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

 
PASSENGERS Anne Hathaway has the biggest damn chestnut eyes you’ve ever seen—I spent a lot of time swimming in them, as they’re about the only thing Passengers has going for it. As a young, beautifully coiffured psychiatrist, Hathaway is assigned to depressurize the lone survivors of a commercial airline crash, and finds herself lavishing special after-hours attention on one unusually elated patient (Patrick Wilson, considerably overestimating the charm of squinty smugness). As her patients begin to mysteriously disappear, the movie shifts into “What really happened on that plane?” mode, with chills provided by the dreaded David Morse peeking around corners. Though deceptively marketed as a just-in-time-for-All-Hallow’s-Eve spooktacular, this is really a character-centered romance that non-starts on the total lack of traction between Hathaway and Wilson. The biggest shock (aside from seeing how arbitrarily movies are chosen for theatrical release) is provided by an intrusively blown newspaper. The horribly drawn-out unwinding of an Astonishing Twist Ending retrospectively absolves the film of responsibility for ridiculous scene-stagings and narrative gaffes, and confirms Passengers as a kind of declawed, inside-out Final Destination — with none of the sense of showmanship, and all the looming malice of a mawkish condolence card. (Selected theaters) (Nick Pinkerton) 

 
SAW V For fans of the deathtrap-redemption horror series and its central figure, John “Jigsaw” Kramer (Tobin Bell) — and realistically, only the die-hards are buying tickets at this point — there’s good news and there’s bad news. On the plus side, Saw V director David Hackl, who conceived most of the elaborate contraptions in prior installments, brings an enthusiasm to the table that Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II-Saw IV) seemed to have lost last time around. He also smartly reverts to the Saw II formula of a co-operative series of traps for a group of five victims that plays like a reality show from hell, here interspersed with the search for the late Jigsaw’s new protégé, revealed in part IV to be Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor). Unfortunately, both Mandylor and Scott Patterson, who returns as fellow Saw IV survivor Agent Strahm, are uninteresting stiffs; worse still are the flashbacks that retroactively place Hoffman in numerous key scenes from the first three films, completely undercutting the relationship between Jigsaw and former protégée Amanda (Shawnee Smith) that was once the heart of the story. The method to the madness of the traps turns out to be quite clever, but the rewriting of Saw mythology is the slasher equivalent of revising Star Wars so that Greedo fires at Han Solo first. (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)

 
GO   THE TREE OF LIFE Throbbing with midlife crisis after a brush with cancer, Los Angeles–based electronics engineer Hava Volterra journeys to Italy in search of deep background about her late father, a physicist. In Israel, where she grew up, in the ghettos of Venice and in the town of Volterra, which gave her family its name, she digs up a pretty interesting family tree and a truly fascinating history of Italian-Jewish life from the 15th century through the Holocaust, enhanced by interviews with historians in Italy and Israel and some nifty animation and marionette puppetry. One sympathizes with Volterra’s yearning to find out more about her “doting” but remote father, yet he remains a shadowy and not altogether likable figure, who, despite being a devout Communist, felt humiliated by his failure to win a Nobel Prize. Trotting out her family’s illustrious pedigree as scientists, bankers and politicians at every turn, Volterra appears to have inherited some of his intellectual snobbery. Fortunately, her affinity for Italian stereotypes is countered with delightful truculence by the film’s most engaging character, her down-to-earth octogenarian aunt Viviana, who enjoys her work in the kibbutz laundry, entertains kids with puppets on the side, and won’t stand for any bullshit about the romantic essence of the Mediterranean temperament. (Music Hall) (Ella Taylor)

 
TRU LOVED Writer-director Stewart Wade’s Tru Loved is a kitschier incarnation of an afterschool special: hokey and simplistic, but also gawkily sweet-natured. Recently relocated from San Francisco to the suburbs, Tru (Najarra Townsend) and family — composed of her two lesbian mothers and two gay fathers — are introduced via faux-’50s sitcom stylings, with the movie temporarily switching from candy-color to black-and-white, as cast members trot out to jaunty music. That ironic impulse coexists somewhat uncomfortably with Tru Loved’s sincerity. Drawn to the newcomer’s outsider edge, high school quarterback Lodell (Matthew Thompson) strikes up a romance with Tru, only to confess to his closeting shortly thereafter. (The film could’ve been titled But I’m a Football Player.) “I didn’t say I’d be your Katie Holmes,” she protests, before reluctantly agreeing to provide social cover for Lo by pretending to be his girlfriend. Matters are complicated when Tru spearheads a gay-straight alliance club with openly out Walter (Tye Olson) and starts secretly dating straight dream-boat Trevor (Jake Abel). Fluffiness aside, the film’s multicultural microcosm does have a giddying effect: Tru Loved offers a utopian vision of inclusiveness you wish the world would embrace. (Music Hall; One Colorado) (Kristi Mitsuda)