Movie Reviews: City of Ember, Quarantine, Rocknrolla

 
GO LOLA MONTÈS A legendary disaster on its initial release, and consequently one of the great causes célèbres of auteurist film criticism, Max Ophüls’ Franco-German swan song Lola Montès follows a record third inclusion in the New York Film Festival with a weeklong run at two local cinemas. Ophüls’ ironic superproduction — as garish and vulgar as any mid-’50s Hollywood costume drama, albeit knowingly so — takes the career of the 19th-century adventuress Lola Montès as the basis for a meditation on the spectacle of stardom. A new digital restoration, including five “lost” minutes, only heightens this pop art premise. The restored version has the cleaned-up color and hyper-real clarity of a refurbished antique diner. Exploding out from the screen, Martine Carol’s lips put the redness in red. The opening sequence is filled with promise, camera and characters cavorting around static Lola (Carol), the central attraction in a fantastic circus. But the movie grinds to a halt 10 minutes into the delirium, with the diva and her current lover, Franz Liszt, ensconced in a deluxe traveling carriage, and never after regains its momentum. There are moments when Ophüls’ deconstructed historical pageant anticipates more radical films by Manoel de Oliveira and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, who made a movie about Lola’s royal lover, Mad Ludwig of Bavaria. But, a lesser film than Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown ­Woman, let alone The Earrings of Madame D ..., Lola Montès can be shockingly inert — a staleSachertorte that might have worked as a silent film or an awkward early talkie. Of course, Lola Montès is also a footnote in the psychohistory of taste. Like its subject, the movie demonstrated the power to cloud men’s minds. After its 1963 showing at the NYFF, Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris announced he’d stake his critical reputation on the proposition that Lola Montèswas the greatest film of all time — repeating the assertion throughout the decade. Not until Pauline Kael pledged allegiance to Last Tango in Paris in 1973 would an American critic fall so hard. (Royal, Playhouse 7) (J. Hoberman)

 
LOWER LEARNING Things are going downhill fast at L.A.’s Geraldine Ferraro Elementary School, where the coke-snorting principal, Mr. Billings (Rob Corddry, from The Daily Show), is embezzling funds, P.E. class consists of boxing matches between fourth- and fifth-graders, and disillusioned teachers dose their students with Nyquil to keep them quiet. “Shop class,” Billings announces over the intercom, “has been cancelled until the finger is found.” In this foul-mouthed comedy, writer-director Mark Lafferty fires off a few resonant side jokes about grade school, from that shop class incident to the eagerness with which teachers and students alike await the recess bell. But mostly, Lafferty is all about expletives and sexual innuendo of the frankest kind, some of it so raunchy (and unfunny) as to make one wonder if the parents of the film’s many child actors bothered to read the script. One could ask the same of Desperate Housewives’ Eva Longoria Parker and American Pie’s Jason Biggs, who star as two administrators trying to rescue the school from the evil principal. They’re pros, and do their jobs well enough, but good grief, why are they here? This is major career regression. One assumes they’re doing the filmmakers a favor for some reason, which makes them heroes, or fools, or both. (Sunset 5) (Chuck Wilson)

City of Ember

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GO QUARANTINE The megaplex boneyard is littered with inferior U.S. remakes of superior overseas horror films, and their existence is even more galling when they keep the originals from getting domestic distribution. It’s a shame that this English-language cover of an excellent Spanish shocker will eclipse the original, at least in U.S. theaters — but even those who despise remakes will have to admit that director John Erick Dowdle’s furious retread is scary as hell. (Unless, that is, they’ve seen the idiot trailer, which gives away the entire damn movie down to the last shot.) Practically a scene-for-scene re-creation, the U.S. version retains the setting — an apartment building under siege by zombie contagion — as well as the gimmick: The movie unfolds in on-the-spot news footage shot by the unlucky crew penned up inside. Far more convincing than Cloverfield or Diary of the Dead in its fake found-footage ambience, Quarantine wisely spends its first 15 minutes acclimating the audience to its chirpy feature-reporter heroine (Jennifer Carpenter). From there, it’s utterly relentless as the dwindling dwellers lunge through infested corridors in gradually vanishing light. The lack of music, the nerve-wracking sound design, the suggestive lighting, and the unobtrusive cutting combine to keep us off-guard, but it’s the ensemble (Steve Harris, Jay Hernandez, Johnathon Schaech) led by the appealing Carpenter that evokes batshit terror so convincingly. (Citywide) (Jim Ridley)

 
ROCKNROLLA What do you have to do to get your career revoked in England, short of being Gary Glitter? After a box-office-catastrophic two-movie run, Guy Ritchie takes another mulligan and returns to “form” — though his tics and tricks have never added up to more than cockney-accented novelty mixed with 2 Days in the Valley dross. A new pack of capering yobs (some guy from 300, Ludacris), including a Pete Doherty–esque crackhead savant, run off with one another’s loot, their various story lines cut together and the scenes temporally shuffled with enough sleight-of-editing to keep up a semblance of kineticism. Brick-shithouse-built rough boys are given “unexpected colors” (something that, in productions of this nature, is entirely to be expected), such as a taste for Merchant-Ivory films. Digressive soliloquies casually linger on such ephemera as American crayfish and the semiotics of a pack of cigarettes, belying looming violence. Why should a movie so titled have one of the most indifferent soundtracks in recent memory? Because Ritchie is a pop tart at heart (see: wife), for whom “rock & roll” has nothing to do with the weight of riffage, and everything to do with dandyish tailoring and pub-belligerent ’tude. Sum total of scenes that deserved to stay in the final cut: Thandie Newton doing a little shimmying frug. (ArcLight Hollywood, ArcLight Sherman Oaks, The Landmark) (Nick Pinkerton)