs, including one co-written and sung by Cyrus (with Travolta), are pretty good, the jokes are mostly funny and the technique is flashy and spectacular, like a Looney Tune cubed. As for Travolta, he hasn’t been this appealingly doggish since Pulp Fiction.

 

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..Len Klady Review ..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Page

Quantum of Solace (Three Stars)
U.K.-U.S.; Marc Forster

Quantum of Solace, eh?

The first James Bond picture I ever saw was Goldfinger, during its first national release, at the Orpheum Theater in Madison Wisconsin. The theater was packed from stem to stern, and the audience, many of them probably University of Wisconsin students like me, was alive to the movie -- and to every crinkled smile and steely quip of Sean Connery as 007, and every cliffhanger and laser-to-the-crotch that threatened him, like few movies I’ve seen.

Goldfinger knocked me out back then -- in no small measure because of the intense audience response, but also because it was exciting and funny. Remember that last word. I‘ve never had quite that juicy a ride with any 007 bash since, though The Spy Who Loved Me and the recent Casino Royale came close,

Now, on to the most recent Bond on my dance card: Quantum of Solace, (the title comes from an otherwise unrelated Ian Fleming short story), which has a good director (Marc Forster of The Kite Runner), good or semi-good writers (Neal Purvis and Robert Wade of three previous Bonds and. more importantly, Paul Haggis of Million Dollar Baby and Crash) and is probably the biggest grossing Bond ever. But truth to tell, it didn’t do much for me -- or for the spotty 10:30 A.M. crowd I saw it with.

Quantum of Solace, in which Bond beds the tart, bossy Camille (Olga Kurylenko), while pursuing her nefarious lover, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), owner of the duplicitous Greene Planet, an eco-corporation that’s actually a criminal enterprise, and winds up foiling a Bolivian water swindle -- is not bad. Given its goals -- aesthetic, commercial and otherwise, it’s obviously a success. Daniel Craig has clearly sealed the deal as the new Bond, grimmer and less bemused than Connery (still the best), but capable of leaping from rooftop to rooftop and displaying casual sadism, like few spy-killer-loverboys you could name.

Yet, despite strenuous efforts in The Bourne Identity vein, it’s not as entertaining as Casino Royale, Goldfinger or, for that matter, From Russia, With Love, which is the movie I would advise the designated writers to watch carefully, again, before embarking on the next Bond script. Russia, With Love was the favorite Bond film of writer Richard Maibaum, who wrote or co-wrote most of them. He probably liked it so much because it gave him a formula and a franchise. It was the movie that established the mode and style that made the movie series such a hit: a mix of the grim sadism and elegant wish fulfillment of Fleming‘s novels and the cool, insider humor that Maibaum and the others injected, which Connery was so expert at delivering. (“Shocking!” Bond says, after electrocuting a foe.)

Bond without humor is a hamburger without catsup, an Aston-Martin without steering, a gourmet dinner without wine. The 007 crew rediscovered something interesting in Casino: the elitist sadism of the books. But the humor is what makes Bond tick. Remember Richard Maibaum.

Read Michael Wilmington's DVD Reviews of the Week:
WALL-E and J'Accuse - plus, this week's box set picks ...

- Michael Wilmington
November 21, 2008

Recent Columns
11.14.08 - Slumdog Millionaire and A Christmas Tale
11.07.08 - Boy in the Striped Pajamas,Madagascar 2, Soul Men and Role Models
10.30.08 - HIgh School Musical 3, What Just Happened? and Changeling (Review Pt 2)
10.23.08 - Changeling, Happy-Go-Lucky, Rachel Getting Married, I've Loved You So Long

 

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