Movie Reviews: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Jennifer's Body, Love Happens

PARIS Paris, as overdocumented as any great city, still has new facets to reflect. For proof, see Claire Denis’ idiosyncratically observed 35 Shots of Rum — a contrast to Cedric Klapisch’s Paris panorama, an encyclopedia of “types” and banal c’est la vie lessons. When an ensemble film works, you welcome the shifts between characters, intrigued to catch up with each in turn. Paris’ rounds feel like obligatory visits. Romain Duris, an actor whose overuse is symptomatic of France’s shallow talent pool, does his preset clenched forehead as a dancer facing possibly fatal illness. Fabrice Luchini’s professor of Parisian history gets the lone funny business, sending dirty text messages to a student (Inglourious Basterds’ Mélanie Laurent — more spellbinding than Paris co-star Juliette Binoche ever was). The white working class and African immigrants get obliging nods, and there’s François Cluzet’s architect, here mostly for a nightmare scene expressing commonplaces about urban planning. There are some good, unusual stop-offs (Rungis, the massive wholesale market; Baudelaire’s gilded suite on the Île Saint-Louis), as well as location resourcefulness (Klapisch coordinates a string of scenes along the city’s highest monuments). At 124 minutes, though, the writer-director has stretched a wide canvas, and only sporadically found anything worth filling it. (The Landmark; Town Center 5; Playhouse 7) (Nick Pinkerton)

PRETTY UGLY PEOPLE Pretty Lousy Movie. Former fatty Lucy (Missi Pyle) tells her old posse of college friends that she’s dying and summons them to Montana, where it turns out that the death in question is merely the metaphorical passing on of her old overweight self. Now a total babe, she wants everyone to celebrate the loss of her final four pounds over the course of a three-day wilderness hike that nobody actually wants to do. At first, Lucy seems so manic and crazed that the viewer might suspect this will turn into a slasher movie. Later, when it becomes clear just how annoying and unlikable each character is, you’ll pray that it turns into a slasher movie. Alas, writer-director Tate Taylor instead seems to be reaching for a Gen-X take on The Big Chill, sans high-powered soundtrack, insightful script or skilled actors. So yes, we get the obligatory boring married couple having second thoughts (Melissa McCarthy and Philip Littell); the former radical who now seems like a sell-out (Phill Lewis); the guy (Larry Sullivan) still nursing a schoolboy crush, etc. What we don’t get is a reason to care. It takes an immensely contrived third-act crisis to create even the vaguest sympathy for this group; and yes, as the title suggests, most of them are supposed to be jerks. But Lucy is no better, interrupting their lives on a whim with a gigantic lie for the benefit of her own ego. At least Pyle got something out of this — she met her husband, a bear trainer, on set. (Sunset 5) (Luke Y. Thompson)

Joe Berlinger’s Crude

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SORORITY ROW The first credit to roll for Sorority Row, director Stewart Hendler’s highly unnecessary remake of a 1983 slasher, is for a character identified as the “Bra-clad sister.” A few entries down are “Slutty sister,” “Ditzy sister” and “Sarcastic sister.” I’m not sure you need to know much more than that, but here goes anyway: Among these luminaries is a group of sorority seniors whose idea of a revenge prank is convincing a young man that he has killed his girlfriend with an ill-timed roofie. The vaguely sensible one among them (played by Briana Evigan, whose resemblance to Demi Moore puts her co-star — and Moore’s actual offspring — Rumer Willis to a strange sort of shame) protests the group’s plan to cover up the death of their fellow sister when the prank tanks, and takes the lead when a graduation gown–wearing maniac begins killing off everyone associated with the death. A very thin feminist subtext about the meaning of sisterhood only highlights how badly this film botches its attempt to have it both ways: naked, bleeding cuties combined with “final girl”–ish, butt-whipping empowerment. Call me the sarcastic sister, but the only things screaming in any convincing way here are the cheap look, epileptic direction and off-key, “edgy” humor. It’s all so ’80s I could die. (Citywide) (Michelle Orange)

GO  STINGRAY SAM Eight years after his underseen debut feature, The American Astronaut, writer-director-singer-songwriter Cory McAbee returns with another sui generis sci-fi/western/musical, set in a parallel universe where Mars is a bottomed-out casino town and the rest of the galaxy has been stratified by an interstellar class war. McAbee, a cross between Buck Rogers and Gene Autry, stars as the titular gunslinger-turned–lounge singer, enlisted by his old sidekick, the Quasar Kid (Crugie), to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a celebrity carpenter from the clutches of a genetically engineered man-child despot called Fredward (Justin Taylor). And that’s just the first of Stingray Sam’s six, serialized 10-minute episodes, which premiered as a gallery installation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and will be available for Web downloading in concert with their theatrical release. Shot, like Astronaut, in crisp black-and-white, with ingenious shoestring production values (including reams of backstory conveyed through tinted, animated collages), each installment features at least one of McAbee’s genre-bending lounge-rock musical numbers. In an American indie-film landscape, where a 500 Days of Summer is lauded for its “originality,” McAbee should be a candidate for canonization. Somebody get this man an order for a second season. (Downtown Independent) (Scott Foundas)