Irresponsible Mom, Abusive Male and other tired characters

Sleepwalking wears its sensitivity on its sleeve. One of those socially conscious indie dramas as glum as its rundown setting, the movie wants to plumb the depths of family dysfunction among America’s have-not crowd. But the transparently familiar issues – abuse, unemployment, parental neglect, promiscuity – are stapled onto characters who never seem credible. They’re just signposts for a particular malaise, with the signs shuffled around at the discretion of the plot. Need a moment of despair? Insert Sign A here. Looking for a sliver of hope? Stick Sign B there. The whole picture plays like a pop-up book in a welfare agency.

The script starts by dealing out the Irresponsible Single Mom card. That would be Joleen, living in some slag heap of a town and fittingly costumed for her sleep-around task at hand – tight jeans, plunging neckline, snakeskin boots. So attired, she parades a succession of low-life guys through her cramped quarters, careful to relocate her daughter Tara onto the couch in order to free up the lone bedroom. Charlize Theron assumes the role, slumming as she did in Monster, but without the weight gain and rather more prettily this time. Since Theron is further occupied as the film’s producer, it’s convenient that Joleen vacates the screen early. Mom absconds for parts unknown, leaving Tara and her 11 innocent years in the care of wimpy uncle James (Nick Stahl), who owns a good heart but, after he gets fired from his job and evicted from his house, not much else.

An old-style fantasy from the new China

If CJ7 feels like the love child of Charles Dickens, Mao Zedong and Steven Spielberg, it’s because that’s exactly what this PG-rated, Chinese-made fantasy is.

It has the requisite sentimentality about the working poor and the innocent child in the big city that Dickens spun into sweeping melodramas two centuries ago. As China embraces its new capitalist image – a fact that informs every last frame of CJ7 – the disapproving ghost of Mao is embedded in the movie’s not-so-subtle critique of the new economy. And as for Spielberg, well, CJ7 is a budget-conscious repurposing of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. I say “repurposing,” since CJ7’s line-crossing between homage and larceny invites a debate that’s outside the purview of this piece.

Fists up! Camera phones on!

It’s been almost 25 years since the original Karate Kid came out and, judging by Never Back Down, a de facto remake of the former (by way of Fight Club), a lot has changed. For one, teenagers really spend a lot more time on their abs. Also, you can’t do squat in this violent, narcissistic world without it being instantly uploaded to YouTube; these kids whip out camera phones faster than Platinum cards. Forget Big Brother – it’s Little Brother you should worry about.

The movie opens on a rainy Iowa gridiron, where Jake Tyler (tall, open-faced Sean Faris), a star high school football player, is goaded into a rather photogenic fistfight. Jake’s an angry kid (or sort-of-kid; Faris looks to be in his mid-20s), haunted by his failure to prevent his father’s drunk-driving death. His rage is compounded by the fact that his mother is moving him and his younger brother, Charlie, to Orlando, where Charlie’s won a scholarship at a prestigious tennis academy.

Bill C-10 a ‘catastrophe’: Cronenberg

“Perhaps there aren’t too many people who have experienced censorship personally, but I have,” says David Cronenberg, one of Canada’s preeminent filmmakers.

“It ends up being one person suppressing the expression of another. However you slice it, it’s always subjective and it’s always maddening and it’s always personal.”

The director of such iconoclastic films as the Oscar-nominated Eastern Promises and The Brood leads a chorus of outrage from artists, film industry insiders, and opposition MPs and senators against the Conservative government’s Bill C-10.