Movie Reviews: Ben X, Four Christmases, Special, Transporter 3

THE BEAUTIFUL TRUTH Writer-director Steve Kroschel’s documentary preaches (and preaches and preaches) the gospel of Dr. Max Gerson, who, in the 1920s, developed a dietary regimen that advocated organic juices, vegetarian meals and coffee enemas as a way to boost the body’s immune system. Despite evidence that the treatment helped to cure cancer by ridding patients of the chemicals contained in processed foods, the Gerson Therapy continues to be dismissed by pharmaceutical companies and vilified by the American Cancer Society. With that in mind, you might expect The Beautiful Truth to be a David-versus-Goliath exposé on how corporations stand in the way of individual health, as they pursue the almighty dollar, but that’s merely scratching the surface of this condescending, manipulative film. Kroschel organizes his argument around Garrett, a home-schooled 15-year-old whose studies about the Gerson Therapy provoke him to investigate its validity. Actually, it’s Kroschel who seems to be provoking the investigation, using Garrett as a passive prop to push the writer’s agenda — the nearly mute kid spends most of the film getting talked at by cancer survivors and scientists, who tell him how evil the mainstream medical community is. Kroschel positions The Beautiful Truth as a sort of instructional video for young people on the merits of eating healthy, but its creepy messianic vibe is far more toxic than all the pollutants in all the processed food you could ever consume. (Music Hall) (Tim Grierson)

GO  BEN X The best movie I’ve seen about teen angst since Donnie Darko comes from Belgium? It’s also the best film about a bullied teen with Asperger’s syndrome that I’ve seen from any country, and its blurred life-into-vid-game fantasy sequences make it seem doubly topical. Ben (Greg Timmermans) spends waaay too much time logged onto a multiuser fantasy role-playing game, but what other consolation does he have in life? His peers torment him; girls won’t look his way; and his divorced parents seem powerless to help. Onscreen, however, his pimple-faced avatar smites rival warriors and wins a comely princess (whose braces make her resemble a certain girl from his high school class). Timmermans looks too old for his character, whose past-tense voice-overs portend a certain ominous, Columbine-style denouement, but director Nic Balthazar — adapting his own novel — has carefully constructed Ben X so that its twist ending isn’t borrowed or cheap. And the barrage of screen graphics, text messages and cell phone videos speaks to modern teens’ isolation-in-connectivity. “2 late 2 heal,” Ben texts his vid-game paramour. You don’t have to be Belgian to know that feeling. (Nuart) (Brian Miller)

Film Movement

Related Content

• I Had Zero Interest in Celebrity Home Tours...Until I Went on One
  July 19, 2012
• This Means War Review
  February 16, 2012
• Lay the Favorite Review: Rebecca Hall Almost Saves Stephen Frears' Sports-Betting Film
  December 6, 2012
• Fast & Furious & Elegant: Justin Lin and the Vulgar Auteurs
  May 23, 2013
• LAUSD Expels Styrofoam Lunch Trays from School
  August 27, 2012

More About

• Greg Timmermans
• David Chute
• Aaron Hillis
• Movie Stars
• Celebrity News

FIX You wouldn’t guess this by reading the film histories of the period, but, back in the day, most of us who were young and sentient scornfully dismissed the bogus counterculture costume dramas (like Easy Rider) that supposedly gave voice to our frustration. One can only hope that a few of today’s yutes will roll their eyes just as dismissively at Tao Ruspoli’s Fix, a shakey-cam odyssey across Los Angeles, from Beverly Hills to Watts, with a carload of drug dealers of convenience, in which almost nothing rings true. Ruspoli, who was the film’s director, co-writer and first-person cameraman, plays a documentary filmmaker doggedly recording every moment of his attempt to deliver his self-destructive ex-con brother (Shawn Andrews, in an entertaining, showboat performance) to a court-ordered stint in rehab. The lead-weight irony is that they may have to score and re-sell some pot to earn the cash needed to buy into the program. Ruspoli, it must be said, is an impressive rough-hewn stylist: Every grainy, bleached-out image is as artfully tousled as a $500 haircut. The slathered-on visual textures aren’t quite enough, however, to distract us from the glib, leftie posturing, the lazy writing (which confuses Tourettic obscenity with low-life authenticity) and the drug-deep existential platitudes (“Fear may be the only thing stronger than grief”). The director’s real-life wife, the alert and intelligent actress Olivia Wilde (House), comes along for the ride, and man, does he owe her one, because the movie would be a lot less watchable without her. (Downtown Independent) (David Chute)

FOUR CHRISTMASES To brand, then dismiss, this seasonal allergen as a disappointment would be giving it too much credit — never, for a second, did this New Line Cinema castoff scream or even whisper decent in the run-up to its opening. The story of couple Kate (Reese Witherspoon) and Brad (Vince Vaughn) — not married, might as well be — who, fogged in on December 25, put their planned Fiji frolic on hold to visit their four divorced parents in the course of a single day, Four Christmases doesn’t offer a single surprise within its scant 82 minutes, which feel like at least twice that. There’s happiness and cheer and more than the occasional tear dropped between shouting matches and withering stares, all pre-assembled and gift-wrapped by the ho-ho-hos at The Studio. There was every reason to hope for more. Four Christmases was directed by Seth Gordon, whose 2007 The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters was a bittersweet, hilarious documentary in which a cocky mullet squares off against a sweet doofus over a Donkey Kong machine. And Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon seemed as sure a thing as pancakes and bacon on Christmas morning. But even there, the pairing’s off: He’s too much, she’s too little. The movie’s pace is lethargic; it desperately needs a laugh track. Only, the joke’s terrible to begin with. Still, not as bad as Vaughn’s last movie: Fred Claus, last year’s holiday lump of coal. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)