Movie Reviews: The End of the Line, The Proposal, Whatever Works

SUPERSTAR Art-house audiences who like a little Touchstone Pictures in their foreign films would do well to seek out Superstar, an Iranian twist on Hollywood comedies like The Game Plan, in which a successful but unhappy man learns important life lessons thanks to the unwelcome arrival of a precocious child he never knew he had. Arrogant film star Kurosh Zand (Shahab Hosseini) is drowning in women and debt when he encounters Raha (Fattaneh Malek-Mohammadi), a young girl who claims she’s his child through a former lover, who recently died of cancer. Kurosh initially suspects a scam but slowly begins to believe Raha, allowing her to live with him while he waits for a paternity test. Writer-director Tahmineh Milani’s light drama travels down the expected narrative paths — even its twist comes right on schedule — and delivers the anticipated platitudes about the importance of personal bonds over material possessions. But even if nothing here surprises, it should be noted that where its American counterparts would settle for coarse, kid-friendly humor and mawkish sentimentality, at least Superstar exhibits a tender, intelligent sweetness, which helps to temper the utter conventionality and more melodramatic moments. (Music Hall) (Tim Grierson)

WHATEVER WORKS Whatever Works is Woody Allen’s first New York movie after five years abroad. It’s his first in even longer to center on the Woody Allen character — an urban neurotic, here named Boris Yellnikoff and brashly played by Larry David. Toughened and (relatively) rejuvenated by David’s aggressive performance, the Allen surrogate is introduced treating his friends to a lecture on the “God racket.” Nothing especially new — Allen wrote this script 30 years ago and intended it for no less a force of nature than Zero Mostel. What gives the material weight is the curmudgeon’s derisive half-smile. Nastier than David’s character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Boris is a cousin to insult comedian Don Rickles — a smug, self-absorbed, argumentative nudnik with unshakable faith in his listeners’ stupidity and his own “huge worldview.” Whatever Works shifts into gear when Boris finds a teenage runaway named Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood) camped out in front of his anachronistically shabby downtown digs, and grudgingly takes her in. Of course, Melodie is also a type. She’s a cheerful, optimistic, winsome Mississippi belle. They “date” (he takes her to Grant’s Tomb and Yonah Schimmel’s knishery), and, living out the Woodman’s fondest fantasy, they marry. Melodie’s parents — white-bread Jesus-praising “aborigines,” as their son-in-law characterizes them — arrive in New York, and the movie dons its jammies and goes to sleep. To drown Boris’ bitterness in a vat of Manischewitz is the aesthetic equivalent of depraved indifference. Whatever Works illustrates, even as it names, Allen’s artistic limitations. For an expanded version of this review, go to www.laweekly.com/movies. (ArcLight Hollywood; Landmark; Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (J. Hoberman)

YEAR ONE Unbearably painful from shrugging start to outtakes-laden finish, Harold Ramis’ half-assed, hare-brained return to writing and directing makes Mel Brooks’ equally muddled, soporific History of the World, Part 1 look downright majestic by comparison — and comparisons are inevitable. Sixteen long years after Groundhog Day, perhaps the greatest American comedy of the 1990s, this is instead the Harold Ramis responsible for Club Paradise — the unfocused and unhinged sketch comedian for whom no laugh’s too cheap, as evidenced by scenes involving the eating of shit, the tossing of testicles and the streaming of urine all over Michael Cera’s face. Released under the Judd Apatow banner, Year One is a hollow, cynical exercise in juvenilia, and the cast of thousands look like they’d rather be anywhere other than the desert, pretending to be biblical outcasts. Jack Black, as hunter Zed, has never worked so hard for so little. Cera, as gatherer Oh, can’t even obscure his embarrassment behind the strands of a cheap and ill-fitting wig. Not one of the comedy all-stars that Ramis enlisted — among them Paul Rudd, whose cameo as Abel lasts all of 30 seconds and still runs too long; David Cross as bro-killin’ Cain; and Hank Azaria as son-sacrificing Abraham — can wring a single laugh from a screenplay that pauses for a moment to contemplate the existence of God between squeezing out sharts. Year One serves as irrefutable proof that He does not exist. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)