Film Reviews

OPAL DREAM Rush screaming from anything that announces itself as “a movie for children and grownups of all ages.” Slight and sweet unto shameless saccharine, Opal Dream is devoted to the proposition that it takes an Australian outback village to validate the imaginary friends of a blond child who is too sensitive for this world but not, alas, for this sappy movie. Adapted from what I suspect is a much better children’s novel by Ben Rice, the story turns on a family composed of two dreamers and two sensible helpmeets to sort things. Eight-year-old Kellyanne (Sapphire Boyce), an arty type who takes after her precious-stone-prospecting dad (Vince Colosimo), does the pale-and-consumptive thing when her ethereal buddies Pobby and Dingan disappear. Everything goes wrong, until suddenly everything goes right when Kellyanne’s practical brother Ashmol (Christian Byers) and their long-suffering mum (Jacqueline McKenzie) rustle up every crusty salt-of-the-earth type in their dusty village to bond in sympathy for the vanishing dreams of children large and small. Awkwardly directed by Peter Cattaneo, who also made The Full Monty,Opal Dream is burdened with lashings of that movie’s schmaltz, but none of its raucous comedy. Pardon my disbelief, but even G-rated tots will roll their worldly little eyes. (Westside Pavilion; One Colorado) (Ella Taylor)

PICK TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY  This critic must admit to deciding fairly early on in Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny that it would be impossible for him to dislike this movie. It was around the time — during the film’s opening musical number — that one of the critic’s own personal rock idols, erstwhile Black Sabbath front man Ronnie James Dio, made a cameo appearance in the form of an anthropomorphic wall poster, offering some words of rock-god wisdom to a 10-year-old metalhead by the name of JB (as in Jack Black). That sequence, which charts the young JB’s decision to pack his bags for Hollywood and turn his back on the sleepy Christian hamlet of Kickapoo, Mo., proves a far more rousing bit of musical storytelling than anything in the recent spate of Broadway-divined non-blockbusters. And a subsequent scene, in which the adult JB performs impromptu lyrics to future bandmate Kyle Gass’ guitar rendition of Bach’s Bourrées in E Minor, is nearly as euphoric. Nothing that follows in TDITPOD is quite as inspired — though, as a pre-credits sequence strongly suggests, the movie’s ambling slacker-stoner rhythms may play best to an audience in a chemically enhanced state of being. Co-scripted by Black, Gass and director Liam Lynch, this is effectively an origin story about how the self-proclaimed Greatest Band on Earth came to be (with a little help from Satan and Sasquatch), as the D search high and low for a cursed guitar pick that grants its bearer the ability to lay down superwicked licks. The Blues Brothers it is not, but in its best moments, the movie feels like a comic exaggeration of the real hardships that a couple of average, decidedly unhip guys went through on their unlikely way to the top. In their first big-screen outing, the D may not have conquered cinema in the way they’ve conquered music, but I for one would not begrudge them a return engagement. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas) (See film feature)

Unholy Smoke (Zade Rosenthal/New Line Productions)

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• Julian Hernandez
• Gaston Biraben
• Kristin Chenoweth
• Danny DeVito
• Tony Scott

WALTZING ANNA You can despise the shabby care given in cut-rate assisted-living facilities; you can bemoan the lack of substantial films either about or for people over 60; and you can appreciate the big heart and noble intentions that went into a modest cinematic labor of love called Waltzing Anna — and still find the movie a maudlin horror, a perfect storm in which Patch Adams capsizes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Sporting a rumpled coif that threatens to turn into a Flock of Seagulls flopover, actor-writer-producer Robert Capelli Jr. plays a disgraced doctor reassigned to a nursing home that’s shady in more ways than the arboreal. Under the influence of a caring-cutie nurse (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and the lovably quirky patients (including consummate pros Pat Hingle and Betsy Palmer), he redeems himself by standing up to the crooked administrator (Murphy Brown’s Grant Shaud). The filmmakers care, the actors try; the closing dedication is heartfelt and sweet. The movie, sadly, is an IV drip of artery-clogging Lifetime movie-of-the-week goo. You’ll know when the hero’s heart has truly changed — he combs his hair. (Regent Showcase) (Jim Ridley)