Dan's Papers - November 16, 2007 - Mike Vilensky's Mini-Movie Reviews

Beowulf
Angelina Jolie is back to bad girl as a seductive demon avenging her daughter's defeat in conquering the Danes. A weird scenario, perhaps, but this special effects heavy motion-capture animation project, based on an epic myth, manages to be at least ambitious and eerie.

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
Mr. Magorium, played by Dustin Hoffman, is the quirky 243-year-old owner of the most fantastic toy shop in the world, who wills his business to his reserved, awkward store manager, played by Natalie Portman. Portman's leadership is quickly challenged by a dark presence in the shop and the cute ingénue, who should be tired of that role, must step out of character in this nicely imagined kid's tale.

Love in the Time of Cholera
Florentino, rejected by the beautiful woman he loves at a young age, devotes much of his adult life to carnal affairs as a desperate attempt to heal his broken heart in this Gabriel Garcia Marquez adaptation. While the Nobel Prize winner's words are nearly impossibly to adapt directly to film, this film is still more intriguing than most.

Lions for Lambs
A stellar cast of Tom Cruise as a congressman, Meryl Streep as a journalist and Robert Redford as a journalist, finds themselves drawn into an investigation of two injured American soldiers in Afghanistan. It's the movie that Katie Holmes ran to see after finishing the New York City Marathon, and while it probably wasn't worth all the burning in her legs, the political drama delivers.

Fred Clause
'Tis the season for campy Christmas films, and I personally find that they never get old. In this season's early Christmas crop, Vince Vaughn plays Santa Claus' little-know brother who, in an Ashlee Simpson-esque move, gets tired of playing second fiddle and moves back to the North Pole to gain his own fame. Juvenile behavior ensues in a film for juveniles that could have waited until at least after Thanksgiving.

P2
Sticking with the holiday season motif, this horror movie finds a career-driven woman trapped in her workplace's parking garage by a sadistic security guard on Christmas eve! If you aren't tired of the torture genre yet, you may enjoy this truly scary set-up. Just don't take the kids to this twisted holiday bloody-skinflick.

Bee Movie
Hamptonite Jerry Seinfeld returns to the big screen as the voice of a recent college graduate bee, disillusioned by the job market for bees, which is severely limited to solely making honey. As the bee travels around New York City, he sets out on a path to change his fate and meets a bee voiced by another fellow Hamptons local, Renée Zellweger. In production since 2003, dare I pun that this film has garnered a ton of buzz?