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  EW review: Self-righteous 'Glory Road'Also: Tepid 'Last Holiday,' lame 'Grandma's Boy'By Lisa Schwarzbaum  Josh Lucas and Derek Luke in "Glory Road." YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- When the final buzzer rings in "Glory Road," it's not enough that the all-black starting lineup of underdog Texas Western Miners beats the all-white juggernaut University of Kentucky Wildcats to win the 1966 NCAA basketball championship; that story is available in any sports history book. No, when the last swollen chord of hallelujah music fades at the end of this hammily righteous sports-as-life drama, racial equality has slam-dunked a victory over bigotry, nothing less. Integrated teamwork has triumphed over ignorant racism. And we the people of a kinder, gentler, more tolerant 21st-century America are invited to congratulate ourselves on all just getting along with far more sophistication than our forebears in the archaic days of the 1960s. Remember the Titans? Forget about them! Here's a new Jerry Bruckheimer production that places its secular faith in an almighty audience appetite for underdogs, sports, and dramas in which wrongs are righted by good-looking Americans while Mahalia Jackson warbles "I'm On My Way to Canaan." Such is the earnest populist intent and crass fancy-footing of a movie that giddily appropriates "glory" in its title -- a declaration of magnificence lifted from Edward Zwick's Oscar-winning 1989 historical drama about black soldiers in the Civil War. When coach Don Haskins (Josh Lucas, humbly beefy) moves to underfunded Texas Western University, having previously trained high school girls, his eyes are on the prize of a Division I championship, not civil rights, and he recruits his African-American players for their athletic talent, not out of personal righteousness. Still, it's only just a jump shot or two before "Glory Road" (a feature film debut by commercial director James Gartner) settles into its rudimentary, music-cued rhythms of classroom civics lessons punctuated by on-court action. The exhausting drills and tough love with which Haskins disciplines his crew (the white boys on the team are nice but hopeless squares) echo the techniques of Kurt Russell's Coach Herb Brooks in "Miracle," but this time it's not the barbarian Soviets as adversaries; it's a bunch of scowling U. of Kentucky boys, led by arrogant, hatchet-faced coach Adolph Rupp. (Jon Voight plays the old SOB wearing prosthetic ears seemingly modeled on LBJ's famous flappers.) Aside from star player Bobby Joe Hill ("Friday Night Lights' " Derek Luke), who defies training rules to court a sweet gal (Tatyana Ali), the players themselves, both black and white, are an interchangeable bunch: One represents the philosophy of Malcolm X, another that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a third explains to a honky teammate that "bad" means "good" in black slang, etc. Indeed, the most memorable characters, for all the wrong reasons, include a caricature of a large, slap-upside-the-head black mama of one athlete who's slacking at his studies and the tearful "let my boy play" mother of another with a heart condition. "Your dignity's inside you!" Haskins preaches to his boys in the dribbling script by Christopher Cleveland and Bettina Gilois. But in case dignity isn't enough, "Glory Road" turns to Martha & the Vandellas singing "Dancing in the Street" to score points. "Glory Road's" eyes are on the prize of showbiz. EW Grade: C+ 'Last Holiday'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum Queen Latifah tries to act all shy and mousy at the beginning of "Last Holiday." As Georgia Byrd, a prim department-store employee with big dreams, a dull life in pre-Katrina New Orleans, and a (mis)diagnosis of imminent death by symptomless disease, the likably ballsy entertainer tucks her chin in, dresses in garments of bilious beige, panics at the attentions of a nice fellow employee (LL Cool J), and uses about a quarter of her lung power. But it's a no-go. We want va-va-ha-ha-voom from our Queen, and so we twiddle our thumbs through the setup until Georgia, having decided (after weeping to the heavens) to blow her savings on a swanky European vacation, throws off her cloister-wear and steps out in the eye-popping wardrobe and brash-but-warm, tough-but-funny, take-no-guff self-confidence that are the performer's identifying marks. Then she's on message. A chaste and tepid remake of a 1950 British comedy in which Alec Guinness learned the benefits of living as if each day were his last, this "Last Holiday," directed by Wayne Wang from a script by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, displays telltale symptoms of "International Blanditis," an unfortunate multinational co-production by-product in which even the most exotic settings and costars assume the depth of cardboard cutouts. Shot at the sumptuous Grandhotel Pupp in the Czech Republic's Karlovy Vary and featuring Gerard Depardieu as a renowned master chef, neither mammoth 300-year-old hotel nor mighty large famous French movie star are given roles of proportionate substance. Instead, in her Queenliness, the newly adventurous, outspoken, generous, and fabulously dressed Georgia enchants everyone she encounters, whether master chef, hotel clerk, or the up-to-no-good muckety-mucks she runs into in the lobby, among them a junketeering U.S. senator (Giancarlo Esposito), a pliable congressman (Michael Nouri), and their host (Timothy Hutton), who also happens to be Georgia's greedy, conniving boss. All learn from her regal magnanimity as she teaches her rapt students to live life with gusto. In a lesson just about as profound, Chef Depardieu suggests everyone ought to use more butter. EW Grade: C Grandma's BoyReviewed by Gregory Kirschling "Grandma's Boy," a low-gas frat comedy about a 35-year-old video-game tester (Allen Covert) who moves in with his grandma and her two friends, does a very thorough job of reducing every recognizable member of the cast to probable career lows. "Everybody Loves Raymond's" Doris Roberts, as Grandma, gets stoned, chugs a beer, burps, and crushes the can. "Partridge Family" mom Shirley Jones, suggesting a "Golden Girl" gone wild, puts a virgin geek's hand to her breast before she wrestles him to bed. Broadway vet Shirley Knight licks paint. "ER's" Linda Cardellini -- not you, Linda! -- grabs her own ass while she karaokes Salt-N-Pepa's "Push It." None of this works -- the car-driving monkey in the last act upstages them all --but at least give the ladies credit: They all, to a woman, commit. Which makes it all the more embarrassing that the movie's so lame. But what inspired their trust? Possibly the fact that the exec producer is Adam Sandler, who clearly pulled this movie together for his friends -- director Nicholaus Goossen and Covert (who also co-wrote) are longtime Sandler pals -- but showed enough sense to stay otherwise far away. EW Grade: D 'Hoodwinked'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman "Hoodwinked," a fast and furious crackpot skewering of Little Red Riding Hood, is reminiscent of a number of other digitally animated fractured fairy tales. Cory and Todd Edwards, the co-writer-directors (with Tony Leech), work with an intricately frenzied slapstick delirium that invites comparison to the "Shrek" films, the Pixar fables, and (in the nondigital realm) "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit." The Edwards brothers, however, made their movie independently for $15 million -- a miraculously low sum in the world of feature-length animation -- and what that relative chump-change budget bought them was the freedom to follow their flakiest corkscrew whims. When they stage a sequence in which Red Riding Hood's grandmother turns out to be a ride-the-devil extreme-sports champion (you heard me), zipping down a mountain on a power ski just inches ahead of a billowy snow avalanche, you don't question the zaniness, because the lickety-split insanity of what you're seeing is so marvelously timed and staged. Bolstered by a score of winkingly catchy pop ditties (I especially liked the annoying billy goat who's forced to sing every line he speaks), "Hoodwinked" is all jokes, bits, and interlocking narrative gimcrackery; it lacks even a trace of feel-good frosting. Yet the absence of "heart" is part of the film's charm -- its antic amorality. If popular, it could kick a whole new era of homegrown animated madness into high gear. In the spirit of a Tarantino time bender, Hoodwinked begins at the end, with the famous climax of "Little Red Riding Hood." Except that Red's confrontation with the Wolf in Granny drag is interrupted by a lantern-jawed Scandinavian lumberjack crashing through the window, at which point you know you're not in Grimmville anymore. The movie then flashes back to four different versions of the events that led to the "crime scene," showing us the tale from the point of view of Red herself (voiced by a no-nonsense Anne Hathaway); the Wolf (Patrick Warburton), who turns out to be less predatory than he looks; the wildly stoked Granny (Glenn Close); and that what-in-God's-name-is-he-doing-there lumberjack Woodsman (Jim Belushi). The result is a wacked kiddie "Rashomon" in which the different versions dovetail with a logic as impeccable as it is flat-out buggy. So who do we root for? Everyone and no one. "Hoodwinked's" most radical feature is that it's a ride without heroes-unless, that is, you count the filmmakers, who could end up doing for independent animation what Soderbergh and Tarantino did for indie film: planting it on the map as a viable mass-culture form. EW Grade: A- Click Here 
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