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Entertainment Weekly

EW review: Movie fulfills most 'Dreamz'

Also: Crummy 'Sentinel,' bright 'Bee'

By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly

Dreamz
The president (Dennis Quaid) and a talent show host (Hugh Grant) meet on "American Dreamz."

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(Entertainment Weekly) -- There are many things a satire should be -- fearless, scalding, revealing -- and one it should probably not be: too easy. "American Dreamz" is a political/media/showbiz parody so hungry to be topical that it looks, at first, like a case of deluded liberal Hollywood ''edge.''

Here's a movie in which the President of the United States, Joe Staton (Dennis Quaid), is a drawling, insulated cipher who can't tell a Sunni from a Shiite, and who takes his orders -- his very thoughts -- from his chief of staff, a bald schemer with a Cheneyesque crooked grimace (Willem Dafoe). In other words, he's a parody of George W. Bush that cuts no deeper than 100 sketches from the past five seasons of "Saturday Night Live."

But wait! In an attempt to bolster the president's sagging approval ratings, he agrees to appear as a guest judge on "American Dreamz," a popular musical reality show in which ordinary folks with a lust for fame blare histrionically ''sincere'' versions of pop songs, all to garner the approval of the show's host, Martin Tweed -- an acid-tongued British supercad played, with a dollop of charming self-loathing, by Hugh Grant.

If ridiculing George Bush as an idiot is old comic news, then sending up Simon Cowell for his adorable smarminess -- or the "American Idol" contestants for being shameless limelight junkies -- is the height of redundancy. Throw in an Islamic terrorist (Sam Golzari) who lands on the show as a William Hung novelty act and gets ordered to blow up the president on national TV (even though he just wants to sing show tunes!), and you have a satire locked and loaded in its obviousness.

The surprise of "American Dreamz" is that it's a blithe, funny, and engaging movie, not because the targets are any subtler than they sound, but because writer-director Paul Weitz ("About a Boy," "In Good Company") has made the shrewd move of staging the film on a human scale, in the homespun wackadoo spirit of a '40s screwball comedy.

Rather than treating its characters as walking punchlines, "American Dreamz" gets us to like them, reveling, from the inside, in their plasma-screen narcissism.

The movie asks the audience to sympathize with President Staton as he reacts to his puppet status by tumbling into a depression (and, for the first time, picking up a newspaper). Is this letting Bush off the hook? Not really: It's more a way of winking at the humanity of his passivity.

Meanwhile, Tweed, on the hunt for new contestants, hits pay dirt when he finds Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore), an adrenalized crooner who, with her chunky sexiness and trumped-up ''white trash'' roots, is like Kelly Clarkson with a dash of Britney. She's the most amoral conniver in the movie, and Grant and Moore have a wicked barbed chemistry as the host and contestant who despise and need each other.

As the president gets ready to go on the show, wearing an earpiece that will feed him every line, we see that no one on screen, from Staton to Tweed to the contestants (who are offered up in a luscious parody of "American Idol's" throaty, showboating ''individualism''), has presented themselves as they are.

Yet the film's true target isn't these bogus celebrities and politicians. It's really us: the people -- the audience -- that make the new culture of American fakery possible.

EW Grade: B+

'The Sentinel'

Reviewed by Gregory Kirschling

Looking back, 1993 was a golden age for thriller cinema. That was the year Hollywood hatched both "In the Line of Fire" and "The Fugitive," the two obvious and way superior antecedents for the very humdrum B-movie mash-up "The Sentinel."

It was also the year of "Falling Down," a borderline-nuts drama that Michael Douglas tore through, playing a far less safe, far less boring role. Here, rotely returning to screen (although he does look hale) for the first time since 2003's "The In-Laws," Douglas plays Pete Garrison, a veteran Secret Service agent who uncovers, as Clint Eastwood once did, a plan to kill the president.

And like Harrison Ford before him, Garrison's gotta run for his life while he clears his name. He's been framed as the mole who's in cahoots with the bad guys. Who are borschty-accented Russians.

The movie smells faintly of 1983 as well. Tracking Douglas in the Tommy Lee Jones role is Kiefer Sutherland, who should have graduated from these chintzy by-the-numbers movies to better material by now, given his award-winning success on "24." (The movie's one rousing scene has Sutherland and Douglas barking at each other in Douglas' livi ng room. These are two actors fun to watch at their highest decibels.)

Eva Longoria is the first-day-on-the-job rookie Sutherland improbably takes on as his partner. Her presence is the only irrefutable confirmation that this musty movie was indeed shot in the 21st century.

EW Grade: C-

'Akeelah and the Bee'

Reviewed by Scott Brown

An inspirational spelling bee movie, with a buoyant up-from-the-hood agenda? "Akeelah and the Bee" may spell it out for you, but it pulls few punches in its depiction of the hurdles a verbally gifted South Central L.A. 11-year-old (Keke Palmer) must clear to compete in a field dominated by wealthier white and Asian superachievers.

Blessed with excellent turns by Angela Bassett (as Akeelah's wary mother) and Laurence Fishburne (her flinty mentor), this feel-gooder revels in its hip-to-be-square hyperliteracy, and neatly exceeds its own PSA-ness, practically amounting to a black, preteen "Good Will Hunting."

EW Grade: B+

'I Am a Sex Addict'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

Sexual obsession is a tricky thing to put on film. You can reveal all the flesh you want, yet how do you get an audience to experience, vicariously, what's going on in the mind, the heart, and ... other parts of your protagonist?

In "I Am a Sex Addict," the writer, director, and star, Caveh Zahedi, turns filmmaking into confession, acting out his own erotic memoir, and since what he tells us isn't pretty, the film carries a grubby, sensational conviction it's hard to turn away from.

A tense, squirrelly man with big white burning eyes that make him resemble a gnarlier Fisher Stevens, Zahedi speaks directly to the audience, then goes back to recall and reenact his relationships, exploring the addiction to prostitutes -- and the compulsive honesty about it -- that destroyed, over and over again, his love life.

His biggest delusion is that his 1960s-style ''openness'' was anything but veiled hostility. Yet when it comes to revealing the twists and turns of his libido, Zahedi is ruefully funny and savage in his self-exposure. He shows us how sex, for him, became a refuge, a packaged escape, a drug posing as a force of life.

I wish that the actresses playing Zahedi's wives and girlfriends weren't so L.A.-model sexy compared to the real, earthy women themselves (whom we glimpse in home-movie footage), yet in one case, with Amanda Henderson as Devin, a free-spirited alcoholic whose problems, for once, matched his own, Zahedi demonstrates that he's a diary-film maker who can transcend confession -- and its lurid cousin, exhibitionism, too.

EW Grade: B


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