GireWire

Jackson Curtis (Chicago’s own John Cusack) races against certain death in Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie “2012.”

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Collapsing skyscrapers!

Gargantuan tidal waves!

Crashing airplanes!

White-knuckle escapes!

Bad acting!

Dogs that never die!

Eardrum-busting dialogue!

Roland Emmerich’s epic doomsday thriller “2012” packs in everything anyone could ever want in a vintage 1970s disaster movie crammed with second-tier movie stars and outrageous special effects.

Don’t even bother with the first 48 minutes of “2012.” The good stuff doesn’t start until 49 minutes into the story, when Southern California turns into earthquake alley, a big chunk of Los Angeles slides into the ocean, and thousands of people fall out of their (literally) split-level homes into giant cracks opening up in the earth.

No mistake. “2012” marks Emmerich’s masterpiece.

After creating a trifecta of apocalyptic demolition derbies with “Godzilla,” “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” Emmerich tops himself with an end-of-the-world scenario based on an ancient Mayan calendar that stops on Dec. 21, 2012, presumably the date that earth ceases to exist.

“The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago!” muses Dr. Adrian Hemsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an American scientist in charge of keeping the story moving and explaining stuff along the way.

The Mayans apparently understood that huge, 21st-century sun flares would produce radiation that turns the galaxy into a large microwave oven, superheating the Earth’s inner core and causing the planet’s crust to destabilize. (Read more…)

Carl (British heartthrob Tom Sturridge) dillydallies with a dollie (Talulah Riley) in Richard Curtis’ music-stuffed “Pirate Radio.”

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If you go to see Richard Curtis’ comedy “Pirate Radio” expecting to see something as heartfelt, profound and witty as his phenomenal directorial debut “Love, Actually,” you will likely be disappointed.

“Pirate Radio” (not much of an improvement over its original title “The Boat That Rocked”) wears out its welcome at a gasping 134 minutes.

The characters tend to be more cartoony and homogeneous than the ones in “Love, Actually,” and the plot is mostly built around a series of vignettes threaded together by a British censor’s campaign to save the Queen’s country from the dreaded, immoral influence of pop rock music.

“Pirate Radio” is based on a piece of rock history in Britain during the Soaring ’60s when the stuffy BBC practically ignored that newfangled music popular with kids.

So, boats harboring floating radio stations appeared just off shore in Great Britain and blasted rock ‘n’ roll programs over the airwaves 24/7 to a grateful audience of about 25 million people.

We witness the workings of one pirate radio station, aboard a rusty trawler, Radio Rock, where a group of hedonistic, alcohol-swilling, drug-abusing, fun-loving DJs and their staff parties like it’s 1966. (Read more…)

Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) takes abuse from Mom (Mo’Nique) in “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.”

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It only takes a few scenes into the bleak, but hope-filled drama “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” to realize you’re in the presence of two commanding actresses whose courageous, uncompromising, full-bore performances rank among the decade’s very best film achievements.

Brooklyn-born Gabourey Sidibe plays Precious, an obese and illiterate 16-year-old Harlem teen who, as we learn, has been repeatedly raped by her mother’s boyfriend and already given birth to one baby. As the story begins, she discovers that she’s pregnant with a second.

Sidibe gives herself completely over to the character, under Lee Daniels’ sensitive direction, and creates a complex, compassionate portrait of such strength and vulnerability that we accept her wounds and pain as our own. (Read more…) Rated: R (language and sexual assault). 109 minutes.

Opens Friday, November 6 at the River East 21, Chatham and City North in Chicago, the Century 12 in Evanston and the Country Club Hills 16 in Country Club Hills.

“007’s license to thrill”

Join Dann Gire (film critic of Chicago’s suburban newspaper THE DAILY HERALD, as well as the founder and president of the Chicago Film Critics Association, and adjunct instructor at Aurora and Harper Colleges in Illinois) and Raymond Benson (novelist, author of 20 books, former official author of James Bond books, film historian, and Film History instructor at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois) as they examine the dossier of James Bond to discover why he’s the most durable character in movie history. Clips from “Dr. No,” “Goldfinger” plus many others are scheduled. See events at Arlington Heights Memorial Library for more details.

Cost: Free

Thursday, November 12, 7:30pm
Hendrickson Room
Arlington Heights Memorial Library
500 N. Dunton Avenue
Arlington Heights

Scrooge (Jim Carrey) watches Belle (Robin Wright Penn) share a moment with his younger self in “Disney’s Christmas Carol.”

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PTiny Tim looks like one of the malevolent young aliens from “Village of the Damned.”

Bob Cratchit looks like one of the innocent bystanders you accidentally shoot during a Wii action video game. So does Scrooge’s nephew Fred.

The characters in Robert Zemeckis’ 3-D animated adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic story “A Christmas Carol” still possess the strange and creepy qualities that haunted the cast of Zemeckis’ 2004 holiday hit “The Polar Express.”

Mostly, it’s the characters’ lifeless, unfocusing eyes that Zemeckis’ motion-capture computer animators haven’t been able to humanize.

Not yet.

And that small detail becomes extremely important in a movie where your heart is supposed to swell when Tiny Tim exclaims, “God bless us, everyone!” and not appear as if he might chow down on Scrooge’s ear.

Jim Carrey, who has made a career out of performing live-action cartoons, supplies a radically un-Carrey sound to Scrooge, whose raspy voice recalls Alastair Sim, who immortalized the role in the 1951 classic “Scrooge.”

Carrey voices the younger versions of his main character, as well as the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. (Read more…)

Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) practices his paranormal powers to kill goats in “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

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It takes a quick 93 minutes for “The Men Who Stare at Goats” to dump a load of satirical napalm all over the U.S. military in a story so comically outrageous that when it cautions us, “More of this is true than you would believe,” we can believe that.

“Goats” has flourishes of other zany black comedies contemplating the madness of war, particularly “M*A*S*H” and “Catch-22,” but finds its own identity in a post-“Star Wars” era when George Lucas apparently had a much greater influence on military PSYOPS (psychological operations) than anyone could have imagined.

Ewan McGregor, who has a few “Star Wars” ties of his own, stars as Bob Wilton, a small-town journalist who decides, after being dumped by his lover for a one-armed man, to cover the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Stuck in Kuwait City and rejected by the established correspondents, Wilton stumbles upon a major story when he meets a mysterious guy named “Skip” with information about a U.S. program to create an army of super psychic soldiers who can kill goats by staring at them.

Skip turns out to be Lyn Cassady, a retired military man and apparently the most gifted goat killer, returned to active duty to perform a secret operation in Iraq.

Although it doesn’t hit Wilton, we can tell that Cassady, played with comic macho bravado by producer George Clooney, is a few rounds short of a full clip. (Read more…)

Residents in Alaskan cities report seeing a mysterious owl late at night just before a tragedy strikes in “The Fourth Kind.”

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Prepare to feel slightly conned by “The Fourth Kind.”

Every time something mysterious is about to happen on so-called “archival” video footage, the image goes haywire at just the second it promises to show us a glimpse of an alien presence or of an object floating over a house.

“The Fourth Kind” operates on the harebrained premise that it’s not enough for audiences to merely witness “documented” footage of Alaskan residents recalling alien abductions and painful extraterrestrial colonoscopies while under hypnosis.

No, we also get actors faithfully re-enacting those scenes. Sometimes, director Olatunde Osunsanmi uses a split screen so we can see the “real” UFO abductees screaming in terror on the left, while on the right, we see actors mimicking them down to every wide-eyed shudder and screech.

What’s the point of this exercise, outside of marveling at the ability of the cast to match every spasm and moan of the people in the “authentic” footage? (Read more…)

Thirty-three features, lots of docs, shorts and discussions will highlight Reeling: The 28th annual Chicago Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival, running from Thursday, November 5 through Sunday, November 15 at four Chicago locations.

Go to reelingfilmfestival.org for details.

Major Thorn (Faye Dunaway), left, lectures Captain Murphy (Amy Acker) about discipline in the indie “21 and a Wake-Up.”

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“21 and a Wake-Up,” the first American-made Vietnam War movie shot where the conflict happened, could pass as an ambitious, rookie student film with its amateurish performances, cornball dialogue and possibly the worst editing job outside of an old Albert Pyun action movie.

Fittingly released on Halloween weekend, “21” offers a truly scary performance by 68-year-old Faye Dunaway as Major Thorn, a by-the-book commander who locks horns with Captain Murphy (Amy Acker), an “undisciplined” female Hawkeye Pierce at the U.S. 24th Evac Hospital during the final days of the war.

“21” was written and directed by Chris McIntyre, who served as a Marine stationed in Vietnam during the war. He based his film on real events, which, ironically, come off here as Hollywood creations, especially when Murphy travels into Cambodia on a secret mission to retrieve a Vietnamese-American girl, the daughter of an Army surgeon killed during a blatantly telegraphed “surprise” explosion. (Read more…) Rated: R (language, nudity and violence). 120 minutes.

Now playing at local theaters.

I couldn’t believe my eyeballs, but there it was in the Daily Herald movie ads buried in fine print: “No commercial ads shown before feature.”

What? The Catlow Theater in Barrington doesn’t show commercials before movies as other suburban movie houses do?

This I had to check out.

I got on the phone and asked for a quote from Catlow co-owner Roberta Rapata about why her theater doesn’t show commercials. Her response was blunt:

“If you want to see commercials, stay at home.”

Gee, that pretty much covers it. (Read more…)