LA Weekly

GO DEFINITELY, MAYBE Sandwiched somewhere between the American Spirit commercials and the Clinton campaigning that make up Definitely, Maybe is a surprisingly rewarding romantic comedy. Imagine, really old-school Woody Allen starring that shit-eating smirker from Van Wilder, Ryan Reynolds. If this isn't exactly Annie Hall or Manhattan, the mere fact that it aspires to those heights is worth a celebration of some kind. The film is told almost entirely in flashback, as adman Will (Reynolds) recounts for his daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin) the story of how he met his now ex-wife and Maya's mother - who might be either his Wisconsin college girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks), the Xerox girl in Bill Clinton's '92 New York campaign HQ (Isla Fisher) or the would-be writer (Rachel Weisz) shacked up with a cranky prof (Kevin Kline). Over the course of a couple of hours, Will and these three bright, beautiful women keep crossing paths - as lovers, as disappointments, as what-coulda-beens, as what-might-bes. Writer-director Adam Brooks, whose French Kiss screenplay was as tony and old-fashioned a romance as Hollywood's made in 20 years, grounds the movie in the up-and-down everyday. As sweet and silly as the film can get, ultimately it just shrugs and says, "Do your best, expect the worst, and you'll muddle through." Which seems awfully ... revolutionary? (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)

ISKA'S JOURNEY Our art houses are surely not lacking for imports about children eking out tenuous existences amid decaying, postindustrial landscapes. None of which is to say that Iska's Journey, the third feature by Hungarian director Csaba Bollok, is anything but sincere in its style and choice of subject matter. The film, which follows close-cropped 12-year-old Iska (non-pro Maria Varga) as she navigates the lower rungs of her homeland's economic ladder, functions effectively as a critique of the poverty infecting contemporary Hungary. And the project's back story - Bollok literally picked then-8-year-old Varga out of a Southern Carpathian slag heap and spent four years working with her before making the film (and adopting her and her co-star/younger sister, Rozalia) - is certainly compelling. Unfortunately, the movie itself is only intermittently gripping. Like Perry Ogden's 2006 Pavee Lackeen (which was set within Ireland's "traveler" community), Iska's Journeyis conceived as a docudrama observing real people within variably fictionalized scenarios. (The hand-held camerawork has a muscular, Dardennes-ish quality.) The early scenes, which focus on Iska's troubled family, feel authentic, but an exchange in a confession booth strikes a discordant note - the introduction of an underlying structure. Subsequent episodes in an overrun, understaffed youth shelter score some damning points, but they also feel like pit stops en route to a predetermined destination. Anyone paying the slightest attention will know precisely where Iska is going to end up, and while Bollok's rage at a culture of negligence is commendable, the inexorability of his heroine's journey suggests cinematic roads already taken. (Grande 4-Plex) (Adam Nayman)

 
JUMPER Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a mighty high school bully. Able to leap through tall buildings in a single bound. Look up in the sky: It's a bird, it's a plane, it's ... Anakin Skywalker? Wait, make that David Rice, a pimply-faced Ann Arbor teen (played first by Max Thieriot and eventually by Hayden Christensen) who discovers he has the ability to "teleport" himself anywhere in the world just by, you know, clicking his heels together three times and saying, "There’s no place like Rome" (or London, Tokyo, Cairo, et al.). So, David leaves home, robs a few banks (fret not, he leaves IOUs behind) and grows up to become a preening Manhattan bourgeois — Bruce Wayne minus the existential angst and social conscience — who refers to the teleportationally challenged as "chumps" and who uses his powers for no purpose other than to live his life like an American Express commercial. (When he sees Katrina-like flood victims on TV, he doesn't think, "I'll save them." Instead, he thinks, "There must be a really wicked swell somewhere in the world right now," grabs his surfboard and heads for Fiji.) Well, he does find some time to woo his former high school sweetheart (Rachel Bilson, who's even more wooden than Christensen) and pulverize the blockhead who used to kick snow in his face on the playground, but only after a morning spent sipping tea atop the Sphinx. And yet, Jumper wants you to root for this guy as he finds his privileged existence endangered by the grizzled jumper-hunter Dr. Van Helsing — no, wait, make that Mace Windu — no, I mean, Roland — who's played by a snow-white-'fro'd Samuel L. Jackson and who's on hand mainly to snarl lines like "I hate jumpers" and "Only God should have that power." Around the halfway point, Jamie Bell shows up to breathe some life into things as a wormhole-leaping artful dodger. But if you're wondering just how it is that the jumpers do what they do, or why Roland and his fellow "Paladins" are so eager to snuff the jumpers out ... well, for that you'll have to tune into our next episode, because as Jumper nears the 90-minute mark, it becomes clear that director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) and his trio of high-profile screenwriters (including David S. Goyer, who wrote the superb Batman Begins) intend to leave those questions — and the fates of the major characters — hanging. Which at least lends Jumper a touch of novelty value: It's a feature-length teaser for a never-to-be sci-fi franchise. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)

THE KILLING OF JOHN LENNON A nonjudgmental re-creation of 25-year-old Mark David Chapman's 1980 assassination of the peacenik pop star - from three months prior to the act to his subsequent incarceration - director Andrew Piddington's fastidiously researched, dubiously suspenseful character portrait is unable to salvage a lick of hindsight from the tragedy beyond "murderous narcissists are people too." (He's a victim of our celebrity-fixated culture? Oh, shut up.) In The Killing of John Lennon, Piddington traces Chapman's exact steps - filming at the Dakota and everywhere else the killer went leading up to the big day - and uses only Chapman's documented utterances and prison-diary narration, flaunting this strict authenticity as if readying a defense against cries of exploitation. If Piddington's baffling sincerity occasionally trumps his flashy optical effects, it's only because star Jonas Ball is so credibly complicated as the Salinger-obsessed killer, even while gazing eerily into the camera or repeating himself in front of a mirror. Chapman's a Travis Bickle for tabloid junkies, and the onscreen titles that mark his countdown till the titular act are a damning clue into the film's tasteless sensationalism. Considering that Chapter 27 - starring Jared Leto as Chapman - is due out in March, it's hard not to think about the trio of made-for-TV Amy Fisher biopics that aired within weeks of one another in the early '90s. Who is the audience here, besides depraved Beatles completists? (Sunset 5) (Aaron Hillis)