Ang Lee’s follow-up to Brokeback Mountain is a surprisingly monotone and overextended period spy drama set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942 and Hong Kong a few years earlier; the mainly inexpressive cast (Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom) specializes not only in stiff upper lips but stiff lower lips as well. Based on a short story by Eileen Chang, this tale of a college student (Tang) who joins the resistance and sets herself up as sexual bait to help assassinate a wealthy Chinese collaborator (Leung) disappoints even in its incidentals (the fancy clothes and the settings pale beside those in period efforts by Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-wai), and the bursts of sex and violence that earned this picture an NC-17 rating offer only temporary respite from the encroaching dullness. In English and subtitled Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin, and Shanghainese. 157 min. (JR) Read more
Directed by Maria Finitzo, this excellent Kartemquin Films documentary profiles Dr. Jack Kessler, a stem cell expert at Northwestern University whose work is motivated partly by a desire to regenerate the damaged spinal cord of his teenage daughter. Finitzo’s long-term investigation widens to include other patients with spinal-cord damage and their everyday ways of coping, as well as a couple of Kessler’s graduate assistants as they follow up on lab experiments. What emerges is a multifaceted unpacking and demythification of a loaded subject. 90 min. (JR) Read more
The hapless overweight hero played by Jeff Garlin in this mild but likable Chicago comedy lives with his doting mother, works at Second City, won’t budge from his perfect parking place across from Wrigley Field, and hasn’t gotten laid in a long time. So his hopes are lifted when he meets a racy and kooky ice cream parlor waitress (Sarah Silverman). Meanwhile, he’s miffed that he can’t even get a tryout for the lead in a remake of Martya movie that he thinks describes his life, though he seems to forget that Ernest Borgnine played a butcher in that film, not an actor. The story ultimately lands in incoherence; but the cameos and local details, and even some of the gags, keep it perky. R, 80 min. (JR) Read more
