Film Reviews: Semi-Pro, Summer Palace, A Walk to Beautiful

 
PENELOPE "A Fairy Tale Like No Other"? Penelope's influences are right up-front — there's the Tim Burton production design (overstocking each frame with curios) and Amélie music-box wistfulness tinkling all about. The film's titular heroine (Christina Ricci) is born into money but, thanks to a hex brought on by a distant ancestor's snobbery, is accursed with a sow's snout (she's a prettier breed of The Twilight Zone's pig people). Director Mark Palansky starts Penelope by whisking us through a "The Story Until Now" sequence, and doesn't slacken much once the real tale starts in — released fully two years after shooting, the film's been trimmed to the quick. This little piggy ventures off her family estate for the first time into a hybrid London-New York-Belle Epoque beyond, to experience life and love (with the impeccably scruffy James McAvoy, ready to front some cruddy sparkle-and-fade NME-championed band). Ricci, though, is appealingly human, and some acknowledgment of the importance of female friendship, in addition to romance, is faintly touching. The social function of fables has long switched from cautionary chiding to coddling self-esteem. Hence the moral here: Self-acceptance brings inner beauty out. It's not quite that easy, but it's also not a bad lie to buy. (Citywide) (Nick Pinkerton)

 
ROMULUS, MY FATHER Known for his dramatic intensity in works like Chopper and Munich, Eric Bana runs the risk of falling into a typecasting rut; he's repeatedly attracted to brooding, unsmiling characters as if becoming a great actor means just emoting really hard. The worst-case scenario of this approach can be seen in Romulus, My Father, a plodding adaptation of Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita's coming-of-age memoir, which mistakes unremitting glumness for insight. In the early 1960s, the young Raimond (Kodi Smit-McPhee) moves from Yugoslavia to rural Victoria, Australia, with his moody father, Romulus (Bana), and philandering mother, Christina (Franka Potente), growing up a hostage to her infidelity and depression and his dad's futile attempts to keep the family together. Directed by Australian actor Richard Roxburgh and adapted by Nick Drake (not the late songwriter), Romulus, My Father is admirably unsentimental about the ravages of poverty and mental illness on the foundations of family. But soon the endless succession of heartaches that visit Gaita's brood — including multiple suicide attempts and romantic betrayals — becomes monotonous and unbearable, the cinematic equivalent of someone slowly pressing his thumb into your forehead. Bana's performance, like those of his co-stars, is affecting but one-note, and the film doesn't offer any fresh observations into the hard-knock life. Romulus, My Father is a stacked deck determined to make you feel bad, but it rarely makes you feel anything else. (Monica 4-Plex) (Tim Grierson)

Palm Pictures

Summer Palace

Related Content

• 10 Best Judd Apatow-Inspired Artworks at Gallery 1988
  December 6, 2012
• Step Brothers
  September 13, 2012
• Jon Hamm and Adam Scott Host Sandy Benefit, With Performances by Aziz Ansari, Sarah Silverman and More
  December 11, 2012
• The Campaign Review: Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis in an Amusing but Toothless Satire
  August 9, 2012
• Some Velvet Painting
  July 26, 2012

More About

• Brett Morgen
• Dan Whitney
• Julia Wallace
• Celebrity News
• Movie Stars

 
SEMI-PRO Better than Blades of Glory, which wasn't nearly as good as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which was a little better than Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which was almost as funny as Old School, which was better than everything else Will Ferrell had done up to that point. This is what it's come down to with Ferrell: grading his movies in various shades of enh as each one blends into the next till they're all one giant gray blob of feh. Which sells short the semifunny Semi-Pro — essentially Major League clad in 1970s short shorts and topped with a few 'fros for fun, as Ferrell's washed-up one-hit blunder tries to get his woeful Flint Tropics into the NBA before the ABA vanishes out of existence. Still, you seen one Will Ferrell sports comedy, you're good. What distinguishes this one from the others: great characters, among them Woody Harrelson's washed-up vet seeking redemption and romance, Andre Benjamin's blustering baller with NBA aspirations, and Andrew Daly's play-by-play man. Funny in spots, but the game's four quarters — or two too many. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)

 
FILM PICK  SUMMER PALACE In its broad strokes, Mainland Chinese director Lou Ye's Summer Palace adheres to a hallowed tradition of American and European movies about idealistic collegiate youths becoming sexually and politically radicalized. Only instead of Berkeley or Paris in '68, the setting is Beijing in the late 1980s, where Yu Hong (the excellent Lei Hao), a student hailing from the northern city of Tumen, arrives to begin her university studies just as the student unrest that will eventually lead to the Tiananmen Square protests is simmering to a boil. The film's restaging of that contentious episode is one reason why Summer Palace, which premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, resulted in Lou being slapped by Chinese authorities with a five-year ban on his filmmaking. Another is the film's explicit sexuality, which rivals Ang Lee's recent Lust, Caution in its frequency and candor. Lou (who first came to the attention of American audiences with his 2000 Vertigo homage, Suzhou River) is clearly a believer that if you liberate the body, the mind will soon follow, which is precisely what Yu Hong sets about doing in the company of her fellow student, the broodingly handsome Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo), who drifts in and out of her arms — and those of her best friend, Li Ti (Ling Hu) — over much of the next two decades. Without overselling the metaphor, Lou turns this menage à trois (or à  quatre, if you include Li Ti's own on-again, off-again boyfriend, Ruo Gu) into a microcosm of the period's major political upheavals. As student solidarity reaches its peak, so does the intensity of the lovers' passions; then, as the Berlin Wall crumbles and the Iron Curtain parts, the characters scatter across the globe, whereupon they find that all the social freedoms of the New Europe and New China can not quell their restless hearts. Lou, whose previous Purple Butterfly similarly grafted romantic melodrama against the swirl of sociopolitical chaos (in that case, the 1930s occupation of China by Japan), scales Summer Palace like a Tolstoyan epic, though his penchant for florid poeticism (seen to best — or worst — effect in the voiceover excerpts from Yu Hong's diary) and jolting narrative ellipses sometimes threatens to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. What never lessens is the movie's rapturous eroticism, and the exquisite longing in each one of Yu Hong's sideways glances. (Music Hall; Playhouse 7) (Scott Foundas)