Cavemen, hitmen and ladies’ men

The DVD Beat
Reviews by Nathan Weinbender

The Pick of the Week
Persepolis
Most animated films are animated because they defy the real world. Animators can put whatever they want on a blank canvas; they have free reign over their creations. Do you think “Kung Fu Panda,” for instance, have been made using human actors? Probably not, and the same could be said for just about every cartoon, from “The Simpsons” to “The Lion King.”

And now we have “Persepolis,” a brilliant animated film adapted from a series of graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, that exists within an animated version of the real world. Her story, an autobiographical coming-of-age tale set during the Islamic Revolution in 1980s Iran, certainly could been made as a live-action feature, but let’s be thankful that the movie has been presented as it has, with lush black-and-white visuals and a dazzling drawing style that is really unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

What this picture does better than any animated feature I have seen since “Grave of the Fireflies” is it manages to give its characters human personalities, and it’s rare for a film to give pen-and-ink creations as much heedless individuality as “Persepolis” does. And it’s amazing, too, how well the animation captures Satrapi’s own rebellious personality, and how it personifies the heart and soul of a child with such a limitless imagination.

It’s too bad that there is the unfortunate misconception that all animated films are mere children’s entertainment, and it will probably cause a lot of adults to avoid “Persepolis.” That would be a real shame, because it is one of the most beautiful, lively and ingenious films, animated or otherwise, to come out of 2007.
Grade: A

Also on DVD
10,000 B.C.
“10,000 B.C.” is a wannabe epic, brimming with awkward dialogue, wooden performances, badly-rendered CGI predators and more historical anachronisms than you can count. It has all the trappings of a big, campy disaster, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t have enough energy to even be enjoyably bad. This movie limps from the starting gate: There’s no story, no character development, no original conflict, no sense of wonder. It meanders aimlessly from one clunky action set-piece to another, none of which have the grace or visual splendor of anything we saw in Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” That film, while hardly a masterpiece itself, at least demanded our attention: It was sort of stupid, yes, but it throbbed with intensity. “10,000 B.C.,” on the other hand, hardly has a pulse.
Grade: D

Definitely, Maybe
The ads for “Definitely, Maybe” make it look innocuous and contrived, and it is, but only to a point. This is a surprisingly intelligent and genuinely sweet romantic comedy, and it gives us a cast of characters who are more interesting and much smarter than the predictable story they inhabit. The movie begins with a father (Ryan Reynolds, surprisingly good here) and daughter (Abigail Breslin): He is in the midst of a divorce with his wife and her mother, she is a precocious ten-year-old who wants to know how her parents met and fell in love. He recounts the story to her, but disguises the identities of the three women who were in his life at the time, one of whom is his future wife. It’s a nice twist on a time-worn formula, “a love story mystery,” as the Breslin character so accurately describes it. Also refreshing are the three potential candidates—Elizabeth Banks as the college sweetheart, Rachel Weisz as a political journalist and Isla Fisher as the best friend—who are all bright, warm and attractive women. “Definitely, Maybe” doesn’t require much thought, nor does it register much emotion, but it’s a solid example of the genre. As far as romantic comedies go, if the pinnacle is “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and the nadir is “Fool’s Gold,” this movie is right in the middle.
Grade: B-

In Bruges
Two contract killers arrive in an antiquated town in Belgium, where they’re told to wait for further instructions. One of the men, Ray (Colin Farrell), wants to indulge in booze and women, while the other, Ken (Brendan Gleeson), would rather visit art museums during the day and stay in bed and read at night. When Ray and Ken discover why they’re in Bruges and who they’ve been sent to kill, the film becomes much more interesting: How will these men come to terms with their own sins and mortalities, and how much should we sympathize with them, even though they submit to the most depraved of human instincts? Farrell and Gleeson are really superb here, creating two of the most complex and interesting hitmen in film history. Their characters exist on so many different plains at once—they’re thoughtful, funny, ruthless, violent, vulnerable and deeply wounded—yet they never let us see the seams of their performances. The film does eventually lose its way, succumbing to tired thriller elements in its last act. But even in its final scenes, the movie bursts with creative fervor, and it has a dogged determination that’s hard to dismiss. “In Bruges” wants to be brash and violent and quirky, and it is all of those things, but it certainly isn’t without a brain.
Grade: B+