Movie Reviews: A Woman in Berlin, A Perfect Getaway, Paper Heart

FRAGMENTS Previously and more embarrassingly known as Winged Creatures, Fragments peers into the private lives of a dozen or so drama queens who survive a shooting spree inside an L.A. diner. From the grisly chaos, Dakota Fanning’s brace-faced teen emerges as a Jesus freak, seemingly planting the seeds of a potential Jonestown, when she begins to creepily recruit classmates for group prayer, while a cancer-stricken schlub played by Forest Whitaker is transformed into a kissing cousin of Lost’s Hurley, winning a hundred grand playing craps before his luck evaporates along with the halter top belonging to the whore who manipulates his cock into her mouth. Such is the level of nuance and texture on display here that Kate Beckinsale’s peroxide blonde is meant to be understood as trash because she chews gum like a cow in heat, but at least the title of Rowan Woods’ misshapen and overreaching melodrama is apt, cobbled as it is from anxiously undigested allusions to war and birds and grief. Hard to say what is more inexplicable — why Guy Pearce’s hot doc poisons his wife or how urine became a plot clincher. But this much is clear: The hell that Paul Haggis hath wrought grows exponentially by the day. (Music Hall) (Ed Gonzalez)

GI JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA Credited as the first “action figure,” G.I. Joe came to life in 1964 as Hasbro’s answer to Mattel’s Barbie doll. There were actually four Joes — one for each branch of the armed forces — and in the imaginations of boys everywhere, they fought Nazis. Forty-odd years later, the Joes have evolved into an international band of soldiers seeking to bring down the evil Cobra Command. In the first of what’s likely to be a lucrative new film series, director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, Van Helsing) outfits actors Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans in “accelerator suits” that allow them to jump cars and buses in a single bound as they and their team attempt to retrieve a suitcase containing nano technology that a lunatic billionaire (Christopher Eccleston) plans to use for world domination. After a first hour that plays like a bad TV show, Sommers hits his groove with an over-the-top Paris chase sequence that, in turn, leads to an underwater finale that’s absurdly overproduced, momentarily diverting, and then instantly forgettable. The script — by Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, and Paul Lovett — is full of embarrassingly bad dialogue, but a recent midnight screening audience laughed benignly, as if to say that they hadn’t exactly been expecting profundity and wit from a summer-season toy-soldier flick. (Citywide) (Chuck Wilson)

Yevgeni Sidikhin

German-Soviet relations

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PAPER HEART A documentary except when it’s a mockumentary, this is all kinds of adorable and heartbreaking — the doc part, at least, in which Charlyne Yi (Martin Starr’s girlfriend in Knocked Up) sets out to cross the country and find the meaning of True Love because she’s pretty damned sure she’ll never experience it herself. Sad, right? Except it isn’t: Along the way, Yi bumps into Movie Stars who don’t buy her bull (Seth Rogen tells Yi her “love glass is half full”) and True Believers whose fairy tales she recounts, using crude, whimsical homemade puppets. It’s like those old folks’ interludes from When Harry Met Sally as interpreted by a sweet hipster naïf. The mock part, though, feels a little too mock: At a bold-faced Hollywood house party, Yi bumps into Michael Cera, and his instant crush on the gawkward comic turns into the love affair Yi never thought within her grasp. The scenes with Cera play a bit darker than intended, as Cera’s crush evolves into full-on stalking, but director Nicholas Jasenovec plays the thing with so much deadpan earnestness that it’s easy to miss the high “creepy” factor. Cera begins ingratiating himself into Yi’s quest, but that part of the story is doomed from jump: It’s entertaining for a moment but hardly as enlightening or endearing as the from-the-heart moments surrounding it. Yet again, real people are more interesting than fake ones. (The Landmark; ArcLight Hollywood) (Robert Wilonsky)

GO  A PERFECT GETAWAY Because they’re usually so badly made, B-movie thrillers rarely merit more than a chuckle and a roll of the eyes, but with A Perfect Getaway, writer-director David Twohy (Pitch Black) strikes the proper balance between the genre reverence for and a loopy subversion of the film’s “terrorized romantic couple” formula. The couple in question — nerdy screenwriter Cliff (Steve Zahn) and wife Cydney (Milla Jovovich) — have just arrived in Kauai for their honeymoon, when they hear about a recent murder of newlyweds on the secluded island. Suspecting a white-trash couple (Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton), they befriend another pair of lovebirds (Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez), who seem nice enough despite some ominous signals that they, too, could have homicidal tendencies. Twohy knows that his film’s raison d’être is to lay out ridiculous red herrings while keeping us guessing who’s targeting our heroes, but he finds inventive ways to mess with expectations, whether it’s by supplying a bizarre backstory monologue or dishing dark humor at the unlikeliest of occasions. Rest assured, though, the story’s Big Twist is reliably out-there, culminating in a no-holds-barred battle to the death that’s craftier and more muscular than the norm. A Perfect Getaway is never great, but Twohy isn’t aspiring for greatness — he’s after gritty and lively and weird. And that’s good enough. (Citywide) (Tim Grierson)