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  EW Review: 'Block Party' brings blissful buzzAlso: Meaty '16 Blocks,' dismal 'Doogal'By Owen Gleiberman YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- The college marching band, that benignly regimented music machine, has enjoyed a bit of a legacy in pop music, probably dating back to the title track of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk." But it isn't often you get to hear a marching band as supercharged and low-down, as rudely alive, as the one in "Dave Chappelle's Block Party." On a makeshift stage at the end of a wide, crumbling alleyway in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Kanye West, looking casually dapper in a black T-shirt, sport coat, and gold chains, his body coiling and tensing to the beat, raps in what can only be described as a holy fury. At first, before you adjust to the velocity of his words, you may think that he's engaged in some sort of wily verbal assault. But then, just behind him, you catch the crooning of John Legend, as well as a chanted chorus (''Je-sus walks! Jesus walks!'') underscored by the stately, ominous hot-funk bounce of Ohio's Central State University band, whose players are arranged on the avenue nearby. West's rap is nothing less than a shout-out to God, and as you take in his confession, plus Legend's soaring plaint, plus the majestic blaring and swaying of the CSU band, the music surges to an ecstatic peak. All of a sudden, you remember what it's like when a concert movie isn't just glorified music-television fodder but, rather, an event that can restore your faith. It helps that we got to see Chappelle, a few scenes earlier, sauntering up to the CSU band in the middle of a practice field in Dayton, Ohio, and asking the members, on the spot, to take a bus to New York and join the big rap/R& B concert he's organizing, which is set to take place on September 18, 2004. With his shaved head, half-lidded eyes, and infectious grin that's always in danger of shutting off as quickly as it lights up, Chappelle has the look of a terminally mischievous cartoon bunny rabbit. In "Dave Chappelle's Block Party," he exists in a perpetual limbo of satirical detachment, but only because he appears to be deviously fascinated by every person and situation he encounters. Like Richard Pryor, he's all feelers, with a mockery that flows, almost compulsively, out of his screwy generosity of spirit. Everything Chappelle does in this movie -- from strolling, with bullhorn in hand, through his hometown of Dayton, offering ''golden tickets'' to random citizens, to standing up on stage and telling the band, over and over, to ''hit me!'' as he lives out the fantasy of being James Brown with each jangly-hilarious ''hit'' -- is done on impulse, as an inspired whim. Yet it's all presented with such catchy, soft-shoe enthusiasm that the film effectively dissolves the line between audience and performer. "Dave Chappelle's Block Party" is perhaps the first concert movie since "Stop Making Sense" to give you a blissful buzz. The buzz comes from the music, which has a loose, burning joy that's rare to behold in a live rap performance, and also from Chappelle's wicked prankster's glee, which spreads through the movie like a happy virus. "Block Party" features Chappelle as its impresario, on-scene jester, and guiding spirit, and the director, Michel Gondry, echoing techniques he used in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, keeps cutting between the run-up to the concert and the event itself, staging the film as a series of flickering time leaps that work on you almost kinesthetically. After a while, you stop thinking about ''past'' and ''present.'' You're eager simply to be in the now, as content to watch a rapping Brooklyn waiter, who turns out to be a brilliant boaster, as you are to see an incendiary stage performance by Dead Prez, with their blistering indictments of white power. The enthralling spirit of "Dave Chappelle's Block Party," its mood of exuberant democracy, extends to every rap and soul performance in the film. A lot of the artists, like Kanye West or Common, summon an intensity of rhythm and attitude that didn't exist in hip-hop before the form went gangsta in the early '90s, yet all of them, in different ways, reject the get rich and f--- the world nihilism that ultimately brought gangsta rap to such a dead end. You can feel the longing for a more redemptive era when Erykah Badu, tearing off her Afro wig in the wind, does a gorgeous paean to ''back in the day when things were cool,'' and that spirit extends to Mos Def (who has the greatest dimples in rap), singing about his desire ''to be free,'' or the Roots, with Kool G Rap and Big Daddy Kane, playing the ferocious ''Boom.'' It's part of the rousing offhandedness of Block Party that the finale, in which Lauryn Hill, with her china-doll face and luscious tremolo, reunites with the Fugees to do ''Killing Me Softly With His Song,'' is sublime, but no more so than a follow-up scene in which Wyclef Jean, off stage, leads a group of those CSU marching band members in his great reggae anthem ''President'' (''If I was president...''), letting them -- and the audience -- know that, in music as in the world, anything is still possible. EW Grade: A '16 Blocks'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum Bruce Willis makes a shocking entrance in "16 Blocks," a thick, juicy steak of a crime-cop-conscience action thriller in the tasty tradition of "Prince of the City" and a hundred episodes of "NYPD Blue." And all he does is walk down a hall. Willis plays Jack Mosley, an NYPD detective gone to seed -- to rot, really. Jack's got a potbelly, a bad leg, and the ashy pallor of the working drunk he is; in decrepit middle age, he's a clock-in, clock-out lifer whose pickled deadwoodiness is company-wide knowledge. Yet the actor eases us into Jack's rotting universe so skillfully -- so thoroughly at home with a fat gut, a gray mustache, and a permanent expression of disillusioned sourness, so authentically and without pride-in-prosthetics -- that at first I thought, jeez, what happened to Willis, for real? What happened is that old "Lethal Weapon" precinct vet Richard Donner got together with the erstwhile John McClane of "Die Hard," both sank their teeth into a meaty script by relative newcomer Richard Wenk that simmers and boils in real time, and the collaboration has done both director and star a world of good as they freshen up in a well-worn milieu. In "16 Blocks," Jack's rinky-dink assignment on a stifling hot NYC summer morning, grudgingly accepted, is a babysitting chore: He's got to drive Eddie Bunker (Mos Def), a measly, chattering twerp of a petty criminal, the title distance from lockup to courthouse where Eddie is to testify to a grand jury. (A trained New Yorker can make the hike, less than a mile, in 15 minutes, easy.) Of course, traversing "16 Blocks" takes considerably longer. Traffic, Jack's stop at a liquor store, and exquisite bad luck put Eddie in the crosshairs of a would-be assassin, and Jack's split-second cop's instinct to intervene only makes the muck deeper: The backup that arrives includes Jack's old brother in shady blue, homicide detective Frank Nugent (David Morse), and it soon becomes clear that the guys who wanted Eddie dead to prevent his testimony are themselves cops -- cops as dirty as they come. Is Jack on the side of the force or the punk? (Turning the chewing of gum into a gesture of menace, Morse shows once again how a guy can morph from "St. Elsewhere's" Dr. Sensitive into one of our most interesting character actors, his pleasant, boyish face now fattened into something much less predictable.) The race is on. The movie throws in sequences of Donnerian red-blooded action -- there's some "Speed" inspired business involving a city bus, and the production makes use of the proximity of New York's Chinatown to its courthouses for some sharp sequences involving cat-and-mouse chases through atmospheric subterranean kitchens and laundries. But the most exciting moments unfold in stillness, while Jack and Eddie are paused between perils, and Def -- electric as a punk with a criminal past and dreams of a future as a professional cake baker -- engages Willis with the seriousness of his patter. Mouthiness from a black man is often used as comic relief in a black-and-white duo, but Def's Eddie is never foolish. And in grateful response, Willis' Jack is never glib. Besides, the two characters have the luxury of real, reflective time to fill, something so rare in an age of zip-bang-crash-zap action-pic editing as to be classified as ''old-fashioned.'' A helluva lot happens in "16 Blocks" -- an outrageous amount, really, along with a coda that deposits the audience squarely (and I do mean squarely) at a movieland finale. Who knew that looking both ways before crossing is where the real action is? EW Grade: B+ 'Aquamarine'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum Feet by day, scales by night: As operating systems go, the locomotive options of the title mermaid in the tweener romantic comedy "Aquamarine" represent a definite upgrade over Daryl Hannah's more cumbersome machinery in "Splash." That's more than can be said about the rest of this movie, a filmy pool of tropes and tchotchkes stereotypically associated with girls of today. When Aquamarine (perky-pretty Sara Paxton, her twinkly expressions perfected on the TV series "Darcy's Wild Life") tumbles into the swimming pool of a Florida beach club during a storm, she's all tail. But after she's befriended by trustworthy 13-year-old best friends Claire (Emma Roberts, still answering to the description ''niece of Julia'') and Hailey (Joanna ''JoJo'' Levesque), she reveals her day legs and confides her mission: If she can convince her mythological father -- that would be Neptune, King of the Sea -- that earthly love is real (in three days), then she can get out of an arranged marriage to an unappealing merman. Aquamarine sets her sights on a cute lifeguard, Raymond (Jake McDorman), and it's still the same old story: Girl meets boy, girl hides fins for fear of rejection, boy can't understand why girl is acting so...fishy. That's only half the deal in this floppy production, based on a novel by Alice Hoffman and directed in a pink-centric feature debut by Elizabeth Allen. Claire (the fearful one) and Hailey (the rebellious one) have their own girlsville issues. Plus, they're crushing on Raymond too. That everything gets worked out -- friendship affirmed, jokes made about silly magazine articles on reeling in a boy -- is as sure as the soundtrack's inclusion of a Mandy Moore song. In such a well-behaved femme aquarium, I'm far more diverted by the antics of the designated Mean Girl, a conniving queen bee called Cecilia. Played with well-honed comic obnoxiousness by "Gilmore Girls'" Arielle Kebbel, Cecilia -- another lifeguard luster, who wants Raymond for her own boy toy -- slithers through her classic bitch role with cheerful sharkiness while "Aquamarine" flounders. EW Grade: C+ 'Madea's Family Reunion'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman Any hopes that Tyler Perry had discovered nuance during the year since his first hit movie, "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," are dashed at the start of "Madea's Family Reunion," in which we meet Lisa (Rochelle Aytes) and her dashing fiance -- who, the moment they're behind closed doors, gives her a whack across the face. (He's played by Blair Underwood as a nightmare Billy Dee Williams.) You haven't seen anything yet, though. The key Perry moment arrives when Lisa's mother, played with sexy resplendent bitchery by Lynn Whitfield, tells her to stay with the rich bastard because (I'm paraphrasing) there are just some things a black woman's gotta do. Let's not sell Tyler Perry short. As the vinegar-witted Madea, he's a drag performer of testy charm, but in his overlit patchwork way he's also making the most primal women's pictures since Joan Crawford flexed her shoulder pads. "Madea's Family Reunion" plays Lisa's horrific engagement off the romantic awakening of her sister (Lisa Arrindell Anderson), but Perry's women aren't just looking for love; they're snapping psychological chains of poverty and abuse and upwardly mobile hunger. No wonder the audience finds them liberating. EW Grade: B 'Our Brand Is Crisis'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman Back in the feisty days of ''It's the economy, stupid,'' a lot of people looked at James Carville, with his gimlet eyes and fight-the-bastards strategic moxie, and saw a stubborn idealism embedded in his snaky cunning. The difference between then and now is the difference between "The War Room" (1993), the shrewd and lively Clinton-campaign doc that show-cased Carville as a rascal hero of realpolitik, and "Our Brand Is Crisis," a fascinating glimpse at the perils of ''exporting'' democracy. In the new film, directed and coedited by Rachel Boynton, a group of pollsters, strategists, and advertising aces from Carville's plush consulting firm, GCS, journeys to Bolivia in 2002 to head up the campaign of ''Goni'' Sanchez de Lozada, one of 11 candidates for president. They bring along all the tricks and techniques -- the focus groups, ''on message'' slogans, and negative advertising -- that have transformed American politics into such an arid megabucks version of democracy in action. As Bolivia, drowning in poverty, teeters on the edge of breakdown, there is some support for Goni, who had already served as president, but many despise him for what they regard as his having sold out the country's poor. In its way, "Our Brand Is Crisis" is a cliff-hanger -- can the Carville Touch work in Latin America? -- but what's eye-opening, as well as depressing, is that the film reveals how even the politics of a nation's life and death can now be reduced to a technocratic shell game. EW Grade: B+ 'Doogal'Reviewed by Scott Brown "Doogal" is not, as you might surmise, some bizarre Scottish delicacy, but an animated movie designed with very young children in mind. And very young children should be very angry about that. Where is it written that 4-year-olds don't deserve a good story, decent characters, and a modicum of coherence? To wit, "Doogal's" ''rich'' mythology: The title character, a mischievous, candy-craving canine (voiced by Daniel Tay), lives in a sun-dappled village populated by a grab bag of amalgamated kiddie-corn types -- jive-talking cow (Whoopi Goldberg), nerdy snail (William H. Macy), genial burnout bunny (Jimmy Fallon) -- and ruled by a benevolent magician (Ian McKellen) with a metal spring for legs and sunshine in his mustache. (Not a misprint.) Doogal's antics inadvertently release the magician's evil opposite, an equally spring-loaded sorcerer with ice in his 'stache (Jon Stewart, who on a recent Daily Show couldn't even describe "Doogal" without lapsing into a fit of self-loathing laughter). He wants to freeze the world and our sunshiny pals must stop him! Judi Dench narrates the ensuing ''heartwarming'' fart-athon with gravitas befitting a Bible story. Weaning toddlers on this kind of lazy garbage -- where retired pop-culture references are passed off as ''in-jokes'' for parents, where flatulence gags verge on the compulsive, where the CG lips don't even match the freaking words -- can only produce a generation more addled than the last, if that's possible. EW Grade: F Click Here 
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