Movie Reviews: High School Musical 3, Passengers, Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom

 
HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR My child made me promise I wouldn’t come on all ’60s-righteous about this one, and Lord knows how I’ve tried to focus on the potential of Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens and all the other vanilla muffins making their leap from small to big screen. But truly, High School Musical 3: Senior Year is as far as all but one of the cast (Ashley Tisdale, a lone standout as the mildly mean girl Sharpay) will be going other than straight to Dancing With the Stars. Set against a production design seemingly inspired by the American flag, director Kenny Ortega’s choreography is industrial and efficient, if haplessly stranded somewhere between Michael Jackson and the Village People. Should we be grateful that no one in this color-blind, class-free, odorless and colorless crew does heroin, gets pregnant or jumps off a cliff? Maybe, but unless you call “Should I go to Juilliard or Berkeley?” a heavy dilemma, HSM 3 isn’t about anything beyond the impulse to burst into tuneless song and dance every five minutes, interwoven with a wan ripoff of All About Eve. However they’ve colluded in making HSM one of the most lucrative TV youth franchises ever, the world’s tweens and teens deserve better than this bottomlessly bland pap. On the way home, we rented West Side Story and Hairspray. (Citywide) (Ella Taylor)

 
GO  LET THE RIGHT ONE IN Terrible title, brilliant film. In '80s Stockholm, an outcast boy named Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is routinely bullied at school until a mysterious girl his age, Eli (Lina Leandersson), moves in next door. She too feels isolated and rejected by the world outside, but for very different reasons; could be, I dunno, something to do with her taste for human blood and ability to fly. Tomas Alfredson, whose prior credits are primarily on Swedish TV shows, makes an astute leap to the big screen with this coming-of-age/horror hybrid that not only delivers gorgeous wintry panoramas but also the requisite metaphors — in this case, vampirism as both adolescent power fantasy and terminal-disease medicament. When it comes to preteens as eternal vampires, Kirsten Dunst in Interview With the Vampire used to be the gold standard; in Leandersson, I think we have a new champion. And if you ever wanted to know what exactly happens to vampires if they enter your house without being first invited across the threshold, this may be the first movie to show the consequences in graphic detail. (Sunset 5; Playhouse 7) (Luke Y. Thompson) 

 
MAX PAYNE If Oscars were handed out for fake snow, director John Moore’s bleary, dreary, sub–Sin City big-screen video game would clean up like Ben-Hur: by the 50th exterior shot strewn with fistfuls of art-directed dandruff, a viewer stuck in this film noir snow globe feels like W.C. Fields in “The Fatal Glass of Beer.” Trudging sullenly through Moore’s winter wonderland is avenging lawman Mark Wahlberg, tracking the syndicate responsible for his family’s murder. The role requires Wahlberg to run the gamut of emotions, from A to A as he opens doors, glowers, assembles guns, glowers, points guns, glowers — and, for a big finish, glowers. (Even if he endows Max Payne with min brayne, the actor still comes off better than Mila Kunis, a vengeful assassin by way of a Macy’s makeup counter, or Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, who plays badass Lieutenant Bravura as if his name were Rookie Nondescript.) At least the summer’s dunderheaded Wanted indulged its thrill-junkie jones for destruction without shame: Apart from one cool effects shot of a dragon-winged demon whisking a thug from a high-rise window — you’ve seen it in the trailer — and a constructivist fistfight rendered in comic-book panels of discrete motion, this joyless, humorless third-person-shooter cheats even on its modest promise of mindless mayhem. The only moment that even mildly ruffles the harbinger-of-doom PG-13 rating belongs to future Bond girl Olga Kurylenko, who peels off her dress with NC-17 aplomb — then vanishes from the movie, proving more adept than anyone else involved at dodging a bullet. (Citywide) (Jim Ridley)

 
NOAH’S ARC: JUMPING THE BROOM Modeled heavily on Sex and the City (problem #1) and set in West Hollywood (problem #2), the canceled Noah’s Arc cable series followed the same-gender-loving Negro lives and loves of 20-something struggling screenwriter Noah and his three older, if not always wiser, friends, Ricky, Chance and Alex. Like the cinematic version of its maternal root, the Noah’s Arc film, Jumping the Broom, centers on the bumpy road to marriage — an especially timely subject to which the film brings heavy-handed polemics, teary bust-ups and reconciliations and lots of slapstick comedy but no real insight or depth. After settling on Martha’s Vineyard for the upcoming bougie-fabulous wedding of Wade and Noah, the fellas are put through the paces of addiction; school-boy crushes; cheating hearts; familial homophobia; lectures on AIDS, adoption and African babies; and the reappearance of a certain queer British rapper. And that’s just for starters. It’s a wearying checklist that would be daunting even in the hands of a more talented filmmaker than series creator (and Jumping the Broom director-co-writer) Patrick Ian Polk. While there are some solid chuckles scattered throughout the film, Polk’s heavy-handed political sloganeering is lifted straight from pamphlets, while his character development and plotting are clumsy and filled with holes. The ensemble acting is, putting it kindly, wildly uneven. Worst of all for a project that’s always confused designer labels for social awareness and political progress, Polk lacks the visual skills to pull us into the film’s fetishizing of the so-called good life. (Sunset 5) (Ernest Hardy)