'WULF' WHISTLES
Sharing the raucous “Beowulf” in crystalline, digital 3-D with a roomful of folks wearing dark, plastic glasses is a blast. Who would've thought the ancient poem could be so visually spectacular?
The in-your-face action bounds off the screen – battles, blood, oozing monsters hovering right over your popcorn. The audience at an AMC Mission Valley preview this week jumped when spears went sailing into the crowd.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis, utilizing some of the same technical tools from his fine “The Polar Express” (2004), there are vivid performances – Ray Winstone as flawed, gallant Beowulf, Anthony Hopkins as king (flashing more bare tush than necessary), Crispin Glover as grotesque monster Grendel and Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother, a vicious reptilian freak.
You can nitpick at shortcut storytelling, the voyeuristic camera on Beowulf reposing in the nude, and even the modernization of the language (“fight me, damn you!”), but there's no denying this is a screamingly good time at the movies.
'WONDER' OF WONDERS
As master of a magical toy store, Dustin Hoffman is blessed with a marvelous, giddy role in the kid-friendly “Mr. Majorium's Wonder Emporium.” He hasn't had this much fun since his crusty professor showering literary advice on spacey Will Ferrell in last year's “Stranger Than Fiction.”
Zach Helm authored “Stranger Than Fiction” and wrote and directed “Mr. Majorium's Wonder Emporium.” For Helm's vision, Hoffman gets an extreme makeover – gray, upswept hairdo, lispish speech pattern, an environment of bouncy children and miraculous playthings.
Though rated “G,” the film gently explores a theme that might need additional explaining to very young children. Otherwise, it's chock full of goodies – a stuffed animal that yearns for an abrazo, an expensive mobile of real-live fish (a cheaper one with fish sticks).
There's charming, 11-year-old Zach Mills, a lonely kid with an unusual hat collection who finds an outpost at the toy store, and Natalie Portman making up for her imprudent adult adventure in “Hotel Chevalier,” the prologue to “The Darjeeling Limited,” as Mr. Majorium's heir. Her chemistry with the 70 year-old Hoffman is a wonder.
WAR PATH
“Redacted,” director Brian De Palma's pseudo-documentary about the rape of a teenage girl by American soldiers in Iraq, is told through the lens of a GI recording his tour of duty with a hand-held camera. The dream is that the finished picture secures his place in film school.
Dream on.
“Redacted” (opening Wednesday) follows the disappointing “Rendition” and “Lions for Lambs” – a trio of misguided attempts at facing the issues of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Co-financed by Landmark Theatres honchos Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, “Redacted” is amateurish, engorged with clichés including redneck, ignorant Southerners (“the cream of Army recruits”).
There's talk of “the heat and awful smells” but no visceral sense of what it really feels like over there. “Redacted” has no heat.
