Movie Reviews: Twilight, Dostana, Eden

Dostana

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• Robert Davi
• Hollywood
• Breda
• Shamim Sarif
• Eileen Walsh

GO TOOTS Toots Shor, self-described “saloon keeper” and proprietor of the eponymous Midtown bar that once was the watering hole of choice for New York’s native and visiting celebrities, is the subject of this fond biographical doc by granddaughter Kristi Jacobson. Copious clips of Shor on vintage interview shows — This Is Your Life, Person to Person — help to illustrate his rise from a street-fighting Jew holding his own in Italian South Philly to the bon vivant public face of postwar New York nightlife (a transition likely made with help from mob contacts established during hulking Toots’ time as a nightclub bouncer). Toots paces itself well enough not to wear thin the charms of its brusque, gargoyle-grinning subject, though it falls prey to familiar historical-documentary banalities, telescoping entire decades into peppy montage and lubricating everything with anonymously “brassy” jazz. The film is most enamored, naturally, with the era of its subject’s greatest influence, the ’50s; one’s reaction to Toots is therefore largely determined by one’s taste for Madison Avenue back slapping, broiled steaks, alcoholic journalists and self-amused “You had to be there” celebrity prankishness, all lovingly recalled by a litany of gargle-voiced sportswriters and Gay Talese, who hogs the best one-liners. (Downtown Independent) (Nick Pinkerton)

TWILIGHT Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular novel, Twilight — the first in a four-book series about a 17-year-old girl who falls in love with the hunky vampire who sits next to her in biology class — bored me silly, but that’s clearly a minority opinion. In the novel, Bella and her cold-to-the-touch lothario, Edward, talk and talk and talk. For the beautifully photographed (by cinematographer Elliot Davis) film version, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg (bless her) has pared the couple’s blather to the essentials, as when Edward (Robert Pattinson) says to Bella (Kristen Stewart), “You’re my own personal brand of heroin.” Poor girl. How could she not succumb? Actually, Bella’s in love/lust the moment she walks into her new Pacific Northwest high school and sees Edward, who shuns her, and then loves her obsessively. Eventually, he introduces her to his progressive vampire family — they eat wild animals, not people — and invites her for a game of bloodsucker baseball, where they encounter a vampire thug (Cam Gigandet), who begins stalking Bella. Director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown) has drawn strong, star-making performances from her two leads, but in the end, she’s clearly no more interested in vampires than Meyer herself. In the 17-million-copy land of Twilight, the calling card isn’t blood and fangs but the exquisite, shimmering quiver of unconsummated first love. By that measure, the movie version gives really good swoon. (Citywide) (Chuck Wilson)