GireWire

Ali (Christine Aguilera) is a small-town girl whose pipes and curves revive a dying nightclub in “Burlesque.”

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Writer/director Steve Antin wants desperately to be Bob Fosse in his brassy, sassy musical “Burlesque,” but the laughably cliché dialogue and shallow characters sink any chance that audiences will mistake his film for Fosse’s Oscar-winning “Cabaret.”

We never know much about pop singer Christina Aguilera’s main character Ali, except that she has no friends, no family, no solid acting ability and no reason to stick around Iowa.

So, she heads to L.A. to find her destiny at a Sunset Boulevard nightclub called Burlesque, run by crusty showbiz veteran Tess (legendary singer and gay cult icon Cher).

The place is packed every night with drinking, enthusiastic clients.

Yet, Tess must be a terrible manager because she’s so far behind on the mortgage, the bank prepares to foreclose on the club.

(Gee, did Tess ever think of pink-slipping some of her kajillion employees or cutting back on those lavish sets?)

We already know that Ali can belt out a song like Christina Aguilera, because she does it at the film’s opening.

So it’s no surprise that when a jealous dancer shuts off Ali’s mic during a number, she carries on by blasting the club’s roof off with her natural, unplugged voice (in echo-chamber mode, too).

Tess sees potential in Ali as a headliner. (Read more…)

John Brennan (Russell Crowe) springs his convicted murderer wife (Elizabeth Banks) from the big house in Pittsburgh during “The Next Three Days.”

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The most significant contribution of Paul Haggis’ lengthy and occasionally intense crime drama “The Next Three Days” could be the elevation of community college literature professors to the hallowed ranks of action heroes.

Noted Australian tough guy Russell Crowe plays one in “The Next Three Days.”

His name is John Brennan and he teaches such works as “Man of LaMancha,” about a man who fights windmills and never cedes idealism to reality.

When Pittsburgh police arrest John’s wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks) and charge her with murdering her boss, John never stops believing in her innocence, and spends years trying to win her freedom after her conviction.

It takes a shout-out from his attorney (the briefly seen Daniel Stern) to force him to see the obvious: “She’s never getting out, John!”

After his beloved and depressed Lara attempts suicide, John becomes desperate enough to consider the inconceivable: that a pudgy man of inaction like himself would plan and execute a daring prison break to honor a promise to Lara that incarceration “will not be your life.”

Strangely, “The Next Three Days” is a much more cinematic work than another current prison drama “Conviction,” yet far less gripping with less engaging characters. (Read more…)

Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is on a quest for hidden pieces of Voldemort’s soul in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.”

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Maybe Harry Potter could cast a magic spell over us before we see his new movie.

He could point his magic wand and utter an incantation like “NoDozeium Offem.” Or “RedBullium Energizus.”

That might help get us through “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1,” a mystical slugfest of gloom, doom, death and dysfunction, a wearying tale of color-bled, never-ending scenes of isolation and despair, mistrust and miscalculation.

Hard-core Harry fans will not be deterred by the meandering plot and bleak parade of expository sequences piling into each other.

But how else could “Deathly Hallows: Part 1” be anything beyond what it is: a beginningless, endless warmup act that lays the foundation for the climactic Battle of Hogwarts in Part 2, scheduled for release July 15?

Director David Yates has already supplied us with two well-crafted “Harry Potter” films: “The Half-Blood Prince” and ”The Order of the Phoenix.” Screenwriter Steve Kloves has performed a masterful job of translating and condensing J.K. Rowling’s epic novels to the silver screen.

Only after Part 2 comes out will anyone be able to gauge if breaking Rowling’s seventh and supposedly final Harry Potter novel into two movies was the best decision.

Meanwhile, Yates and his crew should be commended for sticking to Rowling’s literary vision and not dumbing down the material for “Harry Potter” neophytes, who won’t have a clue what’s going on in some of the character-driven plot developments. (Read more…)

Engineer Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) takes on the dangerous job of trying to stop the “Unstoppable” in Tony Scott’s new action-thriller.

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Seriously, how threatening and scary can a big, unmanned choo-choo be?

Let yardmaster Connie Hooper answer that one.

“A missile the size of the Chrysler Building!” she screeches.

OK. Now that sounds scary.

Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable” celebrates the old-fashioned disaster movie where human hubris and neglect conspire to threaten the lives of untold numbers of people.

“Unstoppable” represents the cream of the disaster movie crop, a smart and compressed dramatic experience pared down to its essentials.

It bends credibility just enough to bump up the action, but treats the whole story as one big Fox TV news report with a “You are There” approach that produces goose bumps.

“Unstoppable” is also a working-class hero tale, “inspired” by a 2001 incident in which an unmanned train zipped along the tracks in Ohio before being boarded and halted.

In Scott’s inspired nail-biter, a neglectful railroad engineer (“My Name is Earl” star Ethan Suplee) starts up an engine and lets it coast along while he jumps out, presumably to run ahead and switch the track.

Not being in great shape, he bumbles it and the train pulls out with nobody aboard.

How bad can this be? (Read more…)

James Franco stars as a climber stuck in the Utah desert in Danny Boyle’s captivating drama “127 Hours.”

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Several viewers keeled over while watching Danny Boyle’s fact-based drama at its Telluride Film Festival premiere earlier this year. That’s actually a testimonial for Boyle’s captivating survival movie and for James Franco’s phenomenal performance as an adrenaline junkie rock climber who spent 127 hours with his arm crushed between rocks in the Utah desert mountains.

Watching a single actor remain stationary for an entire movie might sound horrendous. But as anyone who saw Ryan Reynolds trapped in a coffin in “Buried” can attest, outstanding dramas can take place in the tiniest of spaces.

Boyle continues to astonish his fans and critics with another movie that Monty Python members might call “something completely different.”

He earned best picture and director Oscars for his India-inspired “Slumdog Millionaire.” Before that, Boyle showed us viral Armageddon in “28 Days Later,” the scary final frontier of space in “Sunshine,” neo-noir thrills in “Shallow Grave” and a wondrous children’s adventure in “Millions.”

Boyle isn’t about to start boring anyone now. He starts “127 Hours” with a rockin’, rollin’ soundtrack under vintage 1960s split-screen visuals showing Franco’s Aaron Ralston to be a loner and adventurer driven to finding that sweet spot called his comfort zone then diving merrily out of it.

Franco, perhaps best known as the Green Goblin’s spawn in the “Spider-man” movies, morphs into his real-life character without any of the fuss and pretension that usually comes with his performances. (He played legendary poet Allan Ginsberg earlier this year in “Howl.”) (Read more…)

Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams) freaks out while meeting her hero, newsman Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford), in the comedy “Morning Glory.”

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Roger Michell’s comedy “Morning Glory” could have easily assessed what’s happened to America’s TV news since James L. Brooks’ 1987 masterpiece “Broadcast News” showed us a trio of reporters so busy with their professional lives that their personal ones never intersected.

But “Morning Glory” botches a grand opportunity.

It wanders off into sitcomland where the ending feels phony and false, and all the emotions are CAPITALIZED, underscored and italicized for our benefit.

Every 15 minutes or so, Michell even pipes in an obligatory pop song with lyrics that beat us over the head with how Becky Fuller feels.

She’s the new, young, energetic producer of a faltering New York morning TV show called “Daybreak.” The vivacious Rachel McAdams plays Becky with spunk, charm and infectious enthusiasm bordering on some kind of mania, but she never crosses the line into Scaryville.

On her first day, she fires the foot fetishist co-anchor (Ty Burrell), then must locate a replacement to work with “Daybreak” host Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton).

She finds a dinosaur: opinionated, egocentric award-winning newsman Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford).

An old-school journalist (hey, he dines with Morley Safer, Chris Matthews and Bob Schieffer!) Mike despises the infotainment content of morning news shows and will have nothing to do with “Daybreak.”

Until Becky finds a loophole in his contract that will cost him $6 million if he doesn’t take the job. (Read more…)

Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) and wife Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) share one of many tense moments in “Fair Game,” a fact-based domestic thriller.

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Consider this a “family first” film.

If Doug Liman’s fact-based “Fair Game” had been just another political tirade against the Bush administration for outting CIA agent Valerie Plame, it would be old news and old outrage.

Not here.

Liman tells a virtual horror story about an American family under siege, and how a wife and husband, mother and father, slogged through economic, social and political hell to save their marriage, family and reputations.

In 2003, Bush officials leaked information to reporter Robert Novak who then identified Plame (played by Naomi Watts) as a covert CIA operative, ending her career and — in this story — causing key Iraqi scientists to vanish or be killed.

This act came as retribution against Plame’s outspoken husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn, whose brows are so furrowed you could plant corn in them), a former U.S. ambassador who wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times, charging the Bush administration’s reasons for going to war were falsified.

The administration, represented by David Andrews as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby, deflects Wilson’s assault by letting loose the dogs of war reporters, among them Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell and Fox news.

“Fair Game” is a streamlined, Hollywood movie that works like an epic domestic drama rather than an international thriller, although Liman shot quick scenes in Paris and Baghdad on the sly. (Read more…)

Tangie (Thandie Newton), left, and her mother Alice (Whoopi Goldberg) squabble about her morals in Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls.”

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When a Tyler Perry movie actually gets screened for critics, you know it must be something special.

“For Colored Girls” is special, especially for a Tyler Perry movie.

It offers a sterling cast of actresses who act their hearts out, using the rough and tumble poetry of Ntozake Shange’s stage play to vent their anger and lament their disappointments in modern Shakespearean soliloquies delivered in rumbles of quiet thunder.

“For Colored Girls” also represents a big step for actor/director/writer/producer Perry, whose string of financially successful (mostly) comedies (“Madea’s Family Reunion,” “Why Did I Get Married?” and others) never ventured beyond stock characters and dull, constrained visuals tailor-made for TV.

Perry steps way, way out of his comfort zone to make “For Colored Girls,” a project slightly beyond his storytelling limitations, and he winds up treating Shange’s creation as a Tyler Perry movie on raging hormones.

Perry isn’t up to epic mode here, so he falls back on what he knows, and that means more stock characters and visual flairlessness. But not nearly as stock and flairless as his previous works.

“For Colored Girls” follows an ensemble of nine African American women who, unlike the geographically scattered characters in Shange’s 1975 Tony-nominated “choreo-poem,” now all live in Harlem apartments, except for Jo (Janet Jackson), a publishing magnate whose male-ego driven hubby (Omari Hardwick) has not been faithful. (Read more…)

TV reporter Roxanne Ritchi (voiced by Tina Fey) gets fake-tortured by the villainous Megamind (voiced by Will Ferrell) in the 3-D animated action-comedy “Megamind.”

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“Megamind” is both farce and fantasy, a vivid 3-D animated comedy filled with zany characters, switched identities, reversing roles and surprise plot entanglements.

Then come the standard jokey pop culture references and other derivative material that suffocate the story’s originality and diffuse its intelligent exploration of the roots of villainy and the dangers of pigeonholing young students.

“Megamind” begins as an odd nod to the introduction of 1978’s “Superman.” Two baby aliens a white one with Aryan fine features and a blue one with a bulbous head and pointy chin are dispatched to Earth from a dying planet.

The white baby crash lands in a mansion. The blue one winds up in a prison. The two grow up as fierce rivals, with the handsome alien easily besting the blue one for human attention and appreciation.

Eventually, the entitled alien grows up to become muscular superhero Metro Man, the beloved protector of Metro City and a man who speaks with Brad Pitt’s commanding voice.

The blue alien reluctantly becomes the villainous Megamind, voiced by Will Ferrell.

He doesn’t want to be a villain. But the superhero role has already been filled, and Megamind has been rejected by society on the basis of his appearance and awkward social skills.

What else can he do but use his intellectual gifts for the one thing at which he can excel: being bad. (Read more…)

Peter (Robert Downey Jr.) tries to take the wheel from a sleeping Ethan (Zach Galifianakis) in the buddy/road comedy “Due Date.”

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Call it “Planes, Trains and Automobiles — Without the Planes and Trains.”

“Due Date” stars Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis as two clashing, feuding strangers who share a small car during a road trip from Atlanta to Los Angeles.

One is an uptight architect with a flair for expensive clothes and a problem with his temper. The other is a wannabe actor with a bad perm and a knack for abysmal clothing combinations.

How these two personalities survive their road trip becomes the haphazard plot for “Due Date,” Todd Phillips’ new raunchy laugh-fest designed to hold us over until he delivers the sequel to his smash 2009 raunchy laugh-fest “The Hangover.”

Unlike the uniformly unsavory characters in “The Hangover,” the characters in “Due Date” seem to be struck from the Judd Apatow mold: They’re guys who make us care about them in between bouts of complete self-absorption and frequent gross-outs.

Downey plays Peter Highman, an architect whose extremely pregnant wife Sarah (a comically challenged and miscast Michelle Monaghan) plans on getting a C-section four days away.

Peter first sees wacky Ethan Tremblay (Galifianakis) at the Atlanta airport where Ethan’s car shaves the door off Peter’s rented limo.

Oddly enough, Phillips introduces Ethan in a long, lingering slow-motion shot, the sort usually reserved for the first time a guy meets the hot girl of his dreams.

Except Ethan looks like a hairy, bearded traveler who’s escaped from “Grizzly Adams.” (Read more…)