Film Reviews

GO PICK MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a mighty locomotive. Able to emblazon the word “Dick” across your forehead using her laser-beam vision? Beware: Hell hath no fury like a woman superhero scorned. In this loopy cross-pollination of comic-book mythos and crazed-ex-lover melodrama, Luke Wilson stars as an on-the-rebound architect who starts dating mild-mannered gallery curator Jenny Johnson (Uma Thurman), only to discover that, beneath her bookish exterior, she’s really the indestructible (and very hot) G-Girl, protecting the citizens of New York from myriad catastrophes with the aid of her meteorite-derived superpowers. She’s something of a whiz-bang in the bedroom too; when she and Wilson make love — a hilarious scene — the earth literally moves under their feet. But romantic bliss is short-lived for these two lonelyhearts, and when Wilson tries to break things off, Jenny/G-Girl goes nutzoid. Written by first-time screenwriter Don Payne, My Super Ex-Girlfriend is a one-joke movie if ever there was, but the joke happens to be a good one — a Tracy-and-Hepburn-style battle of the sexes in which Kate can fly and blast through walls — and director Ivan Reitman (who made Ghostbusters) feels at home with the mix of screwball and supernatural. A few big gags (including one involving a giant CGI shark) don’t quite come off, and nobody seems to have figured out what to do with the talented supporting players (Anna Faris, Wanda Sykes and Eddie Izzard among them) who flounder in underwritten roles. The movie is consistently funny, though, and Thurman has her best comic opportunities since The Truth About Cats & Dogs, a decade ago: She again proves herself an inspired goofball, switching personalities and wardrobes with the quick-change precision of Christopher Reeve in his prime. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)

Sony Pictures Imageworks

Related Content

• Rich Kids and Wizards: Readers Weigh in on Steve Aoki and James Franco
  March 21, 2013
• Cannes: Young & Beautiful is a Portrait of a 17-Year-Old French Call Girl
  May 16, 2013
• Does Lincoln Feed the Spielberg Haters?
  November 12, 2012
• Roger Ebert: Why There Can Never Be Another
  April 11, 2013
• Lincoln Review: Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis Make the 16th President Relatable
  November 8, 2012

More About

• Ella Taylor
• Scott Foundas
• Laurent Cantet
• Luke Wilson
• Uma Thurman

GO SHADOWBOXER This is a sick flick. Sick, but satisfying. A cartoonish parable in the mode of Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, Shadowboxer hits harder because its impossible plot, character polarities and absurdist sexual/physical slam-downs stick closer to a single tone. First-time director Lee Daniels, producer of the more simply exploitative Monster’s Ball, has come to understand how to make a metaphor, and that involves a total divorce from reality. After repeated shocks to credibility and moral sensibilities, the viewer slowly realizes that the film’s reformed contract ­killers (Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr.) and its carnival of other psychos represent more than just creepy entertainment, because they certainly don’t represent any humans you’ve met. Through ingenious casting (Macy Gray stands out in comic relief, Vanessa Ferlito for sheer beauty), resonant accordion music and gorgeously decaying Philadelphia locations, Daniels makes a complex statement on a very simple theme. What theme? You figure it out; it ain’t hard. (Culver Plaza; Magic Johnson Theaters; Playhouse 7; Sunset 5) (Greg Burk)

THREE DAYS OF RAIN First-time director Michael Meredith attempts some Altmanian multitasking in transposing six stories by Anton Chekhov onto the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, during a long thunderstorm. The result is both a hypnotic mood piece — where characters’ blank existential stares are framed through rain-beaded car windows — and a murky riff on urban Midwestern ennui (by way of the Russian steppes). Despite showy scenes with Blythe Danner and Peter Falk (who seems to be channeling Jack Lemmon), the film’s real star is the weather, an environmental cloak that affects the main characters, who smoke cigarettes, do drugs, curse in empty lofts, play dominoes, drink in womblike bars, run red lights and initiate conversations by saying “What?” The inspired choice of Lyle Lovett as a jazz DJ provides the glue that links various microdramas: A lonely cabby (football star Don Meredith, the director’s father) mourning the death of his son. A heroin addict (Merle Kennedy) caught under the thumb of a corrupt judge. A yuppie husband (Erick Avarai) confronting his wife’s brittle callousness. This intersecting weave exhibits the boon and bane of such films. None of the stories contains much depth or development, just small ironies and twists that for some may contain multitudes of meaning. Others are left only with Bob Belden’s melancholy jazz score and the endless patter of droplets. (Fairfax) (Matthew Duersten)

GO TIME TO LEAVE The second (after the very good Under the Sand) in a projected trilogy by François Ozon examining death from different angles, Time to Leave blows a fresh, skeptical wind through fairly corny melodramatic territory while keeping faith with the operatic emotions of the genre. Told that he has only a short while to live, Romain (played by the sensuously androgynous Melvil Poupaud), a successful gay fashion photographer and coke-snorting narcissist with a cruel streak, struggles for a way to prepare himself for the end. No consumptive hero, Romain stumbles into coping strategies — an acceleration of his customary risky behavior and ambivalent mind games with his family and his boyfriend — that signal both an extension of his selfish life and significant departures that hint at self-transformation. As always with Ozon — and perhaps with melodrama in general — there’s something both undercooked and overblown about the emotional life of this movie, and as Romain’s boho grandmother, Jeanne Moreau seems shoehorned in for a diva cameo. Yet the same quiet ecstasy that made the final moments of Under the Sand so moving works on the viewer here too, inspiring joy and naked grief in equal measure. (Playhouse 7; Sunset 5) (Ella Taylor)