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Not
quite pals yet: (l-r) Pine and Quinto in Star Trek.
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Back
to the Future
By
Shawn Stone
Star
Trek
Directed
by J.J. Abrams
This reboot of the Star Trek franchise is flat-out
terrific entertainment. By repudiating the sensibility of
the later TV shows and films, and returning to the original
1960s source material—go-go boots and all—Star Trek
embraces a reckless optimism that is a perfect antidote to,
well, the rotten mess we’re living through.
When they restarted the series on TV in the late 1980s with
Star Trek: The Next Generation, all the supposed absurdities
of the original show were removed. No longer would the three
most important officers on the starship be involved in every
phaser fight with a rubber-suited alien; problems were as
likely to be solved by committee as by decisive action. The
miniskirts and go-go boots were gone, too.
This was fine for its time. But do you know what the ultimate
absurdity about the show was? The idea that we’re ever
going to experience interstellar travel. So bring back
the randy, phaser-happy Trek of old!
Kirk is back. So is Spock, Uhura, McCoy, Sulu, Chekov and
even Capt. Christopher Pike. It’s just that, now, they’re
played by Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zöe Saldana, Karl Urban,
John Cho, Anton Yelchin and Bruce Greenwood. Other films have
cast new actors in well-loved roles from old TV shows, with
varying degrees of success, but never in the case of a property
with as an insanely devoted fan base as Star Trek.
Some fans will gripe, but the new kids on the block do very
well. (And, as you probably already know, Leonard Nimoy and
his pointy ears are on hand, too.)
Director-producer J.J. Abrams, creator of the TV series Alias
(the soap opera with sexy spies), and Lost (the action-adventure
show set in a kind of “twilight zone,” has adapted to working
on the big screen with surprising ease. While his large-scale
action scenes are still a bit off—they’re still an advance
over the just-acceptable Mission: Impossible 3—he understands
the balance of humor, action and suspense needed to make a
summer blockbuster thoroughly enjoyable. A good example is
a sequence in which Kirk ignores a computer’s warning and
goes stomping about on a strange planet—first, strange creatures
appear and violent hilarity ensues, then a not-so-chance meeting
jerks the action back into the dark heart of the story.
Abrams maximizes every opportunity for character development,
too, in the witty script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman,
allowing audiences to either reengage with “old friends” or
make new ones. (When Simon Pegg appeared, the woman sitting
next to me exclaimed with satisfaction, “There’s Scotty!”)
There’s a certain bracing satisfaction in the filmmakers’
radical reinvention of the entire Star Trek universe.
It’s even more fun when the film ends and Alexander Courage’s
wonderfully cheesy original theme song is performed. Banished
from all of the previous Trek movies, it serves to
announce that the fun is back.
Theater
of the Banal
Paris
36
Directed
by Christophe Barratier
In a suburb of 1936 Paris, there is a shuttered song-and-dance
hall called the Chansonia. The beloved theater falls into
the grasping hands of a nationalist real-estate agent, Galapiat
(Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), who reluctantly allows a ragtag
group of unemployed locals to restore the theater. That’s
the sentimental heart of Paris 36, an underwritten
and overstuffed drama that wants to be a Truffaut-style soufflé
but falls as flat as the proverbial dessert. The music hall’s
manager is Pigoil (Gerard Jugnot), who has a young son who
busks with his accordion to keep his father in wine while
secretly taking lessons from an old neighbor. With the help
of Milou (Clovis Cornillac), a pugnacious worker’s party organizer,
Pigoil convinces Galapiat to let him put on a show. The variety
act is boosted considerably when a pretty chorine mysteriously
arrives and auditions. She calls herself Douce (Nora Arnezeder),
and in one of the plot’s more idiotic turns, her singing talent
is ignored and she is relegated to being the announcer.
Galapiat falls for her and finances her “wardrobe.” Milou
falls for her and woos her with his tough-guy talk of having
been in the Red Army. Pigoil’s troupe includes other impoverished
friends such as Jacky (Kad Merad), a pathetically untalented
comic, and musicians who work for food. Jacky becomes the
fall guy for Galapiat’s schemes: Jacky spies on Douce, and
does Jewish caricatures at the fascist meetings he presides
over. Jacky’s witless involvement in the meetings is the film’s
only political barb, despite its stagy ambience of social
disintegration. A sudsy pall is cast over the Chansonia when
Pigoil loses his son in a custody dispute with his bourgeois
ex-wife, turning the plot’s theatrical bonhomie into a French-milled
soap opera.
After the flop of the theater’s opening night, the tables
slowly (very slowly) turn, and as expected, Douce is revealed
to have ties to the theater’s storied past, a local nobody
turns out to have been a very big somebody, and one of the
performers meets a tragic end. The film’s star-dusted cinematography
and evocative soundtrack can’t compensate for a story that’s
as trite as the radio jingles Douce uses for a songbook.
—Ann
Morrow
Old
Dog, New Tricks
Is
Anybody There?
Directed
by John Crowley
In what seems to be an attempt to garner Michael Caine an
Oscar for leading performance, Is Anybody There? Gives
the 76-year-old a meaty role in which to chomp his ivories.
Playing a retired magician, The Amazing Clarence, Caine rails
at our mutual fate, made all the worse by being forced, through
straitened circumstance, to reside with decrepit strangers
in an old-age home run by well-meaning but harried “Mum” (Anne-Marie
Duff) and her out-of-a-job hubby (David Morrissey).
“You
accumulate regrets and they stick to you like old bruises!”
he rails to the owners’ death-obsessed son Eddie (Bill Milner).
It’s refreshing to hear an aged character in movies state
it so bluntly, instead of waxing poetic about life’s seasons
or such twaddle.
The movie chronicles the unlikely friendship between Clarence
and Eddie, and the former’s attempts to draw the latter back
into the world of the living. Eddie pines for the days when
his birthday was marked by a day trip with his parents, and
when he occupied his own room. The onset of hard times and
the arrival of the paying guests have turned his life upside
down, and one would have to be an idiot not to sense the psychological
toll all this is taking on him. Mum seems blindly devoted
to the care and feeding of her nonbiological charges, and
it’s hinted that they are a replacement for her own never-met
grandparents and far-away parents. She advises Eddie to be
thankful to have all these old people to school him, but the
poor kid just wants to be able to be master of his own telly.
The movie makes some thoughtful observations about the nature
of aging, which is sorely needed in this society. And yet,
Is Anybody There? misses the opportunity to turn any
of its aging pensioners (aside from Clarence) into fully dimensional
people. Instead, they’re stereotypes. Only Rosemary Harris,
as a former dancer encumbered by a plastic leg, manages to
coax something more poignant out of her role, but then again,
she’s Rosemary Harris. Too many subplots further muddy the
narrative waters.
But if one approaches Is Anybody There? purely as an
excuse to see Caine, it’s not half bad. He’s remarkably unsympathetic:
We find out that he was a horrible husband, and that his sole
wish would be the ability to go back and apologize to his
beloved, if mistreated, wife. Old photos reveal a golden-haired
young man; the comparison with Clarence’s shabby, bewhiskered
present is a striking reminder of what befalls us all. The
movie’s best moment, a climactic birthday party, features
Clarence at his magician best. He beguiles young and old alike
with his witty repartee and fast hands; that is, until a freak
accident puts the kibosh on everything. From there, the old
man’s demise is set in fast-forward, and we’re left with the
warm fuzzy of knowing that he helped to draw Eddie out of
his funk.
Still, the suddenness of Eddie’s parents deciding that he
can have his old room back, and that they can afford to have
a date or family night, gives one the lingering suspicion
that they made off good with old Clarence’s worldly possessions—but
that would have been a different movie.
—Laura
Leon
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