MOVIE REVIEWS: 'Accepted,' 'Dark Water Rising' and 'Creature Features'


Slightly longer versions of reviews in today's Oregonian. Click on the title links for the print versions.

Oh, and I was one of seven writers contributing to "Creature Features" -- today's A&E cover story surveying the history of rogue-animal movies.

Speaking of rogue animals: I'll be talking about "Snakes on a Plane" on Cort and Fatboy tonight (Friday) a little after 6 p.m. (My "Snakes" review appears in The Oregonian -- and posts here -- on Saturday.)



Accepted
(dir. Steve Pink)

As "Accepted" begins, Bartleby (Justin Long) is gleefully minting fake I.D.s at his Ohio high school, right under the noses of his teachers.

He's about to graduate to fraud.

When he's rejected by seven colleges (even Ohio State!), Bartleby decides to appease his parents by telling them he got into the "South Harmon Institute of Technology," a school that doesn't strictly exist -- not least because, well, it would have quite the acronym.

With $10k in ill-gotten tuition money and the help of his equally rejected friends, Bartleby cleans up an abandoned insane asylum just enough to fool his folks into thinking it's South Harmon. Unfortunately, his fake college's Web site accidentally enrolls 300 students -- and he suddenly finds himself running an ad hoc university where the kids design their own curriculum. As Bartleby puts it with Chairman Mao panache, "At South Harmon, the students are the teachers!"

I know: Isn't this how Evergreen got started?

As soon as the dean of the actual Harmon College (Anthony Heald) catches wind of a "sister school" that can't be bothered with zoning, insurance or accreditation, "Accepted" starts hitting all the points of the rebels-versus-faculty formula so hard, you can almost hear the metronome clicking.

But the movie's absolutely hilarious.

There are a few reasons for this. The first is director Steve Pink, who co-wrote "Grosse Pointe Blank" and "High Fidelity." While "Accepted" isn't as sharp as those classics, Pink takes a similar approach with his actors -- casting them carefully, giving them room to find weird little character bits. Most of the stock characters are a little more interesting than they need to be, especially Jonah Hill as Bartleby's big-boned sidekick: He's a Gatlin gun firing one-liners, hysteria, and bleats of humiliation. Comedian Lewis Black gets some anti-academia rants in as South Harmon's burnout "dean of students" -- sputtering lines like "This is not your orientation! This is your disorientation!"

And it's wonderful to watch Justin Long finally get to carry a movie. He first turned up as the fanboy with a life-saving command of trivia in “Galaxy Quest." Since then, he's been rocking supporting roles in "Ed," "Dodgeball," and "Waiting..." -- heck, even in those commercials where he plays the Mac to John Hodgman's PC. Do yourself a favor and go online and find him playing a lovesick Boy Wonder -- to Sam Rockwell's Batman! -- in "Robin’s Big Date."

In short, the 28-year-old actor has a knack for playing overwhelmed geekboys, alternating between Robby Benson handsomeness and looking like somebody just smacked him with a kitten. But he's smooth here in what might be called "the Vince Vaughn role."

"Accepted" feels a little like a Montessori "Real Genius." And it's one of the few genuinely funny comedies in a very dismal movie summer.
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Dark Water Rising
(dir. Mike Shiley)

"Dark Water Rising" is a blunt -- and very effective -- instrument.

Subtitled "The Truth About Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues," Portlander Mike Shiley's documentary embeds itself with volunteers racing to rescue the estimated 50,000 dogs and cats trapped in their homes and chained to trees after the flooding of New Orleans.

Somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of those animals died, we're told. And of those rescued, only 3,000 -- at most -- were reunited with their owners.

The situation is appalling, and Shiley and his fellow camera operators Kim Upham and Mark Stenway take a pretty merciless look at the worst of it. The doc starts by telling us that FEMA's official policy was that all pets be abandoned during the storms that turned the Gulf Coast into a fetid ocean of crushed timber.

Then we see the results of that policy. In squeamish, excruciating detail.

Rotting animal corpses hanging from trees and wires. Pets cowering in walls and bathrooms, reduced to visible ribs and horror-show infections. And, worst of all, the shocking discoveries: an alarming number of unneutered pit bills bound with chains and ravaged by fighting scars, and a school filled with the bodies of two dozen dogs executed for sport -- dogs shot, in an as-yet unsolved mystery, using what may be police ordinance.

The raw brutality of it all makes the rescues that play like something you'd find in a mainstream fundraising video -- with grateful animals nuzzling volunteers -- feel like Bactine on a third-degree burn.

"Dark Water Rising" takes a curious journey through the animal-rescue effort. The doc starts in late September 2005 with the "organized chaos" of the Humane Society's well-funded campaign. Within days, it shifts its focus to a group of tattooed renegades calling themselves "Disaster Response Animal Rescue." They're angry, edgy people camping in front of an abandoned Winn-Dixie -- mounting unauthorized, safety-light animal rescues by day and helping themselves to the grocery store's pharmacy and liquor aisle by night. They're probably showboating a bit for Upham's camera, but their fury is real, and you can't help but admire the way they flout bureaucracy to save mean animals with light equipment.

As mentioned, the movie's the documentary equivalent of blunt force trauma. I do wish it dove a little deeper into the psychologies and backgrounds of the Winn-Dixie group: They're fascinating misanthropes -- doing everything they can for animals, but regarding humanity and its institutions with unconcealed contempt. Also, the film only grazes the serious moral quandaries faced by volunteers who quietly failed to reunite animals with owners they deemed abusive.

But that's quibbling in the face of what this documentary does achieve: It furiously reveals the non-human suffering that's easy to overlook in a disaster area this vast.

"Dark Water Rising" plays at Cinema 21 on Aug. 17 at 7:30 p.m. and at the Laurelhurst Theater Aug. 18-23 at 7 p.m. (and 1 p.m. Aug. 19-20). Director Mike Shiley will introduce and answer questions after all shows.

You can visit the official "Dark Water Rising" Web site here.

Qualified for a B.S. degree
Brutal idealism in pet rescue
Creature Features
(The Oregonian, Aug. 18, 2006)

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Posted: Fri - August 18, 2006 at 03:51 PM        

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