Gil Mansergh’s Cinema Toast

New Releases 3/13/09

The Last House on the Left (R)
Starring: Tony Goldwyn, Monica Potter, Sara Paxton, Garret Dillahunt
Director: Dennis Iliadis
Wes Craven started his directorial career with the original 1972 version (said to be inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s “Virgin Spring” no less). It opens with a family of backwoods crazies raping and abandoning a teen girl. The rapists then unknowingly take refuge in the house of the girl’s parents, where the mother and father take their revenge on the bad guys. This time, the director is Greek, which prompts me to say that the reason they made the remake is “Greek to me.”
Gil does not watch or review slasher films “especially remakes of classic ones

Miss March (R)
Starring: Zach Cregger, Trevor Moore, Raquel Alessi
Director: Zach Cregger, Trevor Moore
The set up is that a young virginal couple who preach abstinence break up when the guy drinks too much beer, falls down, and slips into a coma. Four years later, he wakes to find his former girlfriend is now posing nude as Playboy’s Miss March, so he and his best bud take a cross-country journey to the Playboy mansion to rescue her. Junior-high level male humor dictates that the guys will have rollicking good fun on the trip, like catching a ride with sex-crazed lesbians.. For some reason the studio decided to change the film’s name from it’s original title “”Miss February“. Go figure.
1/2 pieces of pointless toast

Race to Witch Mountain (PG)
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, Carla Gugino, Ciaran Hinds
Director: Andy Fickman
I have always admired how Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson doesn’t take his action-hero status seriously and when he meets a couple of odd-talking teens who turn out to be space aliens, he never breaks stride. There are some PG-rated bad guys including a government type who want to do some (unspecified) experiments on the kids, and a Terminator type programmed to exterminate them. The best sequences are the narrow escapes in the Nevada desert, the worst are after they seek help from an unnecessary UFO expert.
2 and 1/2 pieces of Witch Mountain re-imagined toast

The Class (PG-13)
Starring: François Begaudeau, Nassim Amrabt, Laura Baquela, Cherif Bounaidja Rachedi
Director: Laurent Cantet
One of the best movies about teaching ever made is set in a multicultural Parisian high school and stars a former teacher who made the film from his own experiences. Never leaving the school grounds, it still manages to hold your attention when both staff and students make mistakes “and learn from them. It is a sublime riff on the Socratic method and worthy of your time and attention.
4 pieces of Palme d’Or winning toast

VIDEO/DVD

Milk (NR)
Starring: Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, James Franco
Director: Gus Van Sant
In 1977, San Francisco was the first city to elect an openly gay man (Harvey Milk) to public office and orange juice spokesmodel Anita Bryant was publicly denouncing homosexuality as sinful. In the same election, an ex-firefighter named Dan White was elected to the same Board of Supervisors. Less than a year later, a Twinkie-fueled White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and fellow supervisor Milk. These historic events form the basis of an exceptionally humane film starring Sean Penn in one of the most compelling performances in his outstanding career. See this one, but bring both pom-poms and Kleenex.
4 pieces of Sean Penn tour-de-force toast

Rachel Getting Married (R)
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Debra Winger, Bill Irwin, Rosemarie DeWitt
Director: Jonathan Demme
Fans of “The Princess Diaries” will not be prepared for the drug-using, family embarrassment that Anne Hathaway plays here. She breaks out of rehab to attend her sister’s wedding and manages to manipulate everything until she becomes the center of attention. This isn’t new, and in a family representative of the rainbow coalition, it’s surprisingly well tolerated. The director, seems to be channeling Robert Altman here and the result is messy and perhaps a little indulgent but so is real life.
3 pieces of Gil likes it toast