Movie Reviews: The A-Team, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, The Karate Kid and Killers

THE A-TEAM
Joe Carnahan's big-screen adaptation of NBC's 1983 midseason-replacement-turned-three-seasons-running-hit is convoluted, overstuffed, turned up to 11, and yet, somehow, deadly dull—in other words, white noise. Rather than a reinterpretation, it's a soulless, sloppy, smirky rerun that makes those Charlie’s Angels movies seem positively nouvelle vague; at least Drew Barrymore and crew weren't just shouting bad impressions over the blasts. Liam Neeson is George Peppard as Hannibal Smith, cigar-chomping frontman of the band of wrongly accused Army Rangers; Bradley Cooper is Dirk Benedict as Templeton "Faceman" Peck, bullets bouncing off his perpetual smug grin; Quinton Jackson is Mr. T as B.A. Baracus, whose mohawk still pities the fool; and District 9's Sharlto Copley is Dwight Schultz as Murdock, the howlin' mad pilot who crashes most everything he touches. To the mix, add in Jessica Biel as the Army captain charged with bringing down the boys (complicated by the fact that Face is her ex); Patrick Wilson as the CIA agent who may or may not be setting up the team (but totally is, duh); frequent video-game voice-over actor Brian Bloom as the icky leader of a Blackwater-style operation that's gone rogue, I tellya, rogue; and Gerald McRaney as the worst best friend in the world. The plot has something to do with counterfeiting plates, but it's just an excuse to blow shit up for two hours. How can something this loud be this boring? (Robert Wilonsky)

COCO CHANEL AND IGOR STRAVINSKY
Coco Chanel. Igor Stravinsky. Two iconoclasts whose contributions to their respective artistic fields left an indelible mark on the 20th century. Did you know they use to bone? After a lengthy staging of the disastrous 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring (the sole sympathetic set of ears in the audience belonging to the youngish Chanel), Stravinsky jumps ahead a decade. Lacking love, hot shot Coco (Anna Mouglalis) turns workaholic like a proper romcom heroine; Igor (Mads Mikkelsen), an unpopular genius, is living in squalid exile. She invites him, his sickly wife and their offspring to move in to her country estate, and soon the two artists are furiously humping on the piano. "Your music has more passion," sneers Mrs. Stravinsky, willing to accept the dalliance if it's good for the canon — up to a point. Lit like a David Fincher music video and shot with a gliding camera approximating a wandering eye, Stravinsky strains to convince that its lascivious pleasures have historical import. In the film's 1:1 correlation between erotic indulgence and creative innovation, hot, home-wrecking sex is justifiable only if it directly leads to the invention of Chanel No. 5. Stravinsky is the second corset-ripping French-language romance about the legendary fashion designer to hit American screens in seven months. Here, Coco's cast as a femme fatale who preys on a helpless nebbish. The Audrey Tattou–starring Coco Avant Chanel was much more fun. (Karina Longworth) (Royal)

THE CREMASTER CYCLE
Named for the muscle that turns your nutsack into a walnut when it gets cold, The Cremaster Cycle swings the biggest dick in contemporary art. Produced from 1994 through 2002, Matthew Barney's humongous riff on struggle, reproduction, conceptual drag, and several dozen strands of narrative gobbledygook is undeniably something to be reckoned with — if only as a relic of the boom years in contemporary art. In what now looks like the freakiest Lady Gaga video ever, Cremaster 1 (1995) fuses Busby Berkeley with Marcel Duchamp to propose an allegory of sexual differentiation on board two Goodyear blimps subject to the bizarre geometric dictates of a football field in Idaho. Cremaster 2 (1999), the most visually compelling entry, introduces heaps of quasi-narrative content (murderers, magic, Mormons) in service of a "gothic Western" indebted to David Lynch and Richard Prince. These increasingly elaborate narrative and symbolic structures come to an unbearably tedious climax in the three-hour-long Cremaster 3 (2002), which opens in the mists of B-movie Celtic prehistory before proceeding to a lugubrious rumination on the construction of the Chrysler building and Barney's own art-world apotheosis — as staged on a Guggenheim spiral busy with heavy metalloids, cheetah-women, Comme Des Garçonism and Adobe After-Effects. Literalizing the cycle's parasitic relation to art history, Cremaster 3 casts Richard Serra as a Vaseline-Flinging Architect; culminating the cycle's cinematic ambitions, it premiered at the Ziegfeld. Aficionados of avant-garde cinema tend to call bullshit on Barney, partly because he's a blatantly lousy editor. The voluptuous Hungarian operatics of Cremaster 5 (1997) lack genuine musicality. There's an exquisite cut to be made from the nearly seven-hour yawn time of the complete cycle. Alas, it's not in the interest of collectors who pony up six-figure fees for Cremaster on DVD to enable illicit edits. Barney's career, for all its conceptual excess, is predicated on an economy of artificial scarcity. (Nathan Lee) (Nuart)

FINDING BLISS
Somebody, somewhere along the line, did writer/director Julie Davis (Amy's Orgasm) the disservice of describing her as a female Woody Allen. Watching Finding Bliss, her latest self-amused exercise in personal (and, inevitably, sexual) exorcism, I imagined a sanatarium for all of the directors working under the same delusion. They could detox from cloying narration, lament being enabled by the actors (in this case, Leelee Sobieski, Kristen Johnson and Denise Richards) drawn to their middling "urban sex comedy" material, and kill all of their stillborn darlings in a ritualistic bonfire. It is particularly painful to watch Sobieski — whose unnervingly symmetrical Botticelli face and supernatural poise can't help but hold the screen — put through the paces of Davis' almost unbearably labored script. A film-school graduate struggling to make her first movie, Jody Balaban (Sobieski) finds herself cutting porn for an L.A. production company in order to pay the bills. Hung up on sex (she's a virgin at 25; naturally, her first film is called On the Virge) and getting negged by her sexy, asshole boss (Matthew Davis), Jody learns that porn stars are people, too, not all boys are bad, and — most unfortunately — working out preteen emotional traumas on film can be as gratifying for the audience as it is for the director. (Michelle Orange) (Sunset 5)