This week in local theaters
QUANTUM OF SOLACE Daniel Craig's second outing as James Bond is as frustrating, sloppy and brusque as its predecessor was engaging, sleek and unhurried. At 106 minutes, it's the shortest of the Bond films, but it feels like one of the longest as it bounces hither and yon only to wind up stranded in a Bolivian desert, where baddie Dominic Greene (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly's Mathieu Amalric) is sucking the sand dry of its underwater river. Blame the haphazard direction by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland), who demonstrates by negative example why Bond movies are best served by journeymen with something to prove rather than would-be A-listers slumming it. From its very first moments—we enter the film mid-car chase—Quantum is a spastic, indecipherable, unholy and altogether unwatchable mess. Between swerves and smashes, we simply have no idea who's doing what to whom, where they're doing it, or why. What's meant to be kinetic and cathartic serves only to disorient, to keep the audience at a head-scratching distance. There's no need to worry where Quantum of Solace fits in the Bond pantheon—it's easily one of the worst. (Opens Friday; see a full review at nashvillescene.com) —Robert Wilonsky
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY Poppy, the aptly named central character of Mike Leigh's latest film, is a human litmus test for optimism. Either you find her chirpy, indefatigable high spirits a pain—as many people did during the movie's festival run a few months ago—or you're touched by her instinctual ability to spin lemons into lemonade. Me, I fell in love with Sally Hawkins' sweetly fluttery schoolteacher, who is tested with a series of perfectly scaled problems (the theft of her bicycle, a schoolyard bully, driving lessons) and responds with an open-hearted decency whose depths we only gradually discern. As others have noted, she's so much the opposite of the earth-scorching anti-hero in Leigh's Naked that if they met, the universe might explode. But in Leigh's soul-deep movies, full of the surprises only freely imagined characters can spring, there is no such thing as an uncomplicated person. Poppy, in Hawkins' radiant performance, may be an almost Dickensian avatar of sweetness and light, but she's not a sap—as Leigh shows in a harrowing tour-de-force encounter between his heroine and her hate-spewing driving instructor (a scarily volatile Eddie Marsan), her goodness is searching, not blind. By hitting us up front with the fact of Poppy's improbable optimism, Leigh has made a movie about happiness that is anything but disarming. If anything, the movie sets us on guard, waiting for the inevitable pinprick that'll burst her balloon—even if, to our great joy, it never comes. (Opens Friday at The Belcourt) —Jim Ridley
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