Short Takes
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED A movie adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's tale of England collapsing under the pressure of social change—even one that has passed through the pop filter of co-writer Andrew Davies, British TV's designated gatekeeper of all properties literary to the masses—sounds like much more fun than the 11-hour slog of the 1981 television series. And though I can imagine Waugh rolling his eyes at the idea of Brideshead Revisited as "a heartbreaking romantic epic," the movie is, often inadvertently, an improvement on that sepulchral miniseries. Waugh's novel doesn't have much of a story—social upstart Charles Ryder is taken up and nearly destroyed by an aristocratic family bent on destroying itself. But as directed by Julian Jarrold, Brideshead Revisited–revisited boasts better stately homes and gardens, a marketably youthful cast, and broad winks at the novel's repressed homosexual attraction between pallid upstart Charles (Matthew Goode) and Sebastian Flyte (a show-stoppingly queeny Ben Whishaw), while redirecting the eros to Charles's wan love for Sebastian's sister (Hayley Atwell). As in the novel, though, the great, sick love story is between Sebastian and his mummy, an ice floe played by Emma Thompson as a woman at once energized and doomed by her devotion to Catholic orthodoxy. The movie is far from deep, but you have to admire how it refrains from delivering a postmodern lecture on the perils of fundamentalism and confines itself to Waugh's disturbing vision. —Ella Taylor (Opens Friday at Green Hills)
THE WACKNESS And so it arrives: the first wave of '90s nostalgia, gazing back through the mists of time (or a cloud of the chronic) at distantly remembered 1994—the year The Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die dropped on New York streets facing Giuliani's zero-tolerance crackdown. For the hip-hop-hooked hero of Jonathan Levine's comedy-drama—a mopey, remote Jewish teen (Josh Peck) with a budding career as a pot dealer—it's a lousy time to party but a convenient time to put away childish things, such as virginity. What the movie can't put away is a bongload of indie coming-of-age clichés (parents act like children, girls exist to confer knowledge on nerds) laced with lots of adolescent male self-pity and supporting characters who register mostly as recurring quirks. (Famke Janssen's stoically miserable socialite may be the most underimagined female character in an already less-than-banner year.) But Peck has a doughy, authentically winsome presence, and as his entirely inappropriate surrogate father, a pot-addled psychiatrist whose teenage daughter (Olivia Thirlby) the kid worships from afar, Ben Kingsley uses his slight frame, falcon's focus and contact-high timing for unfailingly incongruous comic effect. (He's especially funny with Mary-Kate Olsen, whose blithe assurance as a gauzy social butterfly can't be just chalked up to casting.) And Levine, who made a promising slasher movie called All the Boys Love Mandy Lane that's stuck in limbo, has an unusual gift for evoking that dreamy, eroticized hormonal haze at childhood's end. The movie's shot in a glare that suggests walking from darkness into noonday sunlight, when everything is so clear it's blinding. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at Green Hills)
THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR If Stephen Sommers' 1999 remake of The Mummy didn't achieve its obvious goal of topping Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was close enough for this then-13-year-old boy. Endless chases, funny quips, breathless pacing—good movie. One sequel and dismal spin-off later, Sommers has been replaced by Rob Cohen, he of Dragonheart directorial fame: If nothing else, I'm happy to report that CGI dragon technology has improved greatly since Dragonheart. A prologue introduces Emperor Han (Jet Li), who, having conquered everything else, wants to conquer death, and seeks out witch Zi Juan (Michelle Yeoh) to help him do so. Instead, Zi curses Han, whereupon he promptly melts into a chocolate-like substance. Cut to the present: 1946 this time, some 13 years after the last installment. Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn O'Connell (Maria Bello, subbing for a now-too-respectable Rachel Weisz) are suffocating in their adventureless Oxfordshire life. Meanwhile, son Alex (Luke Ford) has run off to China, where he discovers the, uh, tomb of the dragon emperor. When Rick & Evelyn show up in China on a mission, they find their estranged son and then save the world. Best not to inquire too deeply into this Mummy: Where Sommers chose cheerful extravagance, Cohen's enterprise is joylessly efficient, pushing the family around from one locale to the next—inevitably too late to stop whatever it is they were there for in the first place—until the final confrontation. Strange how dreary it all is, and how tired Fraser seems. —Vadim Rizov (Opens Friday)
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