Screen Listings

27 Dresses

Katherine Heigl is on record saying her big-screen breakout, Knocked Up, was sexist: “It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as goofy, fun-loving guys.” She’s unlikely to similarly chide 27 Dresses director Anne Fletcher and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna for painting her as a squealing matrimony fetishist. But she should. 27 Dresses is a collection of stereotypes: Heigl as a pining bridesmaid, Judy Greer as a trampy sidekick, Malin Akerman as a blond airhead and Edward Burns as Edward Burns. But it’s mindless fun for the first hour, as Heigl endures escalating humiliations—a gentler variation on Ben Stiller’s comedy of resentment. (It’s telling that this picture and Stiller’s recent The Heartbreak Kid share the presence of Akerman, an appealing comedienne in danger of being permanently typecast as a callous ditz.) But it falls apart in the final act—badly, and for a long time. The characters, including Heigl’s sweet Jane and James Marsden’s leading dude Kevin (a wedding-pages reporter who longs to break out of the “taffeta ghetto”), are suddenly willing to betray each other cruelly, and in public. I’m willing to accept that heroes in mainstream romantic comedies will always be fools for love. But must they make fools of each other, and must they do it in front of open microphones? PG-13. AARON MESH.

A Clockwork Orange

[REVIVAL] A high-def gloss makes the Korova Milk Bar sparkle, but the themes of A Clockwork Orange are as disturbing, prophetic and devilishly hilarious in the digital age as in 1971. Stanley Kubrick’s iconic adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ tongue-twisting novel leaves no sense unviolated. It’s a stylistic landmark, but Kubrick’s ability to milk sympathy for Alex, the film’s frighteningly charismatic “protagonist,” is even more amazing. After nearly an hour of watching Alex rape and pillage, he’s thrust into a Pavlovian experiment in forced pacifism. Kubrick goes for the jugular with a manic glee when it comes to psychiatry, government, the penal system and political fanaticism, blurring the thin line between cruel and unusual and acceptable. After nearly four decades as a mainstream classic, Clockwork remains as challenging, shocking and potent as ever. R. AP KRYZA. Living Room Theaters.

Cassandra's Dream

Similar in plot yet vastly superior in design to the tawdry Match Point, Woody Allen’s latest London-set foray into the crime-thriller genre emerges out of left field as a sustained, tension-filled piece of work. Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell brilliantly play off each other as squabbling working-class brothers whose increasingly expensive tastes lead them to accept a murderous business proposal from their wealthy uncle (a suavely amoral Tom Wilkinson). The movie’s first half feels like Woody’s variation on John Osborne’s kitchen-sink realist dramas of the late ’50s. Perhaps because of this, Cassandra’s Dream has a moral gravity (however out of style that may be) that was missing from Match Point. It’s possible to care about these blokes, their struggles with debt and depression (Farrell) or with pretending to be rich to impress a girl (McGregor, swooning over Hayley Atwell). But then Woody’s writing here is substantially better than it was in his last three films, and McGregor has an energetic way of making even the unlikeliest lines sing. As the story grows darker, Farrell, embodying a uniquely male kind of vulnerability, shows us the fear caused by violence—a state of being rarely depicted on screen with as much truth as this. R. N.P. THOMPSON. Fox Tower.

Cloverfield

“Do you think it’s another terrorist attack?” That’s almost the first question out of the mouths of the partygoers who find their Manhattan loft soiree interrupted by explosions in the monster movie Cloverfield. By the time director Matt Reeves and producer J.J. Abrams have finished their demolition project—a mere 90 minutes of “recovered” handheld-camera footage—we're no more clear on what exactly “it” is, but the applicable word is certainly “terrorist.” Cloverfield is the Rudy Giuliani of horror movies: It has never met a 9/11 memory it didn’t want to exploit. But this is not what you want to know. What you want to know is: What does the monster look like? I certainly don’t want to be the guy to spoil the party, but I think I’m within my bounds to offer that the critter reminded me a little of Kermit the Frog if he got really, really angry. Suffice it to say that the beast is plenty horrible. The handheld gimmick adds to the chaos and dread—the camera moves so much, and so jerkily, that it’s hard to last the full running time without feeling dizzy or sick. Cloverfield ultimately looks exactly like its monster: It’s derivative, it’s unpleasant, and it may be despicable—but holy shit, is it ever good at what it does. PG-13. AARON MESH.

Daughters of Wisdom

[THREE DAYS ONLY] “I don’t think I’d be happy if my mind wandered in the worldly life,” says a Tibetan Buddhist nun, “in the ocean of sadness, like horses, yaks and insects.” A desire to transcend earthly suffering is shared by all the nuns in Kala Rongo, one of the few monasteries for women in Tibet; this is peculiar, since director Bari Pearlman’s documentary makes the earth appear so luminous. The Dzachu River valley, all meadows and crags, looks like a child’s drawing of heaven, and daily life at the nunnery is filled with small wonders—including jaw-dropping footage of women gliding along a steel cable to cross a raging river. Daughters of Wisdom occasionally drifts into the sort of mooning Orientalism that usually mars Western approaches to Tibetan Buddhism, but every so often Pearlman displays cutting insight into the superstition and sexism that make escaping to meditate and chant seem so attractive to these women. The world is too much with them. AARON MESH. Hollywood.

Divorce, Italian Style

[REVIVAL, THREE NIGHTS ONLY] Annulment is illegal in 1960s Sicily. Murder is frowned upon. Still, Marcello Mastroianni reasons, what isn't these days? Look for review on wweek.com. Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum. 7 pm Friday-Saturday, Jan. 18-19. 4:30 pm Sunday, Jan. 20.

King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] Sidney Lumet's Oscar-nominated documentary follows the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on his march through the South. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9:15 pm Monday, Jan. 21.

Mad Money

Is it a natural law that if you star in enough bad movies you become a carrier for lousiness? If so, maybe we could call it “The Diane Keaton Effect.” It certainly applies to Mad Money, a hey-girls-let’s-rob-the-Federal-Reserve heist movie that wouldn’t be so awful (especially considering it’s directed by Callie Khouri, the woman responsible for Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) if it weren’t built around Keaton’s manic, addled hamming. As Bridget, a wealthy housewife inexplicably reduced to janitorial work, Keaton radiates entitlement, as if riches and audience applause were her birthright. Her awful performance wrecks a picture that otherwise hums by efficiently enough; Queen Latifah is unexpectedly restrained and sensible as a co-conspirator, while relative newcomer Adam Rothenberg shows promising comic timing as a lunkhead accomplice. Then there’s the strange case of Katie Holmes: She either knows she’s perceived as crazy and plays up the loopiness for this role, or she really has gone round the bend. The jury is still out on what effect she’s experiencing. PG-13. AARON MESH.

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song

He may now be best known as the hard-line folkie who tried to cut Dylan’s power cords at Newport (or didn’t, or said he wanted to), but Pete Seeger has a legacy of his own—as was well established by Bruce Springsteen covering his material in 2006’s We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Jim Brown’s new documentary provides a cursory look at the politically crusading troubadour’s career, speeding through the major events: the Guthrie years, the pop success with the Weavers, the blacklist, the folk revival, the civil rights songleading, the Hudson River cleanup. There’s not much revelatory material, other than some brief chats with the man himself and a fresh focus on his long-suffering wife, Toshi, but it’s a passable introduction. (A litmus test: If you didn’t know that Seeger introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to the song “We Shall Overcome,” you ought to see this picture. If you were already aware, there’s not much new for you here.) And it’s always a pleasure to watch the man “lining out” a song to a makeshift chorus, his warbling tenor sailing over the crowd. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.

The Amateurs

In the bucolic hamlet of Butterface Fields, the town dreamer hatches a moneymaking scheme: “We’re gonna make a porno film!” The man grabbing his disheveled hair and shouting is Jeff Bridges, in his shambling Lebowski mode, but what follows is a far cry from Logjammin’. Instead, writer-director Michael Traeger asks us to accept that the entire community rallies behind shooting hot girl-on-girl action, even though no one in the town has believably experienced sex before. The Amateurs is that kind of inoffensive, artificial Americana; you can imagine where it goes from there. The only surprise is how many talented actors agreed to participate in this fluff: Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tim Blake Nelson, Ted Danson (cute if entirely unlikely as a gay man who won’t leave the closet because he wants to keep watching football with the guys), William Fichtner, Lauren Graham (on loan from Stars Hollow and looking as if she wants to talk a lot faster) and Joe Pantoliano. Maybe it’s supposed to be a paean to twisted small-town values, but it comes off as entirely condescending—no village is so thoroughly populated by idiots. And never has sex seemed so safe. R. AARON MESH. Clinton Street Theater.

There Will Be Blood

“Ladies and gentlemen, when I say I’m an oilman, you will agree.” That’s Daniel Day-Lewis portraying oil speculator Daniel Plainview, and by the time he’s finished, you will agree that he is many things: a megalomaniac, a misanthrope and a man whose jealousy, self-regard and wrath resemble the Yahweh of the Old Testament—who just happens to be his biggest rival. (Might as well pick on somebody your own size.) Daniel Plainview crawls up out of a hole in the ground, and spends his every waking hour trying to tap into the lake of fire under his feet. Paul Thomas Anderson has tapped into Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, and it’s a sign of Anderson’s confidence that he threw out the last two-thirds of the novel and expanded the lead role to fit Day-Lewis, the world’s most ferocious actor. The gamble worked: There Will Be Blood is the best movie made in 2007. It’s ambitions are huge, and they eventually explode into madness. Day-Lewis howls and roars and even does a little dance, which he tops off with an unforgettable (and very funny) victory chant: “I drink your milkshake!” Yet this frenzy is balanced against Anderson’s clearest distillation of his theme of family. His movie aims for storytelling effects not seen at the cinema since the height of 1970s arthouse epics, and even when it stumbles, it remains a work of breathtaking nerve. R. AARON MESH.