The new DreamWorks animated 3-D feature “Monsters vs. Aliens” is blessed with a high-concept title—possibly the highest ever; my son’s been hocking me about this movie since before he was born—and Seth Rogen’s serenely dense line readings in the role of a genetically altered tomato gone wrong. But a bizarre percentage of the project went wrong somewhere, along with the tomato.

Pilfering everything from “Mothra” to “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” to “Men in Black” and “Monsters, Inc.” the script piles on the mayhem and forgets the funny. Compared with last summer’s DreamWorks smash “Kung Fu Panda,” which really was funny, or even the second “Madagascar” outing, “Monsters vs. Aliens” is pure marketing without anything to market. To add insult to a paucity of jokes, the look of the picture is bright, cold and oddly flat, even when someone’s whapping a paddleball right at your face to remind you that 3-D is supposed to count for something. (Late reminder: See “Coraline” if you want 3-D that counts for something.)

The directors are Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon, who directed “Shark Tale” and “Shrek 2,” respectively. In other words you’re in good hands when it comes to jaded pop culture references. (Here, the riffs list includes “Dr. Strangelove,” “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Apocalypse Now.”) On the day she’s to marry a smarmy TV weatherman (voiced by Paul Rudd), heroine Susan (Reese Witherspoon) gets creamed by a meteor. Presto: She’s turned into a nearly 50-foot dame, no evildoer, but fearsome enough to intimidate the general populace.

For years, a la “Men in Black,” the government has confined various monsters to a holding facility. The lineup includes B.O.B. (Rogen in full-on, entertaining stoner-slacker mode), a cockroach scientist (Hugh Laurie), the so-called Missing Link (Will Arnett) and a Mothra-style grubworm, Insectosaurus. Once Susan, renamed Ginormica by the U.S. government, gets to know her fellow monstrous cellmates, she realizes they’re OK, just misunderstood—unlike the film’s antagonist, space alien Gallaxhar (voice by Rainn Wilson), who deploys a bunch of alien robots to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge and move on from there. I didn’t care for the Golden Gate Bridge scene; it settles for tone-deaf realism and conventional action beats. Although it’s loud. And loud’s probably good enough for the target audience.

It’s tough to get on board with these monsters. They don’t get the banter they—or we—deserve, and the screenwriters lean on wearying stereotypes such as the doltish military brass (Kiefer Sutherland growls away as General W.R. Monger) to the brainless, craven president voiced by Stephen Colbert (who may have ad-libbed much of his material, but not enough). Susan’s transformation from trophy bride-to-be to empowered, independent female feels like feminism for kids of dummies. Witherspoon can be a terrific actress but has criminally little to play here. Only Rogen’s merry gelatinous cretin comes to any sort of comic life. At one point he tries to make small talk with a plate of Jell-O. It’s a pretty good gag. And in this bombastic context, it’s a pretty lonely one.

 
MPAA rating: PG (for sci-fi action,
some crude humor and mild language)
Running time: 1:34. Opening: Friday.
Starring: Reese Witherspoon (Susan);
Seth Rogen (B.O.B.); Will Arnett (Missing Link); Stephen Colbert (the President);
Kiefer Sutherland (Gen. W.R. Monger)
Directed by: Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon; written by Maya Forbes, Wally Wolodarsky, Letterman, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger; produced by Lisa Stewart. A DreamWorks release.
 

There’s not much wrong with the house in “The Haunting in Connecticut” that a little WD-40 couldn’t cure. Everything creaks, including the dialogue. You’d swear the place was haunted by the ghost of a sound designer whose predilection for metallic clangs every time an apparition swoops by a mirror turns this thing into a virtual anvil chorus.

The movie bumps along from low-grade scare to scare, and it’s not lousy, mainly because Virginia Madsen prevents it from being so. It offers the requisite “jump” bits—Scary face in the mirror! Moldy ham in the fridge!—and first-time feature director Peter Cornwell manages some evocatively grisly images of long-ago mortuary activity and necromancy and PG-13-level nastiness. The PG-13 horror market’s generally pretty attractive to investors, and “The Haunting in Connecticut” may get by. But the results are more dutiful than driven, beginning with its drably functional title. What’s next, “A Seance in New Jersey”? “A Medical Conference at the University of North Dakota”?

 The film alleges to be based on a true story and for a little more on that, I refer you to carmenreed.com, maintained by the inspiration for our film’s stalwart God-fearing heroine. (Sample Web site header, offering supernatural housecleaning for a fee: “Do you need help with a haunting?”) Preceded by the book “In a Dark Place” and a Discovery Channel documentary, also called “A Haunting in Connecticut,” screenwriters Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe waste no time getting to it. Sara (Madsen) and recovering alcoholic Peter (Martin Donovan) rent a big Victorian house near the hospital where son Matt (Kyle Gallner) is undergoing  experimental radiation treatments for cancer. All that square footage for such reasonable rent. “I’m just wondering: Where’s the catch?” Madsen asks, as only a game alum of “Candyman” (good, scary horror film) could spin it.

 The catch: It’s a former mortuary, though the movie’s weirdly fuzzy on how much Sara knows about the history and when she knows it.

In the basement, years ago, horrible things were done to bodies, and the funeral parlor director had a clairvoyant son, Jonah, whose specter wastes no time in psychically befriending poor Matt. At first he’s the only one in the house who can see the blood on the floor and the maggots here and there. Then everybody starts freaking out. Elias Koteas, whose weary countenance comes from the Jason Miller “Exorcist” school of method horror acting, portrays a reverend who helps settle the hash of the spooks, though Koteas takes everything in such blasè stride, you’d think it was the guy’s 15th haunting that week.

“The Haunting in Connecticut,” for the record, was shot in tax-advantageous Manitoba. Will the U.S. ever get the hint that it might consider similar refunds on a federal level to compete with runaway production? Next thing you know they’ll be shooting the musical “Chicago” in Toronto. Oh. Wait. They did.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some intense sequences of terror and disturbing images)
Running time: 1:32. Opening: Friday
Starring: Virginia Madsen (Sara); Kyle Gallner (Matt); Martin Donovan (Peter); Amanda Crew (Wendy); Elias Koteas (Rev. Popescu)
Directed by: Peter Cornwell; written by Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe; produced by Paul Brooks, Andrew Trapani, Daniel Farrands and Wendy Rhoads. A Lionsgate release.
 

“Slumdog Millionaire” comes to DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday, completing an eight-month winning streak ($300 million worldwide box office to date) highlighted by several Oscars, including one for best picture of 2008. The film may be full of agonizing subject matter, including grinding poverty and exploitation of children, but the tone of the film is the opposite of social realism. It’s a Bollywood picaresque and a fairy tale no less reassuring in its belief that things will work out than, say, “Top Hat” with Fred and Ginger.

Another, more penetrating film about three young people cast adrift by society finally made it to DVD this week. This one’s no fairy tale. Rather, it’s a classic Depression-era document from the Warner Brothers studio, which led the way in the early 1930s in offering audiences not just escapism and not just despair but remarkable combinations thereof, humming with vibrant, unsettling life.

The film is “Wild Boys of the Road” (1933, above), one of six William Wellman pictures being released on Warner Home Video under the title “Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 3.” It’s dramatically compressed (68 minutes at a sprint) to the point of bursting.

A year after its production under the First National banner, various pressure groups put the screws to Hollywood and the longstanding Production Code became far more strictly enforced. Until then, though, the best work of the pre-Code era got away with comparative murder—check out the uncensored “Baby Face” sometime, with Barbara Stanwyck—while allowing some fierce sexual innuendo to slip in alongside tough, clear-eyed assessments of the state of the nation.

While our times aren’t exactly those times, enough parallels exist to make “Wild Boys of the Road” disturbingly fresh. The film begins at the tail end of the economically reckless Jazz Age. Teenage Tommy (Edwin Phillips) lives with his widowed mother, who gets by with a little help from her friends and her waitress job.

His pal Eddie (Frankie Darro, center) comes home one day to find his father has lost his job. The boys take off, not wanting to be a burden to their folks. Riding the rails, they encounter a girl disguised as a boy (Dorothy Coonan, the future Mrs. Wellman), and the story involves everything from rape to Hooverville encampments to a tragic railway accident.

The America we see in “Wild Boys” is the America we see so often in the pre-Code films: a place where rugged individualism has given way to lawlessness and despair, but where the fighting spirit remains. As Thomas Doherty wrote in his book “Pre-Code Hollywood,” “Wild Boys of the Road” treats its characters like the troubled country they call home, careening “from frivolity to destitution in a matter of minutes.” At the end, Tommy confronts a judge threatening him with jail time. “You read in the papers about giving people help. The banks get it. The soldiers get it. The breweries get it. And they’re always yelling about giving it to the farmers. What about us? We’re kids!”

This is a world away from the eye-popping fabulations of “Slumdog Millionaire.”

I suggest seeing these two as a cockeyed double bill, just to remind yourself how two different filmmakers, working in radically opposed styles and in utterly contrasting temperaments, manage to see the world in all its cruel inequity and then bring it to the screen.

If you have a favorite pre-Code film, released between 1929 and 1934, let me know. “Three on a Match”? “Golddiggers of 1933”? “King Kong”? “Murder at the Vanities”?

We could go on. "Horse Feathers"! The twisted Rodgers and Hart Al Jolson musical "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!"

Sorry, no lifelines on this one.

Here's the best new film of the week, the continuation of Iranian-American Ramin Bahrani's remarkable three-feature career. Below: Red West (Elvis Presley's longtime pal and bodyguard) and Souleymane Sy Savane in "Goodbye Solo," reviewed here.

 


It’s a fleeting shot of a convenience mart, and it could be in any town in America. The name carries a whiff of poetic grandiosity: “Great American Food Store.” Who runs this place? An immigrant from which country? This one? A hundred others?

We never find out. The storefront is onscreen a few seconds, simply one more stop in another night in the life of a Senegalese taxi driver, Solo, who lives and works in Winston-Salem, N.C. “Goodbye Solo” is the third feature—eloquent and very moving—from writer-director Ramin Bahrani, following “Man Push Cart“ (2005) and “Chop Shop“ (2007). He continues to build a remarkable career in independent cinema.

While his newest work gravitates toward a simple pair of character studies, more studied in their storytelling technique than Bahrani’s previous works, all three films bring a genuine decency to the screen, and I don’t mean the kind of humanist decency that essentially kills off your interest in what’s happening. His movies work as movies. They are rich slices of immigrant life. A Pakistani’s coffee cart in Manhattan; a Latino brother and sister’s bruising, breathless existence in the “Iron Triangle” auto body strip near Shea Stadium; a Senegalese cabbie studying to become a flight attendant and negotiating his role as husband and father: These are Bahrani’s subjects, and they contain multitudes.

 “Goodbye Solo” puts together two people who have little in common. Solo, played by Souleymane Sy Savane, is a highly sociable motormouth with a smile bright enough to warm your hands. One night, behind the wheel of his employer’s cab, he picks up a tough, sad old bird played by former Elvis Presley bodyguard and Presley confidant Red West. The character, William, slips Solo $100 as a deposit on a trip he plans to take in two weeks, way out to a place called Blowing Rock along the Blue Ridge Parkway. William is closing out his accounts, settling what little he has to settle. To what end?

Solo, whose wife (Carmen Leyva) has a 9-year-old daughter (Diana Franco Galindo) from a previous relationship, sees William as a man in need of a friend. Night after night Solo drives William to a movie theater, where he sees William make small talk with the young man working the box office. Solo gives William his couch one night after too many drinks together. Then, having moved into a motel, William finds Solo knocking on his door after his wife turns him out.

The motif in “Goodbye Solo” is that of flight, and Bahrani and co-writer Bahareh Azimi work the theme pretty hard. As Solo studies for his flight attendant exam, William is thinking about another kind of leap into the unknown. Like Tom McCarthy’s “The Visitor,” or Courtney Hunt’s “Frozen River,“ the intertwining lives we see in “Goodbye Solo” reflect different American stories, along with a dash of well-made-play tidiness. But the acting’s so true, and Bahrani’s so observant, you find yourself caring about everyone onscreen.

Bahrani’s cinematographer Michael Simmonds brings out the gently decaying beauty in the streets of Winston-Salem. I’m not sure what it would take for Bahrani to reach the audience he deserves, but making one good film after another can’t hurt.

No MPAA rating (some language)
Running time: 1:31. Opening: Friday.
Starring: Souleymane Sy Savane (Solo); Red West (William); Diana Franco Galindo (Alex); Carmen Leyva (Quiera).
Directed by: Ramin Bahrani; written by Bahareh Azimi, Bahrani; produced by Jason Orans, Bahrani. A Roadside Attractions release.
 

This Variety story confirms the latest on the long-gestating Farrelly Brothers movie about The Three Stooges. Look for it in 2010.

Sean Penn's down for Larry. Negotiations continue apace, and with various hammers, grinders and eye-pokings, to add Jim Carrey (plus 40 pounds) as Curly and Benicio Del Toro as Moe.

Penn has won two Oscars; Del Toro, one. On average that's an Oscar per Stooge.

Whatcha think of that casting?

Fifty years ago this July, Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" played its first Chicago engagement. The film's signature sequence remains indelibly droll, strangely frightening and, from the unlikely perspective of its establishing shot, it is framed and edited with masterly assurance. The film is being restored for a Blu-Ray and standard DVD reissue later this year.

Here are the nine minutes in question:

Cary Grant, the wrong man, has been instructed to meet his contact a couple of hours outside Chicago. That's Malcolm Atterbury on the right. Where was the sequence photographed? Not Illinois; not Indiana.

Try the outskirts of Wasco, Calif., north of Bakersfield.

 Am I the only one on the planet who liked “Little Miss Sunshine,” sort of, without believing a second of it? I never believed those nutty, single-trait characters belonged to the same fractured family. I didn’t believe the rousing feel-good finale. What I liked, I liked because of what the performers did to transcend their own material.

I prefer the equally modest “Sunshine Cleaning,” again without believing a second of it. It shares with the other audience-friendly “Sunshine” film a key word in its title; a setting, at least in part (Albuquerque); a key supporting actor (Alan Arkin as a crusty paternal figure); and a rather studied sense of quirk. Nonetheless, the performers get a lot going, and the ensemble’s very easy company.

Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play Rose and Norah, sisters who start up an unlicensed crime-scene cleanup business. Rose is the older, more responsible one, trying to provide for her easily distracted preteen son. She’s in the ultimate bantamweight relationship: regular trysts with her married high school boyfriend, a cop played with unexpected tenderness by Steve Zahn. Norah’s life is a tumble of sullen hookups and general unreliability. The sisters are haunted by the suicide of their mother; for them the biohazard removal biz is a way of processing their grief, and bringing to survivors the comfort they themselves seek.

Certain narrative events in “Sunshine Cleaning”—a fire, for one—are more about dramatic convenience than the mess of real life. It helps to have actresses as vibrant as Adams and Blunt around. Blunt has a way of diving into every moment headlong, physicalizing each interaction. You could call it mugging—she’s certainly a willing ham—but when you consider this 26-year-old British actress’ breakout role in “My Summer of Love,” and then stack that against her scene-stealing bitchiness in “The Devil Wears Prada,” you realize how good she really is.

Adams, 34, is at once more self-effacing and more naturally ebullient. (Blunt, on the other hand, is naturally sardonic.) Do we believe these two are sisters? We do, in fact, even when Megan Holley’s screenplay sticks to the surface. Certain details feel honest. (There’s a depressing reality to the way Rose downgrades herself with lines such as “I’m an idiot” or “I’m so stupid.”) The director, New Zealander Christine Jeffs (“Sylvia”), loosens the plotting as best she can, letting the interactions breathe. Her work, and the film, is strictly about the performers.

MPAA rating: R (for language, disturbing images, some sexuality and drug use).
Running time: 1:32. Opening: Friday.
Starring: Amy Adams (Rose); Emily Blunt (Norah); Alan Arkin (Joe); Steve Zahn (Mac); Clifton Collins Jr. (Winston); Mary Lynn Rajskub (Lynn)
Directed by: Christine Jeffs; written by Megan Holley; produced by Glenn Williamson, Jeb Brody, Marc Turtletaub and Peter Saraf. An Overture Films release.
 

(from Rob Elder)

Although “special guests” have been announced to appear at some late-night Friday parties for the DVD release of the popular vampire film, the studio has been mum on who and where the “talent” will pop in. The festivities will take place between 10 p.m. Friday and 12:30 a.m. Saturday.

But, here are locations for Chicagoland’s “Twilight” shindigs...talent will appear at one of these spots:

The full review of "Duplicity" lies beneath this column.

  A minor but enjoyable entry in the boy-man comedy genre, “I Love You, Man” stars Paul Rudd as a guyless guy—a heterosexual L.A. real estate agent engaged to be married but short on straight-up male companionship in general and a best man for his wedding in particular. Rudd has worked wonders in all sorts of comedies, from “Anchorman” (no one could turn to the camera, suddenly, with more phony intensity) to “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up.” The reason Rudd wears so well has something to do with charm and, more important, spiking that charm with an unsettling dash of vinegar. He’s easy company, but that smile seems to be hiding something.

Stuck in a socially tense situation, Rudd’s character, Peter Klaven, relies on newly minted catchphrases that don’t quite catch. “I’ll see you there, or I’ll see you on the ... other time,” he says at one point. Later he takes to calling his newfound man-date pal Sydney “totes magotes,” a nickname with no known origin.

Such riffs provide the most interesting laughs in the film, which was co-written (with Larry Levin) and directed by John Hamburg. The movie is “The Odd Couple” with a looser vibe and more oral sex references. Peter’s fiance, a pleasant blank played by Rashida Jones of “The Office,” isn’t given much to do plotwise, so the runway’s cleared for Rudd and Jason Segel, who plays Sydney, a sometime investment whiz living the life of a Venice Beach slacker. How these two meet and bond leads to much engaging time-wasting. They’re both freaks for the band Rush, and they initiate a series of jam sessions at Sydney’s oceanfront “man-cave.” A few formulaic lessons in friendship and forgiveness are the price we pay for the fun.

This Judd Apatow-free but decidedly Apatow-inspired vehicle isn’t quite in the league of “Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” “Superbad” or Segel’s starring vehicle, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Director Hamburg’s sensibility is more mainline and commercially calculated; he co-wrote “Meet the Parents” and “Meet the Fockers,” and directed another Ben Stiller humiliation outing, “Along Came Polly.” In “I Love You, Man,” when he’s required to deliver a projectile-vomiting sight gag, he does so in a strictly routine way, nothing off-center or unexpected about it.

What works best is whatever’s completely incidental to the story, such as the totes-magotes/slippy mcgippy jive talk. The script sets up Peter as a familial and social loner—Andy Samberg plays his gay younger brother; their relative closeness is never defined—yet on some level Rudd seems too much the lad (or nerd-lad) to be playing the fellow he’s playing. At the same time he’s the reason to see the film. Segel’s casual, genial belligerence (he refuses to pick up after his dog and gets rageful when confronted) contrasts wittily with Rudd’s depiction of a tightly wound fellow attempting to cut loose and discover the joys of the “man-date.”

Now: If one of these movies can get around to writing a really interesting female lead, we’ll be getting somewhere.
 
MPAA rating: R (for pervasive language, including crude and sexual references).
Running time: 1:40. Opening: Friday.
Starring: Paul Rudd (Peter Klaven); Jason Segel (Sydney Fife); Rashida Jones (Zooey); Andy Samberg (Robbie); J.K. Simmons (Oswald); Jane Curtin (Joyce); Jon Favreau (Barry); Jaime Pressley (Denise)
Directed by: John Hamburg; written by Hamburg and Larry Levin; produced by Hamburg and Donald De Line. A Paramount Pictures release.