Trailer Mash

Ralph Meeker and Farley Granger are marijuana farmers whose perfect crop causes them to fall foul of the Mexican mafia run by Anthony Quinn. When the boys fail to show adequate subservience, Quinn kidnaps their main squeeze, Angie Dickinson, and then, in the style of a Tony Scott movie cranked up to 11, so this trailer promises, everyone turns into Savages. If Oliver Stone is good for anything these days, making sleazy, worthless, contemporary B-movies is probably it. Even if Ralph, Farley, Anthony and Angie are no longer available. In the week that delivers a 3-D movie of Kate Perry's one-dimensional talent, a Spiderman teen-romance comic and Oliver Stone's pimple-necked adolescent fantasia, it's a relief that there is any grownup action in the picture houses at all. A special welcome, then, to writer-director Martin Donovan's very promising Collaborator. Donovan is one of the lost greats. After creating his own celluloid phenotype acting in a bunch of Hal Hartley movies, he seems to have evaporated into TV. Until now. Much older and nowhere near so handsome, he has rearranged himself into a witty and intelligent filmmaker. He also knows how to cast. David Morse is a flavor so strong, especially here when he's playing a somewhat deranged kidnapper, that few directors have a clue how to use him. Yet even on this brief evidence, Donovan appears to have extracted a superb performance. As Morse's victim, and incidentally his old friend, Donovan makes his own work as a straight man look effortless. And he's found a place in there for Olivia Williams, the very definition of taste in a filmmaker. Has to be seen. Magic of Belle Isle is the one with Morgan Freeman in a wheelchair. In the book of Morgan Freeman's movie life, which extends all the way back to 1989's Driving Miss Daisy, there was always a chapter that had him playing a grumpy chap in a wheelchair. But how grumpy can Morgan Freeman really be? Especially when the eternally glorious Virginia Madsen is there to blow helium into his tires. Rob Reiner directs exclusively for people of his own age and older. The child star of Peter Weir's Witness has finally grown up. A protracted adolescence that saw him remain unchanged in some 20 films from Mars Attacks! right through to Inception has ended. In Crazy Eyes, Lukas Haas finally looks like a man of 36. Even has a son of his own. Which is doubly ironic since he appears to be playing a character with the emotional maturity of a lovesick puppy. His character's moronic obsession with Madeleine Zima, the eponymous Crazy Eyes, is seemingly played out against a montage of messy, kinetic L.A. vistas, suggesting this is one of those movies where the environment is as big a character as any of the cast. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon is either therapy or a big old family joke for the directors, the omnipresent Duplasses. Two schlub brothers meet up and for reasons unclear are drawn into an old rivalry that requires them to compete with each other over 25 events from pushups to ping-pong. The guys look about as high quality as the budget, which lends the idea an otherwise unimaginably touching charm. In a lesser world, this may have become an Adam Sandler movie. In which he would play both brothers. Be thankful the Higgs boson dumped you in this reality. Suppose Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kindgdom had been even more of a mythical romance in which cartoon animals and Van Gogh paintings sprang to life as backdrop to a juvenile first romance. That film might very well be Starry Starry Night, at least according to this trailer.

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Trailer Mash

Juveniles, savages and maybe even a few grownups appear in this week's opening movies

Stevan Keane

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Stevan Keane