There is something like ashy molasses in Ray Charles’ voice: dripping syrupy sweet with southern charm yet charged with gritty, unhewn candor, it resonates with a sense of immediacy and emotional clarity that is nothing short of divine. And yet somehow, even after 17 tedious years of development, Ray, based on Charles’ life, does not muster any semblance of the splendor within his music. The film lacks emotional attachment on any level and fails in every way as a meaningful addition to his life and legacy. With a mix of deceitful, manipulative Hollywood story telling techniques masquerading as artistic strokes and tacky, unfocused, pop-filmmaking, director Taylor Hackford, manages to turn an amazing story of sheer will triumphing over adversity into a two-and-a-half hour mess that will damage Charles’ memory, even with Jamie Foxx’s almost perfect portrayal of Ray Charles. (BJ)

Sideways

Writer-director Alexander Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor seemed on a winning streak with Election and About Schmidt: both were inventive and quirky, two qualities their newest collaboration, Sideways, unfortunately lacks. The film follows Miles (Paul Giamatti), a burned-out teacher and struggling novelist, and his best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) on a road trip through California’s wine country organized to make the most of Jack’s last days of bachelorhood. The trip in Miles’ mind is about tasting great wines and in Jack’s is about getting laid as much as possible before marriage shuts him down. Despite their somewhat incredible friendship—they have completely opposing interests, outlooks and goals—the acting is exceptional and Giamatti and Church exude a chemistry that makes their friendship believable and oddly charming. But sadly, the movie is ultimately worthwhile only for its fine performances. Sideways’s structure is painfully episodic, never allowing audiences to become fully engrossed in its obnoxious characters. (GRD)

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie

I didn’t really understand what everyone was talking about in terms of the subversive messages that the show supposedly projects to its mature audience, but I was certainly entertained. The film begins with SpongeBob dejected that his boss, Krusty Krab, did not promote him to manager of the local burger bodega. However, when Krusty Krab is framed, SpongeBob must exonerate his boss to get the promotion he seeks and prove to himself that he is a man. The film takes the audience on a fantasy underwater ride through the depths of a sponge’s soul, testing his courage and self-identity. At one point, SpongeBob and his starfish friend Patrick can’t stop laughing after someone uses the word “weed.” This was one subversive message I could pick up. Wink. The film reaches its climax on the back of David Hasselhoff, who turns himself into some sort of jet-ski to bring SpongeBob and Patrick back to their home so they can save the day and have a big party. If you’ve recently become a baby mama, step out to your local movie theater and see SpongeBob for some old-fashioned family fun. (TBB)

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)

—Happening was compiled by Vinita M. Alexander, Mary A. Brazelton, Theodore B. Bressman, Julie S. Greenberg, Steven N. Jacobs, Bryant Jones, Marianne F. Kaletzky, Amelia E. Lester, Kristina M. Moore, Alexandra B. Moss, Nathaniel Naddaff-Hafrey, Tony A. Onah, Deborah H.M. Pan, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, David B. Rochelson, Zachary M. Seward, Emer Craig Myrick Vaughn, Julie Y Zhou.