ABSOLUTE WILSON See Film Feature (Showtimes)
CODE NAME: THE CLEANER A man who may or may not be a janitor wakes up in a fancy hotel, next to a dead FBI agent, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. Not a bad set-up for a story, but unfortunately the man in question is played by Cedric the Entertainer, who has yet to do as his name suggests in a leading role. (Steven Seagal would have been funnier.) You wouldn’t imagine that a man this overweight could elude his pursuers so easily, but Cedric gets some help from a butt-kicking babe (Lucy Liu) who may or may not be his girlfriend, and if you believe this pairing could plausibly happen, you might be gullible enough to buy a ticket to this movie. The most entertaining thing about Codename: The Cleaner certainly isn’t Cedric — it’s the way grainy stock footage of Seattle is intercut with what are clearly Vancouver locations. That, or the audacity with which plugs for Skittles and Quizno’s have been liberally sprinkled throughout the dialogue. (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)
FREEDOM WRITERS For those who found Half Nelson a bit too gritty for their palates, here comes Hilary Swank as a first-year high-school teacher who doesn’t look like she’s ever paid a bill late, let alone lit up a crack pipe. As 23-year-old Erin Gruwell, she’s a prim idealist in polka dots and pearls — a very white knight cast into the “voluntarily integrated” combat zone of Long Beach’s Woodrow Wilson High School in the wake of the L.A. riots. Based on The Freedom Writers Diary, the 1999 book consisting of journal entries written by Gruwell’s students, Freedom Writers the movie is about how this wet-behind-the-ears teacher taught her racially diverse bunch of dangerous minds to stand and deliver, all the while combating the fussbudget administrators (including one played by Swank’s former Oscar rival, Vera Drake star Imelda Staunton) who seem to have never met a student of color they didn’t fear. It all sounds like a recipe for the most noxious liberal jerk-off movie since Crash, but in the hands of writer-director Richard LaGravenese, Freedom Writers turns out to be a superb piece of mainstream entertainment — not an agonized debate over the principles of modern education à la The History Boys, but a simple, straightforward and surprisingly affecting story of one woman who managed to make a difference. (As fanciful as it may seem, Gruwell really did break through to her class by teaching them The Diary of Anne Frank, culminating in a classroom visit by Frank’s protector, Miep Gies.) LaGravenese is smart enough to see Gruwell’s story as the exception and not the rule, and his casting of Staunton as Swank’s chief antagonist is an inspired stroke — their bitchy exchanges may lack the raucous fury of Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench’s full-on catfight in Notes on a Scandal, but they still seem to be having a grand old time going at it. If only LaGravenese had taken one additional page from the Dangerous Minds playbook and left Gruwell’s tepid personal life (a troubled marriage with Patrick “Dr. McDreamy” Dempsey that pads out the movie’s running time by a good 20 minutes or so) on the cutting-room floor. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)
HAPPILY N’EVER AFTER Remember those fabulously giddy bits in the Shrek movies that riffed on just about every fairy-tale character known to Western man? Someone over at Lionsgate thought they’d turn Disney into computer-animated Grimm, which might have made for inspired satire in less clumsy hands than those of director Paul J. Bolger and screenwriter Rob Moreland, who have drained both the affectionate wit out of the Shrek franchise and the bite out of the Brothers Grimm, and replaced them with shtick as dull as it is ill-natured. This appallingly dumb and tasteless inversion of the Cinderella story features the voice of Sigourney Weaver as a generically shrieky wicked stepmother who discovers she can tinker with fairy-tale endings, notably that of Cinders (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who sports a short, black Audrey Hepburn ’do and a mistaken crush on a narcissistic prince (Patrick Warburton) brazenly ripped off from Beauty and the Beast’s Gaston. An inept Fairy Godmother, a sulky dishwasher (Freddie Prinze Jr.) headed straight for love interest, two run-of-the-mill critters with little to do but try to seize the attention of the under-fives by force, and quantities of unimaginative CGI do nothing to perk up a barely sketched storyline. I spent the movie scratching my head over which audience the studio is hoping to profit from with this noisy rubbish. YouTubers? Tots with ADD? (Citywide) (Ella Taylor)
THR3E What happens when a thriller finds Jesus? It’s bye-bye, blood and boobs. Thr3e, written by Left Behind–er Alan B. McElroy, based on a Ted Dekker novel and debuting as the first theatrical release from Fox’s new Christian-friendly imprint Fox Faith, is on its dull surface the mystery of a psychopath/serial killer and his seminary-student prey — with God replacing gore. There are no dead bodies here, but perhaps filmgoers tired of all those secular scares and heathen horrors won’t miss the aesthetic pleasure of a creative murder scene. Still, Marc Blucas as the hunted seminary student Kevin Parson might as well be dead for all his charisma, even with a back story involving deceased parents and an unhinged, abusive Aunt Belinda (Priscilla Barnes, formerly Thr3e’s Company’s blonde No. 3 and currently looking like Courtney Love after a thr3e-week bender). Of course, Fox Faith wouldn’t want you to trust our judgment; as the movie reminds us in its tidy moral, “We need the power of God to teach us good and evil.” That awesome power has co-opted pop music and cornered the market on swearing-in ceremonies. Can’t we at least have our cookie-cutter thrillers? (Selected theaters) (Jessica Grose)
