Movie Reviews: Crazy On the Outside, Daybreakers, Leap Year

YOUTH IN REVOLT Winded and weary from its long journey to a bigger screen, C.D. Payne’s 500-page 1993 novel has been squeezed into a 90-minute Cliff’s Notes version starring Michael Cera as Nick Twisp as Every Role Michael Cera Has Ever Had. Nick — portrayed in the novel as a 14-year-old “I’m Single, Let’s Mingle” T-shirt–sporting, foreign film–watching, Frank Sinatra–listening Oakland-stuck virgin — has been stripped of his eccentricities, his smarts, his specialness. Now, he’s just another horny too-smart movie teen doing whatever he can to get the girl (Sheeni Saunders, played by Portia Doubleday) in between woefully animated sequences and surrounded by sketched-out weirdos, among them Steve Buscemi as his creepy dad with the bimbo gal pal; Ray Liotta as a fascist cop in line to sleep with his mom (Jean Smart, who already played this part in Garden State); and Erik Knudsen as Lefty, so named because that’s the direction in which his dick bends. It’s as if the writer (Charlie Bartlett’s Gustin Nash, now 0-for-2 in the revolting youth sweepstakes) severed the jokes and hijinks from Payne’s plain yet also playful narrative with a dull ax. The surrealism and sensitivity of the novel, which spawned a cult of collectors who trade the limited-run first edition for hundreds of dollars, have been boiled down till it tastes like pungent tween formula. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)

WONDERFUL WORLD Ben Singer (Matthew Broderick), once the third-biggest kids’ musician in the country, is now the No. 1 grump of an unnamed city that’s played by Shreveport, Louisiana, where writer-director Joshua Goldin’s feature debut was shot, and which also doubles, later in the film, as Dakar, Senegal. More impoverished than the budget is Wonderful World’s script, a shopworn tale of redemption in which the constantly outraged, pot-puffing misanthrope learns that “magic is everywhere.” Alienating his legal-proofreader co-workers and even his 11-year-old daughter, Sandra (Jodelle Ferland), with his bilious indignation, Ben softens in the company of his Senegalese roommate and chess partner, Ibu (Michael K. Williams), who soon exits the movie in a diabetic coma, though his work in the rehabilitation of Ben’s soul will be quickly picked up by his sister, Khadi (Sanaa Lathan). It’s heartbreaking to see Lathan, an underemployed actress whose talents were last put to good use in 2006’s Something Else, in such a ridiculous, impossible role, falling into bed with repugnant Ben and teaching Sandra West African dance. Broderick looks as if he wants to hide permanently behind his three-day growth. But nothing can mask the embarrassment of having to bark lines like, “If I wanted a parasite, I’d eat raw pork.” ( Laemmle Music Hall Theatre) (Melissa Anderson)