Movie Reviews: The Happening, Poultrygeist, Savage Grace

GO  THE ANIMATION SHOW 4 In its fourth year, this traveling festival of short animated films is now minus one of its original curators — stick-figure wizard Don Hertzfeldt has declared his “retirement,” though he has urged fans to keep supporting the show. Perhaps as a direct result of leaving Mike Judge in sole control, the program this year is almost entirely comedic in nature — Hertzfeldt had more of an existential side — with the only major exception being the Swiss director Georges Schwizgebel’s “Jeu,” an M.C. Escher-like collage of interlocking images that pull out to reveal larger patterns. Titles like “Angry Unpaid Hooker” and “Yompi the Crotch-Biting Sloup” speak for themselves, and will likely elicit their fair share of “huh-huhs.” Fortunately, we also get more elaborate slapstick in Smith & Foulkes’ “This Way Up,” in which a pair of unlucky undertakers chase after a coffin that keeps eluding them by quirks of fate and timing. Soccer-playing insects, voodoo idols, crazy Russian bunnies driving cars, and a polar bear in love with a penguin are among the other highlights; only Trevor Jimenez’ “Key Lime Pie,” a film noir spoof about dessert addiction, doesn’t quite work as a story, though the animation is still cool. Bill Plympton also has a new short, and if that doesn’t excite you, you haven’t been paying attention. Go watch more cartoons. (Nuart) (Luke Y. Thompson)

Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

The Happening

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More About

• Ed Gonzalez
• Reha Erdem
• Tom Kalin
• Jessica Alba
• Animated Films

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The Happening

GO  THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME The title will be unfamiliar to most Americans; not so in Japan. The source is a sci-fi novel that’s been adapted every decade since its 1967 debut: as a film, a TV series and now, retooled into a semi-sequel, as an animated feature. Makoto (voiced by Riisa Naka), an indifferent high-school student, one day discovers that she’s inexplicably gained the ability to jump out of time — this involves literal jumping, and a litany of pratfalls. She uses the gift to mostly trivial ends (retaking a quiz, beating her little sister to a pudding cup), and also to escape the number of life-or-death situations that evidently imperil a normal teenager’s schedule. The Western world can be divided between those who are predisposed to dig anime and those who split at the first sight of spiky orange hair. I am not among the former. That said, there’s real craftsmanship in how Girl sustains its sense of summer quietude and sun-soaked haziness through a few carefully reprised motifs: three-cornered games of catch, mountainous cloud formations, classroom still-lifes. It’s basically the equivalent of a sensitively wrought read from the Young Adult shelf, and there’s naught wrong with that. (ImaginAsian Center) (Nick Pinkerton)

THE HAPPENING What a bunch of nonsense — effective nonsense, chilling nonsense, occasionally wrenching nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. This is what happens when M. Night Shyamalan tries to play both John Carpenter (bloody) and Stanley Kubrick (cold-blooded) while writing and directing what the literalist will either dismiss or embrace as the horror-film extension of An Inconvenient Truth, depending upon who the literalist thinks is responsible for, ya know, killing the planet. No spoilers here, because there’s nothing to give away — not even the alleged cause of the toxin that causes folks in the Northeast to go loopy before killing themselves with whatever’s handy (a cop’s gun, a shard of glass, a sidewalk 40 stories down ... a rototiller, ick). One minute folks are enjoying themselves in Central Park, the next, they’re stabbing and shooting themselves for the following, oh, 90 minutes, give or take. (The film’s first 10 minutes are, down to the last second, unrelentingly horrific.) Mark Wahlberg, as a Philly science teacher obsessed with the sudden decline in the bee population, and Zooey Deschanel, as his uninterested missus, plod through the Pennsylvania countryside in search of a safe haven, only they can’t find one; the toxin’s everywhere. But, if nothing else, a couple experiencing a few hiccups — she’s contemplating an affair with the voice of Shyamalan, making one of his more clever cameos — finds it easier to talk shit out when death is imminent. Which is a decent point, even if you have to avoid the piles of corpses on your way to therapy. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)

MEET BILL Is Meet Bill the worst movie ever? Probably not, but it’s certainly incoherent enough to give Gigli a run for its money. It tries hard to mimic the arch tone of the best suburban tragicomedies (American Beauty, et al.), but a surfeit of stock characters, double-wide plot holes and heavy-handed symbolism ruins the effect. Aaron Eckhart plays Bill, a mild-mannered mensch whose impossibly shrewish wife (Elizabeth Banks) is cheating on him, unrepentantly. When a hidden camera catches wife and lover in flagrante delicto, she kicks poor Bill out of the house, whereupon he enlists the aid of a lingerie saleswoman (Jessica Alba) and a precocious high-schooler (Logan Lerman) in an effort to win her back. Complicating matters is the fact that Bill works at his father-in-law’s bank, even though he secretly plans to open a doughnut franchise (which he even more secretly doesn’t want). First-time directors Bernie Goldmann and Melisa Wallack have no control of their material, not to mention their actors: Both Banks and Alba give off all the flat, cookie-cutter-sexy charisma of Victoria’s Secret print-ad models, while the usually charming Eckhart is a mess. Who encouraged him to unleash an endless parade of bizarre mannerisms, slumping his shoulders and twitching his face maniacally? It’s as if the weight of carrying this leaden film induced Tourette’s. (One Colorado) (Julia Wallace)