Film Reviews

JAAN-E-MANN The surprisingly durable Bollywood leading man Akshay Kumar started out 15 years ago as a karate-chopping action hero. But even then there was something chinless and ungainly about him. Now, on the cusp of 40, Kumar has reinvented himself as a likable romantic stumblebum, a winsome dork in the body of a hunk. Kumar is just about perfectly cast in Shirish Kunder’s Jaan-E-Mann (Beloved), a garish family entertainment for Diwali, roughly the Hindi movie equivalent of the Chinese New Year season in Hong Kong. In an early flashback sequence, Kumar relishes putting on coke-bottle glasses, radiator braces and a braying laugh as Agastya Rao, a college meganerd who will grow up to be a studly-looking astronaut, without managing to outgrow the agony of being ditched by Piya (Preity Zinta), a lively classmate who was miles out of his league. The story continues seven years later, as Agastya flies to New York to renew the courtship, in the company of Piya’s loutish rock-star-turned-film-star ex-husband, Suhaan (a charmless Salman Khan), who shadows the couple in a series of clownish disguises (including disco-diva drag) to coach Agastya and feed him sure-fire sweet talk through an earpiece. That episode is the movie’s centerpiece, though it was doomed at the script stage by the fact that Khan’s character is the focal point rather than Kumar’s. Apart from an extended scene-setting flashback that takes the form of a lavish Farah Khan song-and-dance montage, most of the running time is devoted to wearying flop-sweat farce. Viewers who are not already Bolly-heads are likely to be appalled. (Fallbrook 7, Naz 8) (David Chute)

JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLES TEMPLE See film featureROMEO AND JULIET: SEALED WITH A KISS Almost single-handedly animated by Disney veteran Phil Nibbelink over the course of several years, this feature brings together what are apparently the director’s two favorite things: Shakespeare and seals. Yes, the star-crossed lovers are now baby seals (get it? “sealed”?) cavorting beneath a strangely psychedelic landscape and occasionally breaking out into big-band musical numbers. Nibbelink’s daughter voices a fish who babbles in near–baby talk, when she’s not quoting Arnold Schwarzenegger. Needless to say, this is one odd concoction, which should find its primary audience among college potheads who like to watch ’70s Hanna-Barbera creations on the Cartoon Network late at night — the reverb-heavy love song that plays as Romeo (Daniel Trippet) and Juliet (Patricia Trippet) float out into an ever-morphing cosmos is as trippy as any Pink Floyd number. There’s no Shakespearean violence to worry about in this telling, nor is there any explanation as to why these two seals of different colors fall for one another, but explanations may be beside the point if enough mind-altering substances are consumed. It isn’t really possible to recommend viewing the film any other way. (Selected theaters) (Luke Y. Thompson)

SAW III  The third time isn’t exactly the charm for the Saw franchise: the elaborate, Rube Goldberg torture traps have come to seem a tad rusty and the one-thing-after-another pacing is now more loose spring than corkscrew. Stick with Saw III, though. It still delivers the goods. Series co-creator Leigh Whannell (who wrote the Saw III script) and director Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II) remain the undisputed masters of imaginatively unpleasant bodily harm (including, but not limited to, death by ribcage evisceration, a near-drowning in pig vomit and a vivid illustration of the physics of cold fusion). But as before, their real interest lies less in the latest subject of Jigsaw’s torture gauntlet — here, a distraught father seeking revenge on his son’s killer — than in the life and opinions of the cancer-stricken genius/madman (Tobin Bell, reveling in what may be cinema’s most protracted swan song since Garbo in Camille). In Saw III, that focus expands to encompass Jigsaw’s complexly creepy relationship with his apprentice/former victim Amanda (Shawnee Smith), until, as the two halves of the film dovetail in the final act, we find ourselves in the grips of a downright Hegelian debate over vengeance, forgiveness and the possibility (or lack thereof) of affecting human change. That may not exactly thrill those who admire the Saw films only for their splatter quotient, but all told, this is a more affecting study in grief, guilt and human frailty than Babel. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas) (See film feature)

 SHUT UP AND SING More ballsy than profound, Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines’ off-handed 2003 remark at a London concert about being ashamed that George Bush was from Texas cost the Dixie Chicks dearly in record and tour ticket sales, and in air time on country music radio stations terrified of alienating their hyper-patriotic fan bases. That she had the right to say it, and say it again at the same venue in 2006, will be uncontroversial to almost anyone who goes to see Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck’s engaging documentary. Kopple and Peck went on and off the road with the band for the three years of waffling, agonizing and  defiance] in between Maines’ mouth-offs. The freedom of speech stuff is far less gripping than the emergent slice of girl-band life, which is more about fertility babies and supportive house-husbands than about sex, drugs or booze. Best of all, it’s a great portrait of Maines, a rebel girl you’d really want to spend time with so long as she’s on your side. Truculent, effortlessly funny and congenitally mutinous, Maines is a bull in a china shop with the voice of an angel, and you can’t help but cheer her fuck-you to a kow-towing music industry, and to all the bullies who picketed her concerts, wanting her dead. (Century City 15) (Ella Taylor)