D.E.B.S., writer-director Angela Robinson's lipstick-lesbian/teen-spy/action-thriller spoof doesn't live up to its genre-crossing, parodic ambitions. A former short film stretched beyond the interest of its wanly amusing riffs, it settles for easy, familiar jokes and slack storyline tension. Four nubile young women are recruited to be U.S. secret agents after a hidden pattern in their SAT scores shows them to be master liars, cheaters and fighters. Clad in plaid miniskirts and armed with one-liners, state-of-the-art weaponry and lip gloss, they're employed to keep an eye on elusive criminal mastermind Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster, looking like a baby-dyke version of Demi Moore). Quicker than you can say “Holy bumping bush,” Lucy and one of the young agents are engaged in PG-13 girl-on-girl action. Guilt ensues. Beneath the film's stock characters and flaccid camp bitchiness are messages about the importance of female friendships and honesty about being who you really are. Noble sentiments, but not enough to recommend the film. What does almost justify the cost of admission are Meagan Goode sashaying in slo-mo in a tightly fitted wife-beater and micro-mini, Holland Taylor stealing every scene she's in, and the very droll Devon Aoki as a chain-smoking, French-accented sex addict who gives the film some of the bite it so desperately needs. (Ernest Hardy) (AMC at the Block, Orange; Century Stadium, Orange; Edwards University, Irvine; Edwards Long Beach)
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This comic updating of 1967's beloved if didactic Stanley Kramer comedy Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?—which featured Hepburn and Tracy as parents meeting their future son-in-law, Sidney Poitier—has surprising depth and charm, descriptors never before ascribed to a movie starring Ashton Kutcher. He plays Simon Green, a hotshot Manhattan stockbroker heading for the suburbs to meet, for the first time, Percy and Marilyn (Bernie Mac and Judith Scott), the parents of his fiance, Theresa (Zo Saldaa). Theresa hasn't yet told her folks that Simon is a skinny white boy, and the sight of him sends Percy into a protective tizzy, cueing a predictable parade of father-and-suitor bonding moments, from go-cart racing to sharing the same bed (Percy snores). Routine comic business, but as the film progresses, director Kevin Rodney Sullivan (Barbershop 2) and screenwriters David Ronn, Jay Scherick and Peter Tolan drop in some impressively direct and emotional discussions of race, including a sure-to-be-talked-about dinner scene in which Percy goads Simon into telling the assembled family a stream of derogatory black jokes. It's a bravura scene, elegantly staged by Sullivan and grounded by the warm chemistry between Mac and Kutcher, two goofs who are clearly mad for each other. (Chuck Wilson) (AMC at the Block, Orange; AMC Downtown Disney, Anaheim; AMC Fullerton; Captain's Family, Santa Ana; Century Stadium, Orange; Edwards Aliso Viejo; Edwards Anaheim Hills; Edwards “Big One” Megaplex, Irvine; Edwards Brea Stadium East; Edwards Kaleidoscope, Mission Viejo; Edwards Marketplace, Irvine; Edwards Metro Pointe, Costa Mesa; Edwards Newport, Newport Beach; Edwards Ocean Ranch, Laguna Niguel; Edwards Park Place, Irvine; Edwards Triangle Square, Costa Mesa; Edwards Westminster; Edwards Westpark, Irvine; Four-Star Cinemas, Garden Grove; Krikorian Buena Park; Regal Foothill Towne Center, Foothill Ranch; AMC Marina Pacifica, Long Beach; AMC Pine Square, Long Beach; Cinemark at the Pike, Long Beach; Edwards Long Beach)
From its austere opening credits to its screechy women, this 35th film by Woody Allen looks and sounds like a dozen other Allen movies. Over dinner, two playwrights (Wallace Shawn and Larry Pine) discuss whether life is comic or tragic. Someone at the table tells an anecdote about Melinda (Radha Mitchell), a young woman who, returning unexpectedly to New York, interrupts a friend's dinner party. The playwrights set about reshaping her tale in competing comic and tragic versions, dramatized for our benefit. In one, Melinda is a chain-smoking obsessional pill-addict who can't sleep or, worse luck, stop talking; in the other she's a relatively sunny creature, a benign femme fatale. In both versions Melinda sets in motion a game of erotic musical chairs, with the other members of Allen's ensemble (including Amanda Peet, Chlo Sevigny, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jonny Lee Miller) tumbling in and out of beds and marriages. Allen has one indisputable gift, for writing lines fully of quirky, exasperated, defeatist, neurotic urban humor. Here the Allen surrogate is Will Ferrell playing a failed actor, all flailing gestures and squinty eyes. Whenever he's on screen, the film comes alive. Otherwise, not so. (Brendan Bernhard) (AMCattheBlock,Orange;CenturyStadium,Orange;EdwardsAlisoViejo;Edwards“BigOne”Megaplex,Irvine;AMCMarinaPacifica,LongBeach)
The moments that ring true in this sequel evoke once more the shoulder-squaring pride of FBI Agent Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock) when she steps into her professional role and all her personal ungainliness falls away. There are, too, those sidelong glances of annoyance with incompetence, which again should gratify anyone who's had to work with a bunch of jerks. But the premise of the first Miss Congeniality (tough agent forced to act girly for the first time while going undercover at a beauty pageant) is unrepeatable by definition, and Gracie is much less interesting as a now-fashion-savvy agent in Las Vegas, a franchise character going through the motions as she takes a personal interest in the kidnappings of the reigning Ms. USA (Heather Burns) and the pageant's oleaginous MC (William Shatner). The only thing remotely resembling a character arc is handed to Regina King, the ferocious Margie Hendricks in Ray. As Gracie's new partner, King goes from angry black stereotype to intrepid heroine in record time. Later, King's turn onstage at a drag club, as a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be Tina Turner, is actually funny. Like a cup of cold water in the desert. (David Chute) (AMC at the Block, Orange; AMC Downtown Disney, Anaheim; AMC Fullerton; Century Stadium, Orange; Edwards Aliso Viejo; Edwards Anaheim Hills; Edwards “Big One” Megaplex, Irvine; Edwards Brea Stadium West; Edwards Kaleidoscope, Mission Viejo; Edwards Marketplace, Irvine; Edwards Metro Pointe, Costa Mesa; Edwards Newport, Newport Beach; Edwards Ocean Ranch, Laguna Niguel; Edwards Park Place, Irvine; Edwards Rancho Santa Margarita; Edwards Triangle Square, Costa Mesa; Edwards Westminster; Edwards Westpark, Irvine; Four-Star Cinemas, Garden Grove; Galaxy Cinemas, Anaheim; Krikorian Buena Park; Krikorian San Clemente; Laguna Hills 3; Regal Foothill Towne Center, Foothill Ranch; Regency Laguna South Coast, Laguna Beach; AMC Marina Pacifica, Long Beach; AMC Pine Square, Long Beach; Cinemark at the Pike, Long Beach; Edwards Long Beach)
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In 1998, as part of a tolerance-and-diversity assignment, some very nice middle-school children in the tiny town of Whitwell, Tennessee, after learning that Norwegians had worn paper clips in solidarity with their Jewish community during World War II, began collecting some of their own to commemorate the Holocaust. When the media got wind of this, the project really took off: 27 million donated paper clips rolled in, Holocaust survivors wrote and visited, and a well-meaning German Gentile couple actually shipped over one of the cattle cars that took the Jews to the death camps. It's easy to sneer at all this, especially in an era saturated with Holocaust-uplift documentaries (visions of Miramax's Harvey Weinstein tearing up and yelling, “My God! Life is beautiful!”). Certainly the project, as filmed by Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab, is alarmingly literal-minded, not to mention sentimental. But ethnically homogeneous Whitwell sits in Klan country, not far from the site of the Scopes trial, and there is something quite heartening about watching these kids earnestly guide others around their memorial, which was four years in the making. If nothing else, PaperClipsmay make you think twice the next time you reflexively mutter “redneck.” (Ella Taylor) (ArtTheatre,LongBeach)
