Movie Reviews: Adam, Aliens in the Attic, The Collector

G-FORCE
The premise, punched-up puns, and character development are more lightweight than the helium balloons in Up, but Disney’s new CGI-heavy excuse to flood the market with kiddie merch (it’s the year’s first 3-D commercial, and we’re the real guinea pigs) has a box-office trick up its shallow sleeve: Jerry Bruckheimer. Amping up the Beverly Hills Chihuahua formula with a whole A-team of adorable, talking furballs who converse in one-liners and pop culture references (Apocalypse Now and Scarface, really?), the mega-producer’s stamp is on every fight sequence, explosion and ugly stereotype. I’m referring to Blaster, one of the genetically modified guinea pigs in G-Force — a federally funded team of elite animal operatives — who is literally black, speaks in buffoonish jive, and is voiced by Tracy Morgan (“Holla!”). Penélope Cruz plays the spicy she-pig Juarez, but more embarrassing is Zach Galifianakis, apparently still hungover and forced to show his live-action mug as the nerdy Dr. Dolittle, who commands the squad with voice-recognition hardware. Together, along with a fly, a mole and the competent direction of longtime F/X supervisor Hoyt Yeatman Jr., these charmless happy-meal avatars must battle evil industrialist Bill Nighy and his sentient consumer-electronics robot, which looks exactly like a junkyard Decepticon. From recycled trash to inevitable blockbuster gold, Bruckheimer is the true transformer. (Citywide) (Aaron Hillis)

LOCAL COLOR
For a purportedly autobiographical work, the events of this labor of love from director George Gallo (whose screenwriting credits include Midnight Run and Bad Boys) fit seamlessly into the fabric of the standard coming-of-age movie. John (Trevor Morgan), a fledgling aesthete from a working-class family whose father (Ray Liotta) equates artistic inclinations with effeminacy, seeks out the tutelage of Nikolai (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a foul-mouthed, vodka-guzzling painter who has given up on art and life. The year is 1974, and Nikolai’s career as an old-fashioned paint-and-brushes man has foundered under the rise of abstraction, which he constantly rails against, dishing up equal servings of profanity and profundity in a thick Russian accent that’s supposed to cut through all the bullshit and pretension on display. Over the course of a life-changing summer at Nikolai’s country house, John learns about more than just color theory, thanks to the ministrations of an older woman (Samantha Mathis), and it seems inevitable that before the credits roll, the kid will also have inspired a new lease on artistic life in the old master. This painlessly tasteful film serves both as propaganda — simplistically championing the integrity of representational art over sordid modernism — and as an inspirational tale in which one discovers that in the art world, as in Hollywood, dreams really can come true. With Ron (Hellboy) Perlman providing comic relief as a grotesque cravat-sporting art dealer. (Music Hall; Fallbrook 7) (John Tottenham)

LORNA’S SILENCE
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, secular worker-priests of the Belgian cinema, emerge once more from their lower depths. In describing one of their movies, you describe them all. Their characters are the victims of soggy street-cart food and social disintegration — no God, no family or community infrastructure, no moral compass. Here, it’s Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), an Albanian living with a Belgian junkie, Claudy (Jérémie Renier). Spouse or roommate? The details casually drop into place. They’re married only as a business arrangement: Claudy got his dope money; Lorna got Belgian citizenship, which she’s scheduled to transmit through remarriage to another incoming immigrant, all arranged by phlegmatic lowlife mobster Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione). This being a Dardenne film, the protagonist is stashing money to buy a modest dream of “normal life” — Lorna wants to open a snack shop with her boyfriend. This being a Dardenne film, Lorna’s a self-preserving solipsist, blind to any harm she does getting hers, which includes having passively agreed to Fabio’s plan: murder-O.D. Claudy to expedite her divorce and next quick-cash wedding. In a sense, the Dardennes make economic horror movies, starring the dregs of the working class. Claims for something higher don’t read; the Dardennes challenge their beleaguered subjects, not themselves and not their audience. When Lorna and her ilk confront the “moral conundrums” of bare-subsistence life, no alternative answer seems viable. This leaves the viewer (impatient, in this case) to wait for the constipated soul to arrive at inevitable relief. (Royal; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Nick Pinkerton)

GO NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD
At the same moment that directors like Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong were earning festival kudos and critical acclaim for the early films of the Australian “new wave,” the more industrious/shameless likes of director Tim Burstall (“Tim liked getting tit in the shot”) and producer Antony I. Ginnane (“the Roger Corman of Australia”) were churning out low-budget quickies equally ripe for world export — albeit to the grindhouses instead of the art houses. Mark Hartley’s boisterous film-buff documentary Not Quite Hollywoodpays loving homage to the latter camp, who played an equally important role in the 1970s revival of a moribund Aussie film industry, even as their movies popularized the notion of the outback as a haven for loose women, slobbering boozers, and homicidal biker gangs. Mostly alive and well and happy to share their war stories before Hartley’s camera, these “Ozploitation” mavens run the gamut from larger-than-life, carnival-barker hucksters (like The ABC of Love and Sex: Australia Style impresario John D. Lamond, interviewed in front of a pole-hugging go-go dancer) to ingenious genre purveyors (like George “Mad Max” Miller and the late Richard Franklin, whose Hitchcock-inspired Patrick and Roadgames beg rediscovery). But the talking heads here are routinely upstaged by the exploding ones — plus lots of jiggling jugs and airborne motorbikes — provided by Hartley’s exuberant film-clip montages. The rise of video and the death of the drive-ins would eventually bring the curtain down on the Aussie schlock industry, but for two glorious hours, Not Quite Hollywood returns us to a time when the price of admission was cheap and the thrills even cheaper. (Nuart) (Scott Foundas)