Movie Reviews: The Box, A Christmas Carol, The Men Who Stare at Goats

THE BOX Click here for a full review by J. Hoberman. (Citywide)

A CHRISTMAS CAROL Nothing if not a meaty yarn, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a lot more besides, but Robert Zemeckis, a cutting-edge animator who hasn’t told a decent story since 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, has a tin ear for the writer’s grand moral melodramas, or just doesn’t care much. What switched him on were the technical possibilities of Ebenezer Scrooge’s journey back to the future, which Zemeckis has folded into a whiz-bang, often terrifying 3-D thrill ride with all the emotional satisfaction squeezed out of it. The movie’s performance-capture digital technology gives Jim Carrey, sunken into a great beak of a nose and never-ending chin, a chance to show off his india-rubber body language as he morphs from bent old Scrooge to fresh young Scrooge and back again with the aid of whimsically drawn ghosts of Yuletides past. The action is breathtaking, but when A Christmas Carol isn’t carried away by its own frenzied motion, it’s a ruinously stiff tableau vivant of good folk in cabbage-patch faces pilfered from The Polar Express. Zemeckis milks Tiny Tim’s Forrest Gump–ish pathos for every holy drop, leaving little breathing room for the final chapter’s powerful parable of Scrooge doing penance for a life squandered on avarice and acquisition. In the new and far from improved A Christmas Carol, the human drama comes buried in software. (Citywide) (Ella Taylor)

DIED YOUNG, STAYED PRETTY Eileen Yaghoobian’s doc on the loose federation of North American rock-poster artists is splatter-structured, in supposed solidarity with the free-associative, channel-surfing, exquisite corpse, packrat, eclectic-clusterfuck spirit of its subjects’ work. The frantic eccentricity manifests in groaningly wacky sound-effects cues, krazy kutaways, and edits that rub together interviewees for counterpoint friction. The cacophony of voices, though, forestalls any coherent personal vision — and probably makes some of these guys come off less intelligent than they are. Subjects, shot in Austin, Minneapolis, Chicago, Kentucky, North Carolina, etc., include medium talents and screenprint maestros, ding-dong naifs (Brian Chippendale) and scene fixtures who compare These Days unfavorably to their fervid and receptive youth. Yaghoobian happily follows them for a ramble, as when Rob Jones, the most likable, least blowhard with major screentime, soliloquizes on Elvis: “Who knows, who can fathom the depths of the man?” The King is one of a few topics that keep bobbing up on a rushing current of edits, others being “Messin’ with the squares,” 9/11 (punk or not punk?), and the odd certitude that Moral Majority brownshirts are any day going to start kicking down doors and confiscating vinyl. Tom Hazelmyer offers the only puncture to the oft-monotonous subversion, which seems to often involve Christ and G.W. in embarrassing poses. Whenever the quaint, binary idea of a scrappy counterculture versus The Man overshadows the personalities, craft, and musical context, the movie’s an Adbusters bore. (Downtown Independent) (Nick Pinkerton)

THE FOURTH KIND Seventy-one years after Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast snookered a gullible American public with its real-time alien-invasion scenario, The Fourth Kind writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi tries a similar gambit, albeit with less showmanship than Welles had in his pinky finger. Likely rushed into cinemas to cash in on the more recent (and also superior) you-are-there scare tactics of Paranormal Activity, The Fourth Kind purports to be based on the research of Nome, Alaska, psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler, who discovered strange consistencies in the testimonies of several sleep-deprived patients. Under subsequent hypnotherapy, those patients recovered memories of alien abduction — and occasionally levitated, spoke in demonic tongues and did other freaky, Exorcist-type stuff. In a series of Unsolved Mysteries–style reenactments, an anesthetized Milla Jovovich plays the good doctor (with hammy backup from Will Patton as a local sheriff and Elias Koteas as a fellow shrink), while the “real” Tyler appears in fashionably degraded “documentary” footage, including a hilariously overwrought onstage interview with Osunsanmi even less convincing than the film’s ostensible dramatizations. A couple of modestly effective shocks lie in store but none as frightening as the onscreen text informing us that some 11 million people claim to have seen a UFO. Still, even the we-are-not-alone crowd may be forced to concede that the only thing lurking beyond the edges of The Fourth Kind’s frame is a PA holding a reflector board. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)

LOOKING FOR PALLADIN Andrzej Krakowski pegs his water-treading labor-of-love indie to the always cool but here too blithe Ben Gazzara, playing a reclusive screen legend dodging a pushy agent. (Guatemalan location shooting is the only other attraction.) Suited and earpieced on the colorful streets of Antigua, Josh Ross (David Moscow, kinda still “the kid from Big”) incompetently hunts after Jack Palladin (Gazzara), repeatedly striking out with the locals, to their great mirth but not ours. Jack (whose list of movies reinforces the Palance echo of his name) is inexplicably hiding out as a cook at a nice restaurant, where he also dodges a small, aimless film crew that mostly sits around a table. Josh’s other, convoluted agenda — Jack’s ex-wife was also his (inattentive, famous) mother — leads to some anticlimactic chats about the overgrown youngster’s feelings of resentment. Requiring cuts, some sense of direction and dialogue that doesn’t either declare or dither, the film looks like it was fun to make. (Music Hall; Town Center 5) (Nicolas Rapold)