Timeline
PG-13, 114 minutes, South Wind 12
The Paramount Pictures adventure Timeline relies on several trite formulas that bore audiences to the point where they might avoid theaters altogether.
The Michael Chrichton-novel-based spotty plot tells the story of Chris Johnston (Paul Walker, The Fast and the Furious), the wayward son of an archeologist. When Chris' father, Professor Johnston (Billy Connolly, Head of the Class) gets trapped in France in 1375. In a far-fetched and exasperated manner, Chris must travel back in time to retrieve him. Chris brings along his father's top students and predictable action ensues.
This movie suffers from several flaws. The horrific acting delivered by Walker and his cohorts never establishes any connection with the audience. If the audience doesn't care about the characters, then it won't care that a bunch of British knights are chasing them. It doesn't help that the dialogue they deliver consists of bad puns and empty words. Audiences will groan out loud when they hear lines such as, "If that happens one more time we're history."
There are no redeeming qualities to this film. Audiences would better use their time if they just rented Back to the Future and Robin Hood and watched them simultaneously.
—Cal Creek
Grade: D-
The Missing R.135 minutes, South Wind 12
Opie has a lot of explaining to do for The Missing, a western that could be the single most offensive major release since Gods and Generals, Ronald F. Maxwell's sermonic love letter to the Confederacy.
Shockingly, humanistic director Ron Howard (Parenthood, Apollo 13) nearly outmatches Maxwell's historical bile with The Missing's vile depictions of Native Americans. Worse, his film displays so little in the way of forward momentum that it seems to run as long as the four-hour Generals did.
Luminous Cate Blanchett (The Lord of
the Rings) stars as a tough-minded widow looking after two young children in New Mexico circa 1885. When Apaches kidnap her eldest daughter, she enlists the help of her estranged father (Tommy Lee Jones), who left when she was a child to go live with the Chiricahua.
Howard has called The Missing "dark," but it's really just unimaginative. The director falls back on the same graphically violent tactics he employed for Ransom to show Native Americans as women-stomping, baby-killing savages. What compelled this usually benevolent director to make a film so full of hate?
—Stephen Shupe Grade:D+
Seabiscuit
PG-13, 141 minutes. Woodruff Auditorium. Kansas Union
Gary Ross' lengthy adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's best seller is populated by the same chipper sitcom zombies who made the director's previous film, Pleasantville, such a sublime satiric joke.
Send-up isn't on the agenda for Seabiscuit, a stars-and-stripes fairy tale that casts a severely slimmed-down Tobey Maguire (more Skeleton-Man than Spider-Man) as Red Pollard, the troubled Depression-era jockey of an abused runt named Seabiscuit. As ever, Ross throws too many elements into the mix, from stock footage depicting the country's economic toil to a prolonged set-up that keeps the title character off screen for most of the first hour.
Performances are uniformly strong, especially Jeff Bridges' turn as Charles Howard, the wealthy automobile entrepreneur with a broken heart. Even though Ross' optimism may prove grating at times, his affections for the media and blowing money at the track have a wide-eyed subversiveness of their own.
The film's honey-dipped cinematography is by John Schwartzman, who's all but guaranteed an Oscar nomination. As for the rest of this sweet slice of mythic Americana, the underdog status of its equine hero seems particularly apt.
—Stephen Shupe
Grade: B
thursday, december 4, 2003
jayplay 29