Movie Reviews: College Road Trip, CJ7

10,000 B.C. No doubt your history teacher failed to tell you of the long-lost Yagahl tribe, which apparently thrived on snowy mountainsides 6,000 years before Mike Huckabee believes the earth even existed, and consisted of one Jamaican (Mona Hammond), one Maori (Cliff Curtis), and a whole lot of white people sporting dreadlocked wigs and dirt on their faces. The aspiring hero of this tribe was D’Leh (Steven Strait) — pronounced “delay,” which is pretty funny considering how needlessly slow the story sometimes feels — who risked everything for the love of the only woman in the world with blue eyes (Camilla Belle). Her name was Evolet, and we’re told that means “the promise of life” in whatever made-up language these people are supposed to be speaking. When Evolet gets kidnapped by evil “four-legged demons” (i.e. guys on horses), it’s up to white boy D’Leh to rally together various tribes of black and brown people to save his girlfriend and, as an entirely secondary matter, free a whole mess of slaves. Director Roland Emmerich (Godzilla, Independence Day) knows his money shots: any time he throws some mastodons or giant dodos on the screen for a little beast-battlin’ action, he has our attention. But his lack of skill with actors really shows during the long moments of downtime in-between. Strait desperately needs direction, and doesn’t seem to be getting any. (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)

Sony Pictures Classics

Sony Pictures Classics

CJ7

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More About

• Steven Strait
• Ella Taylor
• Stephen Chow
• Albert Ayler
• Martin Lawrence

(Click to enlarge)

CJ7

FILM PICK  CJ7 This utterly beguiling foray into family comedy from Hong Kong director Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer) may be the tribute to Spielberg's E.T. Extra-Terrestrial the gleefully childlike filmmaker has had up his sleeve forever. But CJ7 is also a high-spirited poke in the ribs to the new Asia, with its amped-up capitalism, obsession with technology and brutal indifference to the lumpenproletariat left behind in the speedy march of "progress." Chow is goofy and hapless as a construction worker with nothing to his name but his pride, honesty and determination to keep his small son Dickey (played by the appealing 9-year-old actress Xu Jiao) in the pricey private school where he's being bullied to death by fascistic little rich thugs with slicked-back hair and access to all the techno-gizmos their rich parents can buy. Ever a champion of the underdog and the handmade, Chow, whose own childhood poverty informs all his movies, conjures a savior out of a junkyard — a strange alien who looks like a newly-hatched chick with huge eyes, a flubbery green body, Charlie Chaplin moves and an unstable relationship to the martial arts. At first CJ7 appears to be the new pet that will establish Dickey as the coolest kid in school, but the bipolar little fellow has other ideas not dissimilar from those of his creator, whose method is (barely) controlled chaos and the sustained subversion of our every assumption, including those regarding the masculinity of the protagonists and the cuteness of kids in general. If CJ7 is a slapstick action picture that doffs its cap to children's delight in casual brutality, it's also a sweet-tempered and oddly beautiful piece of schmaltz that sends up its own populist family values without ever betraying them. (Sunset 5; Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7) (Ella Taylor)

 
THE BANK JOB  Click here for full review by Robert Wilonsky. (Citywide)

 
COLLEGE ROAD TRIP Less a movie than a collection of family-friendly platitudes rationed out at regular intervals, College Road Trip concerns overly protective police chief James (Martin Lawrence), who wants his daughter Melanie (Raven-Symoné) to attend college near their suburban Chicago home, despite her dreams of going east to Georgetown. Grudgingly, James spends a weekend driving Melanie to D.C. for her admission interview, encountering gratingly "wacky" obstacles such as karaoke-singing Asian tourists and dorky white people (led, appropriately, by Donny Osmond) along the way. Lawrence's descent from hyperactive foulmouth to G-rated father figure has been in evidence for years now, but watching director Roger Kumble move from flawed but juicy projects like Cruel Intentions to pap like this is a depressing career development. The script, credited to two screenwriting duos, never ceases to remind us that any father-daughter difficulties can be settled with unconvincing heartfelt words over a treacly score or, in a pinch, a spontaneously choreographed song-and-dance number. It doesn't matter if nobody in this movie behaves like a real person, College Road Trip says reassuringly, just so long as everybody hugs at the end. Speaking of the end, the tagline says it all: "They can't get there fast enough." (Citywide) (Tim Grierson)

 
GIRLS ROCK! Palace — age 7 — unleashes a blood-curdling scream Poly Styrene would be proud of, then smiles demurely. So it goes at the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls, a femme-only affair where grrl luminaries like Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein usher young women through an intensive five-day basic training: The kids meet, form a hasty band, write a song, and bash it out on the camp's closing-night concert. The program's agenda is weighty and worthy: promoting assertiveness (self-defense is a mandatory class) and combating the "diabolical new threat" of teen pop. Several amusing montages mash up archival footage and alarming stats — between the ages of 9 and 15, the percentage of girls who say they're happy with themselves drops from 60 to 29. But while the camp is all about liberation, the film hews to a predictable doc template and comes off as a drag. Co-directors Arne Johnson and Shane King introduce several of the camp's most troubled girls (unlike 2005's Rock School, which smartly zoomed in on its music school's most charismatic figure — the ex-rocker teacher — the focus here is squarely on the kids), and then show their path from trite conflict to ultimate catharsis. If the girls come up with some colorfully off-the-wall stuff — "How do you tune a taco?" one howls — this dreary doc does little more than underline the talking points. (Nuart) (Vadim Rizov)