Movie Reviews: The Invention of Lying, Whip It, Zombieland, Paranormal Activity

FAME Baby, look at me. Gone are Leroy’s cornrows, short shorts and leg warmers: The anodyne adolescents in 25-year-old Kevin Tancharoen’s directorial debut (written by Allison Burnett) suggest not the charismatic, street-smart pupils at Performing Arts, but the Up With People squares. Don’t you know who I am? Like all good drama queens, the students in Alan Parker’s 1980 original, which unfolded during an unmistakably Koch-era New York, took up space (blocking traffic on West 46th Street) and disrespected authority (dropping f-bombs in class, smashing school property). They also did drugs, had sex (and abortions, if necessary) and stayed up past midnight. The new class at P.A. is strictly PG, sharing a chummy coffee with the vocal instructor (Megan Mullally) who takes them on a karaoke field trip to Lucky Cheng’s, where not one drag queen is visible. Light up the sky like a flame. Though his gayness was awkwardly shoehorned in, carrot-topped Montgomery was at least undeniably out in Parker’s film. His closest analogue — many of the kids in the remake are race and/or gender inversions of the original characters — merely alludes to homo leanings through emo, Efronesque bangs and a slightly swish carriage. Members of the class of ’80 struggled to stay in school despite homelessness and crime; the greatest crisis in ’09 finds a student’s Sesame Street work schedule affecting her GPA. The sanitized moppets in the new Fame sing the body generic. (Citywide) (Melissa Anderson)

MORE THAN A GAME More Than a Game follows Akron’s Fab Four (later Five) kids on the basketball court, from their “Shooting Stars” traveling youth team into high school and a run of championships. The reason this documentary tells their story — instead of that of the team that miraculously upsets the by-then-nationally-recognized starters in junior-year playoffs — is because one of the Fab was LeBron James. Ignored in the film’s discussion of LeBron’s transition to premature fame is his attempt to swing early NBA eligibility after the loss, which wouldn’t jive with the “all for one” ethic, among the film’s many pep-talk lessons. The ostensible director here is Kristopher Belman, an Akronite who played court videographer to King James’ St. Vincent–St. Mary team, but final cut belongs to LeBron Inc. The recent PR flub of Nike henchmen confiscating footage of James getting gently dunked on in a pickup game testifies to the powerful trust authoring James’ legacy. The film could be a tie-in to the recent ghostwritten autobiography, Shooting Stars. Most obtrusive, though, is the contribution of Harvey Mason Jr., producing and soundtracking, who sets Game adrift on an endless sea of crashing crescendos. Good game footage, a few clear looks at the kids behind it, but mostly as processed as Space Jam. (ArcLight Hollywood; The Grove; The Landmark; The Bridge; AMC Magic Johnson Crenshaw 15) (Nick Pinkerton)

PANDORUM Despite too many cheap, sound-cue scares and a slow-boil plot that veers between tension and tedium, Pandorum — a dead-serious horror/sci-fi pastiche that unimaginatively borrows from everything from Alien to WALL-E — gets sort of interesting. Flight engineers Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) and Colonel Payton (Dennis Quaid) awake from a years-long “hypersleep” aboard the Elysium, a massive spacecraft launched from the increasingly uninhabitable planet Earth in 2174. With no memory of their mission, they find themselves in an abandoned wing of the craft, a predicament they discuss at great and scintillating length (“It’s cold in here!” Payton declares. “It’s fucking dark in here!” Bower retorts.) Eventually, Bower ventures out to get the 411, encountering mummified corpses of his fellow crew members and then the gooey, writhing mutants marauding through the craft in search of human flesh. A team slowly materializes out of the terrorized survivors Bower meets on his way to try and reset the craft on its course to Tanis, an Earth-like planet. Much slimy mutant battle ensues. Director Christian Alvart clearly attended horror’s new paint-shaker school of direction (motto: shaky = scary!), but the script’s twisty, end-of-the-world intrigue saves this otherwise leaden film from total self-destruction. (Citywide) (Michelle Orange)

GO  PARANORMAL ACTIVITY For Katie (Katie Featherston), a San Diego college student, things have been going bump in the night since she was 8 years old and a ghost attached itself to her. The unseen being that has been benignly haunting her for years thrills Katie’s loving but skeptical boyfriend, Micah (Micah Sloat), who sets up a video camera to capture any supernatural goings-on. For his debut feature, reportedly shot in seven days at a cost of 15 grand, writer-director Oren Peli works wonders with stationary camera footage of the sleeping couple: The bedroom door moves, slightly; lights in the hallway go on and off; a shadow passes the bed. As the nights go by, the presence, seemingly annoyed at being recorded, begins upping the ante, and soon it appears that poor Katie is on the verge of channeling her inner Linda Blair. Grounded by strong performances by newcomers Featherston and Sloat, who pretty much have the movie to themselves, Paranormal Activity, which demands to be seen in a crowded theater, is refreshingly blood-free — the fact that its old-school scares caused seemingly jaded 20-somethings at a recent midnight screening to squirm in their seats suggests that there’s hope for the world after all. (ArcLight Hollywood) (Chuck Wilson)