John C Reilly Page 6

You know you're in trouble when the George W. Bush quote you open your movie with ("Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream") gets the evening's biggest laugh.

It's no stretch to call Adam McKay's Step Brothers the year's stupidest film. Part of me feels bad labeling it as such, but then I remember that no movie boasting scenes of a grown man licking dog feces really wants to be taken seriously on any level.

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The Promotion Review

By Jesse Hassenger

Very Good

It's rare to find an American movie that cares about what its characters do for a living, and rarer still for that living to be a recognizable one. Most film characters seem to hold glamorous but faux-humble positions: architects, magazine editors, PR reps, and other vague, unconvincing justifications for owning ridiculous real estate (you may see some ordinary cops or lawyers, which usually requires that the story takes them on some sort of heroic journey and/or dark tour of a metaphorical or even perhaps underworld). Screenwriter Steve Conrad, though, actually seems to pay attention to how someone might earn his living -- even how someone might feel about how he earns that living. His script for The Weather Man found a local TV personality adrift in a feeling of meaninglessness (and food-throwing hostility), while The Pursuit of Happyness detailed the often-wrenching struggles of staying above the poverty line.

Now Conrad has directed his first feature, The Promotion, and he remains fascinated by the mechanics of everyday life -- more so, in fact, because Doug (Seann William Scott) and Richard (John C. Reilly), both assistant managers at a Chicago-area grocery store, will probably never be anything as glitzy as a local weatherman or a stockbroker.

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Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story Review

By Bill Gibron

Excellent

Judd Apatow needs to quit right now. He can't have a better year than 2007. After successfully saving big-screen comedy with the masterful Knocked Up and proving his imprint mantle with the summer smash Superbad, he's now delivered on the talent trifecta with the uproarious Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Though helmed and co-written by Lawrence Kasdan's talented son Jake, this is Apatow's baby, from the satire-meets-slapstick tone to the casting of recognizable fan favorites. Along with a bravura turn by John C. Reilly in the title role, what we wind up with here is one of the Awards season's silliest -- and most satisfying -- surprises.

When he was a young boy, Dewey Cox lost his virtuoso brother Nate in a freak machete accident. The trauma left the lonely child challenged, olfactorily speaking. Hoping to follow in his talented sibling's footsteps, Dewey learned the blues. He was then catipulted to fame during the heady days of early rock and roll. Though condemned for playing the Devil's music, his mixture of innocence and innuendo led to massive mainstream success. Life on the road, however, was filled with temptations.

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Year Of The Dog Review

By Chris Cabin

Weak

There's a passage in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One that lends itself directly to Mike White's Year of the Dog, regardless of where the film runs with this idea. Said by the owner of a pet mortuary to a lowly employee concerning normal funeral homes: "Why wouldn't I be [jealous of] all that dough going to relations they've hated all their lives, while the pets who've loved them and stood by them, never asked no questions, never complained, rich or poor, sickness or health, get buried anyway like animals?" Correctly assuming that as a public we take the love we can't find with humans and bestow it on animals, Waugh's criticism has more than a leg up on Mike White's directorial debut.

Peggy (Molly Shannon) dotes on Pencil, her puppy, with the affection only rewarded to the luckiest of children from the most spoiling of parents. So, when Pencil gets into some toxic shrubbery and goes, as all dogs do, to heaven, Peggy is inconsolable. Not that there aren't plenty of people who want to help her. Her oafish neighbor (John C. Reilly) wants to date her, her best friend (Regina King) wants to set her up with someone, and the receptionist at the vet (the invaluable Peter Sarsgaard) wants to get her a new dog ASAP. It's the receptionist, Newt, who gets Peggy into veganism and, ostensibly, sends her on a path of social destruction the likes of which are rarely seen.

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Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby Review

By Annette Cardwell

Very Good

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

America, meet your newest folk hero. His name is Ricky Bobby, and unlike his more humble legendary predecessors like Davy Crockett and such, this dim-but-daring NASCAR driver was born to win. He's a brand new kind of champion for the "shock-and-awe" America, living his life by one motto: "If you're not first, you're last."And whether you're a member of the NASCAR Nation or dead on the other side of the fence with the rest of us urban-intellectual elitists, you'll find Ricky Bobby and Talladega Nights funny and entertaining. It skirts the line between parody and homage so well that you will hardly be able to tell whether Will Ferrell and his Anchorman collaborator Adam McKay are poking fun at or celebrating NASCAR culture.The story follows Ricky (Ferrell) from his childhood, in which his deadbeat racecar driver dad (Gary Cole) instilled in him that lifetime motto, to his redneck adulthood, where - with the help of loyal pal Cal Naughton Jr. (John C. Reilly) - he climbs the NASCAR ranks to become the best racer in the land. He's got it all: the "smoking hot" wife (Leslie Bibb), his sons Walker and Texas Ranger, product endorsements galore (lampooned a little uncomfortably with many product placements), and the love of fans everywhere.But it all comes crashing down when gay French driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen of Ali G fame) comes on the scene, stealing his days of thunder. When Ricky tries to take him on in a big race, they both wreck spectacularly, putting Ricky in the hospital and into a career tailspin. In order to get his groove back, he heads home and rediscovers his original sensei, dad Reese Bobby. And so begins the long road back, which is hilariously strewn with cougars, blindfolds, and Lucky Charms (you'll see).The biggest question for most fans is, "How funny is Ferrell?" Well, for my money, he's very big on the chuckle quotient, but I wasn't falling out of my chair, as I have with some of his other efforts. It's subjective, of course, but much of the material seems a little tame. Instead, I found that the most ingenious moments came when Ferrell, Reilly, and Cole are just allowed to riff, and they end up with these incredibly wacky, edgier, side-splitting bits. One of my faves involves Reilly's Naughton telling a half-comatose Ricky about his foray into nude male modeling. Priceless.Overall, the gags throughout are funny but sometimes come a little cheap. While I don't think any of our Southern, NASCAR-loving friends will take offense, some of them do cut a little too close to just pointing out how ridiculous white-trash Americans live. But, whatever... everyone seems to love Larry the Cable Guy, right?The bottom line here is that this movie is created to be so likeable and probably tested against the broadest mainstream audience possible that it's going to be a monster hit. If you want your wild and crazy Will Ferrell, look for him elsewhere. But if you just want a few laughs from a movie that you know everyone's going to enjoy, Ricky Bobby's definitely your man.Hey, Macarena!

A Prairie Home Companion Review

By Anne Gilbert

Very Good

Even among NPR fans - already a rather specific group - there is somewhat of a rift when it comes to the weekly program, A Prairie Home Companion. It's the sort of corny jokes and quaint folk singing that went out of fashion a half-century ago, and to listeners it can be a soothing throwback -- unbearably, cloyingly sweet -- or, to folks who drink Tab cola and wear Reading Rainbow screen-print tees, so uncool it's hip.The film of the same name is really just a barely fictionalized version of the radio show - the content is the same, the gentle, homey sensibility certainly is the same; the only real difference is the parts are played by superstar talent. So it has precisely the same appeal and built-in fans of the program. Fans of director Robert Altman will be most pleased. If you aren't a follower already, well, there is precisely nothing here to win you over. It's A Mighty Wind without the irony.Despite decades of popularity, it's the end of the road for A Prairie Home Companion, because the radio station was sold to a Texas corporation (undoubtedly one in the oil business) that sent someone north to fire the cast and raze the theatre. Flitting between onstage and off are the cast and crew, now abuzz at the thought of a looming axe: a pair of floopy, scattered singing sisters; two ribald cowpokes; a stage manager harried by the performers' eccentricities; a tritely rebellious teenager; a weepy sandwich lady and her lover; a blonde in a white trench coat acting as a ham-fisted filmic device; and a house detective so trapped in the dames-and-private dick era that he's named Guy Noir. At the center of it all is Garrison Keillor, playing himself as the unflappable, vaguely bewildered host of the program.The manic energy, overlapping scenes, and meandering (and often unresolved) storylines are all Altman trademarks, to be sure, but as scripted by Keillor, they all fit in nicely with this cozy brand of Americana. Also, the setting falls in with Altman's affinity for setting films amid the controlled chaos that goes into creating art, which has led him to making some masterpieces (The Player) and some majestic flops (Ready to Wear). Companion, it must be said, is neither.It does hop with rapid-fire wit, and the cast is enviable, if occasionally baffling. The standouts are hardly surprising - Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin are charming as the flighty Johnson sisters; Kevin Kline embraces anachronism as the hapless Noir; and though it seems unfair to commend him for playing himself, Keillor is a delightful center to the storm. And though she may appear incongruous on the list of heavy-hitters and accomplished character players, Lindsay Lohan, playing Streep's sulky daughter, is either quite sweet or not intolerable, depending on how tired you are of her tabloid persona.The missteps are unmistakable, though, glaring despite the frantic pace and mishmash of characters and stories. Plot points are picked up and promptly dropped, which is simply ambiance when it is a running joke about how Keillor got into radio, but feels inappropriate when it is the death of one of the show's regulars. Including a luminescent angel of death worked well in All That Jazz, but here, poor Virginia Madsen is saddled with a clunky, useless, monotone role that is utterly pointless. And the unevenness of the Noir character is aggressively irritating - fart humor and slapstick who's-on-first routines? Really? That's beneath this film, or it should be.Perhaps the stylings of Keillor and Altman are oddly too well-suited. For rabid Companion fans - and perhaps avid Altman followers as well - the film is like watching something you have seen and loved a hundred times already, but in some new way. If you are outside the built-in audience, however, the entire film is an inside joke: someone can explain it to you, but it will never be as fun as if you just... got it.Can I get an Amen?

Casualties Of War Review

By Don Willmott

Excellent

Vietnam War movies are always tough to watch, especially for those of us who go through life burdened with liberal guilt. But of all the Vietnam movies out there, none is more painful to watch -- and paradoxically more beautifully shot -- than Casualties of War, in which all of director Brian De Palma's prodigious talents are in full effect. To steal a line from another Vietnam classic: "The horror..."

Based on an allegedly true event that was reported in the New Yorker, Casualties is a stripped-down tale of a small platoon of Army grunts who head into the jungle only to lose their humanity, a trope that has traveled from Conrad to Coppola to here. It's Satan in paradise, wreaking havoc and leaving unexplainable carnage behind.

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Chicago Review

Excellent

The Broadway revival of Chicago managed to be cheeky and creaky, a throwback to pseudo-racy vaudeville that's "clean-sexy" in a non-threatening, Marilyn Monroe sort of way. Chicago the movie, from first-time feature director Rob Marshall, amplifies the passion and ratchets up the sass, all with a wink and a grin held over from the original tongue-in-cheek theatrical production.

From its first song-and-dance to its final curtain call, Marshall's Chicago packs its frames with all that jazz; translated, that means corruption, adultery, exploitation, and death. This ain't the 1990s, folks. It's the Roaring '20s, and murder - as seedy attorney Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) so aptly puts it - is "a form of entertainment."

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Criminal Review

Argentinian filmmaker Fabian Bielinsky enjoyed a surprise hit in 2002 with his crackling con artist scheme Nine Queens. The intricate thriller about an established crook and his inexperienced protégé moved at such a rapid clip that it left your head swimming with twists until all the facts finally crashed into the table.

Criminal, first-time director Gregory Jacobs' generically-titled attempt at an American remake, performs the cinematic equivalent of the doggie paddle. It takes Bielinsky's well-paced con and changes just enough so that the story no longer makes any sense.

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The Anniversary Party Review

By Zenny Tropa

Weak

I have long admired Jennifer Jason Leigh for her courage in the face of critical adversity, cheering every mumble in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, clinging for dear life to the screwed warble-songs of Georgia. Sadly, "The Ballad of Jenny" went askew this year when she decided to continue her particular Brand X of raw performance, churning out snarly but predictably intense perfs in The King is Alive and her own co-directed The Anniversary Party.

Along for the ride, helping her pen this Party of lovey-dovey actors in a disgruntled group hug, is none other than her Cabaret co-star, Alan Cumming. Together, they're a force to be reckoned with: the crème de la crème of indulgence. Playing a bisexual writer and an aging starlet who never won an Academy Award, they are in effect exorcising their jitters toward an unsuspecting audience. Whether you're willing to go along for the ride is entirely up to you, but this critic found it to be deadly dull. Too much poisoned ice cream will give you a headache.

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The Aviator Review

Excellent

The mythology of Howard Hughes is quite possibly bigger than the man could ever live up to. Already the subject of a handful of movies and over 100 books, the particulars of the Hughes legend are widely known. But leave it to Martin Scorsese to spin the eccentric's life into a more coherent -- if sprawling -- mass.

As its title would imply, The Aviator focuses Hughes through the lens of the airplane, his greatest passion in the world. Hughes is known for many things -- business, movies, his women, hypochondria, political scandal (the lattermost is barely touched in this film) -- but it's his love of and scientific advances with aircraft that have had the most lasting effects on society.

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Dark Water (2005) Review

By Chris Barsanti

Very Good

As perhaps a concession to the modern age, the haunted-house story Dark Water is set not in some gloomy old mansion but in the claustrophobic confines of a dank apartment building, and it's all the better for it. But in many other ways the film is a fairly classic scary story, albeit one that heightens a mood of mournfulness over incessant spine-straightening scares. Fresh off the wide acclaim for his young Che Guevara travelogue The Motorcycle Diaries, director Walter Salles seems an odd choice for this, his first Hollywood project. But it's a similar transition to that taken by another South American, Alejandro Amenábar, who he came to Hollywood and made The Others, another solidly classical spooker gussied up with sharp talent and moody atmospherics.

And Dark Water (a remake of Hideo Nakata's 2002 film Honogurai mizu no soko kara) is nothing if not moody. It begins in the gloom of a divorce, with just-separated Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) and Kyle (Dougray Scott) fighting over who is going to live where - shared custody of their young girl Ceci (Ariel Gade) making commuting a big issue. Righteously furious Dahlia needs a cheap place near a good school and so ends up looking at a place on Roosevelt Island, the apartment-block-choked strip of land in the East River that makes most Manhattanites shudder and think, "There but for the grace of my broker, go I..." She and Ceci tour a grim apartment there with a chatty manager (a spot-on John C. Reilly) who tries to talk up the depressing view of rain-shrouded towers and smokestacks and the building's neo-Fascist architecture; only Reilly could say "Brutalist" with such perfectly smarmy cheer.

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For Love Of The Game Review

Excellent

My brother says I shouldn't review sports movies. Because I'm not a sports fan, he says, I can't be objective.

He may have a point, but I don't think For Love of the Game is fundamentally a sports movie. Sure, suit Kevin Costner up in a baseball uniform and you might think you're looking at another Field of Dreams, but For Love of the Game is something we don't see a lot of. Allow me to explain.

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The Good Girl Review

By Blake French

Bad

The Good Girl is as close as you can get to nothing and still have something to project on screen. So greatly lacking in life, interest, and imagination, it's amazing the film was ever made. The characters almost sleepwalk from scene to scene, deficient of spirit, energy, humor, and any will to live. Nobody in this movie has a decent future. Most of the characters look as if they'd happily dive head first from the nearest bridge.

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The Perfect Storm Review

Weak

I do not like boats. I get seasick. I hate being on the water.

As it turns out, I'm starting to dislike movies about boats, too. They also make me seasick.

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Boogie Nights Review

Extraordinary

Now this is some production. I'm lucky enough to live in one of the "selected cities" for Boogie Nights's limited opening (it goes wide on Oct. 31), and in all my years as a moviegoer, I think this is the first time I've seen a mirrorball in the theater put to use during a film. Outside of that, Boogie Nights may have generated the most enthusiastic audience response I've heard in ages.

The premise is simple and well-known. Young "Dirk Diggler" ("Marky" Mark Wahlberg) is a busboy discovered in a Receda nightclub by a big-time porn flick producer (Burt Reynolds, in perhaps his best role ever). Mingling with the likes of Amber Waves (Julianne Moore, my fave actress), the innocent Rollergirl (Heather Graham, who doesn't have nearly enough screen time), and other bigshots of the biz, Diggler rises (so to speak) and falls as the porn industry ruptures during the dawn of the 1980s.

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Magnolia Review

Extraordinary

Sooner or later, every director makes his Short Cuts.

Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights) only waited until his third film to make his, an over-three-hour epic with at least 10 major characters in almost as many separate story lines. And thanks to those characters, every one a rich mystery burning with secrets, Magnolia is a smashing success.

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The Hours Review

Good

Stephen Daldry's The Hours is the quintessential highbrow arthouse picture of the year, the one film critics from the coasts will adore but is guaranteed to alienate audience members more in tune with Maid in Manhattan, Analyze That or The Two Towers.

Consider yourself warned. A Masters degree and a penchant for PBS' Masterpiece Theatre aren't required to fully comprehend and enjoy the picture, but they help. Hours masterfully weaves together three individual stories about three interconnected women existing in three different decades. Mentally ill author Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is on suicide watch in 1920s England as she pens her novel Mrs. Dalloway. Suburban housewife and mother Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) reads the same novel in 1951 as she suffers through a loveless marriage with her WWII veteran husband (John C. Reilly) and overprotected son, Richie (eight-year-old Jack Rovello). And modern day New York City book publisher Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) mirrors the character of Mrs. Dalloway as she plans a party for her dying ex-lover, Richard (Ed Harris), who recently won a literary prize.

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Boys Review

Bad

Twenty-five cents to the person who can explain what the point of this exercise was. The fetching Winona Ryder falls off a horse and Lukas Haas rescues her by taking her into his dorm at the all-boys prep school. Because she didn't want to go to the hospital. Haas decides he's in love so they run off to a carnival. And a car was stolen, and maybe Ryder had something to do with that. And John C. Reilly is the cop on the case! This disjointed review echoes perfectly what the sensibility of the film is: Virtually nil.

The Aviator Review

Excellent

Eschewing every pitfall of the biopic genre and delving deeply into the essence of both Howard Hughes' genius and his slow burn into madness, Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator" is a film of grand scope and masterfully intimate nuance, portraying a wild young mustang of a man who lived a fast life on an epic scale.

Presenting Hughes' view of the world as one in which nothing is impossible and the most momentous, groundbreaking decisions come instantly and instinctively ("What would controlling interest in TWA cost me?"), the film's crux is not the psychosis the man is best known for today, but his gift for sparing no expense to pursue novel visions no one else could see.

"We gotta reshoot 'Hell's Angels' for sound," Hughes decides on a whim in an early scene, after having already spent four years and millions of his own dollars perfecting his first foray into filmmaking -- a World War I epic featuring dozens of biplanes in an ambitious, jaw-dropping dogfight scene, parts of which Hughes shoots from a plane he flies into the fray himself.

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Chicago Review

Excellent

Within the first five seconds of the musical number that opens the film adaptation of "Chicago," director Rob Marshall has established such a sublimely vivacious speakeasy atmosphere of hot jazz, cigarette smoke and showgirls that you'll feel as if you've been transported backstage at a posh 1920s cabaret.

The scene crackles with seductive energy as vaudeville siren Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones) prowls across the footlights with a phalanx of sexy dancers, cooing "All That Jazz" in a voice that turns the men at the darkened tables around the stage into putty.

And just for a second, wannabe song-and-dance girl Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger) imagines herself up there in Velma's place. As the beautiful flapper floozy stands in the shadows at the back of the theater, wide-eyed but reeking of wily ambition, Marshall (who directed the recent stage revival of "Cabaret") shows us a flash of Roxie's imagination in which she's the fabulous star of the fabulous show, wearing a fabulously silver sequined waterfall dress, strutting and singing to wild applause.

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Gangs Of New York Review

Good

In the opening moments of Martin Scorsese's American history epic "Gangs of New York," a galvanized band of 19th Century Irish immigrants, armed to the teeth with axes and swords, emerges from a catacomb hideout beneath an abandoned brewery and kick open a shabby wooden door to reveal an amazing sight: the vast, almost frontier-like streets of lower Manhattan, circa 1846, brought to life in such exacting detail that you can almost smell the horse plop on the muddy roads.

This single shot does wonders for establishing the heavy, gritty, treacherous atmosphere of the muscle-ruled Five Points area in which the film is set. It's a place where falsely accused people are hung by crooked cops to set examples for petty criminals and where fire brigades duke it out in front of burning buildings to determine who gets to fight the fire.

Leading the pack of Irish bruisers is the stouthearted Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), who is subsequently killed in the ensuing violent, snow-bloodying street battle by William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) -- leader of The Natives, an vicious anti-immigrant gang, who leaves Vallon's young son, Amsterdam, one angry orphan.

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Magnolia Review

Very Good

An intricate mosaic of emotional stories intertwined by coincidence, "Magnolia" is an elegant exposé of human frailty written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who demonstrated his gift for burrowing under his characters' skins in 1997's melancholy porn industry soap opera "Boogie Nights."

He's honed that skill in the last two years, and his new multi-narrative, which features many of the same actors, is stunning and magnetic in its ability to tie you impulsively to even the most wretched of characters.

"Magnolia" takes place over the course of a single, unusually stormy (on a mythological scale) day in the San Fernando Valley and meditates on the complexities of family, and on the facades people put up to mask their insecurities, their grudges, greed and regret, their love, their selfishness and other symptoms of the human condition.

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The Good Girl Review

An honest, unsentimental, modest and well-crafted film from the writer-director team behind 2000's awkward stalker indie buzz flick "Chuck and Buck," "The Good Girl" is the melancholy allegory about a once ambitious small-town woman desperate to escape the malignant malaise of her monotonous life.

The ennui of years in discount-retail hell, the desperation of being tethered to a lay-about, stoner husband and the regret of never having realized, or even pursued, any of her dreams have piled up as emotional ballast in Justine's life. And the weight of it all is manifested viscerally by Jennifer Aniston in a pensive, title-role performance of effectively plodding, downcast body language.

When a sullen, taciturn 22-year-old named Tom (Jake Gyllenhaal) -- who calls himself Holden in honor of his juvenile fixation with "The Catcher in the Rye" -- takes a job at the Retail Rodeo, Justine thinks she recognizes a kindred spirit. "I saw in your eyes that you hate the world," she says by way of introduction. "I hate it too."

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Anger Management Review

Unbearable

Writer David Dorfman, director Peter Segal and star Adam Sandler missed a golden opportunity in "Anger Management," a comedy bereft of laughs about a milquetoast office drone and designer of fat feline fashions (?) who is sentenced to rage therapy after an incident on an airline.

The incident: His repeated polite requests for a headset to watch the in-flight movie are absurdly mistaken for aggression by a flight crew with post-9/11 jitters. The missed opportunity: The concept's punchline should have been that he really is a rage-a-holic and the calm version of events we see is his skewed perspective of normalcy.

Instead, the picture sticks with the notions that typically dim-bulb Sandler (insert empty-eyed double-take head-cocks here) really is a misunderstood nice guy, and the actor fails to find a single genuine laugh in the story's goofball gimmick -- which is that his nutzo court-appointed therapist (Jack Nicholson, volume turned up to 11) moves in with him and makes his life a living hell.

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Criminal Review