LA Weekly

BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE There’s no official rule which says that werewolf movies have to be boring, but it doesn’t seem like anyone has tried particularly hard in a long, long time. Blood and Chocolate does nothing to buck the trend. Looking as bored as the viewer is likely to feel, Agnes Bruckner goes through the motions as Vivian, a Hungarian-American werewolf in Bucharest who inexplicably falls for a dumb-ass comic-book artist named Aiden (Hugh Dancy, who looks more like a boy-band refugee than your typical geek). The head werewolf (Olivier Martinez) lives in an absinthe factory. The beastly transformations are accomplished via circa-1980 camera dissolves. And there are multiple pathetic attempts at faking martial-art-du-jour Parkour. At one point, Aiden says to Vivian, “If you cared a goddamn thing about me, you’d have left me before we ever met!” By the same logic, dear reader, if you care a goddamn thing about your evening’s entertainment, you’ll walk out of this howler before you ever buy a ticket. (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)


CATCH AND RELEASE In the small pantheon of successful women screenwriters, Susannah Grant is aristocracy. But the muscular dialogue that fed so many great lines to Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and Cameron Diaz in In Her Shoes goes AWOL in Grant’s directing debut, a slack dramedy about a young woman (Jennifer Garner) whose grief for her dead fiancé — they’re called Gray and Grady, respectively, which doesn’t bode well — is assuaged not by the usual band of earth mothers, but by his three buddies, each of whom suffers in his own strenuously odd way. This mildly fresh premise never takes off, in part because Grant flashes most of her emotional cards in the first half-hour, leaving all the characters to rot in underdeveloped eccentricity. Garner is no more than serviceable as the tightly wound Gray, unwinding in the arms of Grady’s lothario friend Fritz, very badly played by Timothy Olyphant (a disconcerting cross between Billy Zane and Sir Cliff Richard with a lot invested in grating raffish charm). Kevin Smith is a dreary inverse of his Silent Bob character as the good-hearted Fat Friend who stops gabbing only when he’s scarfing down leftover pizza, while Juliette Lewis salvages what scraps she can from her role as a New Age L.A. ditz. Revelations pile up, followed by insight and maturity, and pretty soon there’s nothing left to do but go fishing in scenic Colorado and be really, really nice to your friends. (Citywide) (Ella Taylor)


EPIC MOVIE The speeds of sound and light remain constants, but the speed of crap accelerates like a rocket luge on Crisco Mountain. Seriously, the daddy of the (blank)-movie genre, 1980’s Airplane!, stocked its pop culture arsenal with references to 1957’s Zero Hour, 1970’s Airport, and 1975’s Jaws. By contrast, this ostensible parody of big-budget adventures (specifically The Chronicles of Narnia) reaches all the way back to last May’s The Da Vinci Code, July’s Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and October’s Borat. (Borat?!) Just like the filmmakers’ previous Date Movie, this feeble fast-buck shitbomb is an amateur-hour game of Spot That Reference, intended for people who crack up simply at the mention of anything topical — sudoku, “Lazy Sunday,” Cribs. Which means that by the time this dud drops on NetFlix, it’ll be as obsolete as a Chia pet jokebook. The only bright spot: Darrell Hammond’s spot-on demolition of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, uncanny right down to his swashbuckling dying gesture. (Citywide) (Jim Ridley)


  FUNNY MONEY In a farce, the comic action typically occurs in a house with an enormous living room and lots of side doors, through which assorted characters, in a manic flurry of confusion and mistaken identities, can be abruptly flung. In Funny Money, an American adaptation of Englishman Ray Cooney’s hit play, that’s the fate awaiting two detectives (Armand Assante and Kevin Sussman) who arrive, separately, at the Hoboken home of Henry Perkins (Chevy Chase), a wax-fruit-factory foreman with plans to upend his humdrum life by absconding with a briefcase full of Mob money that’s inadvertently come his way. Henry’s plan sends his wife Carol (Penelope Ann Miller) straight to the whiskey bottle, and if one’s interest in this never-hilarious but often-quite-amusing film fades in the home stretch it may be because director Leslie Greif and co-writer Harry Basil make the mistake of sending Carol upstairs to pass out, thereby losing out on more of Miller’s revelatory comic timing. She’s terrific, as is Chase, who is more relaxed and generous than he’s ever been, as if having taken seven years off to stay home with his daughters has reminded this perennial scene gobbler that there are pleasures to be found in letting the other guy score the laugh. (Beverly Center; One Colorado; Regal Irvine; Agoura 8) (Chuck Wilson)


PICK G.I. JESUS A young Marine named Jesus (Joe Arquette) survives honorable service in Iraq, but the year away has left a scar on his marriage to Claudia (Patrícia Mota): The passionate spark is still there, but another man is circling, and there are hints Claudia leads two lives. His little daughter Marina (Telana Lynum) loves him — but a ghostly stranger named Mohammed (Maurizio Farhad) now frequently appears (only Jesus can see him) to quietly scorch his conscience over a father and daughter Jesus killed by chance and without malice in a Fallujah-like firefight. As a Mexican who enlisted to secure U.S. citizenship, Jesus suffers further when he’s ordered back to Iraq. He will absolutely lose his family if he leaves them for another year. As these pressures become murderous, writer-director Carl Colpaert never loses his balance, despite the David Lynchian leap of faith he asks us to make midway, in a twist so bold as to be a backflip. If anything, this extra layer in the story effectively illuminates the moral choices Jesus must navigate. In 2006, I was on the jury at CineVegas, which gave top prize to G.I. Jesus , because Colpaert has so vividly seized the contemporary moment, and explored it with his own eyes and conscience. He has also brought together a flawless cast: Arquette, Mota, Lynum and Farhad are phenomenally gifted, each an exciting new discovery. And he’s brought it all off on a shoestring budget. In the time since, Colpaert (best known as the producer of Gas, Food Lodging , Mi Vida Loca and The Whole Wide World ) has painstakingly reworked the film technically (which he shot on HDDV) to eliminate the once-flaring reds that distorted the action. The imagery is now crisp and feels “filmic.” Whenever there’s a bit of video-esque texture, it seems freely chosen, thematically appropriate to a war we know mostly through video, and — more importantly — innate to a story that asks us to sort out just what is real in war, and in having a conscience.  (Showtimes) (F.X. Feeney)