DVD Corner

Visit WeekinRewind.com, the new archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which are featured each week in the DVD Corner.

“Empire Falls”: It collapses. From director Fred Schepisi, this underwhelming adaptation of Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, filmed in Maine, will leave native Mainers covering their ears. The accents are wrong, with the film’s lauded cast making the same mistakes so many have made before them – they make us sound like village idiots. The problems extend to Schepisi’s direction and to Russo’s script, which generate a soap opera of awkward situations, forced relationships, and slow pacing. Caricatures take the place of characters. The film is so stagy, you watch its hive of interweaving stories from the outside, never really believing there’s an inside. The core of this three-hour journey has its heart in the right place – the movie is concerned with the class differences of small towns, the loss of those small towns when they fall on difficult times, and how those complexities come to affect its characters, particularly its main character, Miles Roby (Ed Harris). But unlike the more interesting book, those complexities fail to transcend the screen; elements become mawkish. Like any soap opera, “Empire” isn’t without its moments – Joanne Woodward gives it her best shot as the wealthy yet one-dimensional Francine Whiting, and Robin Wright Penn does some fine work as the cancer-stricken Grace Roby. Others don’t fare as well. Paul Newman is silly and predictable as the town drunk, Max; Helen Hunt is miscast as the sketchy Janine Roby; and Harris’ Miles never connects. When I interviewed Harris after filming had wrapped on “Falls,” he said that what he enjoyed about the movie is that “it takes its time in telling its story.” Turns out he wasn’t joking. “Empire Falls” takes too much time – and then it takes an hour more. Grade: C-

“Fever Pitch”: From the Farrelly Brothers, makers of “There’s Something About Mary,” “Dumb & Dumber,” “Osmosis Jones” and “Stuck on You,” comes “Fever Pitch” – but don’t let that encourage you if you’re a fan of the Farrellys or discourage you if you aren’t. The film finds the Farrellys leaving their trademark gas-and-gross-out gags in favor of something more traditional – romance. The film is about love – love for the game of baseball, specifically the Red Sox, and the love that grows between Drew Barrymore’s Lindsay Meeks, a corporate executive on the climb, and Jimmy Fallon’s Ben Wrightman, a high school teacher and Red Sox fanatic. Let’s define fanatic. For Ben, it means he has attended every single Red Sox home game for the past 20-plus years, he sleeps on Red Sox sheets, drinks from Red Sox mugs, and uses Yankee toilet paper just so he can rub in the point of how he feels about that team. Obviously, there is a downside to such obsession and for Ben, it’s this – by spending so much time rooting for the Sox, he has yet to connect long-term with anyone save for a few male friends, also Sox fanatics. Likeable as he is, the man is emotionally stunted, his priorities screwed up. As one character succinctly puts it, “the Sox have never loved you back, Ben.” As written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, “Fever Pitch” rides the rails of formula but it’s consistently winning. Throughout, the writing is solid, often clever; the chemistry between Barrymore and Fallon is undeniable; you come to care for the characters; and the robust, wholly unbelievable ending is earned. Rated PG-13. Grade: A-

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: An uneven movie with limited appeal that exists on the fringes. It won’t enjoy the cult status of Douglas Adams’ book, but that won’t surprise fans of the book. Adams’ tale always was better suited for the page and for the imagination than for film – a literal environment in which whimsy and satire, when not done exactly right, can fail onscreen. What’s missing here is a sense of purpose that balanced the book’s anarchism, an irreverent wit that doesn’t feel as if has to sell itself on center stage. The book was free to be what it was, but the movie, while encouraged to do the same, seems compromised by the medium. You can feel it straining to capture that freedom. The good news is that all isn’t lost. Individual scenes can be riotous, the film’s originality is a lark, and the acting by Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent, Mos Def as his alien pal Ford Prefect, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian and Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox is strong. Joining them is John Malkovich, nicely creepy as a legless religious guru with an ugly agenda, and the great character actor Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast, a bemused alien whose perceptive comments about the meaning of life and the universe help to pull together the threads with unexpected finesse. Stealing the show is Marvin (voice of Alan Rickman), a woefully depressed robot whose biting asides aren’t just funny, they prove a gift. Rated PG-13. Grade: B-

Other reviews

“Frankenstein”: USA Network gave Mary Shelley’s classic horror story a modernization with this 2004 TV movie. Martin Scorsese is an executive producer of the chiller that puts two New Orleans police detectives (Parker Posey, Adam Goldberg) on the trail of a killer who’s claiming parts of victims’ bodies. Thomas Kretschmann and Vincent Perez play the doctor and his synthetic creation. DVD extras: “making of” documentary; audio commentary by director Marcus Nispel. ??? (Not rated: AS, P, GV)

“Chasing Freedom”: Juliette Lewis stars in this 2004 drama movie made for Court TV and relating the fact-inspired story of a corporate lawyer whose views are transformed by her handling of a political-asylum case. Her client is a woman (Layla Alizada) who comes to the United States after fleeing from Afghanistan, where the Taliban discovered she was running a school to teach other women to read and write. ??? (Not rated: AS, P, V)