Movie Reviews: The Tale of Despereaux, The Yellow Handkerchief, Yes Man

GO  GOMORRAH Matteo Garrone’s dramatic portrait of the notorious Italian Mafia organization Neapolitan Camorra focuses on the ancillary figures who, willingly or not, prop up the mob’s activities. The five interwoven narratives in this visceral but disciplined and beautifully acted movie show to devastating effect how ordinary men and women — and especially vulnerable boys desperate for masculine role models — get caught up in the seductive violence and are ruthlessly destroyed by the network’s hardened henchmen. It’s hard to tell whether the movie exaggerates the Mafia’s reach deep into and pollution of the infrastructure of everyday life, laying the groundwork for guerrilla-style civil war. Given Gomorrah’s arch referencing of the brutality in Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, I could wish Garrone were a little less excited himself by the brutality he stretches over 136 long minutes. And if he, too, like author Roberto Saviano (upon whose best-selling exposé the film is based), is forced to leave Italy for fear of mob reprisal, will he be denied entrance to the United States on the grounds that one of the Camorra’s real-life business ventures is helping to underwrite the rebuilding of the Twin Towers in New York? (Sunset 5) (Ella Taylor)

MY NAME IS BRUCE If your ears perk up at the mere mention of a fourth Evil Dead movie, or you tune in to Burn Notice just for co-star Bruce Campbell, then My Name Is Bruce was made precisely with you in mind. A cult B-movie legend to throngs of fanboys who love sardonic zingers delivered with hammed-up machismo, Campbell takes it on the chin as director and meta-star of this juvenile horror/comedy, a self-serving tribute thinly veiled in self-deprecation. Campbell plays himself as a pompous, washed-up oaf who lives in a desert trailer, regularly drunk-dials his ex-wife, and laments taking degrading roles like Cave Alien 2, albeit in a universe where characters quote his old catch phrases and reference his straight-to-video dreck as punch lines. Mistaken for the hero he plays onscreen, Campbell is kidnapped one night by a goth teen (and superfan, naturally) in the hopes that he’ll save the kid’s podunk town from Guan-di, the glowing-eyed Chinese god of war and bean curd who has been accidentally resurrected. With a high-camp villain that seems to have escaped from Bubba Ho-tep, slapstick scares à la Evil Dead, and Ted Raimi playing three different roles, the only things missing from this unfunny Campbell love fest are a passable script, Sam Raimi’s inventiveness and a level of sophistication beyond nose-picking and ass grabs. (Nuart) (Aaron Hillis)

RAB NE BANA DI JODI Working with actor Shah Rukh Khan in the 1995 record-breaker Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Braveheart Wins the Bride), writer, director and latter-day production executive Aditya Chopra re-imagined the Hindi movie hero as an obstreperous romantic, tunefully refusing to take no for an answer. In Chopra’s new Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (A Match Made by God), SRK again stubbornly lays siege to the affections of a woman who is (for form’s sake) temporarily hesitant, this time cast not as a strapping student but as a mousey milquetoast of a functionary for the Punjab Power Company, who, with his pursed lips and fussy cleanliness, hopes to win love through small gestures of affection. The other twist here is that, as the movie opens, Khan’s Surinder Sahni is already married to his idol, Taani (Anushka Sharma), a match arranged on his deathbed by her father, Surinder’s revered former teacher. “I can never love you,” Taani tells Surinder sadly on their wedding day, and no Shah Rukh Khan character worth his salt is going to take that one lying down. When Taani admits she’s always wanted to learn to dance, and Surinder happily agrees, the way ahead seems clear: Ever since Astaire and Rogers, smooth footwork has been the ideal medium of movie-musical courtship. (Newcomer Sharma turns out to be a charming comedic sparring partner and also a fabulous hoofer.) RNBDJ, in fact, always seems to be right on the verge of blossoming into a classic, but while no actor on Earth could gaze at a woman and lip-synch a line like “Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hai” (“I See My God in You”) with as much conviction as King Khan, the romantic declarations feel too grandiose for this modest-spirited movie. The only character sensible enough to offer a word of demurral (“We are human beings only, yaar, not gods”) is a comic relief barber, big-hearted Bobby Khosla (Vinay Pathak), who snips off Surinder’s moustache and gels his hair into a leaning tower, in a nod to the loopiest of all Bolly-cinema conventions, the Double Role. With the help of his impenetrable disguise, Surinder approaches Taani on the dance floor as Raj, exactly the sort of wild and crazy Punjabi guy a mild-mannered bureaucrat would envision as his polar opposite. The impersonation is set up with a wink and a clever twist, but its consequences are psychologically incoherent. As Bobby cogently observes, Raj wouldn’t seem so real to Taani if he hadn’t been in there somewhere all along. So why does the movie endorse the disappointing view that only the muffled, nerdy version of Surinder is authentic and lovable? In effect, the oppressed Taani is allowed to open up but the repressed Surinder is not, which hardly seems fair. (Fallbrook 7; Laguna Hills Mall Cinema; Naz 8 Artesia; Naz 8 Riverside; Norwalk 8) (David Chute)