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

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Page

Observe and Report ,
Hannah Montana: The Movie, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Gigantic, and Sin Nombre
_________________________________

Observe and Report (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S. Jody Hill, 2009
    
This oddball show, in which Seth Rogen gets fat and psycho-nasty, and Ray Liotta and Anna Faris respectively play his tough cop and trashy babe nemeses, is, no kidding, the Taxi Driver of mall cop comedies, as writer-director Jody Hill has already confessed was his intention. And that’s a title it will never lose.
    
But if Travis Bickle and Paul Blart seem an odd mix, be advised that Hill and company never completely work out all the kinks in his concept. Rogen plays Ronnie Barnhardt, a rotund Dirty Harry-wannabe who dreams of being Eastwood or De Niro, but still lives at home with his mom (Celia Weston), an amiable souse who claims she slept with most of his high school friends, and probably did. Meanwhile, his mall is being terrorized by a fat flasher who keeps whipping it out at convenient moments, and burglars who keep looting the place. It’s a Ronnie sort of job, but somehow the PD sends over Detective Harrison (Liotta) who thinks Ronnie is a doofus.
    
The movie is pretty funny all the way through-- and Faris, as a mean little makeup shop slut named Brandi is hilarious -- but it also leaves a bad taste in your mouth. (To be honest so did Paul Blart.) Having your comedy hero be an actual semi-psychotic on a macho trip and vengeance kick is a daring move (though it smacks of Adam Sandler), and so are the pathological depths to which some these characters sink. Cinematically, it’s just okay.
    
Observe and Report is certainly a better movie than the hit Paul Blart -- not a hard contest to win. But in some ways, they aren’t all that different: gross-out comedy vehicles for star comics about cop fantasies that turn weirdly real. I thought it would have been funnier if Ronnie wound up in a straitjacket or got framed as the flasher, and then exonerated in a penis lineup.

Seriously though, enough is enough with this trend. I don’t want to see another mall cop comedy, because the possibilities get scary. What if we get one starring Blimp Rushbomb aka Rush Limbaugh, with Bill “Riled Up Riles” O’Reilly is the tough cop, and Glenn “The Wreck” Beck as the flasher? Basta!


Hannah Montana: The Movie (Two Stars)
U.S.; Peter Chelsom, 2009
     
Hannah Montana: the Movie isn’t a very good movie, but that isn’t the fault of Disney Channel superstar Hannah, aka Miley Cyrus. Despite being hamstrung by a ludicrous, cliché-clogged script packed with cornball sentimentality, dubious “real life“ parallels and clumsily telegraphed so-called comedy, the show can’t sink the bouncy, razz-ma-tazz 16-year-old. She manages to bust loose from the movie-malarkey, tear through her musical numbers and -- playing both a surrogate, country gal Miley Stewart as well as her blonde bombshell songstress alter-ego Hannah -- bring down the house.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of movie in between those rock numbers, and, despite strenuous efforts by director Peter Chelsom (Funny Bones, Town and Country) and the supporting cast, most if it is bad.
    
Here’s a hint for the incredibly talented young Ms. Cyrus and her savvy executive producer/costar dad Billy Ray (“Achy Breaky Heart”) Cyrus -- a nearly foolproof formula from director Andrei Konchalovsky (maker of the great Russian epic Siberiade and the heart-stopping thriller Runaway Train) to determine whether a movie, or movie script, is bad. According to Konchalovsky, “Good movies are unpredictable but logical. Mediocre movies are predictable but logical. And bad movies are predictable but illogical.” Of course, there are some exceptions to this rule. But this movie -- about as painfully predictable and outrageously illogical as you can get -- isn’t one of them
    
In the movie, Miley Cyrus-- energetically playing those two versions of herself “Miley” and “Hannah“ -- is joined by papa Cyrus, playing the movie Miley’s dad Bobby Ray. Disappointed by his daughter’s L. A. -drenched teen values, her mistreatment/sabotage of best friend Lilly’s (Emily Osment) birthday, and her scandalous fashionista fight with Tyra Banks on Rodeo Drive, Bobby Ray decides to circumvent pushy publicist Vita (Vanessa Williams, wasted) and take her back to Crowley’s Corners Tennessee, for some Hannah detox and syrupy good times time with the folksy Stewart family, headed by Elvis-loving Grandma Ruby (Margo Martindale).
    
Miley initially turns up her cute little button nose at this world without Bloomingdales, but pretty soon she discovers that Crowley’s Corner‘s has everything a good ol’ Disney gal, and even a superstar like Hannah, could want. There’s wise old, benevolent but stern Grandma Ruby, who doesn’t cotton to hoity-toity citified ways, and there are lots of down-homey birthday parties, plus relatives and friends, most of whom don’t seem to have the slightest notion about the Hannah masquerade. There’s the dreamy hunk farmhand with the automatic smile, Travis Brody (Lucas Till) who’s had a crush on Miley since the first grade, and who wants to start up a Brody Bunch. And there’s the villainous developer Bradley (played by Barry Bostwick, Brad of The Rocky Horror Picture Show) who’s hell-bent to turn the whole charming smile-fest of a town into one big glitzy Brad-and-Janet-style shopping mall. (Boo! Hiss!).
    
It's inevitable -- or at least predictable-illogical. Falling back in love with Crowley‘s Corners and incidentally with winsome chicken coop-specialist Travis, Miley decides to help out with some local benefits to block Bradley, engineered by Bobby Ray’s Reba-ish heartthrob, the oddly spelled heartbreaker Lorelai (Melora Hardin), and this crusade eventually mushrooms into an appearance by her hidden secret identity Hannah -- despite the fact that the snoopy scooper-upper, mugging Brit scandal writer/pooparazzi Oswald Granger (the appositely named Peter Gunn), is on Hannah’s trail (alone on the planet, it seems) and eager to sneak around and fall into every mud hole in sight.
    
Land o’ goshen, what a plot! Every bit of rustic tomfoolery you -- or writer Dan Berenson (Cinderella 3 and Twitches Too) -- could imagine is dredged up, running the gamut from Petticoat Junction meets Melrose Place to Sweet Home Alabama filtered through The Country Bears. Finally, after Oswald has fallen on his last pratt, and Travis has practically gotten a winsome hernia, Berendsen and Chelsom lead us shamelessly to a dual performance (two worlds) by Miley and Hannah at a mammoth outdoor rock festival, whipped up in a trice, that suggests a Crowley’s Corners version of Woodstock, with a huge backup rock band, but without the hippies.
    
This movie, not counting the musical numbers (of which there are too few) keeps getting strangled by its own comedy (of which there’s far too much). Almost every time Miley sings, it’s a triumph. Almost every time she and the rest of the cast start pratfalling and yucking it up, it’s a country cow-pie. And I’m not speaking as some citified cynic. I‘m a small town boy myself and I’ve spent time in many a hay-barn and country kitchen, mooning over my first grade (or at least third grade) crush. But this is the kind of small-town humor you find scribbled on Malibu restaurant cocktail napkins.
    
Credibility is thoroughly mugged and mangled in the first few minutes, when Miley and Emily try to get in Hannah’s own concert (once again, nobody knows the double identity), and wind up whizzing around on a golf-cart toward a fuming Bobby Ray. The mysterious Miley, whose Hannah masquerade hasn’t even been cracked by even the National Enquirer, and is now being pursued only by the mud-prone but persistent Oswald, then ducks a New York gig, is transplanted to C. C., Tennessee, and ends up trying to juggle her desire to save the town (couldn’t she just have bought the land herself?) and live up to the first-grade fantasies of the cowboy hatted charmer Travis.
    
The lowlight of all this alleged romantic comedy -- much of which might make even a tweener cynical -- is reached when Miley tries to fool everybody at once, running back and forth between a town benefit dinner (as Hannah) and a date with Travis (as Miley), while popping in and out of her Miley and Hannah getups, and crawling around under the banquet table -- all of this climaxing in a lobster fight and a steamed Travis. It’s a good thing the movie ends with Miley/Hannah’s concert and not that lobster farce, or the audience might really think they’d been plunged into Hee Haw Hell.
     
Whenever the ebullient and high-spirited, sometimes hip-hop-hearted Hannah gets on stage and sings (occasionally a song she wrote) this rib-nudging movie shucks off its country clowning, straightens up and flies right. But remember, tween or teen idol movies don’t have to be dopey -- or predictable-illogical. Back in 1964, teen pop kings The Beatles made the unpredictable and surreal, but beautifully logical A Hard Day’s Night -- a musical comedy movie where they “played themselves” to ultimate rock and cinematic glory. Exec producer/pop Billy Ray (whose favorite movies include Bonnie and Clyde, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Blue Velvet -- surely must realize on some level, that -- box-office smash or not -- this movie is a country crock, and that Miley and Hannah deserve better than this predictable but illogical fiasco.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Two Stars)
U. S.; Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2009
    
This is an approximation of an American art movie, based on Michael Chabon’s well-regarded novel, and here, it comes off as just another navel-gazing coming-of-age script. It doesn’t matter that the navels at which coming-of-ager Art Bechstein (Jon Foster) mostly gazes belong not to Art himself, but to knockout classical-music-playing tippler Jane Bellwether (Sienna Miller) and her seductive psychopath boyfriend Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard), both of whom log in some bedtime with Bechstein. In between these unerring nude romps, Art keeps having edgy dinners with his gangster dad (Nick Nolte wasted), who must be upset at what a dull narrator his son turned out to be, and can’t straighten him out, no matter how hard he glowers. Neither can Art’s hot-to-trot screw-anywhere Book Barn boss lady (Mena Suvari).
    
Despite its admired novelistic source, this is another example of a movie type I mostly dislike, though I gave a pass last week to yet another example Adventureland: the coming-of-age romantic comedy drama in which a middle class kid, stultified by suburbia, or morose with money, escapes the chains of family and bourgeois hypocrisy, and finds redemption of a sort in the sack or with wild-ass friends.
     
I can understand why filmmakers (and novelists) would want to write those stories (sometimes from life), and why they would consider them real, tough and honest -- and good opportunities for rock nostalgia soundtracks. But too often, they reek of self-pity and payback and late-night drunken monologues you don‘t want to hear. And they usually only work if they strenuously avoid becoming sex fantasies, and if they’re really funny or unusually perceptive. Most of them aren’t-- including Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Sarsgaard and Miller -- give them credit -- really try hard to be the self-destructive and seductive sex objects required, but it’s a losing battle. Foster is mostly a mope. Spoiler alert:





When two of the movie’s characters hold hands at the funeral of a third, I checked out. And I’m not breathlessly awaiting Mysteries of Des Moines or Mysteries of Barstow.
 
Gigantic (Two Stars)
U.S.; Matt Aselton, 2008
    
Jeez, another one! Will movie adolescents and twenty-somethings just never stop coming of age all around us?
    
Here, wise-guy loner Brian Weathersby (Paul Dano) is a big-city mattress salesman, Harriet Lolly (Zooey Deschanel) is a rich girl who falls asleep on his mattress and wins Brian’s heart; John Goodman (in the only performance here I liked) is Harriet’s brash bully of a dad Al; and Ed Asner is Brian’s tolerant pop -- solidly behind his son’s curious life ambition to adopt a Chinese child -- something that bothers Harriett and intrigues Al. Land o’ goshen, what a plot!

What happened to most of the old funny romantic comedies? This movie, thanks to writer-director Matt Aselton, has some sharp intelligent dialogue. But except for Goodman, it’s mostly delivered too obviously: enthusiastically by the adults and in a desultory monotonous, too hip-for-Manhattan-hip style by the lovers.
    
So, why in the world do current low-or middle-budget American art films fixate so often not on the poor or middle class, but on the comfortable and urban? Even these lovers’ spiritual/cinematic granddaddy Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), in a good version of this kind of movie, knew he had to deliver the goods -- or else go into plastics. I’m not asking too much from these shows, I think. I just want them to entertain and enlighten me -- with more than deadpan mattress jokes -- and win my heart -- with more than benevolent Chinese adoptions.
 
Sin Nombre (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Cary Fukunaga
    
Here’s a near-great little film from a new writer-director Cary Fukunaga, who focuses on a world I bet he didn’t grow up in. Showing us the desperate flight of some Central American and Mexican young people to the U.S., Fukunaga gives us a mean, scary little world of Mexican youth gangs -- and then takes us on an epic chase and quest to the border.

All the acting is fine: Paulina Gaetan, Edgar Flores, Kristyan Ferrer, Tenoch Huerta Mejia, Diane Garcia, Luis Fernando Pena and the others. And all the scenes have real visual sting and pull. Despite some slightly predictable illogicalities now and then, it’s a good movie. Come to think of it, these characters come of age too. But it means more when they do. (In Spanish, with English subtitles.)

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs

- Michael Wilmington
April 9, 2009

Recent Columns

4.02.09 - Fast & Furious, Silent Light, Sugar, Adventureland, and Paris 36
3.26.09 - Monsters Vs. Aliens, The Haunting in Connecticut, Z, and Shall We Kiss?
3.19.09 - Duplicity, I Love You Man, Knowing, and The Great Buck Howard
3.12.09 - Miss March, Last House on the Left, Race to Witch Mountain, Brothers at War and Everlasting Moments
3.05.09 - Watchmen, Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29, and Waiting for Dublin
2.26.09 - Crossing Over and Two Lovers
2.19.09 - Fired Up!, Friday the 13th and Must Read After My Death
2.13.09 - The International, Confessions of a Shopaholic and Under the Sea 3-D
2.06.09 - Coraline, He's Just Not that Into You, The Pink Panther 2 and Fanboys
1.30.09 - New in Town and The Uninvited
1.23.09 - Revolutionary Road, Inkheart, Notorious and The Secret of the Grain
1.16.09 - Defiance, Hotel for Dogs and Paul Blart: Mall Cop
1.9.09 - Last Chance Harvey, Marley & Me, The Reader
1.2.09 - The Top Ten