Gil Mansergh’s Cinema Toast

New Releases 10/17/08

W (PG-13)
Starring: Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Ellen Burstyn, Elizabeth Banks
Director: Oliver Stone
In Oliver Stone’s portrait of the Bush White House. Artfully chosen actors are cast as Bush (Josh Brolin), Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss), Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), Rove (Toby Jones), Powell (Jeffrey Wright), Rice (Thandie Newton), Laura Bush (Elizabeth Banks), and President Bush, Sr. (James Cromwell), and they revel in the chance to play those larger than life characters. This is not Stone’s first foray into Presidential histories (he has already done “J.F.K”, “Nixon,” and “Evita“), but this is the first time a film has been made and released while the President is still in office. You can be sure there will be a firestorm among the pundits and prognosticators of the airways as they predict: A: “It will help elect Obama”, or B: “It’s a cheap shot that people should ignore.”
3 pieces of Stoned history toast

Max Payne (PG-13)
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges
Director: John Moore

From the Press Notes: “Rockstar Games’ antihero Max Payne gets his own movie with this video game adaptation. Mark Wahlberg (THE DEPARTED) plays the titular cop who is still trying to get over the death of his family while investigating several murders, while Mila Kunis (FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL) costars as an assassin desperate for her own revenge.”
The “titular cop” ?
Unavailable for Preview

Secret Life of Bees (PG-13)
Starring: Queen Latifah, Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys
Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood
Sue Monk Kidd’s novel gets dipped in so much honey that it becomes cloyingly sweet and untrue to the original source material. Yes, there is still the postcard of the Black Madonna with the words Tiburon, South Carolina on the back, and yes, there is a matriatrchal society of African-American women, and yes the power of love and redemption is still tangible “so why does it all seem so contrived onscreen?
2 and 1/2 pieces of where’s the Buzz? toast

Sex Drive (R)
Starring: Josh Zuckerman, Clark Duke, James Marsden, Seth Green, Amanda Crew
Director:
Like a vulgarized update of “The Sure Thing,” this is a road movie about a teen age male willing to take a long road trip to rid himself of that pesky virginity. There are a few funny bits here (the pudgy, zit-faced friend has girls galore, they travel through Pennsylvania in the midst of the annual Amish sex orgy, and Seth Green has a great cameo as a buggy driver with a beard). But, it’s hard to enjoy the humor when every other word is an “explitive deleted” and some of the sexual postions mentioned aren’t even in found in Kinsey or Krafft-Ebing.
1 and1/2 pieces of vulgarity for the sake of it toast

In Search of a Midnight Kiss (NR)
Starring: Scoot McNairy, Sara Simmonds, Brian McGuire
Director: Alex Holdridge
With the word “INDIE” written all over it, (and proud of it), this $12,000 film seems destined to show all the Hollywood types that an intriguing movie can be made despite the sophomoric vulgarity that seems a requirement for such a project (NEWS FLASH: young men masturbate while fantasizing about inappropriate love objects “and young women do too.). It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot of talent here both in front and behind the camera.
3 pieces of INDIE spirit toast

NEW On DVD

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (PG-13)
Starring: Harrison Ford, Ray Winstone, Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen
Director: Steven Spielberg
Story: George Lucas, Jeff Nathanson
Producer: Frank Marshall
It’s the early fifties, and Indiana Jones is 20 years older than we last saw him “20 years older and suspected of having Communist sympathies in Eisenhower’s Cold War America. What’s a fellow to do but get a younger sidekick who understands what all this new Elvis Presley music is about, and manages to smile even harder as Indy gets grumpier. The film opens in the same gigantic Federal wherehouse where the Lost Ark was sent for storage, and careens around the world in search of bigger and better snakes, ancient ruins and even carnivorous ants. It’s not perfect, but its still damn good.
3 and 1/2 pieces of Lucas and Spielberg toast

Mongol (R)
Starring: Tadanobu Asano, Honglei Sun, Khulan Chuluun, Odnyam Odsuren, Aliy A
Director: Sergei Bodrov
Exquisitely photographed, this Russian import tells how Genghis Khan’s conquered the Steppes by adding a soap opera plot. The battle scenes seem confusing to me (the director should have studied “Lord of the Rings”) and lakes of fake blood are spilled, but it holds your attention the way “Lawrence of Arabia” or “Doctor Zhivago” did “by the magnetism and magnificence of the landscape.
3 pieces horseback riding toast