Rock the Kasbah

Review by Bob Ignizio

If all you want is Bill Murray being Bill Murray, then you might be satisfied with ROCK THE KASBAH. As usual, Murray is funny and likeable as Richie Lanz, a washed up agent/manager who gets stranded in Afghanistan when the singer he has booked for a USO tour (Zooey Deschanel) goes awol and takes Richie‘s passport with her. If you want more than that, however, you’ll be sorely disappointed in this trite, cliché ridden film written by Mitch Glazer and directed by Oscar winning director Barry Levinson.

What we have here is a standard issue fish out of water story (Richie trying to deal with the alien customs of Afghanistan) mixed with a rags to riches tale (Richie discovers talented young Pashtun girl Salima (Leem Lubany) singing Cat Stevens songs in a cave and decides he’s going to make her a star). As an added bonus, we also get the tiresome cliché of Richie falling for a prostitute (Kate Hudson) with, you guessed it, a heart of gold and a sharp mind for business. And of course Hudson is 29 years younger than Murray.

Kingpin (February 24th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[KINGPIN screens Thursday February 24th at 6:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

The Cleveland Cinematheque, in a change of pace, is showing KINGPIN, a mainstream Hollywood PG-13 comedy crowd pleaser, as a tie-in to the opening in University Circle of the Corner Alley, a novelty restaurant chain that combines fine food with bowling.

It also sends the message to students at the various colleges and arts institutes around University Circle that, once they graduate into this economy, they'll be lucky if they can even get a minimum-wage job, part-time (so no benefits) as a food-server or a pin-setter. Oh, wait, machines do all the pin-setting now. Well, there's still food service. Have a nice time paying your titanic student loan debt with that.

Come to think of it, the Cinematheque actually did show TITANIC once, true story. Unlike that blockbuster, however, KINGPIN released a year earlier in 1996, scored a gutterball with ticket-buyers, for some reason. Thus It has has
deservedly gone on to `cult' status.

St. Vincent

Review by Joseph Anthony

It wasn’t easy for first time director Theodore Melfi to find the star of this film – Bill Murray. Near impossible, really. In an interview with USA Today, Melfi described how difficult it was to reach Murray, who has no agent or manager. “You call a 1-800 number,” says Melfi.

Weeks of unanswered messages later, the hopeful director called Murray’s lawyer. “What number do you got?” the lawyer asked. “The 800 number.” “Well that’s what I got,” said the lawyer. He recommended snail mail. Melfi obliged. After months, Murray set a date to talk about the ST. VINCENT script with Melfi.

Repost: Moonrise Kingdom (March 13th at the Capitol Theatre)

[MOONRISE KINGDOM screens Thursday March 13th at 7:30 pm at the Capitol Theatre.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

With MOONRISE KINGDOM, director Wes Anderson perfectly captures that beautiful, fantastic, and all too brief moment when childhood innocence gives way to the beginnings of sexual maturity. Anderson's twelve-year old star crossed lovers Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) are just beginning to toy with the idea of physical intimacy, but are still childlike enough to find running away from home (or in Sam's case, going AWOL from his Khaki Scout troupe) to embark on a wilderness adventure just as exciting, if not moreso, than getting to second base.

Sam is an orphan and extremely precocious, which is at least part of why his fellow scouts dislike him. Suzy is mature for her age as well, and apparently viewed by her lawyer parents Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura (Frances McDormand) as a “problem child”, or so Suzy infers from the title of a book she finds in the house. When the two adolescents met a year ago, they immediately sensed they were kindred spirits and set about planning their future escape together, said plans having just been put into motion as the film begins. MOONRISE KINGDOM isn't quite a children's movie, but it definitely understands the way 12 year olds see the world.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox (March 11th at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX screens Tuesday March 11th at 7:30 pm at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Rather than try for a slavishly faithful adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX, director Wes Anderson has opted to reshape it to suit his own distinctive style and themes. The basic premise, that Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) steals food and beverages from three mean and nasty farmers, is the same.  However, Anderson has added new characters and plot elements to the tale that give the movie a flavor unmistakably his own.  The humor is dry and quirky, and where the book focused mainly on Mr. Fox, the movie puts more emphasis on the titular character’s extended family and friends. The result is far closer to THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS than CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY.

The Monuments Men

Review by Pamela Zoslov

With its dramatic real-life subject matter and stellar cast, you'd think THE MONUMENTS MEN, the new movie directed by George Clooney, would be more, well, monumental. It's a comedy-drama about the Allied mission to rescue the art treasures of Europe from their methodical plunder by the Nazis. Clooney stars with Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville and Jean Dujardin as members of the special platoon of curators, museum directors and art historians who undertake the dangerous job.

All that star power works against the movie's plausibility, making it feel more like OCEANS 11 in Army drag than a realistic history. Clooney, whose directorial efforts have been variable (ranging from GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK to LEATHERHEADS), seems to have trouble settling on the right tone, so the movie lurches uneasily from M*A*S*H/Hogan's Heroes barracks comedy to mawkishness as two members of the platoon are killed. (The two who perish are played by the less famous of the bunch, so their deaths are preordained.)

Repost: Moonrise Kingdom (May 10th and 12th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[MOONRISE KINGDOM screens Friday May 10th at 9:20 pm and Sunday May 12th at 6:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

With MOONRISE KINGDOM, director Wes Anderson perfectly captures that beautiful, fantastic, and all too brief moment when childhood innocence gives way to the beginnings of sexual maturity. Anderson's twelve-year old star crossed lovers Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) are just beginning to toy with the idea of physical intimacy, but are still childlike enough to find running away from home (or in Sam's case, going AWOL from his Khaki Scout troupe) to embark on a wilderness adventure just as exciting, if not moreso, than getting to second base.

Sam is an orphan and extremely precocious, which is at least part of why his fellow scouts dislike him. Suzy is mature for her age as well, and apparently viewed by her lawyer parents Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura (Frances McDormand) as a “problem child”, or so Suzy infers from the title of a book she finds in the house. When the two adolescents met a year ago, they immediately sensed they were kindred spirits and set about planning their future escape together, said plans having just been put into motion as the film begins. MOONRISE KINGDOM isn't quite a children's movie, but it definitely understands the way 12 year olds see the world.

Moonrise Kingdom

Review by Bob Ignizio

With MOONRISE KINGDOM, director Wes Anderson perfectly captures that beautiful, fantastic, and all too brief moment when childhood innocence gives way to the beginnings of sexual maturity. Anderson's twelve-year old star crossed lovers Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) are just beginning to toy with the idea of physical intimacy, but are still childlike enough to find running away from home (or in Sam's case, going AWOL from his Khaki Scout troupe) to embark on a wilderness adventure just as exciting, if not moreso, than getting to second base.

Sam is an orphan and extremely precocious, which is at least part of why his fellow scouts dislike him. Suzy is mature for her age as well, and apparently viewed by her lawyer parents Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura (Frances McDormand) as a “problem child”, or so Suzy infers from the title of a book she finds in the house. When the two adolescents met a year ago, they immediately sensed they were kindred spirits and set about planning their future escape together, said plans having just been put into motion as the film begins. MOONRISE KINGDOM isn't quite a children's movie, but it definitely understands the way 12 year olds see the world.

Ed Wood (April 14th at the CWRU Film Society, Strosacker Auditorium)

[ED WOOD screens Saturday April 14th at 7:00 pm and 9:30 pm at the CWRU Film Society, Strosacker Auditorium,]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I happened to learn the tuition rates lately charged by some of our local colleges. Would you believe more than $100,000 a year? In Cleveland? Most graduates at this point probably won't even earn that much in their lifetimes. Add student-loan compound interest and you've got a recipe for a post-grad career major in Despair and a minor in Anger.

And it's especially piquant for the film students, those who, on top of merely paying for the privilege to attend some con-job learning institution, slave for production costs, film-festival entry fees, psychiatric counseling etc., working themselves into deeper and deeper holes trying to gain a foothold in a tough media industry overwhelmed with applicants. And all the while it stares them in the face, that even if they “make it,” most of them will never, ever be as renowned and as loved as the exceptionally bad filmmaker-tranvestite Ed Wood Jr.

Passion Play (now on home video)

[PASSION PLAY is now available on home video.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

After its festival run the magical-realist drama PASSION PLAY went straight to DVD a few months ago, a curious fate for a motion picture with such star power: Mickey Rourke, Bill Murray and Megan Fox toplining, with supporting-cast turns by Kelly Lynch (wife of writer-director Mitch Glazer) and Bill Murray's underrated brother Brian Doyle-Murray. So why'd this skip theaters - yet SUCKER PUNCH struck? Call it the curse of Megan Fox.