Gil Mansergh’s Cinema Toast
New Releases 2/09/07

Norbit (PG-13)
Eddie Murphy, Thandie Newton, Cuba Gooding Jr.
Directed by: Brian Robbins
We Know from “Dreamgirls” that Eddie Murphy can act, and we know from several other films, that he enjoys hiding behind makeup to play several fat and thin, male and female, young and old characters in the same movie, and he does so here as well (Thanks to makeup wizard Rick Baker and gallons of latex foam). But this comedy starts in a Chinese restaurant that offers both take out food and adoptions and goes downhill from there. It all seems forced, built upon slapstick stereotypes of “clownlike” qualities of morbidly obese men and women.
1 and 1/2 pieces of phat toast

Hannibal Rising (R)
Gaspard Ullel, Rhys Ifans, Gong Li,
Directed by: Peter Weber
In “The Very Long Engagement” Ulleil played the man Audrey Tatou searched for for years, but I don’t believe him as Hannibal Lector any more than I believe “Danny Deckchair” (Rhys Ifans) as a sadistic Nazi. In this unncessary, uninteresting and uninspired prequel, everyone involved seems just in it for the paycheck .
1 and 1/2 pieces of gory psychology toast

The Messengers (PG-13)
Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, John Corbett
Directed by Oxide Pang, Danny Pang
This is the kind of movie that real estate brokers who sell houses in the country hate–a secluded farmhouse where the bloody victims are helpless women and children.
Not available for preview

Venus (R)
Peter O’Toole, Leslie Phillips, Jodie Whittaker, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Griffiths
Directed by: Roger Michell
The vehicle chosen to win O’Toole his long denied Oscar, is the story of Maurice and Ian, a pair of veteran actors, whose comfortable daily routine is thrown off-kilter by the arrival of Ian’s teenage grand-niece, Jessie. Maurice isn’t out to teach Jessie. He’s out to grab as much as he can from her. And grab he does “repeatedly and often. In one sense, Maurice is trying to grab energy, and life and youth from Jessie. But he also wants another sexual conquest, and O’Toole plays Maurice as an unabashedly lewd, lecherous, libidinous, dissolute, and randy old man. (At the Rialto in Santa Rosa)

3 and 1/2 pieces of O’Toole toast

NEW ON VIDEO/DVD

Flags of Our Fathers (R)
Ryanne Phillippe, Jamie Bell, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, Barry Pepper, Paul Walker, Joseph Cross, Benjamin Walker
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Box Office: $33,574,332
Eastwood has long wanted to direct an epic war movie with all the requisite bomb blasts, airplane swoops, bullet hits, close-ups, cutaways, bloody bodies, missing limbs, and shots of soon-to-be-dead soldiers looking at the photo of their loved ones. He finally got the chance. The only problem is that the battle isn’t the most interesting part of this heroic tale. It’s that the iconic figure of marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi was a staged photo-op “WWII hype to make the folks at home feel good that is so important and relevant. By the way, Eastwood composed the movie’s effective music score.
2 and 1/2 pieces of war-is-hell and propoganda-is-too toast

Hollywoodland (R)
Adriane Brody, Ben Affleck, Diane Lane, Bob Hoskins
Directed by: Alan Coulter
Box Office: $14,271,459
The narrator said he was more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but actor George Reeves (TV’s Superman) wasn’t faster than the speeding bullet that ended his life. Affleck is very good as the ersatz man of steel, and Brody is perfect as the dogged detective investigating the actor’s supposed suicide.
3 pieces of super mystery toast

Flicka (PG)
Alison Lohman, Maria Bello, Tim McGraw
Directed by: Michael Mayer
Box Office: $20,949,649
Advertised as the best horse-and-kid movie since the “Black Stallion” (25 years ago) is misleading. (See note below) Based upon the beloved Mary O’Hara novel “My Friend Flicka,” they have transformed the boy (played by Roddy McDowell in the superior 1943 version) into a girl who gets writer’s block and so has to leave her expensive private school to come home to her family’s Wyoming horse ranch where a wild mustang saves her from a mountain lion. Phew.
NOTE: Even though the “Horse Whisperer” (1998) begins with a horrific truck/horse accident that cripples girl and horse, it’s grittiness (and Robert Redford’s direction) make it a far superior film for kids who are old enough. That same year, “Second Chances” has an injured girl nursed back to health through the love of a horse (or two). Both are several hands above “Flicka.”
2 and 1/2 pieces of why not cast a real 16-year-old? toast

Heading South (NR)
Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Menothy Cesar, Lys Ambroise, Louise Portal
Directed By: Laurant Cantet
Box Office: $472,683
Imagine a series of Harlequin Romance bookcovers, with beautifully aging women searching for life (and sex) in the ritzy beach hotel of 1970’s Haiti. Like the real people in those PBS specials who chose to live in the past for a few weeks, these characters talk directly to the camera. Interesting, provocative, hedonistic performances, made stronger since intense poverty and Baby Doc’s violence are just behind those palm trees.
2 and 1/2 pieces of “juicy middle-age” toast

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (PG)
Ken Takakura, Qiu Lin, Li Jiamin, Shinobu Terajima, Kiichi Nakai
Directed by: Zhang Yimou
When he learns his son is ill, a Japanese fisherman who hasn’t seen his son in a decade, visits and tries to mend fences, but the son refuse to see his father. The daughter-in-law suggests a way for the two to connect, but it involves a long and complex journey to the Chinese countryside. In Chinese with English Subtitles
3 pieces of poignant toast

The Science of Sleep (R)
Gael Garcia Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat, Jean-Michel Bernard, Emma de Caunes
Directed by: Michael Gondry
Box Office: $4,572,038
A surreal, unfinished, amateurish, brilliant, distressing, uplifting, artisic, out-of-control, deftly nuanced film from the man who brought us “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
3 pieces of dreamlike toast

Running With Scissors (PG-13)
Annette Benning, Brian Cox, Gwyneth Paltrow, Alec Baldwin, Joseph Fiennes, Jill Clayburgh
Directed by: Ryan Murphy,
Box Office: $6,754,898
An A-list cast struggles to find order in this series of hit and miss skits that were supposed to be a cohesive whole. The problem is that all of the “quirky” characters go way past being eccentric into being 100% mentally ill.
1 and 1/2 pieces of unlikeable toast

Boynton Beach Club (R)
Sally Kellerman, Joseph Bologna, Len Cariou, Brenda Vaccaro, Dyan Cannon
Directed by: Susan Seidelman
Box Office: $3,007,009
Titled “The Boynton Beach Bereavement Club” in film festivals, the name change symbolizes the uncertainty in the minds of the film makers. Trying to avoid the stereotypes of aging in movies like “Cocoon” or “Grumpy Old Men,” they perpetuate others as these widows and widowers drop their pithy one-liners seemingly free of health or financial worries.
2 pieces of unintentionally ageist toast