The low-down on this week’s premieres
Six new flicks this Friday. (Or four, if you’ve got any taste at all.)
“Jack Black as a Mexican wrestler, with the Napoleon Dynamite guy.” That, most assuredly, approximates fairly closely the extent of the studio pitch necessary to win the greenlight for Nacho Libre — and, really, the entire breadth of knowledge with which you need be armed to decide whether you’ll see it. So, save for specifying that “Napoleon Dynamite guy” refers to writer/director Jared Hess, not actor/seminal talent-show terpsichorist Jon Heder, that’s what you’ll get from me.
Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock (noSpeedjokesnoSpeedjokesnoSpeedjokes) exhibit particularly poor relationship timing in The Lake House, a remake of a Korean film about a romantic pair who realize after exchanging love letters that they’re living two years apart. The picture also, if I’m not mistaken, marks Reeves’s first filmic foray into time travel since his felicitous days as Ted “Theodore” Logan. Read the review/interview, page 23.
An Inconvenient Truth is a documentary. About global warming. Starring Al Gore. And 14 entirely nude, writhing erotic dancers. Even that, though, might not be enough to drag a significant portion of American moviegoers to a road-trippish chronicle of Gore’s campaign to end a problem some folks don’t think even exists. But at least one critic, ours (review, page 25), says it’s not only vital, but surprisingly entertaining. So, for my part, I’m not going to tell you whether I was lying about the dancers.
Next: Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, wherein a new kind of racing makes things even furiouser and ... aw, screw it. Next.
Garfield’s A Tail of Two Kitties. Two puns, one title. Adorable. Fuck you, Jim Davis. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
(Sorry, Mom, for the language.)
Water, the last in an elemental trilogy by Toronto-based directress Deepa Mehta that includes Fire (1996) and Earth (1998), follows three widows in 1930s India striving for social liberation against the backdrop of Mahatma Ghandi’s independence movement. Clearly, Wind got the shaft here. And Heart? Oh, don’t get me started on Heart. That kid’s just irritating. Lose the monkey, douchebag.
(Sorry, again. I think I’m still pissed about Garfield.)
- Brian Villalobos
Local premiere dates for limited-release films are tentative and can change at the last minute. Please check your local theater listings to confirm showtimes.
