REVIEWS

MOVIES BY TROY PATTERSON

Vaughn shares the mic.

Yelchin gets dressed down by Downey Jr.

Revenge of the Nerd

School’s out...to lunch in this forced, drug-addled farce

Charlie Bartlett ANTON YELCHIN, ROBERT DOWNEY JR. MGM, R

Teeth ½ JESS WEIXLER, JOHN HENSLE Y ROADSIDE AT TRAC TIONS, R Anatomical anxiety gets gruesome in offbeat comedy Having sworn to save herself for marriage, Dawn, a sunbeam of a teenager, spends her weekends promoting abstinence. But when a boy from her youth group forces sex on her and winds up a gory mess, she starts devoting her free time to exploring the myth of vagina dentata. Home-girl has got a set of chompers in her honeypot, and they get feisty when she feels violated. Teeth lurches among genres, sometimes working as a horror film, sometimes playing like a freakish coming-of-age tale, and elsewhere offering splattery satire and a fable of female empowerment. But given its style—winking, clever, and rather overworked, with many scenes offering a glimpse of a cave’s stalactites, a reference to banana splits, or some such pun—let’s just call it a biting comedy.

untenably absurd in the Sundance fashion, with a little person named Jordan Prentice called upon to portray a brattish actor playing a symbolically meaningful dwarf in a film within the film. He comes up short.

CLOCK WISE FROM TOP LEF T: KEN WORONER; COURTES Y PIC TUREHOUSE; COUR TES Y ROADSIDE AT TRAC TIONS; COUR TES Y C7 FILMS

At some moments, the hero of this high school comedy will remind you of Rushmore’s Max Fischer, another enterprising semi-nerd given to grand schemes. At others, he’s like a throwback to the protagonists of teen-crisis flicks of a certain vintage, such as Christian Slater’s pirate DJ from Pump Up the Volume. But mostly, Charlie resembles the depressive Bud Cort character in Harold and Maude. Both live with dotty mothers in rambling mansions, each thinks of himself as a terminal misfit, and you can feel the new film straining hard in the direction of Hal Ashby quirk even before its characters start crooning Cat Stevens’ “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out.” It’s kinda cute the first time around, but then Charlie Bartlett reprises the number at its climax. The movie combines a pronounced shamelessness with an inability to quit while ahead.

Or maybe it’s just out of touch. Try not to fall into the holes in this premise: Young Mr. Bartlett, freshly kicked out of prep school, where he had no friends, boards the yellow bus to public school, where he ranks as both a loser and a twerp. When the family psychiatrist puts

the kid on Ritalin to help him cope, the patient first responds farcically—zipping around in the kind of whirlwind fit experienced by cartoon felines loaded on catnip—and then seizes an opportunity. Charlie recruits the school’s pot-dealing bully as his business partner, complains

The movie combines a pronounced
shamelessness with an inability
to quit while ahead.

of various maladies to every shrink in the phone book, and from the boys’ room, starts listening to his schoolmates’ woes and dispensing solutions running from Ativan to Zoloft. Thus, he becomes cool.

Golly! Some of us had gotten the sense that kids today were the most heavily medicated and deeply psychoanalyzed generation in history, but Charlie Bartlett doesn’t especially care about sense, and its corniness would go down more easily if it didn’t seem so phony. It’s a message movie without a message.

In Bruges
COLIN FARRELL, BRENDAN GLEESON
FOCUS, R
Action comedy is done in
by Sundance quirk
After botching a job in London,
two hit men follow orders to
cool their heels in the Belgian
tourist town known as “the
Venice of the North,” which is
a bit like lying low in Colonial
Williamsburg. Ken (Gleeson), the
older of the killers, treats this as
an opportunity for sightseeing,
but his colleague Ray (Farrell),
already shivering with guilt,
quakes with revulsion at every
glimpse of a Gothic spire. Who’s
going to pay for the fatal mistake
back in England? Will Ray find
love with a foxy drug dealer?
Who cares? In Bruges opened
January’s Sundance Film Festival,
and its action soon becomes

Vince Vaughn’s
Wild West Comedy
Show ½
VINCE VAUGHN, JUSTIN LONG
PICTUREHOUSE, NOT RATED
The tall funnyman introduces
some stand-up guys
Not a concert film so much as a
document of a stand-up mara-
thon, this testosterone-soaked
trifle finds four comedians
zigzagging from L.A. to Chicago
in the space of 30 days, doing a
show each night, with Vaughn
serving as an MC, impresario,
mascot, and bait. Some of the
jokes, about the rigors of waiting
for the cable company, say, or the
clownishness of ordering a “soy
chai vanilla frappuccino,” seem
well past their sell-by dates, but
it doesn’t much matter. The mov-
ie’s real subjects are backstage
anxiety and tour-bus delirium—
the comics delivering impres-
sions of each other, sweating
over hecklers, and talking sundry
smack. Some of their material
does hit the bull’s-eye, either
because of its topicality—Ahmed
Ahmed coolly riffs on ethnic
profiling—or its brazen lack
thereof, as when John Caparulo
offers, “I wish I did political
jokes, but I don’t know shit.”

They predicted riots.

SPOTLIGHT ON THE MUSIC OF

Chicago 10

With its file footage and animated courtroom scenes set to crunching rock, Chicago 10—about the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the trial of the protesters accused of inciting them—is a documentary that plays like a long-form music video. True, these songs aren’t exactly B-sides and rarities: Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” both get spun, and the affair would have been incomplete without a little too much Rage Against the Machine. Nonetheless, it all adds up to a competent anthology worth carrying to the barricades.

Weixler shows Teeth.