James Rocchi At The Movies

Rocchi's Picks and Pans - April 2007

With dozens of movies playing in the Bay Area -- from multiplexes to the art houses -- the question is simple: Which to choose? Here's CBS 5 film critic James Rocchi's look at a few films playing now the Bay Area

Grindhouse
3 our of 4 reels
Directors Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, Desperado) and Quentin Tarantino (Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction) join forces to make a big, bloody double-feature inspired by the '70s B-movie matinees they grew up with. First up is Rodriguez's Planet Terror, about a Texas town besieged by a zombie-making plague, with only a small band of rag-tag survivors who can save humanity. It's in the vein of George Romero's zombie epics, with gore galore. Tarantino's Death Proof is a serial-killer thriller, with Kurt Russell's scarred, scary Stuntman Mike chasing and killing young women in his muscle car from hell. The 80-minute running time for each film helps Rodriguez, who's kind of like the film making equivalent of a shark -- a head full of cartilage, and when he stops moving, he's in trouble. Tarantino's effort features some amazing stunt sequences, and Russell chews the scenery to splinters, but it still feels like a minor effort from a major talent. Still, if you want to crunch popcorn and giggle with shock, Grindhouse will deliver.

The Reaping
0 out of 4 reels
Starring Hilary Swank as a miracle-buster, The Reaping sees Swank sent to a small Louisiana town where the Ten Plagues of Egypt are ravaging the land -- boils, blood, frogs from the sky, the whole bit. It's not just the laughable script and epileptic camera work that make The Reaping a bore; it's also the fact that everything in the movie feels like a rip-off of other, better '70s horror films. When The Reaping plays like a Southern-fried riff on The Omen, it's trashy-bad; by the end of the film, borrowed from Rosemary's Baby and obviously designed to set up a sequel, it's laughable -- and the most scary thing about it is that this is the best gig two-time Oscar winner Swank signed on with the project.

The Page Turner
4 out of 4 reels
A young woman tries out for a piano scholarship, but the judge -- France's greatest female pianist (Catharine Frot)-- is having a bad day, and shatters the applicant's chances with causal rudeness. Years later, the girl is a woman (Deborah Francois) whose lawyer boss ... happens to be married to Frot's pianist. And so begins a careful, insidious suspense film that will have you jumpy with tension and impressed by writer-director Denis Dercourt's well-drawn characters and sense of the real. Don't expect any scenes of fisticuffs or bloodshed -- but instead get ready for a subtle battle of wills and a very real sense of suspense. It's rare for a thriller to have something to say, but The Page Turner takes many elements --- art, creativity, female sensuality, class -- and turns those into tension-builders as thrilling and suspenseful as a ticking time bomb.

Meet The Robinsons
3 out of 4 reels
Kid's book genius William Joyce creates funny, loopy little stories -- The Adventures of Dinosaur Bob and the Family Lizardo, George Shrinks -- and his A Day with Wilbur Robinson gets the Disney treatment here, as a young orphaned genius meets a boy from the future who drags him on a time-bending adventure. Joyce's book is small, but this movie is big -- fast and furious and stuffed with sight gags and throwaway bits. It can get a little overwhelming, but the computer animation is impressive -- and, if you get the chance to see it in 3-D, stunning. Meet the Robinsons is hardly up to the standard of quality set by Emeryville's Pixar (Toy Story, The Incredibles) but it's also brief, breezy fun for kids.