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'You, Me, and Dupree'

By Ben Spierenburg

Bucking a longstanding magical trend, three is only a normal number in "You, Me, and Dupree," a moderately entertaining film about the pitfalls of hosting an unforgivably uncouth houseguest. Propped up by the robust comic abilities of the ever-effusive Owen Wilson, the story is nevertheless only sporadically funny, with jokes often falling flat altogether. However, unlike some other recent humdrum comedies, at least the limited laughs in "Dupree" flow from its premise and not from, say, the random shot of a dog-humping-a-leg. While not exactly the funniest film Wilson has ever been in, an exceptionally strong cast does what it can to bolster "Dupree," resulting in a somewhat satisfying end product.

Matt Dillon plays land developer Carl Peterson, your average hard-partying guy who finally has everything going for him. In the film's opening moments, he marries stunning schoolteacher Molly (Kate Hudson), moves into a beautiful new home in a nice town, and receives a major promotion at work from his boss and new father-in-law, Mr. Thompson (Michael Douglas). Carl's good fortune takes a turn for the worse when he learns his best man and best friend, Randy Dupree (Wilson), has been fired and is now homeless. He gives his wayward buddy a place to crash "for a few days," which of course quickly turns into a few weeks.

Dupree is the sort of friend who's never been able to hold down a steady job or relationship, a stargazing slacker who talks of getting his call to action someday from "the mothership." As the comic foil in a group of typically serious actors, Wilson is responsible for generating many of the lighter moments, but gets occasional assistance from the always-amusing Seth Rogan, who plays a whipped husband still secretly obsessed with drinking, smoking and porn.

As you might expect, Dupree begins his reign of mischief immediately upon arrival, sleeping naked on the couch his first night. The next thing you know, he's clogging up the toilet, interrupting the newlywed's private romantic time to use the upstairs bathroom, and advising them to "light a match." Although not all that hilarious or original, the comic situations do have the virtue of being believable. The film generally has a balanced and well-paced feel to it, thanks to the efforts of brother directing duo Anthony and Joe Russo.

Asked to deal with a new marriage and a rowdy houseguest, Carl is further strained when his boss and father-in-law begins to steadily emasculate him. The domineering Mr. Thompson sabotages Carl's condo project, suggests he take the Thompson last name, and outlandishly tries to persuade him to get a vasectomy. An old hand at playing rich and powerful executives, Douglas adds tremendous acting weight to the film, but his dramatic skills aren't exploited, and he comes up rather lame whenever asked to create humor.

All the stress makes Carl a cranky guy, and his increasing irritability begins to hurt his marriage. Meanwhile, Dupree becomes driven to improve himself, waking up early to cook breakfast, train for bike races, and fill in for Carl as Molly's career-day speaker. Dupree also begins to fill in for Carl's husbandly duties, mailing off his portion of the wedding gift thank you notes and providing Molly with regular support and comfort.

Dillon is perfectly cast as the troubled, hardworking husband, as his countenance perpetually seems to betray a hint of anger simmering below the surface. Hudson must alternate between playing a sweet wife and an annoying nag, and she does both convincingly. Wilson gives a superb comic performance, but the film relies too heavily on him to provide all the humor. Mike LeSieur's screenplay nimbly plays the characters in the triangle off each other, but in the end the overall concept still feels a tad formulaic, like a glorified 108-minute sitcom. CV

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'A Scanner Darkly'

By Andrew Brink

As "A Scanner Darkly" begins, we are instructed that the events we are about to witness take place in the future. Seven years from now, to be exact. Seven years is a modest enough stretch of time that, even with our high tolerance for change in a world where a Starbucks can sprout up overnight, we expect that life as we know it will remain recognizable. It turns out that seven years isn't what it used to be. If this film is prophecy, in less than a decade, society will have eradicated any trace of ambiguity from our lives. We will all be either addicts or narks. Winners or losers. Immaculate doctors or paranoid patients infested head-to-toe with imaginary bugs. Of course, this film is as much of a prediction of the future as "Mars Attacks!" was, but it certainly succeeds in shooting a sobering bullet into the imagination. The film comes very close to hitting its mark.

Written and directed by Richard Linklater, "A Scanner Darkly" brings yet another of writer Philip K. Dick's imaginings to the big screen. Hollywood has been mining Dick's work for decades, most notably with Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" and Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report." In "A Scanner Darkly," Linklater provides the most definitive answer as to why directors continue to find inspiration in Dick's words. Dick, while asking science fiction's grand question of "what if," seems more concerned with the question of "how far?" His stories recognize that change is inevitable, that uncertainty breeds a desire to escape, and that progress, a train with no brakes, will inevitably run over countless innocents as it races onward. So how far do we travel, and how far do we push?

Some answers, and warnings, are found in Linklater's movie. On paper, the plot seems straightforward. During the film, simple is replaced with bouts of incoherence and chronic rambling. But what else would you expect from a story about drugs? "A Scanner Darkly" finds American society overwhelmed by an addiction to Substance D, a drug derived from a toxic flower of unknown origin. Undercover cop Fred (Keanu Reeves), a key agent in the war on drugs, infiltrates and monitors a circle of friends as they go about their day living with the delights, delusions and dangers the substance provides. The group includes James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrleson), Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder), and himself, Bob Arctor. Confused?

We learn that Substance D causes the brain to divide, forcing one side to compensate for the other and creating some fairly large gaps in reality. For instance, in trying to bust a major drug supplier, Fred comes to realize he has actually been targeting himself. And that creates, as you might imagine, a few complications. While the plot sounds logistically impossible, the film's use of - and I swear I'm not high as I write this -- interpolated rotoscoping animation brings to life the fluid state of the film's daydreamers, making it impossible to ignore or remain indifferent to the world presented.

By now, we know what we can expect of Keanu Reeves, and his performance here doesn't surprise or surpass, just safely reinforces. He can do stoned/confused/brooding appropriately. The standout performance of the film, and the glue that holds the movie together, is Downey. With the character of Barris, he creates an addict who demonstrates that there is a large dose of vanity in paranoia. Everyone is out to get him, but at least that makes him the center of the universe. Unlike Harrelson's typical stoner (like, cool, man), Barris is a master inventor, of both devices and words. He creates a silencer out of Styrofoam and utters small sermons, such as, "This is a world getting progressively worse." Spoken like someone who read yesterday's newspaper. Perhaps the future is closer than we think. CV

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'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'

By Ben Spierenburg

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Chock full of enough razzle-dazzle eye-candy to make your eyes rot out of your head, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" is a spectacular but overly long follow-up to the 2003 box-office hit. Reminiscent of the "Matrix" franchise, the second and third "Pirate" installments were filmed all at once, a flawed approach that should be abandoned by studios forthwith. Like the second "Matrix" film, "Dead Man's Chest" is filled to the brim with loads of viscerally stimulating, groundbreaking special effects, yet ultimately is a stupendously tough slog that provides no satisfaction, just a cliffhanger setup for the final film.

Clearly, a crucial part of the blueprint that made "Curse of the Black Pearl" a smash success was tossed aside. At a relatively brisk 100 minutes, the original was an enjoyable swashbuckling adventure that left you wanting more. At an arduous two-and-a-half hours, "Dead Man's Chest" leaves you looking for the end an hour too early.

The excessively protracted and complicated tale begins with Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) waiting at the altar for Will Turner (Orlando Bloom). Problem is, Will has been arrested by despicable East Indies Co. rep. Lord Cutler Beckett (newcomer Tom Hollander) for helping Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) in the first movie. Elizabeth is also placed under arrest, and Turner is forced to find Sparrow and take his mystical compass (which points you where your heart desires) to free his fiancé. Beckett needs this to find the Dead Man's Chest, another magical item that grants the owner supreme control of the seas.

After a cursory search of the globe, Turner soon finds Sparrow, who alas, has been taken prisoner on an island of primitive cannibals. They believe Sparrow to be a god, so naturally they plan to burn and eat him in order to free him from his human form. Turner is quickly captured and imprisoned with Jack's crew, left dangling in a basket of bones high above a gorge. Their thoroughly entertaining escape from the island is one of the highpoints of the film.

Although the luster and newness of his heavily make-upped character has faded, Depp is once again hypnotically convincing as Captain Jack Sparrow. Finally given the time to talk, Turner finds out that Sparrow also needs the chest, if only to save himself from being hunted down by new CGI villain Davy Jones (Bill Nighy). An undead squid-faced creature who commands a crew of similarly inspired monsters (one has a hammerhead shark face, another a seashell face), Jones is the captain of the Flying Dutchman, a ship that can submerge at a moment's notice. More nauseating than frightening, these baddies are lame in comparison to the skeleton-pirates from the first film.

The story rambles to and fro through a number of unnecessary subplots, many of which should definitely have ended up on the cutting-room floor. As the movie progresses, the elaborate stunts feel more and more gratuitous and unbelievable. There is something to be said here about the law of diminishing returns, namely that this film unwisely pays no attention to it. One example is the mythical sea monster the Kraken, which can swallow ships whole. While certainly an impressive special-effects feat, the creature is trotted out a few too many times to remain interesting.

Yet despite its flaws, by no stretch of the imagination is "Dead Man's Chest" a bad film. It has an exceptionally talented cast, a superb director in Gore Verbinski, striking cinematography, and astoundingly awesome special effects. It's just that, well, it's the kind of exhausting adventure that's best watched sprawled out on your couch at home, where you can fall asleep if you like. CV

'The Devil Wears Prada'

By Marjorie Baumgarten

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Anne Hathaway showed in "Brokeback Mountain" that she has the acting chops to keep her from getting pigeonholed as a princess diarist. However, Hathaway seems to backslide in "The Devil Wears Prada," the confessional of a young working woman in New York City. Adapted from Lauren Weisberger's bestselling roman ˆ clef about the year she spent as an assistant to Anna Wintour, the legendarily demanding editor of Vogue, "The Devil Wears Prada" offers a wicked look into the top tier of the fashion world, a world that makes most of us feel like voyeurs at the big prom.

Hathaway plays Andy Sachs, an aspiring journalist who has just graduated from college and moved to New York. She lands an interview at Runway magazine, the bible of fashion, whose editor Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep) has a reputation as a dragon lady.

In a very smart move, Streep underplays the part so that her Miranda never needs to raise her voice to get what she wants. She exudes the imperiousness of royalty, which comes from her absolute confidence in her position as the ultimate arbiter of all things fashion. Hathaway, however, gets bogged down in Andy's dreary story about learning that there's more to life than selling your soul for a pair of Jimmy Choo's. She begins the movie as someone who cares not one iota about fashion, but after enough withering comments about how grossly overweight she is as a size 6, Andy succumbs to the pressure.

In many ways "The Devil Wears Prada" suffers from some of the same unreality that marred "Sex & the City," and perhaps not unrelated is that director Frankel directed at least half-a-dozen episodes of that HBO series. Also, noted costume designer Patricia Field comes to Prada by way of "Sex & the City." Like Carrie Bradshaw's magnificent apartment paid for on a New York columnist's salary, the implausibility of Andy's new duds is never broached. In other words, if you shut down your brain and simply take in the wardrobe and performances by Streep and Blunt you'll have a swell time, just as you would aimlessly flipping the pages of a fashion magazine. CV

'Wordplay'

By Andrew Brink

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Ifeel sharp when I can solve a crossword puzzle in 48 hours, give or take a day. At least, that was how I felt until I watched the documentary "Wordplay," directed by Patrick Creadon. The film spotlights people who can burp out a six-letter word for Ancient Britannia and can complete a crossword puzzle while most of us are still sussing out the meaning of the clue, "eye cheesecake." Forget Superman. The citizens of "Wordplay" are the true superheroes of summer. The Man of Steel may leap tall buildings, but he has yet to prove he can solve the Sunday New York Times Crossword in two minutes.

"Wordplay" documents the world of puzzleheads and their headstrong journey to the 2005 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The film features Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times Crossword, who walks us through his personal history (he invented his major in college: Enigmatology) and that of the Times Crossword (their guidelines forbid the use of two-letter answers). From there we meet puzzle constructor Merle Reagle. Many remarkable solvers are shown in the film, but none is more mesmerizing than Reagle as he builds an enigma from scratch (and without a dictionary in sight).

The heart of the film beats at the annual tournament, where the country's best solvers come together and meet the criteria of a functioning family: competitive, a bit covetous and generally happy to be in each other's company. We are introduced to Ellen Ripstein, who - after nearly winning the tournament for 18 years - is known as the Susan Lucci of the puzzle scene, and reigning champion Trip Payne, who states, "I've always been intrigued by the letter 'Q'." Not exactly the spastic kids of "Spellbound," but entertaining. The film features such icons as Bill Clinton and the Indigo Girls, who muse on the power of puzzle solving and how it can massage everything from writer's block to politics. They reassure us that we may not be able to solve every world conflict, but we have a good chance of eventually finding a four-letter word for sawbill. CV

'Superman Returns'

By Scott Renshaw

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Director Bryan Singer doesn't waste any time letting you know that he's going retro for his franchise re-boot "Superman Returns." The block-letter opening credits swoop and whoosh just the way they did in Richard Donner's 1978 "Superman"; in the background, John Williams' rousing fanfare plays. Marlon Brando intones the voice of Superman's father Jor-El from his original performance. Even Brandon Routh's squeaky-voiced delivery as Clark Kent provides frightening echoes of Christopher Reeve. Singer wants to return us to that time when, as the tag line famously announced, we could "believe a man can fly" - because at last, special-effects technology have allowed comic book pages to come to life.

Nearly 30 years and an immeasurable number of gigabytes later, it's no longer exactly a problem convincing audiences that a man can fly, or shoot webs, or sprout adamantium claws or burst into flames. But the bar has been raised - by the likes of Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" films, or even last year's "Batman Begins" - for the psychological depth given to super-powered folks in tights.

That's a crucial missing piece in a story that embraces Superman as an icon rather than an individual. It's set five years after the events of "Superman II," with Superman (Routh) just returned from a quest for whatever might remain of his home planet of Krypton. The world has had to figure out how to go on without him, with Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) - now a single mom with a son coincidentally around 5 years old - having taken the departure most personally. Everyone is thrilled to know the Man of Steel is back - with the notable exception of Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), recently freed from prison and armed with a plan to use Superman's own history against the world.

Singer, of course, has plenty of experience by now with big-budget comic book adaptations after his work on the first two "X-Men" movies, so it's not surprising that he has a firm grip on action sequences like the crackerjack jet-in-peril set piece. He also gets great work from Spacey - who won his Oscar for the Singer-directed "The Usual Suspects" - whose take on Luthor brings more pure malevolence than Gene Hackman's interpretation. Great villains are half the battle in comic book adaptations, so "Superman Returns" would seem to be on solid ground.

But the other half of that battle is creating a compelling dramatic dilemma for the protagonist, and it's there that the script by "X2" writers Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris hits a wall of steel. The big hook is supposed to be the romantic triangle involving Supes, Lois and her new beau Richard ("X-Men"'s James Marsden), and the lingering bitterness represented by Lois' Pulitzer Prize-winning essay "Why We Don't Need Superman." That would, however, require some kind of spark between Bosworth and Routh, whose face seems as impervious to emotion as his curly forelock does to dishevelment.

Perhaps that's because - at least as far as we can tell - Lois is only really in love with the idea of Superman. And that's not terribly surprising, because Singer himself seems mostly to be in love with that idea as well. He's making a movie about our need for hope in a dark time, trying to cobble his Superman/Jesus metaphors to the necessary machinations of a Hollywood blockbuster. The result is something slightly aloof: a hero only briefly allowing us to touch his cape before he's off to the Fortress of Solitude.

It's kind of a shame, because Singer has actually crafted a comic-book movie confident enough not to shout every scene at us. A meteor crashes in one scene not with a spectacular explosion, but with a distant, muffled thud; one climactic moment comes and goes without the expected whoop-it-up kaboom. But these muted moments are matched by a muted personality, nothing remotely close to the simple exhilaration of the first two Reeve "Superman" films.

Late in "Superman Returns," Lois stares at a blinking cursor, frustrated in her attempt to create an essay titled "Why We Need Superman." With his attention to abstraction rather than inner life, Bryan Singer never manages to come up with a decent answer, either. It's not enough to believe a man can fly. We need to believe that the thing that's flying is actually a man. CV

(Scott Renshaw reviews movies for the Salt Lake City Weekly.)

'Down in the Valley'

By Felicia Feaster

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More spectacular than any Western sunset is a film with big stars and serious investors (actor Edward Norton is one of them) sinking just as dramatically into the Pacific.

"Down in the Valley" is a film that begins promisingly as a study of a tragically mismatched couple grappling toward authentic love in an inauthentic time. But eventually this Sundance Institute project becomes, like so many overwritten screenplays, chock-full of big ideas that lead nowhere.

"Down in the Valley" is part of the small fraternity of cowboy delusionism. Such tales of unhappy but passionate cowpokes include the recent "Brokeback Mountain" and John Schlesinger's 1969 masterpiece "Midnight Cowboy." In such tales, the cowboy pose is a kind of hopeless outsider stance, an inability to square an old-fashioned way of looking at the world with a dismal contemporary reality.

Harlan Fairfax Carruthers (Edward Norton) whose name is pure Louis L'Amour Western kitsch, says he's from South Dakota. But his cowboy playacting with guns and John Ford dialogue in his cheap San Fernando Valley apartment suggests he may be more of a Method rancher.

Harlan scrambles down from the hills like a Marlboro billboard come to life, with his lasso and Stetson and West Village mustache, to woo the jaded and underage Valley Girl Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) with his hat-tipping manners and boyish innocence.

Cowpoke Harlan is undeniably an anachronism, a courtly gent ambling through the land of road rage and roofies. But his filly, Tobe, is in her own way an L.A. woman cut from a different cloth. With her alabaster skin and grossed-out queries ("Who gets fake tits when you're 18?"), Tobe is a beguilingly complex Lolita part innocent, part insider - who leaves Harlan muttering, "Holy smokes!" after she ravishes him.

She invites Harlan to the beach and he rewards her for the courtesy with the kind of gesture teenage girls go mad for. He quits his job to spend the day in her company.
Harlan is a dream lover for Tobe, an empty vessel she can fill with Ecstasy and sex, and he's a daddy figure to her skittish little brother, Lonnie (a highly effective Rory Culkin), whose brutish supercop stepdad, Wade (David Morse), is masculinity-off-the-leash.
Lonnie develops a boy crush on the attentive Harlan, who thoroughly bewitches him like Robert De Niro's various predators in "Cape Fear" and "Taxi Driver." It is a reflection of "Down in the Valley"'s hopeless naivetŽ that instead of finding something creepy and mesmeric in Harlan's cult of personality, the film continually casts him as a tragic romantic. "Down in the Valley" wants you to like Harlan as much as it does, despite the fact that Harlan is, to put it mildly, a psychopath.

Like much of "Down in the Valley," Tobe and Harlan's romance at first promises something meaty. Harlan's gallantry and romantic streak and unfamiliarity with recreational pharmaceuticals marks him as an exotic Other. Harlan is the kind of real man who's been erased in the modern rush, who in times of stress retreats to the remaining green patches of L.A. to ride a white filly and shoot bottles. Like Iron Eyes Cody in those long-ago anti-litter ads, Harlan looks down upon the valley of highways and jets and you can virtually see a tear forming in his eye.

If only "Down in the Valley" hung onto the idea of a man out of time long enough to deliver real results. Instead, director David Jacobson's film is terminally on the move, too antsy to develop his more interesting ideas, like why a man might choose to be a cowboy as a rejection of Hollywood inauthenticity.

Harlan's delusions of cowboydom, after all, are only an extreme expression of the kind of self-delusion and fantasy lifestyles that define the City of Angels. There is every reason to believe masculinity hemmed in by Hollywood vacuity would go cagey and psychotic.

But Jacobson isn't particularly interested in social commentary or in outsiders as a warped mirror through which to examine ourselves. Instead, he sinks any originality with a heap of hokum, from the pretentiously meaningful vision of Harlan riding his horse through an unfinished subdivision, to his tendency to burden Harlan with cowboy philosophizing about tree branches and destiny.

"Down in the Valley" becomes increasingly constrictive and outright ludicrous in its attempts to tap into the Western mythos, as when Harlan escapes with Lonnie on horseback into the Hollywood Hills. Wade pursues on horseback, as if finally forced to enter into not only Harlan's but writer/director Jacobson's delusion. Many viewers will probably opt not to join them on the ever-loopier trail ride.CV

'Click'

By Ben Spierenburg

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Weepy melodrama mixed with sophomoric slapstick, "Click" ultimately makes you wish there really was a universal remote, if only so you could change the movie you're watching to something better. About a man who gets the chance to sort out his hectic life using a magical remote control, the film has a clever premise sure to hook audiences, but fails to exploit it with any jokes worth remembering. The filmmakers refuse to let the humor flow naturally from the premise and produce an uneven picture, which clumsily blends a grim Dickensian storyline with Adam Sandler's tired brand of dog-humping hilarity.

As Michael Newman, Sandler plays an architect more interested in getting ahead at work than in spending time with his lovely wife Donna (Kate Beckinsale) and two sprightly children, Ben and Samantha (Joseph Castanon and Tatum McCann). Trying to watch an important video for work one night, Michael becomes irritated by the large number of random remote controls in his house, none of which he can comprehend. Determined to simplify at least one area of his life, he ventures out to buy one of those newfangled universal remotes his loaded neighbors have.

All the usual places for buying such an item are closed, so Michael ends up at a Bed, Bath and Beyond. After taking a quick nap on one of the plush beds, he finds a mysterious door labeled "Beyond," behind which he finds an eccentric but friendly scientist named Morty (Christopher Walken, who seems born for such roles), who has just what Michael is looking for - a universal remote capable of making everything easier.

Morty doesn't tell Michael just how universal his remote is, but he finds out quickly enough. Soon he's happily pausing to punish adversaries with face-slaps and genital-kicks, muting his barking dog, and fast-forwarding through tedious fights (and coital sessions) with his wife, all with the simple push of a button. When confused, he consults Morty, who shows him how he can view any moment of his past complete with voice-over commentary courtesy of James Earl Jones.

Before long Michael's universal remote begins to malfunction, skipping over all the supposedly uninteresting parts of his life as it speeds him to his next career milestone. Stuck on autopilot, his marriage and his health deteriorate as he realizes that he has wasted his life on work. From here on, you won't need to fast-forward to figure out exactly how it all ends. Just imagine the most clichéd ending possible.

Sandler is merely satisfactory as he portrays Michael at various ages and weights. The make-up department helps greatly in this regard, and is superb at showing us what Sandler will look like when he's 60 and saddled with 300 pounds of blubber. And while a demure Kate Beckinsale is respectable as his wife Donna, a broad supporting cast adds little. David Hasselhoff is underwhelming as Michael's egotistical, tactless boss. Sean Astin ("Rudy") is barely used as Ben's speedo-clad swim teacher, and Rachel Dratch ("Saturday Night Live") is unbearably unfunny as Michael's gawky assistant.

Although screenwriters/producers Steve Koren and Mark O'Keefe supply a structurally solid script about a workaholic's downfall, you get the distinct feeling that any number of other writers could've done more with the material. And while director Frank Coraci ("The Waterboy") does a decent job of illustrating the controller's features and telling the story, it's not enough to save the picture from itself.

Indeed, like the universal remote in the film, "Click" is defective. It tries to be a juvenile comedy and a weighty drama all at once, and as we all know, a movie divided against itself cannot stand. Every last stale joke from the Adam Sandler arsenal is recycled and awkwardly dropped into the somber story. In their mindlessly misguided attempts to amuse, the filmmakers ruin what might have been a quality film by inserting far too many senseless jokes concerning farts, dogs in heat and kicks to the groin.

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