Reviews

In the comedic drama City Island, writer/director Raymond de Felitta pairs Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies together as Vince and Joyce Rizzo, a couple that cause more damage by hiding their aspirations than by opening up to one another. Interestingly enough, in The Man from Elysian Fields, Garcia portrayed a man hiding his secret career as a male escort from his wife, played by Margulies. However, City Island is much lighter and palatable fare and with a broader appeal to viewers. 

The Rizzos appear to live a mundane life on the outskirts of the Bronx on City Island. As a corrections officer, Vince Rizzo (Garcia) takes particular interest in young ex-con Tony Nardella (Steven Strait) and decides to bring him home in his custody. Turns out that Vince has many secrets that he keeps from his wife, most importantly that he has an illegitimate son -- guess who? -- and that his weekly poker game is really an acting class. He's afraid of his wife Joyce's (Margulies) temper, although his deception backfires in that she thinks he's having a affair. Meanwhile, his daughter Vivianne (Dominik García-Lorido) is hiding the fact that she lost her college scholarship and is working as a stripper to earn money for school.

With a lock on our consumer culture, The Joneses is an enjoyable satire, a sort of mixture of The Stepford Wives and the Home Shopping Network. The film focuses on the Joneses, a "family" made up of salespeople assigned to influence the spending habits of a certain suburb.

David Duchovny plays Steve, the father figure who also happens to be the newest addition to the team. His "wife" and boss, Kate, is played by a lovely and well-matched Demi Moore. Rounding out their family unit is Amber Heard as Jenn, their "teenage" daughter who prefers older men, and Mick (Ben Hollingsworth), who works with the high-school set as he deals with his own issues. Also playing a large part in the story are Gary Cole (fabulous as always) and Glenne Headley as a neighbor couple who completely buy into whatever the Joneses are selling.

It's always heartening to see independent productions get a chance to find audiences in theatrical release, and SXSW 2009 selection The Square, a thriller from Australian filmmaker Nash Edgerton, is a superb example. The movie opens Friday in Austin theaters.

Set in the suburbs during holiday season, The Square is a deceptively simple story built upon chaos theory, where seemingly minor events have tragic consequences. Ray (David Roberts) is a construction manager living the good life and building more opportunities for others to do the same. Like many cinematic middle-age men, Ray is dissatisfied with his life but not enough to leave his wife. Ray's fortunes change when his lover approaches him with a pile of cash and the seductive opportunity to start over.

From the UT Film Institute (The Cassidy Kids, Elvis and Annabelle) comes the powerful drama Dance with the One, which premiered at SXSW Film Festival last month and screened this week at the Dallas International Film Festival. Actor Michael Dolan (Hamburger Hill, Biloxi Blues) makes his directorial debut with a story co-written by Smith Henderson and Jon Marc Smith. As thrilling and suspenseful as a crime caper, it's really the family drama and determination of the main character that engage viewers.

In Dance with the One, small-time pot dealer Nate (Gabriel Luna) is in the business to support his family. Scarred by the tragic death of their mother, Nate wants to get his little brother Sitter (Mike Davis) away from his alcoholic dad Owen (Gary McCleery), as well as himself and his childhood sweetheart Nikki (Xochitl Romero) out of Texas to Oregon. Nate takes the opportunity to help his boss Bobby (Paul Saucido) -- who's also Nikki's dad -- to take care of a situation with a harder substance, hoping the money he earns will be the final push to freedom. However, things go wrong when the drugs go missing, and Nate must find a way to protect his family from the silent partner out for his investment and blood.

The film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is an odd but effective take on police corruption and the horrors of drug addiction. The film, now available on DVD and Blu-ray, combines a standard police procedural with elements of quirky, drug-fueled surrealism in a dark commentary about the fine -- and often blurred -- line between police work and criminal behavior.

Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, the story follows Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), a New Orleans police sergeant who injures his back while trying to rescue an inmate from a flooded jail cell. McDonagh is promoted to lieutenant for his heroism, but along with the promotion comes the prospect of a lifetime of debilitating back pain.

Six months after his promotion, McDonagh is assigned to investigate the execution-style murders of five Senegalese immigrants. By this time, he's already deeply addicted to painkillers, supplementing his prescriptions with OxyContin, cocaine and whatever else he can pilfer from the evidence room or score from suspects he detains. But McDonagh's substance abuse is only one of his problems; when not hustling his next fix, he's begging his bookie (Brad Dourif) to loan him enough money for just one more bet or paying a visit to his equally drug-addled girlfriend, Frankie (Eva Mendes), a high-dollar prostitute.

As McDonagh leads the murder investigation, it's obvious that he's a very skilled cop. But his true talent seems to lie in complicating his own life. As his gambling debts mount, he goes to extreme lengths to pay them off. He has a run-in with one of Frankie's johns, an abusive but wealthy and well connected thug who vows to get revenge when McDonagh steals his money. McDonagh also takes his rogue-cop interrogation methods way too far, and soon both his job and his life are in jeopardy.

Take two genuinely funny people, put them in a comedy ... and then ruin it by trying to make it really funny. You know the emphasis in that sentence, right?

Date Night stars two of the funniest people on the planet -- Steve Carell and Tina Fey -- as Phil and Claire Foster, two comfortably marrieds with kids whose attempt to shake up date night gets sidetracked by mistaken identity. The Fosters end up running all over Manhattan to get clear of the criminals and, well, hilarity does not ensue.

Like many Hollywood comedies, many of the jokes in Date Night seem to be planned by committee, from one particularly lame attempted getaway from gun-toting thugs involving penis meds, to bad physical comedy attempts to be sexy. Every time it seems to get interesting, something stupid happens to sabotage any chance of really enjoying it. It's surprising only one writer (Josh Klausner) is credited.  Interestingly, he also wrote Shrek the Third, another derivative and unfunny comedy. 

You can read more of contributor Laurie Coker's SXSW reviews and features at True View Reviews.

When the PR rep for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo told me not to offer my senior students passes to see the film, my curiosity piqued. Now that I have seen the Swedish (subtitled) mystery thriller, I understand completely. The film will mostly likely garner a NC-17 rating because of some graphic sex scenes and disturbing subject matter. As a huge fan of mysteries, the story intrigued me overall, even though some aspects are predictable, but I'm inclined to admit I found some scenes tough to watch.

Based on Stieg Larsson's novel Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women) about a journalist and a young female hacker, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo brings together several unlikely characters, connecting them by way of a 40-year mystery. The story begins with financial reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) being sentenced for three months in prison for filing a supposedly fraudulent story about a well-known businessman, but hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) knows he was set up. From there, the tale moves to Blomkvist being hired by millionaire Henrik Vagner (Sven-Bertil Taube) to investigate the disappearance of his favorite niece (Harriet) when she was 16.

Director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) pays homage to stop-motion king Ray Harryhausen with his own version of Clash of the Titans, based on Harryhausen's 1981 original. Harryhausen's films from the 1950s through 1970s were full of amazing monsters and stop-motion action, most notably Jason and the Argonauts, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and One Million Years B.C.  Like Harryhausen, Leterrier brings to life the mythical world of the Greek gods through larger-than-life monsters and the golden ethereal world of Mt. Olympus.

The 2010 version of Clash of the Titans begins with the infant Perseus discovered afloat at sea by a poor fisherman. Perseus (Sam Worthington) turns out to be the son of Zeus but is raised as a man, and watches helpless as his family dies from the wrath of Hades (Ralph Fiennes), god of the underworld. Mankind is defiant, and the gods retaliate by allowing Hades to teach a lesson to the arrogant king and queen of Argos. With his anger against Hades fueling him, Perseus volunteers to lead a dangerous mission to defeat the Kraken before it either destroys Argos or takes the sacrifice of the princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos). Meanwhile, Hades plots to seize power from Zeus (Liam Neeson) and unleash hell on earth.

Feelings of loneliness and detachment usually isolate people from the world around them. But these feelings also can bring lonely souls together, bonding them with a shared sense of separation from their families and friends.

This paradoxical notion that separation can unite people is the central theme of The Yellow Handkerchief, a quietly intense film about three disparate strangers who generally trust no one but learn to trust each other while on a road trip through Louisiana. Smartly written, beautifully filmed and powerfully acted, The Yellow Handkerchief opens in Austin at the Arbor on Friday.

The story opens as Brett Hanson (William Hurt), newly paroled after six years in prison, wanders into a rural Louisiana town with a lot of emotional baggage and no idea where life will take him next. He meets awkward, lovelorn teen Gordy (Eddie Redmayne) and sullen teen beauty Martine (Kristen Stewart) after witnessing Gordy's inept and predictably disastrous attempt to impress the girl.

If you thought it was silly and childish of us at Slackerwood to present our SXSW guides through the eyes of Film Fest Geek Barbie, wait until you see Marwencol, a film about an entire miniature city populated with Barbie-sized men and women, and its creator. The film won the Best Documentary Feature award at SXSW and it is easy to understand why -- while there were many good docs at the fest this year, this one is so very different and so compelling that it stands out in sharp contrast. I feel like I'm still under the film's spell, but I don't want to tell you too much about it and spoil the discovery process.

Marwencol is about Mark Hogancamp, whose life changed the night that five guys followed him out of a bar and beat him so badly he suffered brain damage. At age 38, he had to learn to walk again, and write, and so forth. His personality changed -- he was no longer an alcoholic, but could not sketch illustrations in the way he used to. Discharged from the hospital before he was better due to his insurance running out, Mark tried to find self-therapy for his imagination and fine motor skills. He created an entire little world in his Kingston, New York backyard -- the fictitious WWII-era town of Marwencol in Belgium -- and populated it both with alter egos from his real life, including himself, and fictitious characters.