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Review
Part of “My Sister’s Keeper” takes place in a courtroom, and the convoluted plot can be a trial in itself. Yet the essence of the story, a fictional projection of medical possibility, is anything but legalistic. For all its awkward structure, the film is heartfelt and deeply affecting.
The plaintiff, 11-year-old Anna, is played endearingly by Abigail Breslin. Anna grabs our attention in the prologue when she announces, “I’m a designer baby. I was made in a dish to be spare parts for Kate.” Her older sister Kate, that is, who suffers from leukemia; she’s played, beautifully, by Sofia Vassilieva. Almost from birth Anna has been an involuntary donor of blood, bone marrow and other substances that Kate needs to survive. Now, faced with a kidney transplant, Anna wants to put a stop to her painful servitude, so she sues for medical emancipation from her parents, Sara and Brian (two more fine performances by Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric.) The excellent cast includes Alec Baldwin as Anna’s lawyer, Heather Wahlquist as her aunt, Thomas Dekker as Kate’s boyfriend and Joan Cusack as a sternly compassionate judge.
Nick Cassavetes directed from his and Jeremy Leven’s adaptation of the Jodi Picoult novel. The book had its own structural problems, plus an ending that was problematic to say the least. If the back-and-forth time line remains tangled, the ending is now more honest, though anguishingly so. Honesty and intelligence suffuse the production, which is equally eloquent about the toll that grave illness can take on a family and the role that love can play in healing it. The superb cinematographer Caleb Deschanel has contributed images of great warmth, though also unsparing ones when they’re appropriate. “My Sister’s Keeper” may seem unusually serious for summer entertainment, but any season is the right one for a good film.
Review
Michelle Pfeiffer has a career triumph in "Chéri" playing an aging courtesan. Aging has never looked so good. At 49, her Lea de Lonval realizes that her glory days, along with the waning hours of La Belle Époque, are over, and so, for sport, she decides to take up with a 25-year-old dandyish Adonis named Chéri (Rupert Friend). She plans to teach him a few things before sending him on his way. What she doesn't count on is that they will fall in love with each other.
Directed by Stephen Frears, written by Christopher Hampton, and based on two celebrated novels by Colette – "Chéri" (1920) and "The Last of Chéri" (1926) – "Chéri" is being promoted as a frisky comedy. It's a great deal more melancholy than that, though. Frears summed up Lea in an interview where he stated that "she's unnerving, as though being that beautiful contains its own tragic quality." The tragedy lies in what is being taken away. For a courtesan, whose face and figure are her fortune, the diminishment of beauty is especially burdensome. But Lea's masklike radiance in this film transcends youthful allure. She's more mysteriously beautiful than ever. This is what Frears was aiming for – the incandescence of the tragic – and it is what Pfeiffer so movingly conveys.
Because she started out in the movies as glorified eye candy – she had the standard surfer chick look – it took a while for Pfeiffer to become recognized for the great actress that she is. In "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "The Age of Innocence," "The Russia House," and many other films, she has a force and a frailty that astonish. (I've always wished she could play a Chekhov heroine.) In "Chéri," as in "The Age of Innocence," she can move right into a plush period piece and give it a present-tense vitality.
It would have been easy in "Chéri" for Pfeiffer to play Lea as a weepy victim, but she understands that Lea has her pride. Pfeiffer's performance is all about what lies beneath Lea's pride. She is savvy enough to have lived extremely well off the ministrations of wealthy men, but, to her amazement and fascination, Lea for the first time finds herself in love. It's not just that Chéri brings her back to her youth. He also reminds her of what has been lost. When he leaves her for an arranged marriage, and then returns to her, she says to him, "You came back and found an old woman," and she is not simply fishing for a compliment. She means it. Lea has achieved success in life by being brutally practical. Even in love, she cannot submit to false delusions.
Frears creates a buzzing, cackling universe of old-time courtesans, including Chéri's mother, Charlotte Peloux (Kathy Bates), once Lea's rival, still an adversary. Bombastic, devious, her dark, sprawling home chockablock with vulgar gewgaws, Charlotte is everything Lea is not. (Charlotte spins her years by reporting that "saggy flesh holds perfume better.") Lea not only wants to rescue herself, she also wants to rescue Chéri from the clutches of such a woman. The airiness of Lea's Art Nouveau house, with its soft pastel colorations, is a blissful respite for him.
Frears and Hampton previously collaborated on "Dangerous Liaisons," which also starred Pfeiffer and to which this film no doubt will be compared. But the gamesmanship in "Chéri" is far more nuanced. The only thing at stake, ultimately, is the human heart. The film might have been even better if Rupert Friend were a stronger counterweight to Pfeiffer. He has a tendency to let his looks do his acting for him. But as Chéri, he presents the right ripe image, and, in any event, Lea's passion for him is not intended to be entirely rational.
How could it be? She muses at one point that she was born decades too early for him, but if they had met up at the same age, their liaison would have been dimensionless. Lea's sweet sorrow, not to mention Chéri's, is inextricable from their disparate years. Plenty of terrible movies know how to work your tear ducts. Here's a weepie that, in Pfeiffer's performance, touches you on the highest levels. Grade: A (Rated R for some sexual content and brief drug use.)
Review
TORONTO -- Two decades after it happened, the horrible story of the stoning of a young married woman in a small Iranian village, on the basis of her husband's patently trumped-up charges of adultery, has finally been told, and told powerfully (and with excellent production values), on the big screen.
Originally described in 1990 in a book by a French-Iranian journalist named Freidoune Sahejam, this stunning adaptation is the work of first-time director Cyrus Nowrasteh, an American-born graduate of the USC film school, who knows what film technique is all about.
Adventurous indie distributors should definitely give this film a look, especially those with an interest in human-rights or women's issues. It would also be a natural for film festivals around the world and should do extremely well in the ancillary market, especially with sales to colleges.
Iran officially denies that stoning takes place there, but independent evidence indicates otherwise. In any case, one problem the film might encounter is that in the present environment it could certainly be construed as an anti-Islamic work, since virtually everyone in the film (certainly all the males) are presented as villains.
The story is related as a flashback told to the French journalist, the day after the event took place, by Zahra, Soraya's close friend. The latter is played by the excellent and well-known Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who was nominated for an Oscar in 2004 for her work in "The House of Sand and Fog."
Soraya's husband Ali wants to divorce her to marry a tempting pre-teen girl who's been offered to him, but Soraya refuses to agree until she can earn enough money to support her and her two sons. Ali gets impatient, however, and blackmails the local ayatollah (a former hatchet-man for the Shah) into helping him. Soraya's uneducated employer Hashem is easily intimidated into testifying that she had "slept in his bed," and the wishy-washy mayor goes along with the obviously phony charges.
The film itself is presented with the stateliness and inevitability of Greek tragedy, and the nobility with which Soraya accepts her fate is reminiscent of the grandest of Italian operas. It's obviously meant as a fable, a cautionary tale, and can't be judged by the usual criteria of realism, especially the pure villains like her husband Ali.
Given the title of the film, we all know exactly what is going to happen, and the film's strategy is to slowly draw out the horrifying details: the gathering of the stones; her burial standing up, as far up her waist; the forcing of her two sons to abjure her and throw stones themselves; and of course the chilling spectacle of the blood lust of the mob.
The editing is a bit overdone at times (especially when the cuts are amateurish and unnecessary), as is the occasionally melodramatic music track, though the ambient sounds on the soundtrack are brilliantly done. In any case, it's a powerful, shocking piece, and the denunciation of a system in which an accused woman has to prove her own innocence (while in the case of a man, his guilt has to be proven by others), is strong and clear and unforgettable.
Review
The Iraq war has been dramatized on film many times, and those films have been ignored just as many times by theatre audiences. But Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” is the most skillful and emotionally involving picture yet made about the conflict. The film, from a script by Mark Boal, has a new subject: the heroism of the men who defuse improvised explosive devices, sloppily made but lethal bombs planted under a bag or a pile of garbage or just beneath the dirt of a Baghdad street. Bigelow stages one prolonged and sinister shoot-out in the desert, but the movie couldn’t be called a combat film, nor is it political, except by implication—a mutual distrust between American occupiers and Iraqi citizens is there in every scene. The specialized nature of the subject is part of what makes it so powerful, and perhaps American audiences worn out by the mixed emotions of frustration and repugnance inspired by the war can enjoy this film without ambivalence or guilt. “The Hurt Locker” narrows the war to the existential confrontation of man and deadly threat.
Over and over, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), following a tip-off, walks to a bomb site in a heavy protective suit and tries to figure out how to pull apart clumsily tangled wires and flimsy triggering devices. We’ve seen James’s predecessor die on the job: a man watching him from a nearby store detonated a bomb with a cell phone. As James goes in, slowly, under a hot sun, treading like a spaceman through trash-filled streets, people gather in doorways or look out windows. Which of them is hostile, which friendly, which merely curious? The two other members of James’s team, the frightened young Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and the wary, experienced Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), cover James, screaming at anyone who moves. The two men feel entirely vulnerable; they both admire and detest James, who pulls them into situations they would rather leave to someone else.
In the past, Kathryn Bigelow, now fifty-seven, has outdone the macho movie boys at their own game. In her “Blue Steel” (1989), as Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a cop, geared up for a day’s work, Bigelow focussed on her revolver, her leather holster, and her shoes, in gleaming closeup. The sequence hovered somewhere between fetish and parody. Bigelow went into the ocean with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves in the surfer-crime movie “Point Break” (1991), and brought off scenes of languorously slo-mo destruction in the cultish sci-fi crime movie “Strange Days” (1995). By the mid-nineties, I had her figured as a violence junkie with a strong tendency to stylize everything into stunning images that didn’t always mean much. As a filmmaker, Bigelow is still obsessed with violence, but she’s become a master at staging it. In “The Hurt Locker,” there are no wasted shots or merely beautiful images. As Eldridge and Sanborn jerk their guns this way and that at a bomb scene, Bigelow, working with the great cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, jerks the camera around, too. She wants us to be there, to feel the danger, the mystery.
This kind of immediacy is commonplace in action filmmaking, but, unlike so many directors today, who jam together crashes, explosions, and people sailing through the air in nonsensical montages of fantasy movement, Bigelow keeps the space tight and coherent. No matter how many times she cuts away, you know exactly where James is in relation to a bomb—whether he’s in the kill zone or far enough away to be safe. (You can’t break up the integrity of space when space is the subject of your movie.) And Bigelow prolongs the moment, stretching out our anxiety almost to the point at which it becomes pain. “The Hurt Locker” is quite a feat: in this period of antic fragmentation, Bigelow has restored the wholeness of time and space as essentials for action. Occasionally, a plaintive reader writes me a note after I’ve panned some violent fantasy movie and says something like “Some of us like explosions. Ease up.” Well, I like these explosions, because I believe in them. Realism has its thrills, too.
The insistence on plainness, the absence of stylization, carries over to the performances as well. Jeremy Renner has played the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and many minor roles in action movies. He has a round face, with a beautiful smile that he mostly keeps hidden, and a strong but unglamorous body. Bigelow’s idea in casting him, I think, was to make her star a competent but physically ordinary American serviceman whose greatest gifts are within. William James, it turns out, is implacably heroic. He never steps away from danger. You might say that he’s drawn to it and needs it, but he never makes a fuss about what he’s doing. His charisma consists of having no obvious charisma except phenomenal concentration and guts. And since he knows, handling bombs, when to be cautious and when not to be, he can be hair-raisingly casual, tossing aside a disabled device as if it were an empty juice carton. At one point, he shucks his headset, too, and Sanborn, who needs to stay in touch with what James is doing, is so enraged that he slugs him. In the nineteen-fifties, Aldo Ray played men like William James—war lovers, completely at home on the battlefield but hapless in the normal relations of life. (When James and his partners relax and get drunk, the only way they can show their affection is to punch one another in the stomach.) But Ray’s military men were unreachable, stone-cold killers, while James has strong emotions, which he keeps pent up.
Review
Jennifer Lynch's morbid thriller "Surveillance" begins with masked intruders killing people and the slaughter never stops. It's been 15 years since David Lynch's daughter gave the world "Boxing Helena," but she hasn't lost her interest in minds that are seriously demented.
Somewhere in the desert, two flamboyantly reckless killers are leaving a trail of death including that of a local police officer. His colleagues are not best pleased when two assured FBI agents show up to interview three witnesses to the most recent carnage.
With a high splatter quotient and many scenes of deviant humiliation, the film will have its fans even if the eventual twist hardly comes as a surprise and probably isn't meant to. "Surveillance" will please the B-movie crowd in theaters and on into the ancillaries.
Police Captain Billings (Michael Ironside) and his men are not happy at all when FBI Agents Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) and Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) arrive to take over a case they are keen to solve. It doesn't help that for all their professionalism the two feds appear to be very tightly wound.
Hallaway separates the three witnesses -- a female druggie (Pell James), a little girl (Ryan Simpkins) and a wounded police officer (co-scripter and producer Kent Harper) -- and watches them via camera as they relate the horrific incident on a deserted road in which five people were slain.
Each has a different take on what transpired but the agents have reason to believe which ones are lying as the story unfolds in flashbacks.
The film looks great with cinematographer Peter Wunstorf using different stock and inventive angles to good effect while Todd Bryanton's score helps maintain a constant undercurrent of dread. Lynch fills the screen with elements that some viewers of the film will want to go back to watch more than once, although not this one.
Review
Bottom Line: Crash, bang, wallop as the machines sweep in for another cataclysm.
LONDON -- Designed to give devoted fans of the 2007 "Transformers," which grossed more than $700 million worldwide, more of the same, Michael Bay's sequel "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a nonstop whirl of flying, battling and crashing machinery.
Characters and comedy are in short supply in a plot that's basically an Indiana Jones-style search for a buried treasure, in this case a 1,000-year-old matrix that will give life back to Optimus Prime, one of the alien robots who is on the side of humans in their fight against the evil Decepticons who are out to destroy them.
With Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox back as the leads and massive battles involving ships, planes, tanks, rockets and industrial level shape-changing machines, the film will make another huge dent in the global boxoffice.
With its intelligence at the level of the simple-minded, however, the film is not likely to attract moviegoers who seek something more than a screen filled with kaleidoscopes of colored metal. Fan boys will no doubt love it, but for the uninitiated it's loud, tedious and, at 147 minutes, way too long.
LaBeouf's nerdy character Sam is off to college in this one. He barely has time to meet his new roommates before the war games begin. Fox's hot-chick car mechanic Mikaela has come to visit, and the two are soon off on the international hunt for the missing matrix.
Sam's nitwit parents (Kevin Dunn, Julie White) are on holiday in Europe. They also get involved along with college fellow Leo (Ramon Rodriguez) and eventually Simmons (John Turturro), a former agent who now works at his mother's butcher shop. Rainn Wilson is wasted in one scene as a snarky professor.
Tyrese Gibson and Josh Duhamel return as stalwart soldiers, and there's the expected army of cars, trucks, assorted vehicles and mechanical implements that can become nasty metallic beasts in a flash. The long climax takes place in the Egyptian desert with ancient secrets to be found inside the pyramids with explosions going off all around.
Bay's team of four editors stitch together smashing but meaningless images, though it's as difficult to make out which machine is which as it is to tell what anyone is saying. The noise level -- not helped by Steve Jablonsky's relentless score -- is super-intense and everyone yells lines at high speed. Because nothing they're saying makes any sense, it's hardly important.
LaBeouf gets little chance to show what charm he might have. Meanwhile, Fox has little to do except look great in a tank top and tight jeans while running in slow motion through flying sand.
Review
“Comedy,” Jerry Lewis or some other professional wisenheimer once said, “is a man in trouble.” In Harold Ramis’s “Year One,” a thoroughly, sometimes gaggingly broad and sly conceptual laugh-in laced-with-jokes — about God, poop, circumcision, female underarm hair and the state of Israel — comedy is two men dressed in animal skins and neck deep in shtick. Set in what looks like a succession of B-movie studio sets, the film brings to mind a Hope and Crosby road movie, though only if Bob and Bing, after studying the Bible as children and reading Nietzsche as adults, were grappling with issues of faith.
Filling Hope and Crosby’s clown shoes nicely in “Year One” are Jack Black and Michael Cera as Paleolithic tribesmen. Zed (Mr. Black) is an inept hunter with a wayward spear while Oh (Mr. Cera) is a gentle gatherer who murmurs sweet nothings to his berries. After Zed is banished by the tribe for his blunders, the two hit a surrealistic road that takes them from the forest to the desert with stops along the prehistory and history continuum. Before they depart, however, Zed bites into a golden apple he plucks from the forbidden tree of knowledge, a defiant act that awakens his mind. “Everything is weird,” he declares with philosophical purity. Not long after he is down on his hands and knees sampling human scat.
Everything is indeed weird in Mr. Ramis’s highbrow slapstick, in which theological questions are smuggled in between silly bits about excrement and body hair. Much as Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner did with the 2,000 Year Old Man, Mr. Ramis, who wrote the screenplay with Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, is playing with history, or rather with the serious stories familiar from religious instruction and Hollywood epics. “Is it true that you were at the scene of the Crucifixion some 2,000 years ago?” Mr. Reiner asks the 2,000 Year Old Man. “Oh, boy! I knew Christ,” Mr. Brooks replies. “Thin lad. Always wore sandals. Hung around with 12 other guys. They came in the store, no one ever bought anything. Once they asked for water.”
In “Year One” Zed and Oh keep up a similarly nonsensical running conversation during their travels, which take them first to a meadow where they meet two pastoral types, one of whom has a really bad attitude. That would be Cain (David Cross), who’s soon brutally whaling on his brother, Abel (Paul Rudd). (“You want some of that?”) Er, spoiler alert! Cain kills Abel, beating him to death with a rock. Mr. Ramis stages the murder with so many (off-screen) blows that the scene rapidly morphs from funny to queasily humorous to just plain unpleasant before rebounding to the uneasily comic. Mr. Ramis likes to push humor to its tasteless edge, but the violence here feels almost personal, as if he were wielding that rock.
In some ways that’s precisely what he’s doing in “Year One,” which, as Zed and Oh amble through different historical periods and Bible stories, takes knowing and often profane swats at the sacred. Cain proves to be a real pest (a nice observation on the persistence of evil), and things go from bad to worse. Zed and Oh are sold into slavery and marched across the desert by Romans with British accents. They escape, only to inadvertently persuade Abraham (Hank Azaria wearing a long glued-on beard) not to slay Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Jokes about snipped foreskins and the Holy Land’s borders ensue, as does a trip to Sodom, leading to an assortment of predictable, if unprintable, puns and yuks.
In his 1981 satire “The History of the World, Part I,” Mr. Brooks revisits the past, starting with the dawn of hirsute man and ending with the French Revolution, tossing in some religious broadsides along the way. Mr. Ramis, by contrast, fashions a seamless narrative from Zed and Oh’s adventures, jettisoning the usual time frames associated with these foundation stories to create something of an ahistorical collage. In this film Stone Age man walks alongside Roman centurions and heroes and villains from the Old Testament, which suggests that when Mr. Ramis hasn’t been listening to old comedy routines he’s been boning up on the debate about evolution versus creationism. Riffing on the movie’s title: in the beginning there were multiple beginnings, each good for lots of laughs.
For the most part those laughs are generous, tasteless, groaningly goofy and irresistible, though I wish the filmmakers had resisted the temptation to sacrifice, for an unnecessary gag, a Sodomite priest (Oliver Platt) who had taken a liking to Oh. By that point the film has run out of steam, having mined various B-movie clichés (the kind in which prehistoric women wear eyeliner) and even taken a time out for a discourse on God. I would like to think that the final scene, which finds Mr. Ramis playing Noah and sending Zed and Oh off with female mates, was a lazy afterthought, simply an admission of how the past was written. Here’s hoping that in “Year Two” the Stone Age finally gives way to Stonewall.
“Year One” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Violent sacrifices and excremental snacks.
Review
How are the elements of the charming,
traditional romantic comedy The Proposal like the checklist of a charming, traditional bride? Let me count the ways...
Something old: The story of a haughty woman and an exasperated man who hate each other — until they realize they love each other — is proudly square, in the tradition of rom-coms from the 1940s and '50s. Or is it straight out of Shakespeare's 1590s? Sandra Bullock is the shrew, Margaret, a pitiless, high-powered New York book editor first seen multitasking in the midst of her aerobic workout (thus you know she needs to get...loved). Ryan Reynolds is Andrew, her put-upon foil of an executive assistant, a younger man who accepts abuse as a media-industry hazing ritual. And there the two would remain, locked in mutual disdain, except for Margaret's fatal flaw — she's Canadian. (So is X-Men's Wolverine; I thought our neighbors to the north were supposed to be nice.) Margaret, with her visa expired, faces deportation and makes the snap
executive decision to marry Andrew in a green-card wedding. It's an offer the underling can't refuse if he wants to keep his job. (A sexual-harassment lawsuit would ruin the movie's mood.) Okay, he says. But first comes a visit to the groom-to-be's family in Alaska. Amusing complications ensue.
Something new: The chemical energy between Bullock and Reynolds is fresh and irresistible. In her mid-40s, Bullock has finessed her dewy America's Sweetheart comedy skills to a mature, pearly texture; she's lovable both as an uptight careerist in a pencil skirt and stilettos, and as a lonely lady in a flapping plaid bathrobe. Reynolds, meanwhile, is just refining his dry comedy thing, learning to get the most from his deceptive cute-face looks. Who knew these two would, hmmm, complete each other? Working together, both are surer and more disciplined in delivering their comedy goods.
Something borrowed: The boisterous family dynamics. The eccentric supporting players (none more extreme than Oscar Nuñez from The Office). The snappy screwball
dialogue in Pete Chiarelli's script. And the way Anne Fletcher directs like a camp counselor wrangling bunkmates...it's all been seen before. For a reason. These elements work.
Something blue: As the wise and saucy matriarch of the family, the divine 87-year-old Betty White has fun as one hot grandma — and inspires her younger stars to say ''I do,'' too.
Review
Of the many Woody Allen surrogates past—some skilled, others considerably less so—Larry David, the professional curmudgeon behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, may be the most philosophically harmonious. Allen and David express their obsessions and neuroses differently—Allen is more nervous and retiring, while David tramples brazenly over social norms—but their misanthropy forms a heavenly chorus during the best moments of Whatever Works, an otherwise wobbly odd-couple comedy. Dusting off an ancient script intended for Zero Mostel three decades ago, Allen tweaks the material enough to supply David with bilious rants about the stupidity and meaninglessness of man and the universe, but not enough to bridge the modern world with dated, All In The Family-style comic stereotyping.
Hobbled by a limp incurred after a failed suicide attempt—jumping from his apartment window, he hit a canopy on the way down—David lives in a shabby basement apartment and spends his days teaching chess to unpromising child prodigies and bloviating about humanity’s shortcomings to anyone who will listen. But like a lot of stock codgers, David has a heart of gold, which shines through when he takes in Evan Rachel Wood, a naïve teenage runaway from deepest Mississippi. Wood proves a malleable hunk of clay for David to shape with his “wisdom,” thanks to her need for a father figure and her willingness to absorb his abuses. Eventually, the two enter into a weirdly platonic marriage—a late reference to Viagra is, mercifully, the only evidence of anything physical—but the arrival of Wood’s conservative, hyper-religious mother (Patricia Clarkson) throws a wrench in the works.
Though Clarkson acquits herself reasonably well in a terribly conceived role, her entrance interrupts David’s hilariously twisted mentorship of Wood and sends the movie careening in a far less promising direction. For a good 40 minutes or so, David all but disappears from the action, leaving the Southern hayseeds alone to undergo an unlikely transformation from Bible-thumpers to bohemians. Whenever the focus falls back on David—sometimes talking straight to the audience in an extremely effective breach of the fourth wall—Whatever Works gives effective voice to Allen’s jaundiced philosophy of life: In a world without order, justice, or any belief systems that are uncorrupted or rational, you do what makes you happy. Then you die.
Review
I'm not generally in the habit of praising movies for being good for you, but Food, Inc. is more than just a terrific documentary — it's an important movie, one that nourishes your knowledge of how the world works. Or, in this case, has started not to work. The director, Robert Kenner, features and builds on the muckraking testimony of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) to create an essential, disturbing portrait of how the food we eat in America has become a deceptively prefab, even hazardous industrial product.
Kenner doesn't rant. He connects the dots — from the huge, aggressively lobbied government subsidies for corn to the transformation of farms into factories of mass-produced, corn-fed cattle, which are then slaughtered and ground into ''hamburger meat filler,'' which is cleansed with ammonia, all so that we can buy a double cheeseburger for 99 cents. Food, Inc. shows how the use of high-fructose corn syrup in almost every supermarket product is part of the same system that masses chickens in concentration-camp coops, where they're bred for their oversize, flavorless white meat (and you thought breast enhancement was just popular for humans). It all traces back to the assembly-line techniques pioneered by the fast-food industry, which were then adopted everywhere else. A big-picture vision of conglomerate duplicity and control, Food, Inc. is hard to shake, because days after you've seen it, you may find yourself eating something — a cookie, a piece of poultry, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen tomato — and you'll realize that you have virtually no idea what it actually is.
Review
n Dead Snow, a group of Norwegian medical students — pals on an Easter vacation — bunk together in a mountain cabin, ready for fun involving skiing, beer drinking, and sex. What they get is an invasion of WWII-era Nazi zombies who haunt the hills. (The undead bastards are gluttons for dining on guts.) Cheery, silly, splattery, and respectful of its elders (and betters, particularly Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead), this bloody/cheesy subtitled Scandinavian lark is written and directed
by Tommy Wirkola, who has a nice touch with severed limbs.
