LA Weekly

DEATH SENTENCE There’s no degree of separation between risk-assessment executive Kevin Bacon and the gangbangers who killed his son in the first of this season’s you-toucha-my-family-I-keel-you thumbscrewers—a gory anti-revengers’ tale seemingly resurrected from the catacombs of Cannon Films. (It’s based on a novel by Brian Garfield, reportedly written to counteract the pro-vigilante slant Hollywood gave his Death Wish.) The director, Sawteur James Wan, lays the genre mechanism bare—innocents are placed in harm’s way; the hero retaliates and becomes no better than the bad guys, until the bad guys do something even more heinous—and we, with a combination of sympathy and bloodlust, respond to each new zap. Or we would, if the movie weren’t so laughable in every common-sense detail—starting with Bacon’s instant transformation from pencil pusher to demolition man. A motif of father-son eye-for-an-eye overkill and some choice talk about the futility of war from an otherwise ineffectual detective (Aisha Tyler) raise the possibility that this is some kind of au-courant post-9/11 allegory. But the only things anyone’s likely to remember, besides Bacon’s crazy-eyes act, are John Goodman’s soon-to-be-legendary turn as a bilious bug-eyed gun dealer and a hellacious back-alley/parking-garage chase shot from a careening fender-level camera. Like much of the movie, it’s as hammily dynamic as it is impossible to swallow. (Citywide) (Jim Ridley) See interview with James Wan.

FRESHMAN ORIENTATION When director Bryan Singer caught this movie a couple of years ago at Sundance — back when it bore the vastly superior title Home of Phobia — he was sufficiently taken with lead Sam Huntington that he cast him as Jimmy Olsen in Superman Returns. Yep, it’s been on the shelf that long. Huntington’s potential is clear, even as he’s thrust into a shopworn premise about a college freshman who pretends to be gay so that a sorority babe (Kaitlin Doubleday) will hang out with him. There are other things to like about writer-director Ryan Shiraki’s college comedy, mainly that it feels more real than most: The dorm rooms are tiny, the buildings worn out, the parties kinda lame, the clubs annoyingly P.C., and the students not quite as beautiful as they normally are in the movies. Just one problem: It isn’t particularly funny. Mocking lesbians for bad bongo-beating poetry, for instance, just ain’t fresh, interesting or even especially offensive. Casting John Goodman as a worn-out old queen is a nice touch, though. (Regent Showcase) (Luke Y. Thompson)


HALLOWEEN Rob Zombie’s Halloween isn’t quite a remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher masterpiece. The first hour,  which vividly and viciously imagines the dirt-bag childhood of an abject little psychopath named Michael Myers (the exquisitely wormy Daeg Faerch), might be considered a prequel. Yet even when it kicks in on familiar turf—Michael’s escape (slash) from the loony bin (strangle) and hunt (slaughter) for his sister Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton)—Zombie’s up to something all his own. Horrific as it is, Halloween isn’t so much a horror film as a biopic, and a superb one at that. The life and times of a fictional monster may not be as respectable a subject as a historical monster like, say, Idi Amin or Truman Capote, but Zombie’s portrait is every bit as reverent, scrupulous, and deeply felt as any Oscar-grubbing horrorshow. Note the strange circumspection, the discipline of tone, the utter lack of snark, the absolute denial of gore-for-gore’s sake. (Yes, Eli Roth, there is such a thing as “torture porn”—and you’re a dumb dirty perv.) Can you feel the love? If anything, Zombie indulges too much sympathy for the devil; his Halloween deepens Carpenter’s vision without rooting out its fear. (Citywide) (Nathan Lee). See interview with director Rob Zombie. (Citywide)


KLIMT If there’s one film that holds its place on my ever-shifting list of the best films of the last decade, it’s Raul Ruiz’s 1999 Time Regained, a brilliantly stylized visualization of the blurred borders between Proust’s life, art and social milieu. Klimt, by contrast, feels like a listless graft of similar strategies — the circular swoops and dives of a camera perpetually in motion, the action bookended by the painter’s delirious musings on his deathbed — onto an artist whose work was dismissed by many in his day as oversexed, and by some today as eye candy. Ruiz sets his rehab of Klimt’s ambiguous reputation in the artist’s hometown of fin-de-siècle Vienna (bourgeois, philistine) and Paris (rad, liberating), where, as Marx so beautifully put it, “all that is solid melts into air.” John Malkovich is his usual wry and slightly ponderous self as Klimt, whose platonic and carnal relationships with dozens of women (primarily the French dancer Lea de Castro, played by the lovely but lightly talented Saffron Burrows) juiced his peacock-gorgeous canvases. Stephen Dillane is sly and witty as the oppressively paternal figure who shadows Klimt through his movie. But Ruiz is so intent on harnessing the painter to his own — here, rather arid — relativism that he never manages to convey the unfettered eros that brings crowds flocking to exhibitions of Klimt’s work, even as critics hold their noses. (Nu Wilshire; One Colorado) (Ella Taylor)


LADRÓN QUE ROBA A LADRÓN The filmmakers behind this mainstream Spanish-language heist comedy are positioning the movie as an authentic Latin reimagining of a familiar Hollywood genre, but, really, they’re just ripping off Ocean’s Eleven. In the George Clooney and Brad Pitt roles, Alejandro (Fernando Colunga) and Emilio (Miguel Varoni) are career thieves plotting to con Valdez (Saúl Lisazo), a crooked L.A. millionaire scamming immigrants with his bogus cure-all infomercial products. Ladrón’s one clever idea is that the heroes’ crack team consists of average Latino day laborers who, because they are largely ignored by their upper-class employers, are the perfect anonymous soldiers to carry out the risky caper. Director Joe Menendez and writer José Angel Henrickson also take a few stabs at ridiculing the obscene affluence that is the centerpiece of the Ocean films, but they quickly lose their nerve, settling instead for manipulatively crowd-pleasing odes to the simple decency of hard-working immigrants. Ladrón’s earnest tone works against the film’s hoped-for irreverent stance, and Menendez’s slack pacing undercuts the project’s attempt to offer a viable alternative to Hollywood fare. For a movie whose bad guy bamboozles unsuspecting Latinos with false promises, Ladrón could be cited for precisely the same offense. (Citywide) (Tim Grierson)