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ENTERTAINMENT
Entertainment Weekly

EW reviews: 'Stealth,' 'Aristocrats'

By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly

Stealth
Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx in "Stealth."

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Jessica Biel
Jamie Foxx
Kurt Russell
George Carlin

(Entertainment Weekly) -- There's a new threat among us. It is faceless and fiendishly intelligent, with only one goal: to destroy its enemies. It feeds on technology, but also on something darker, gathering information it stores in an all-seeing nerve center.

How dark is it? Let's just say this: It has downloaded every last song available on the Internet. Look out, al-Qaeda!

In "Stealth," a high-velocity, low-concept sky-attack thriller, the world is under siege by terrorists and rogue warlords, but the real danger is a foe more homegrown and familiar: your new wingman. It is not a man at all, you see, but a top secret American droid fighter plane that thinks and flies all by itself, operating entirely by computer.

Nicknamed "Eddie," its actual moniker being the acronym EDI (so clever), it looks like a giant copper stingray, with a pulsating blue marble of a brain housed in its cockpit, and it even talks -- in a voice meant to evoke HAL, the ominously sensitive computer-with-feelings from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

EDI is programmed to kill, but when he speaks, in those dulcet tones of servitude, he's like KITT from "Knight Rider" on his wimpiest day. He's so icky-fey that he sounds as if he's warming up to play Felix in a dinner-theater production of "The Odd Couple."

The job of breaking in this awesome hunk of machinery has fallen to Ben (Josh Lucas), Kara (Jessica Biel), and Henry (Jamie Foxx), an elite task force of Naval Air Force pilots who are used to working as a close-knit trio. They have no desire to take on a fourth member of the team, let alone one that isn't human. The decision, however, has already been made by their commanding officer (Sam Shepard), a sinister crew-cut firebrand who is plugged into the corridors of power.

The creators of "Stealth" have devised what sounds like a shrewdly corrupt strategy for having their bombs-away excess and eating it, too. Directed by Rob Cohen, the youth-action pulp packager who made "The Fast and the Furious" and "XXX," the movie, with its opening crawl about fighting "the enemy" and its demagogic grab bag of global threats, was obviously conceived as a "Top Gun" for the new millennium: a fantasy of good-looking kids in hyperspeed planes zapping evil out of the sky.

"Stealth" is full of whooshing jet engines, hurtling landings on aircraft carriers, and lava orange fireballs -- the standard aerial military videogame porn. Except that it's EDI the droid cruiser that gets to do all the macho-decadent, neo-'80s ass-kicking stuff; it even blasts cruddy power-synth rock & roll. This allows Lucas' Ben, the group's hot-dog renegade of a leader, to remain a good liberal citizen, and for the movie to pander to xenophobic war-on-terror absolutism without falling into it.

Ordered to target a Tajikistani warlord who is parading a cache of nuclear weapons, Ben rejects the assignment, recoiling at any possibility of collateral damage. It's EDI, the programmed superfighter, who blasts first and asks questions later. He's the one who needs to have his wings clipped.

I went into "Stealth" hoping that its talented cast might make it more entertaining than it had any right to be. Yet the stars are asked to chew on the driest of technobabble, and to strike poses of flyboy and flygirl moxie that make them look callow rather than heroic.

Josh Lucas, with his junior Kevin Costner dreamboat-hayseed sexiness, is an appealing actor with a wholesome, easy style, but he needs to tone down his crinkled glow of self-love. It's almost bizarre to see Jamie Foxx in a role this lightweight after his complex triumph in "Ray." ("Stealth" was shot before he won the Oscar.) When he isn't strapped into his cockpit, Foxx doesn't get to do much besides strut, flirt, and spin a basketball; he brings little to the party apart from airy self-mockery.

Jessica Biel, on the other hand, is so out of her depth that the movie's biggest mistake was to strand her in North Korea. Her parachute crash landing is "Stealth's" one truly harrowing action sequence, but whenever the film cuts to her ragged scramble to the border, it stops dead.

In all the attacks on liberal Hollywood, it is often forgotten that "Top Gun," a movie that might almost have been commissioned by the Navy, was a perfect pop paradigm of Reaganite swagger. "Stealth," a dregs-of-summer knockoff, is too ponderous and inept to serve a comparable function now, yet the film's lack of thrust may be related to an absence of conviction about its own war-is-a-videogame cliches. On some level, the people who made this movie understand that it's no longer hip, the way that it was 20 years ago, to sit in a chair and cheer as other people fight.

EW Grade: C-

'The Aristocrats'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

We live in a round-the-clock comedy culture, in which the trade secrets of professional joke tellers have long ago been dragged out of the closet.

It's now an official cliche that humor is rooted in insecurity and pain, that comedy is aggression directed against the audience (the stand-up's infamous boast: "I killed!").

But unless you dare to see the fascinating sick-joke documentary "The Aristocrats," you may have no idea exactly how much the minds of comedians resemble those of serial killers, child molesters, and babies happily smearing their bassinet walls with poo.

This is a movie about the rudest, dirtiest secret in the world of comedy -- a joke so vulgar and despicable that it is told only by comedians to other comedians, told late at night after the audiences have gone, told less as a joke than as a ritual, a bebop monologue of hideous kink, binding everyone who tells it or listens to it into an underground fraternity of forbidden laughter.

In "The Aristocrats," we watch more than 100 different comedians, old and young, male and female, mainstream and cult, as they tell this joke, dissect it, meditate on it, recall anecdotes about it, and generally revel in the lurid, disgusting glory of its existence.

The joke, incidentally, goes something like this: A man walks into an agent's office and says, "Have I got an act for you!" He then describes the act, which consists of a family of performers coming up on stage and engaging in a litany of unspeakable behavior -- activities, left entirely up to the imagination of each joke teller, so gross and sadistic and perverted and horrific (not to mention criminal) that I would be hard-pressed to find euphemisms for most of them in this review. Incest, bodily excretions, rape, murder: They're all there, and all in good fun! The agent, nonplussed, then asks what the name of the act is. The answer: the Aristocrats.

It is, as more than one of the storytellers points out, a lousy joke -- all lurid setup leading to an innocuous vaudeville whiff of a punchline. Yet the badness, in its way, is the point.

Devoid of true wit, the joke is unabashedly a showcase for depravity, providing each comedian with a chance to unlock the outhouse of his or her fantasies. It's an Olympic contest of "can you top this?"

George Carlin gets the ball rolling with a tale of vile human waste that may have you reaching for a barf bag, and the scatological dementia just escalates from there. If you thought that people like Paul Reiser and Drew Carey and Jason Alexander were mainstream clean, think again. There's an ingenious Martin Mull version, a splattery "South Park" version, a pet-unfriendly mime version, and a rare public celebrity-roast version (featuring Gilbert Gottfried in full rasping cry). By the time the movie reaches the hidden sacrilege of Bob Saget, even he can't quite believe the things that are coming out of his mouth.

"The Aristocrats" has a lot of laughs, but as it giggles and blasphemes its way into areas not so far removed from the scandalous landscape of the Marquis de Sade, the movie, funny as it is, becomes exhausting and a bit depressing. It's at once a comedy, a horror film, and a hilariously unsettling testament to the deepest reality of what comedians are: rim-shot madmen, driven to seek out and destroy all that's taboo. The joke, of course, is ultimately about them, our aristocrats of unhinged anarchy.

EW Grade: B+

'Sky High'

Reviewed by Scott Brown

Sky High
As Will, Michael Angarano (left) deals with being the son of superheroes Commander (Kurt Russell) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston) in "Sky High."

"Brains, brawn and beyond" goes the motto of "Sky High." Of those three, guess which ideal dominates this harmless, tween-targeted cape-capade?

Perhaps that's inevitable, considering our main character is awkward frosh Will (Michael Angarano), son of the Commander (Kurt Russell), a genial meathead strongman, and his gravity-defying soul mate Jetstream (Kelly Preston). Like all good superfamilies, they send their boy to Sky High, a supposedly competitive hero academy that's a bit too Disneyfied to be Hogwarts-cutthroat.

The school is distinguished principally by its location several miles above the earth. (Now, that's busing.) At first, Will exhibits no "hero" powers, disappointing his dad, and he takes his place among the second-class "sidekicks." Then he hits superpuberty and gets caught up in a teen caste system inflated to superheroic proportions. (The results are either Day-Glo cute or darkly Nietzschean, depending entirely on your own scars.) Naturally, there's a supervillain, and naturally, lessons are learned, mostly via brute force.

Reverse-imagineered from "Spy Kids" with a hint of the (ahem) incredible, "Sky" deals skittishly with that status question, ending on an "I'm okay, you're okay" note. Visually, it aims for Best Power Rangers Episode Ever, with a Styrofoam aesthetic that looks like it fell off a truck bound for Spencer Gifts.

The flick is best in its bittier moments (watch for the stellar cameos), and there's nothing to trouble the tots. But parents beware: When American fantasies of excellence start looking this flimsy, you may get the sinking feeling that somewhere over India or China, there floats a Sky Higher.

EW Grade: B-

'The Edukators'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

When you see young lefties on the streets, lashing out at globalization and the WTO, it's easy to feel that their passion and wrath are matched by their self-righteous naivete.

"The Edukators," a fluid and gripping drama from Germany (it has the design of a thriller and the mood of a spontaneous, whirling-camera character study), is the first film to anatomize the contradictions of the rage-against-the-machine generation.

In Berlin, a trio of youthful activists, all attractive in a glamorously unbathed sort of way, break into posh villas and rearrange the furniture, Manson-family style, leaving notes that say things like "Your days of plenty are numbered." Director Hans Weingartner sees these scowling baby Marxists for what they are: middle-class wastrels who've inflated a valid critique of the system into a tantrum.

When they kidnap a pleasantly stuffy businessman (Burghart Klaussner) who turns out to be a former '60s radical, it's too pat an irony, yet the duel of wits between the wised-up fat cat and his ardent revolutionary captors makes for a forceful inventory of our political climate: stormy and urgent, with gusts of hot air.

EW Grade: B+

'On the Outs'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

It's one thing to know in your head why people starved of options turn to crime and drugs. It's another to see the tragedy laid out in front of you, with the haunted logic of circumstance, the way it is in "On the Outs," a starkly honest and affecting dramatic feature directed by Lori Silverbush and Michael Skolnik.

Set in Jersey City, the movie intertwines the lives of three teenage girls all gasping for air. What's devastating is the way that each is held responsible for her fate. When Marisol (Paola Mendoza), a crack addict, loses her 2-year-old daughter to the bureaucratic foster-home/adoption machine, her howl of agony scalds your soul, yet our sorrow carries a cautionary shudder of judgment.

The other characters are 15-year-old Suzette (Anny Mariano), who is caught by the cops holding a gun for the scoundrel who got her pregnant, and Oz (the marvelous Judy Marte), a drug dealer whose tough-as-the-boys cockiness breaks down after she watches her mother succumb to addictive demons.

"On the Outs" parses the hopes and terrors of blasted lives with an empathy that never cheapens into pity. The movie wounds as much as it heals, and that's its true power.

EW Grade: A-


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