Movie Reviews: An American Carol, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Flash of Genius

 
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE Based on Toby Young’s tome about his spectacular fuck-ups and flame-out at Vanity Fair, Robert Weide’s big-screen version is sitcom-drab. Simon Pegg plays Young, reducing the writer — in the book version, a narcissistic twat who aspired to be Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, sans the looks or talent — to nothing more than a barely functioning idiot, a cretin clad in a “Young, Dumb and Full of Come” T-shirt whose loutishness is outmatched only by his inability to function as a human being. Worse, the story’s been turned into a romantic comedy, in which Simon woos his considerably smarter though no less self-absorbed superior, Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst), who’s fucking an editor (Danny Huston) who seems to be speaking in four different accents at once, none of them quite of the English variety. It plays like a made-for-CBS redo of The Devil Wears Prada, which was likewise set at a Manhattan glossy but also happened to contain some genuinely insightful observations about the perils of workplace success. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)

 
MENTOR As aging novelist and graduate professor Sanford Pollard, Rutger Hauer shares a vocation, a shaggy gray haircut and a pair of tortoiseshell frames with the Michael Douglas character from Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys. Like Douglas’ Grady Tripp, Pollard juggles relationships with his students, carrying on a romantic liaison with the class assistant (Dagmara Dominczyk) while becoming guru to a talented young writer (Matt Davis). But whereas Douglas’s defining characteristic in Wonder Boys was his midlife fatigue, Pollard is notable for his abusive mind games and penchants for cocaine and predatory sex. You didn’t think they hired Rutger Hauer to play Mr. Chips, did you? With Hauer as cruel ringmaster, an erotic triangle develops, and eventually it feels as if director David Carl Lang has welded the plot of Indecent Proposal onto Wonder Boys’ world of bourgeois academia. All the bedroom action apparently transforms Pollard’s young protégé into a great novelist, although Davis appears no less boyish and clueless at the end of the film than he does in the beginning. Lang tells us that hanging around someone like Pollard will turn you into a great writer, but it’s hard to accept Hauer as anything other than a despicable prick. Mentor might have rung truer had it allowed Pollard to stay a monster, rather than redeeming him in a predictably heartwarming climax. (Grande 4-Plex) (Sam Sweet)

Blindness

Jia Zhangke’s Still Life: simply one of the best of the year — or any year that’s likely to come.

Related Content

• Five Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week, From Battling Curators to Banana Splits
  February 20, 2013
• Five Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week, Including '90s Flashbacks
  March 27, 2013
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Is David Lynch's Masterpiece
  May 16, 2013
• The Iraq Vote: Howard Berman's Most Momentous Achievement Is One He's Come To Regret
  June 3, 2012
• 5 Films People Will Be Talking About at Sundance
  January 15, 2013

More About

• Azhar Usman
• David Zucker
• Robert Kearns
• Movie Stars
• Celebrity News

 
NICK & NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST Peter Sollett’s 2002 film, Raising Victor Vargas, remains among the most pointed, poignant and joyful films about teen love ever made. Everything about it felt special, from its depictions of the Lower East Side of Manhattan to its cast, then-newcomers who seemed to radiate from within as they groped and coped beneath watchful eyes. Now, Sollett can only retrace those footsteps in this far lesser movie about little more than a boy (Michael Cera, once more in the Michael Cera role), a girl (Kat Dennings) and their friends cruising the streets of NYC in search of the latest, greatest, hippest band in all the land (a band we never see or hear, incidentally, which shorts the audience of at least one promised reward for making it to the movie’s end). From its indier-than-thou soundtrack — larded with the likes of Vampire Weekend, Bishop Allen and Band of Horses — to its split-second hipster cameos (Devendra Banhart, Seth Meyers, John Cho, Kevin Corrigan), this after-hours romantic comedy plays like the exact opposite of Victor Vargas: Where that movie was organic, with every scene hitting just the right note and feeling so magically accidental, Nick & Norah is like something crafted in a lab by 54-year-old hucksters trying to sell shit to the kids under the cheerless guise of “alternative.” The only thing it’s an alternative to? Good. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)

GO  OBSCENE Barney Rosset is a tragic hero. He says so himself at the end of Obscene, stating — by way of a colleague’s parting shot — what the previous 90 minutes of Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor’s very fine documentary make unstintingly and yet wistfully clear. Beginning with Rosset’s 1989 appearance on a delightfully vulgar cable-access show and a question about how he managed to lose his publishing imprint, Grove Press, in an unexpectedly hostile buyout, Obscene then reels back some 50 years, tracing the Chicago origins of a kid who grew up to fight perhaps the preeminent publishing battle of the 20th century: censorship. Much of the film and photographic material is culled from Rosset’s stunningly replete archives, and an assortment of artists, publishers and literati appears to champion and chide the man who first brought Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch to the starving bosoms of the American public. Having sold off every acre of his prime Hamptons real estate in an attempt to keep Grove afloat through the ’60s, instead of jillionaire-hood and publishing-board eminency, the 86-year-old today settles for the modest life of a cult figure with some kick left; his lit-and-naked-ladies journal, The Evergreen Review, now exists online. (Sunset 5) (Michelle Orange)