Film Reviews

THE FLYING SCOTSMAN Barely a year after The World’s Fastest Indian, we get The World’s Fastest Schwinn? Well, not exactly, but it’s hard to keep Roger Donaldson’s picaresque true-life tale about an eccentric New Zealand coot and his home-built motorbike totally out of mind while watching first-time director Douglas Mackinnon’s true-life about... an eccentric Glasgow coot and his home-built racing cycle. Only, whereas Donaldson’s movie was all heart, Mackinnon’s is pure hokum. It’s not that the story of Graeme Obree (Jonny Lee Miller) — a former competitive cyclist who came out of self-imposed retirement in the 1990s to set a couple of world speed and distance records — lacks for dramatic incident, but as rendered by Mackinnon and screenwriters John Brown, Declan Hughes and Simon Rose, it has a terminal case of the cutes crossed with the labored earnestness of a disease-of-the-week melodrama. When Obree isn’t busy being a maverick (taking apart a washing machine to use its bearings for his bike, inventing new riding positions that are subsequently banned by mean-spirited racing officials), he battles the roller-coaster mood swings caused by his manic depression (which the movie never names outright, a la the homosexuality of Suddenly Last Summer) and, in one downright looney sequence that may or may not be a paranoid fantasy, gets chased through the streets by the same schoolyard bullies who taunted him in childhood. All that’s missing is the PSA coda in which the cast appears on screen, out of character, to say, “If you know someone who may be suffering from depression...” (Fallbrook) (Scott Foundas)

MISS POTTER See film feature. (Showtimes)

(Photo by Teresa Isasi)

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NOTES ON A SCANDAL Queasily parked between halfhearted satire and overcooked melodrama, this adaptation of a well-received 2003 novel by British writer Zoë Heller offers the unhappy spectacle of a raft of acting talent trying to do right by slimy material. The setting is one of those modern London high schools where what passes for education is pure “crowd control,” but the premise — an unlikely bonding between two lonely women teachers — reaches all the way back to cut-rate Muriel Spark. Judi Dench is infuriatingly good as that reliable old Eng-lit creation, the lesbian closet case whose repressed passions have warped her into a manipulative witch ready to whack all who stand in the way of her deluded desires. Director Richard Eyre (Stage Beauty) asks us to take on trust the emotional isolation of Dench’s object of desire (the always excellent Cate Blanchett), who enjoys a rich domestic life whenever she’s not shagging a 15-year-old special-needs pupil in her art studio after class. Setting aside the scads of preposterous plot contrivance, Patrick Marber’s screenplay is full of jaundiced cleverness about England’s intricate class system, but that’s far from enough to save this disreputable movie, not the least of whose sins is that it manages to elicit a bad performance from Bill Nighy — which I’d have thought was close to impossible. (ArcLight; NuWilshire; Playhouse 7) (Ella Taylor)

PICK PAN’S LABYRINTH Like his terrific 2001 The Devil’s Backbone, Mexican horrormeister Guillermo del Toro’s new movie offers us both real-life and fantastical monsters, and if you know his work, you won’t waste time figuring out which to root for. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a little girl whose anxious dark eyes recall those of that other dreamy daughter of the fascist era — the Frankenstein-obsessed Ana from Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive — is the link between harsh reality and dark fantasy in the savagely beautiful Pan’s Labyrinth, which is set in 1944 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Trying to protect her sick mother (Ariadna Gil), who is pregnant by the austere officer (a menacing Sergi López) in charge of rooting out the tattered remains of the rebel opposition, Ofelia seeks refuge, with the encouragement of a friendly maid ( Y Tu Mamá También’s Maribel Verdú), in a classically del Toro underworld of dripping caves and grabby tree branches, long-tongued toads and helpful fairies, ruled over by a demanding but fair-minded faun (Doug Jones). Where the world up top is full of fascist spit and polish and sadistic violence for power’s sake — ever devoted to his beloved genre, del Toro rubs our faces in nearly unbearable defacings, both literal and symbolic — down below Ofelia finds, in the contents of her own troubled mind, terror aplenty and a subversive challenge to confront the wicked stepfather who’s ruining her life, and Spain’s. Though never sentimental, del Toro’s hopeful ending is as historically premature as it is true to the trust he places in the redemptive power of the imaginative life. (Selected theaters)  (Ella Taylor)

PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER A multimillion-euro adaptation of a best-selling German novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer relates the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), born in 18th-century Paris with a uniquely puissant sense of smell. He begins life as an orphan, sold into servitude to a brutal tanner, but in Toucan Sam fashion follows his nose into the rarefied world of perfumers, where his superhuman gift proves highly valuable. After a brief yet intense infatuation with the bodily smell of a comely fruit monger leads to her sudden death, Grenouille becomes obsessed with discovering the means to create a permanent record of an individual’s scent and to concoct the most powerful perfume possible. The pungent plot may sound preposterous, and indeed it’s hard not to snicker early on when Grenouille is introduced as a mere nose hanging in darkness, his inner life revealed via a digital zoom up his nostril. But Perfume ’s hyperfragrant world strives beyond mere physical sensuality toward a spiritual erotic. It’s a noble experiment in pushing the limits of cinema, but one too many sequences of ruffling silks and dreamy flower bouquets evoke little more than the ad-agency clichés of an elongated Chanel No. 5 commercial. (ArcLight) (Ed Halter)