‘Men Who Stare at Goats,’ ‘Antichrist,’ ‘Christmas Carol’: Movie reviews, news

Lyn (George Clooney) and critter face off in "The Men Who Stare at Goats." (Photo courtesy of Overture Films)

“The Men Who Stare at Goats”

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” arrives between a great film about the Iraq war, “The Hurt Locker,” and another one coming soon, “The Messenger.” As satire it never sheds any light on a war that is still killing people. There are funny sparks along the way, mostly from Jeff Bridges, doing a bounce off The Dude in “The Big Lebowski” as big, smiling Bill. This gonzo goof-along convinces the Pentagon that his elite team of “psychic spies” is the ticket to victory, or at least one hell of a Ken Kesey mission.

But the main figure is Lyn, a soldier recruited as one of Bill’s “Jedi masters” for his psychic powers (he mentally makes a goat drop dead). He’s acted by George Clooney, chummily directed by his loyal production partner, Grant Heslov. Perhaps Clooney was aiming at another “Three Kings,” which bounced smartly off the 1991 Gulf War. Now the larking-around suggests a Rat Pack mutation, a mutually goosing boys’ party. Included are Ewan McGregor as a noodle-nerved reporter eager to be “embedded” in Iraq, and Kevin Spacey doing his customary,  voice-of-ironic-death number as Larry, who takes the New Age daffy dozen of Bill’s team far into the dark side (that is, Bush/Cheney territory).

LSD is used as a punch line, and we half expect Peter Fonda to chopper in with Michael J. Pollard or the ghost of Hunter Thompson. Based on Jon Ronson’s book about actual “psy-op” schemes, mostly dumb ones, this is a glib, scattered comedy in which a joke about Twizzlers carries the same heft as riffs on torture. One actor shoots a hole straight through the malarkey: Waleed Zuaiter as Mahmud, an Iraqi civilian hostage whose fretful, unamused stare says he doesn’t care to be a sacrificial goat for stupid Americans. (Opens Friday; rated R) ★★

“Disney’s A Christmas Carol”

Charles Dickens does get screen credit, and his novella’s first page opens the movie. But “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” is about Disney and director Robert Zemeckis striving to bend animation forward, as Zemeckis did in 1988 with “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” The plot of the great holiday fable is respected, and Alan Silvestri’s score graciously folds in classic carols. Dishearteningly, this vastly expensive movie becomes pushy and exhausting in the new, 3-D way.

As with the fly-by gimmick of the 1950s, glasses are required for viewing. The modern approach creates a much fuller, almost sculptural effect, using digital animation that employs real actors like armatures (bodies and voices come from Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Bob Hoskins, Colin Firth, etc.). Dickens loved his own special effects on the page, so you can’t really blame Zemeckis and his huge team for piling on the wows as old Scrooge, now largely a grand hook nose and matching chin, gets his Christmas comeuppance for being a miser. This works well in the return of Jacob Marley and the charming Ghost of Christmas Past, a sort of ivory flame, but excess balloons with the titanic Ghost of Christmas Present, who seems to combine Zeus and Santa Claus.

And the ghost of future Xmas is very grim, with Scrooge miniaturized and terrorized. Although the novel is a family favorite, the movie’s late, dark episodes could be way too much for young kids. Entertainment loses something when we feel strapped into a long, increasingly morbid theme-park ride, even with a smiling, quick-fix finish. And here’s a dark thought: If viewers get hooked on this film’s approach, will all the older, 2-D classics seem flattened, becoming the ghosts of movies past? (Opens Friday; rated PG) ★★

Charlotte Gainsbourg among the pretty trees of "Antichrist." (Photo courtesy of IFC Films)

“Antichrist”

I was sure that no movie this year could surpass in pretension the last half-hour of Coppola’s “Tetro,” but then I saw the “prologue” to Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist.” In it a couple make love, strenuously shared with us in candid genital close-up. Their son toddles in to witness the Primal Scene, then goes to a window through which snow is prettily blowing, stands transfixed on the sill, and topples to his death. All of this is shot in radiant, pewter/silver tones, to a mournful aria from Handel’s “Rinaldo.”

The kid’s toy soldiers are labeled Grief, Pain and Despair, words that also title coming story segments. It’s a pledge of escalating agony. Dad (Willem Dafoe) is a therapist who decides that only he can heal the more grievously grieving Mom (Charlotte Gainsbourg). So he takes her to their forest cottage called Eden, where she previously sacrificed her intellectual confidence and fell prey to dark fears and forces. Dafoe’s care-giving, a mix of fumbling questions and healing games like a bad Oprah show, brings on episodes of desperate sex and sadism.

Von Trier, who was prompted by a depression crisis and by reading August Strindberg (some mood-lifter!), is dealing in archetypes that long predate modern psychology. Dafoe, once a touching Jesus Christ on film for Martin Scorsese, becomes a dazed totem of brainy but foolish masculine rationalism, a patronizing control monster. Next to Dafoe, Max von Sydow is starting to seem like a real good-time Charlie.

Whip-slender but not defenseless, Gainsbourg is all primordial fear and dark, brooding instinct. She is the Female Other in touch with her inner, medieval witch (there’s proof up in the attic). Her sister in spirit is a pathetic doe who drags around its dead offspring. And there is a feral fox, briefly talking like Mercedes McCambridge’s Satan in “The Exorcist.” The devil fox gets a sure laugh, but most viewers sober up fast once Gainsbourg becomes so nasty that she castrates Dafoe’s cockiness in a brazen way, then inflicts mutilation on herself.

“Antichrist” has lovely shots of trees, and is rather bravely acted, but wallows crudely in the misogyny that it was, possibly, meant to condemn. The woman is less a grieving, guilty mother than a demented fem-Id on a payback trip. This asinine fiasco is “The Blair Witch Project” for miserably married or simply kinky intellectuals. (Opens Friday; unrated) ★

“(Untitled)”

Silly in a serious way, “(Untitled)” mainly concerns Adrian, a New York composer whose sagging vanguard has lost its muse. His atonal, post-Cage works (that’s John, not Nicolas) sound desperately impromptu, involving such elements as kicking a bucket (the musician doesn’t die, but the music does). Played by Adam Goldberg, a very shaggy expansion of a furrowed brow, humorless Adrian gets into a sex tangle with a primly vacuous gallery owner (Marley Shelton), who prides herself on being un-commercial, though one “sculptor” does quite well with assemblages featuring dead animals.

Adrian’s brother Josh (Eion Bailey) paints and sells large, amorphously pretty abstractions to hospitals and hotels, while envying Adrian’s world of stupefying self-importance. Directed by Jonathan Parker (“Bartleby”), the film both satirizes and fondly celebrates a realm of eager, glib and creatively lame ambition. Its slender substance comes in two sharp envelopes: crisp design by David L. Snyder (shown off by Svetlana Svetko’s photography), and David Lang’s witty, diverse, even self-mocking music, including percussion work by UCSD’s Steven Schick. (Opens Friday at a Landmark theater; unrated) ★★

STARS: FOUR (ace), THREE (worthy), TWO (involving), ONE (dud), ZERO (nil).

RECOMMENDED (and current): “An Education,” “The Beaches of Agnes,” “Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” “Paris,” “Where the Wild Things Are”

Hiroshi Watanabe (left) and Justin Kwong in "White on Rice." (Photo courtesy of SDAFF)

NEWS Etc.

Fest winner returns: Having won the audience favorite prize at the recent, highly attended San Diego Asian Film Festival in Mission Valley, Dave Boyle’s “White on Rice” opens Friday (Nov. 6) at the Reading Gaslamp 15 downtown. Hiroshi Watanabe stars as a divorced Japanese nerd who moves to America to join his sister, bunks in with her genius kid and pursues a hapless dating binge. The comedy also includes animated satire of a samurai picture. Cast members will talk about the movie at the 5:45 and 7:40 p.m. shows on Saturday. The Gaslamp is at Fifth and G streets.

Free movies: The Central Library, major post for film freebies, has two on tap. At 2 p.m. on Sunday (Nov. 8), the movie is “The Way We Get By,” Aron Gaudet’s documentary about three people (one the director’s mom) who give depth to their aging lives by greeting soldiers returning from Iraq at the air base in Bangor, Maine. At 6:30 p.m. on Monday (Nov. 9) the library’s theater offers Eran Riklis’ Israeli film “Lemon Tree.” It  dramatizes the true-life dispute of a Palestinian widow (Hiam Abbass), whose lemon grove affronts her new neighbor, the Israeli Minister of Defense. The library is at 820 E St., downtown San Diego.

We’ll always have…: “Casablanca,” as perennial as a movie gets, and maybe the wittiest of greatly popular films. Wartime Casablanca and Paris are perfectly at home on Warner Bros. sets, and if you don’t relish the chemistry of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, well, take up Parcheesi. Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, Paul Henreid and S.Z. Sakall add greatly to the pleasures of Rick’s Café, which fits snugly into the patio space of Tops Presents Cinema Under the Stars, 4040 Goldfinch St. The door swings open at 7 p.m. on Thursday through Saturday, with the film at 8:30 p.m. For letters of transit, contact www.topspresents.com

A QUOTE (not a blurb!): “You despise me, don’t you?”/ “If I gave you any thought I probably would.” — Ugarte (Peter Lorre) courting the affection of Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in “Casablanca.”

David Elliott is the SDNN movie critic

Tags: Adam Goldberg, Antichrist, Charlotte Gainsbourg, David Elliott, David Elliott column, David Elliott reviews, David Lang, Disney's A Christmas Carol, Ewan McGregor, george clooney, Jeff Bridges, Lars von Trier, Men Who Stare at Goats, review (Untitled), review A Christmas Carol, review Antichrist, review Men Who Stare at Goats, SDNN, Steven Schick, SWRNN, White, Willem Dafoe

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 12:19 am and is filed under David Elliott . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.