filmland / By Charlie Myers

Punished

We got one new movie last week, and it was awful. What’s wrong with us?

(Dec. 11, 2008) Previews

The major opening Friday, Dec. 12, is the “reinvention” of the 1951 science fiction classic of the same title, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) steps into director Robert Wise’s shoes and Keanu Reeves inherits the role of the emissary from another planet with a dire environmental warning for Earthlings, originally played by Michael Rennie. Only Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) and her stepson (Jaden Smith) can save us. I thought the original was one of the best sci-fi films of the 1950s; perhaps this will be effective as well. Rated PG-13 for some sci-fi disaster images and violence. 103. At the Broadway, Mill Creek, Fortuna and Minor.

GALLERY >

Delgo is an animated science fiction film about the title character (voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr.), a teenager who falls in love with a princess (Jennifer Love Hewitt) of a rival tribe. Trouble is, the tribes hate each other and Delgo has to surmount that challenge. I hope he does a better job than Romeo managed. The film also features the voices of Anne Bancroft, Val Kilmer and others. Rated PG for sequences of fantasy action violence. 90m. At the Broadway, Fortuna and Mill Creek.

A holiday family reunion runs into some glitches in Nothing Like the Holidays. Directed by Alfredo De Villa, the film involves the Rodriguez household in Humboldt Park, in West Chicago, near Christmas. Trouble is, Mom (Elizabeth Peña) intends to divorce Dad (Alfred Molina), one brother (John Leguizamo) shows up with a white wife (Debra Messing) and another (Freddy Rodríguez) is just interested in an old flame. Looks like familiar holiday movie fare. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements including some sexual dialog, and brief drug references. 99m. At the Broadway.

Review

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE: Somewhere in this vast land, people are probably seeing good films. You know, films with mature themes and ideas, a plot that is satisfying, actual characterization and character development, films whose subject matter has to do with the world many of us inhabit and, perhaps best of all, effective acting. As you’re reading this, someone is watching Sean Penn as Harvey Milk or Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married (which has played in Ashland). But here in the cinema backwaters, where distributors probably assume everyone is a stoner and won’t notice anyway, we get (besides every stoner film ever released) such masterpieces as Punisher: War Zone.

To be slightly evenhanded here, I should note that the number of filmgoers locally who support foreign or independent films is not very large, if attendance at the screenings I go to is any indication, and exhibitors are in business to show a profit not offer alms to cranky arty types.

So, I fantasize that I’m going to wake up some morning in movie paradise where every dark, depressing, literate and perverse release I want to see is magically playing at a theatre near me. Oh wait, for Humboldt County, that’s called DVD-Land, with hope that the TV screen is big enough to read the subtitles.

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