Stage Beauty

The film suffers from a haphazard and disorganized structure; the shaky cinematography is positively migraine-inducing; and the “mood” lighting simply worked to obscure any attempt to discern what was happening. Stage Beauty opens with Maria (Claire Danes) standing wistfully in the wings while watching a performance of Othello’s Desdemona by her employer, London’s “leading lady” Ned Kynston (Billy Crudup). She mouths his lines with practised passion, for despite a ban on female actresses in public theater, Maria—surprise, surprise—harbors ardent aspirations for thespian glory of her own. The filmmakers missed a golden opportunity to exploit the subtle human side of a fascinating historical moment, instead creating an unconvincing hodgepodge of hackneyed aphorisms. (JHR)

Team America: World Police

The new Trey Parker and Matt Stone production Team America: World Police is a delirious send-up of the international save-the-world action genre spoofing every movie from the Star Wars trilogy to Knightrider to The Matrix and unsympathetically mocks every public figure from Michael Moore to Kim Jong-Il to, curiously enough, Matt Damon. And they do it with puppets. Unlike most politically-motivated comedies these days, there’s no clear slant towards either the left or the right. Team America is a throwback to the kind of movie that casts the establishment as the good guy and everyone who goes against them are either evil or woefully misinformed. While, to many, such a theme may seem ironic, what makes this movie so pertinent and vital is the fact that this unthinking good-vs.-evil mentality may be more widespread than we’d like to believe. On the other hand, this movie also tells me that beating the hell out of puppets is funny. (SNJ)

Vera Drake

An intimate film about the lives of a small cast of characters, this simple masterpiece by director Mike Leigh manages to be at once philosophically expansive and physically claustrophobic. Personalities too large for their surroundings compound the effect of poverty on spaciousness—there is merely too little room to accommodate everyone, their needs for privacy and their individual desires. Imelda Staunton gives a tight performance as the title character, a mid-century London mother who tests light bulbs in a factory and keeps house for the wealthy to provide for her children and aged mother. Somehow, she still finds the time to invite neighbors over to her apartment for tea and a matchmaking session. In her “spare” time, she performs simple abortions to “help out young girls,” as she conceives of it, in a British cultural climate in which doing so is almost unthinkably wrong. The pendulous arm of justice, too, presses down on Vera Drake. By the end of the film, it is not just women as a social category who must live without freedom but Vera herself, forced to exchange liberty for captivity and the ultimate sort of crowdedness—that of a prison. (ABM)

Woman, Thou Art Loosed

Woman Thou Art Loosed is a misnomer. Titling this film Movie Thou Art Disturbing, Depressing, Not Very Uplifting Nor Powerful At All! would be far more appropriate. The main character, Michelle, played by Kimberly Elise, is raped by her mother’s boyfriend at the age of twelve, and cannot reconcile her painful past with her spiritual quest for God. To Elise’s credit, she does as much as much as possible with such a weak script. On her time in jail: “I was getting raped in the shower and a woman was pulling my leg, just like I’m pulling yours.” This movie should not be released in theatres. It should be overnight Fed-Ex’ed to Lifetime, where they can show it over and over again in their next “Girl Has a Troubled Childhood, and Her Life Is Filled with Rape, Drugs, Prostitution and Murder Movie Marathon.” (TBB)

—Happening was compiled by Vinita M. Alexander, Mary Augusta Brazelton, Theodore B. Bressman, Emily Ga Wei Chau, May Habib, Nathan J. Heller, Steven N. Jacobs, Bryant Jones, Emily M. Kaplan, Christopher A. Kukstis, Timothy J. McGinn, Kristina M. Moore, Will B. Payne, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, David B. Rochelson, J. Hale Russell, Zachary M. Seward and Scoop A. Wasserstein.