GireWire

Micky (Mark Wahlberg) gets some pickup notes from his half-brother trainer (Christian Bale) in Mark O. Russell’s family drama “The Fighter.”

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David O. Russell’s energized domestic drama “The Fighter” would be more accurately titled “The Fighters,” because it’s not really about a single pugilist, but an entire Massachusetts family of no-nonsense scrappers and offensive hitters.

If anything, Mark Wahlberg’s titular fighter Micky Ward is the least interesting character in the lineup.

An emaciated Christian Bale mops the boxing ring floor with him as Ward’s half-brother and trainer, Dicky Ecklund, an ingratiatingly entertaining guy fighting his own rounds with alcohol and crack addiction. (Bale dropped significant weight for the role, popped in some bad teeth and receded his hairline for his frightening and effective transformation.)

The perky Amy Adams packs on a few pounds and a whole new street attitude as Micky’s girlfriend Charlene, a tough bartender who doesn’t need a man to fight her battles.

Then there’s the amazing Melissa Leo. who almost didn’t take the role of Micky’s iron-willed manager/mother Alice. Leo fleshes out the one-note part into an entire symphony of control, pride, manipulation and guilt.

The fact-based “Fighter” is barely fueled by plot, which loosely follows Micky from his modest beginnings as a promising welterweight into his eventual victory in the ring, an ideal stopping point for any boxing motion picture.

Russell’s drama scripted by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson shows us enough boxing sequences to feed our expectations, but is far more interested in the dynamics of its characters outside the ring. (Read more…)

Convict Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) puts the moves on fellow convict Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor) in the fact-based “I Love You Phillip Morris.”

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The extent that Jim Carrey’s con man character in “I Love You Phillip Morris” connects with its audience ultimately determines how much we are drawn into this peculiar and edgy story of unstoppable, limitless true love.

Of course, this will vary from viewer to viewer. But for me, Carrey’s daring, bombastic portrait of a sociopathic homosexual convict who falls for a mild-mannered fellow inmate comes off as insincere, removed and disingenuous.

That’s not altogether a bad thing. After all, he’s a con man. He’s supposed to be insincere and disingenuous.

But Carrey plays Steven Russell with such calculated aloofness, and suppresses so many comic bits threatening to erupt at any moment, I expected him to stop dead in the middle of a major dramatic scene, look at us and shout, “I’m just kiddin’ around!”

“Phillip Morris” contains a few heavy dramatic scenes that would benefit from a character who we believe is truly tormented or emotionally distraught.

Carrey can take us just so far down the road to serious Oscar emoting until that twinkle in his eye suggests it’s all a put-on. He’s conning us, too.

If “I Love You Phillip Morris” had a theme song, it would be “What I Did for Love” from the musical “A Chorus Line.”

What Steven Russell does for love is lie, cheat, steal, run, impersonate, forge, escape from prison and risk death, several times over. (Read more…)

Ordinary guy Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp) has his life turned upside down by the fetching Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie) in “The Tourist.”

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Call it “The Tourist” claptrap.

Here we have a romantic thriller that should have evoked comparisons with a classic Alfred Hitchcock film starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint or Grace Kelly.

It comes closer to a “Naked Gun” parody, except with all the fun sucked out of it and the pacing slowed to a funereal beat.

Nothing in this tepid and dishonest romantic thriller adds up to much, beyond an excuse for the cameras to linger over the surface beauty of its two major stars as they preen and pose instead of emote and relate to each other.

From the very beginning of its ludicrously overblown opening sequence, “The Tourist” telegraphs that we’re in for 104 minutes of visual sizzle and dramatic fizzle.

The beautiful and elegant Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie) sits in a Parisian plaza, sipping tea, when a messenger gives her a letter that instructs her to board a train for Vienna. She rises and begins to walk, and an entire brigade of undercover cops who’ve had her under surveillance suddenly rushes and dashes to keep her in sight.

James Newton Howard’s music rising tensions fueled by percussive explosions furiously plays as Elise self-consciously strolls across the plaza as if she’s on a fashion runway.

She halts so the camera can drink in her beauty and we can admire her clothes.

The music hits a fever pitch of suspense! (Read more…)

“Grease” co-creator Jim Jacobs

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We’re sorry, Sandy.

All this time, we were completely wrong about you and the ending of your musical movie “Grease.”

We thought that when you doffed your sweet Sandra Dee persona, donned that black leather number and sucked down a cigarette, you transformed into a sweet tart for John Travolta.

“That isn’t what it is at all!” says the man who should know.

Born-and-bred Chicagoan Jim Jacobs wrote the original stage production of “Grease” with his partner, the late Warren Casey. I sat down with Jacobs on Tuesday morning for some coffee near his North-side condo.

“The point of the show is always missed by 99 percent of the critics all over the world, and by a lot of the actors as well,” Jacobs said.

So, what did it mean when Sandy went to the dark side of fashion?

“It was a poke!” Jacobs said. “A good old-fashioned razz against those … Hollywood movies that turned the main guy into a fine, upstanding citizen.” (Read more…)

Ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) suffers a slow emotional and mental deterioration when she auditions for “Swan Lake” in “Black Swan.”

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Darren Aronofsky’s disturbing “Black Swan” chronicles in exquisite, excruciating detail how a control-freak ballerina pirouettes off into the abyss of madness and obsession.

This psychological drama is part Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and Herbert Ross’ “The Turning Point,” all permeated with a Cronenbergian addiction to physiological ickiness.

It tells the story of Nina, a longtime ballet dancer played by Natalie Portman, who reportedly prepared for her physically demanding role for nearly a year. The work paid off, because her portrait of a dancer is astonishing and convincing in its detail and execution, at least to the untrained eye of a mass audience.

Nina lives with her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey), a slightly embittered former ballet star now living off the fumes of her daughter’s meager success with her prestigious New York dance company.

The company is preparing to launch the classic “Swan Lake,” and the meticulously committed Nina could be up for the dual roles of the good White Swan and the evil Black Swan.

She has the nice White Swan nailed. It’s the naughty Black Swan that makes her manipulative director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) think she can’t handle the role. Her technical craftsmanship is masterful, but her dancing lacks passion and feeling.

“I want to be perfect,” Nina says. (Read more…)

Leslie Nielsen hams it up with co-star Nicolette Sheridan during a 1996 appearance to plug the spoof “Spy Hard.”

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I met Leslie Nielsen in 1988 when he came to Chicago to promote his comedy feature “Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad.”

“I love comedy!” he told me. “I love being an idiot!”

If you don’t believe that, Nielsen brought his own whoopie cushion to our interview. Talking to him went something like this:

“People have come up to me on the street and said, ‘Leslie, you’re pfffrooot! a sex symbol! But you can’t take that too seriously. You can’t get wrapped up in that pfffrooot! stuff!”

I remembered the theme song to his anthology TV series, Walt Disney’s “Swamp Fox,” and I faithfully sang it to him in his room at the Park Hyatt Hotel. He seemed to be impressed I knew the lyrics.

“I approached with great hesitation doing the role of Swamp Fox for Disney,” the then 62-year-old actor said. “I thought, ‘Well, I’m an actor! I’m not going to wear that hat with a fox tail on it, parading around and doing kiddie stuff.’ Boy, I was so stupid in my attitude.

“Today there are so many people who remember ‘Swamp Fox.’ You see, as an actor, you never know what will remain, what sticks with people.”

Nielsen died Sunday night in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., from pneumonia. He was 84.

What will stick with people even more than “Swamp Fox” will be Nielsen’s late-in-life evolution from a serious actor into a comedy icon of the silver screen, starting in 1980 with his role in the disaster film spoof “Airplane!” followed by a TV series and movies starring Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin, the dumbest, luckiest cop to ever walk a Hollywood beat. (Read more…)

By any measure, Ruth Gruber is a most remarkable woman.

She wanted to get a closer look at Adolf Hitler, so she pretended to be a German citizen so she could sit in the area closest to Der Fuhrer.

At 15, she was accepted at New York University. At 20, she became the youngest student to receive a doctorate.

In 1944, she escorted 1,000 Holocaust refugees from Naples to New York during a secret war mission.

Above everything else, Ruth Gruber was a journalist working mostly for the New York Herald Tribune. It was a career she carefully chose, even though her skeptical father said at the time, “What kind of career is that for a nice, Jewish girl?”

Bob Richman, who photographed the docs “An Inconvenient Truth” and “My Architect,” makes Gruber’s fascinating life story his directorial debut in “Ahead of Time.”

It’s a straightforward, traditional doc with talking heads, archival footage and interviews with Gruber’s friends and relatives. But what a subject he has to work with. (Read more…) Not rated; suitable for general audiences. 73 minutes.

Now playing at the Renaissance Place in Highland Park.

Doug (James Gandolfini), a plumbing guy from Indiana, takes a New Orleans stripper (Kristen Stewart) under his Midwestern wing in Jake Scott’s slow, big-hearted “Welcome to the Rileys.”

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This might well be the closest thing we get to an actual Christmas movie this holiday season.

Jake Scott’s family crisis drama “Welcome to the Rileys” boasts superlative, nuanced performances from its three main actors and a seasonally appropriate story of charity and good will toward all.

But it moves so slowly and deliberately that it fails to sweep us along with the damaged characters as they meander off to New Orleans for some healing and a greater understanding of themselves.

James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo star as the Rileys, Doug and Lois. They live in Indiana. Their teen daughter has been dead for eight years after a tragic auto accident.

Their marriage has been dead for a long time, too.

Lois has frozen herself in time. She probably has the same hair style she did when her daughter died. She clearly hasn’t left her home since then. (One telling scene shows Lois trying to use a key to open a car trunk that has no key hole suggesting she hasn’t driven a car since remote controls came along.)

Doug has become withdrawn and distant, and often goes into the garage to openly cry out his grief.

We soon realize that he has also been seeing a local waitress for companionship and other benefits. (Read more…)

Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) falls for Maggie (Anne Hathaway) in “Love and Other Drugs.”

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Edward Zwick’s romantic drama “Love and Other Drugs” comes in three main parts: a torrid love affair, the explosive 1996 success of a new drug called Viagra, and a man’s search for a cure to his lover’s degenerative disease.

These disparate segments feel as if they’ve been rudely shoehorned into a single movie, and it falls to the magnetic performances of Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway to make it all click, and click it does.

Zwick dumps Hollywood’s false and pretentious boudoir modesty where steamed-up stars keep the sheets around their necks (for females) and stomachs (for males).

Instead, Zwick opts for plenty of bold, yet tasteful nudity, so much of it that it might be jarring at first because it violates our chaste Hollywood expectations.

Give it time. Soon, the nudity becomes part of the romantic landscape, as it is, usually, in real life.

Based on James Reidy’s book “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman,” Zwick’s movie follows the relationship between a shallow, fast-talking and inept pharmaceutical salesman named Jamie Randall (Gyllenhaal) and an attractive, independent woman named Maggie Murdock (Hathaway).

He pretends to be an assistant to a potential customer, Dr. Knight (Hank Azaria), so he can sneak a peek at her breast during an exam.

She figures out the deception and clobbers Jamie with her bag. Ah, love at first fight. (Read more…)

Rapunzel (voiced by Mandy Moore) captures a good-hearted thief named Flynn (voiced by Zachary Levi) in “Tangled.”

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Where Walt Disney/Pixar’s “Toy Story 3” sketched all-too human characters in an adult story about mortality and the unstoppable march of time, “Tangled” returns to classic Disney princess tales for kids, with the characters filtered through a “Shrek” sensibility of jokey punch lines, self-aware catchphrases and the physical laws of a “Roadrunner” cartoon.

“Tangled” begins with an unlikely homage to “Sunset Boulevard” when good-guy thief Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi) tells us in feeble voice-over narration that he died, and we’re about to see what happened before he did.

A magic flower saves the life of a pregnant queen who gives birth to Rapunzel (eventually voiced by singer Mandy Moore). The infant inherits the flower’s mystical restorative powers. So, a nasty woman named Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) kidnaps the baby and raises Rapunzel as her daughter, just so she can use the girl’s glowing tresses to remain eternally youthful. Locked in a high tower until her 18th birthday, Rapunzel buys Mother’s view of the world as corrupt and terrible, until she meets the fleet-footed Flynn, fleeing two former associates after stealing a royal tiara from them. After she beats him up and stuffs him in a closet, Rapunzel makes a deal with the rogue: She’ll fork over the satchel with the tiara if he’ll give her a guided tour of the outside world.

“Tangled” is a musical (hey, why waste Mandy Moore?) with Alan Menken’s music and Glenn Slater’s lyrics supplying a few appealing songs, especially the spite-filled “Mother Knows Best.” (Read more…)