The Gran Torino was an American sports car manufactured by Ford between 1972 and 1976, a long, low, wide vehicle with an aggressive grille and a large engine. It was a man’s man’s car—handsome without being conspicuous, powerful without being ostentatious. There was a gruffness about it, with a name that came from the Italian city equivalent to Detroit—Turin, or as the locals said, Torino. Today, the Gran Torino is a collector’s item, a relic, a well-crafted reminder of long-gone American automotive dominance.

Clint Eastwood, who you may have heard of, is an American actor who started out in the television western Rawhide exactly 50 years ago. He made his first fistful of dollars in a trilogy of Italian westerns portraying men with fast hands and few words. But his widest popularity came between 1971 and 1976, when he appeared in three films as Dirty Harry, a tough-and-ready cop with an aggressive streak and a large gun. He was the quintessential man’s man—strong-jawed but clean-shaven, with just enough wrinkles left in his suit and etched in his face. Today, he is a celebrated director, too old for action, a well-respected remainder of rapidly-diminishing American cultural dominance.

The comparison is invited because Eastwood’s new film, which feels for all the world like his last in front of the camera, is called Gran Torino. In it, the aged star is Walt Kowalski, a widower, a war veteran, and a psychologically wounded man. His two sons and their families have forgotten him, or try to forget him, or try to put him somewhere where they will be able to forget him. His combat duty was in Korea, the forgotten war, lost between the twin towers of World War II and Vietnam, although Walt is haunted by the atrocities he committed. He is bitter, scathing, deeply racist and desperately lonely. His only comforts are his dog and his mint-condition Gran Torino, which he helped make during his years at a Ford plant.

Oh, one last thing. He lives on a street filled with second-generation Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia.

What follows is both simple and complicated. It is yet another retread of white guilt: Walt, and Eastwood, standing in for middle-class middle America, must come to terms with past and current sins of prejudice and discrimination. In the fifties, Hollywood made what are known as problem pictures, which dealt with “the Negro problem”. Gran Torino, on one level, is just an updated problem picture, with ethnic substitution.

But after a half-century in the business, Clint Eastwood knows how to make a movie. And he is still a captivating screen presence, even though his smooth voice is almost vanished. Through his performance and his camera, we see an unflinching portrait of a man trying to make the right choices with the wrong tools. It is hard not to view Kowalski as the logical extension of Harry Callahan, as a commentary on the costs of false invincibility and stubborn self-reliance.

Eastwood has stripped his screen persona to its core—once again, with few words to say, but without any weapons to hold, in hands that have lost their dexterity and speed. What is left is a journey that stretches from the past to the present, from Korea to Michigan, from Rawhide to Unforgiven, a journey that ends in Gran Torino. Go take it for a spin.

Gran Torino (2008)
Directed by Clint Eastwood.
With Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Ahney Her.
116 minutes. Drama.

Superheroes and superstars have three things in common—they enjoy the fickle, fleeting adoration of legions of fans, they are held to a higher moral standard than the rest of us, and they seem incapable of calling it quits. That’s why, when Bruce Wayne shuts down his basement Batcave in The Dark Knight, when Peter Parker tosses his latex in the garbage in Spider-Man 2, when Bob and Helen Parr are relegated to stultifying suburbia in The Incredibles, our sixth sense tingles—we know it’s a matter of time before the cape and cowl go back on.

That sense of anticipation runs through the first half of Watchmen, an ambitious, heavy-handed American dystopia set in an alternate 1985. Through an exquisitely-crafted early sequence, we see that America has decisively won the Vietnam conflict, Richard Nixon is still President, and that the Cold War is heating up. The US and USSR are watching each other with twitchy trigger-fingers on their nuclear arsenals. Masked vigilantes, once revered, have now been imprisoned, institutionalized or disbanded.

Lost in this grim world are the former Watchmen—Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) and Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup). They are living inconspicuously, helping the government, prowling nighttime streets, watching their costumes gather dust. They are all dissatisfied, with their own lives and with the society they inhabit.

It’s a compelling setup, made all the more so by acute political and social commentary. Paranoia about nuclear war, communist sympathies and military supremacy are veiled swipes by the filmmakers at America’s current fears of a nuclear Third World, terrorist networks and asymmetric warfare. Disturbed by the human propensity for violence and destruction, Nite Owl asks a fellow hero, The Comedian, “What happened to the American dream?” The chilling reply: “It came true.”

But somewhere between the dirty streets of Manhattan and the barren surface of Mars, Watchmen loses its way. After smaller stories of pedophiliac murderers in New York and war criminals in Hanoi, suddenly the Watchmen are fighting in a faux pyramid in Antarctica to save the world from doom. It’s the curse of the blockbuster that pyrotechnics too often take priority over plot. The film’s pessimism ends up feeling pedestrian. Any group of caped crusaders can save the world. Yawn.

The more interesting questions are whether the world is worth saving, and from whom. Writers David Hayter and Alex Tse force us into philosophical difficulties, but then provide too-easy answers. In Watchmen, the threat to humanity is human antagonism; the threat to America is American aggression. These are not problems solved by a knockout punch, no matter how beautifully rendered.

The film is also overly long, at 163 minutes. Anticlimactic, moralizing speeches don’t make it feel any shorter. Director Jack Snyder and editor William Hoy should have shaved a half hour from the running time, leaving Mars and Antarctica on the cutting room floor. As Watchmen keeps reminding us, the world we’ve created is cold and unforgiving enough.

Watchmen
Directed by Jack Snyder.
With Billy Crudup, Carla Gugino and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
163 minutes. Action/Fantasy.

Let’s get some basics out of the way. The Spirit is based on a series of graphic novels created by Will Eisner in 1940, and brought to the big screen by Frank Miller. Eisner and Miller are two of the best-known names in the sequential art industry. Eisner is a legend and innovator, having elevated the comic book medium with unconventional stories of urban life and blight. Miller used to ink dark, psychological comic book sagas in the 1970s and 80s, wrote a couple of Robocop sequels in the 1990s and now, evidently in vogue in Hollywood, spends his time creating dark, unwatchable movies. He seems to be getting paid more for doing less the older he gets.

A graphic novel, by the way, is like a comic book, except it’s for grown-ups (which means kids read them). In a graphic novel, Veronica would come after Archie with a knife.

In The Spirit, a policeman, Denny Colt, who lives in a nameless, faceless American city, dies and is injected with a serum by his unscrupulous coroner. The serum gives him a second life with enhanced healing powers. He confides in his police commissioner and becomes a shadowy, masked appendage to the force known only as the Spirit.

The movie is bad. It is so bad, so overwhelmingly bad, that the rest of this space must be used to scare you away from it. The city the Spirit inhabits is an anachronistic mash-up of 1960s design and present-day technology—so the cars, trucks and planes look forty years old, all rivets and metal sheets, and the men wear fedoras, but they use sleek cell phones and the Internet. The Spirit displays inhuman acrobatics and physical resilience, yet comes close to death, yet voluntarily chooses to live on. All of this is incredibly disorienting, leaving the viewer confused about where, when and why events are taking place, and ignorant about the parameters of the world. Can the Spirit die? If so, how? Do we even care?

The movie’s awfulness, however, goes beyond its lack of coherence and therefore lack of drama. The Spirit is emblematic of so much that is wrong with our cultural landscape. It is one of a thousand pieces of entertainment detritus littering our minds. Or, to switch analogies, like a sausage—preprocessed, churned out of a factory, indistinct, artificially shaped, coloured and flavoured to look appealing, palatable in very small doses and sickening in excess.

The film euphemistically markets itself as ‘from the producers of 300 and Sin City’—in other words, the same rich guys who already cashed in on the marginal stylistic cleverness of Sin City are still trying the milk, and bilk, the public. Originality, today, is just a financial opportunity. It is seized upon, imitated, duplicated, replicated until even the original appears quotidian.

Why do we tolerate such a marketplace? Have we been so thoroughly trained by our television sets, car radios and magazines? Is our demand to be amused so insatiable that we voluntarily subject ourselves to the visual and auditory assault that is The Spirit and its ilk? Or are we still able, however dimly, to recognize that what is ‘out there’ is of our collective creation? For our own sake, our own spirit, one hopes so.

The Spirit
Directed by Frank Miller.
With Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes and Samuel L Jackson.
108 minutes. Action/Fantasy.

A film opened on Wednesday set in India, funded by British production companies, revolving around the Indian version of a British television show, and filmed in India by a British director with Indian actors speaking both Hindi and English. Got that?

Last Sunday, it won the American Academy Award for Best Picture. It’s time to play a game. This came about because: a) the Academy voters are sick and tired of their own products; b) Neocolonialism is hot; c) The plight of the Indian poor deserves meaningless accolades; d) Slumdog Millionaire is a really great film.

We’ll use our 50-50 lifeline to take away two of the incorrect answers—a) and c). The Academy Awards isn’t meaningless (anything watched by millions can’t be), but it’s pretty close. In 1927, studio heads created the Academy, which has about 6,000 members, to disenfranchise industry workers. As the de facto company union, its job was to prevent other unions from forming. The awards were incidental. Slumdog’s Best Picture statuette reflects the opinion of a few thousand American craftsmen and women—public relations officers, art directors, and so on—who work in western Los Angeles County, California.

Do these SoCal stiffs have a fetish for analyzing Anglo-Indian relations, or do they just love Slumdog Millionaire? Let’s ask the audience—the movie audience, that is.

Jamal and his older brother Salim live in a Mumbai ghetto as young children do—subverting every authority they can. In the film’s vibrant opening sequence, they outrun and outwit the police, get dragged to school by their single mother, and get beaten by their teacher. A brutal community attack, fueled by ethnic hatred, leaves the boys orphaned and homeless. Shivering, soaked, broke and broken, they meet another orphan, Latika, and try to survive with the creed of their old literature book, The Three Musketeers—all for one, and one for all.

Director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), cinematographer Anthony Mantle and editor Chris Dickens unfold Jamal’s journey piece by kaleidoscopic piece, in tightly-paced snippets of colour and colourful dialogue. Simon Beaufoy’s script is briskly chaptered—Jamal’s appearance on India’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and his slow progress up an ever-larger mountain of rupees, provides the structural room for flashbacks, flash forwards and moments of surrealism.

We get three films in one—a rags to possible-riches suspense, a buddy comedy with Jamal and Salim (played by three actors each, ending with Dev Patel and Madhur Mittal in the adult roles), and an epic love story between Jamal and Latika (again with three actors, last by Freida Pinto) as they try to overcome betrayal, poverty, geography, doubt, and trauma.

Sleeping security guards, beggars at four-way intersections, young gunmen on nighttime streets—these and other details collapse the distance between the East and West Indies, between Navi Mumbai and New Kingston. A don frustrated with the cricket match on TV. A police force acting as judge, jury and executioner. No wonder the audience at Carib clapped, cheered and cried.

In the end, it doesn’t matter which answer is right, or what the authorities say. Slumdog Millionaire tells us—wonderfully, wordlessly, and winningly—the only thing that matters is whether you give up. Keep playing, no matter the odds, no matter the past, no matter the cost, no matter the pain. All for one. One for all.

Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle.
With Dev Patel, Freida Pinto and Anil Kapoor.
120 minutes. Drama.

It’s easy to forget, inundated as we are by film after film after film depicting the lives of young, white American urban and suburban professionals, just how affirmatory going to the cinema can be.

We are all stuck in this big, crazy world, stuck with the same struggles and triumphs, heartbreaks and hopes. We all try to make sense of lives that seem fundamentally anarchic and arbitrary. Some of us have religion. Some of us have degrees. But all of us have the movies. We recognize ourselves on the screen, our experiences carefully pared, parsed and shaped into compelling stories. Art doesn’t only imitate life; it explicates it.

The only problem for us, living in Jamaica, is that most of the movies at the cineplex are like funhouse mirrors—you can kinda see yourself if you look from the right perspective, but it’s badly distorted. We recognize love; we don’t recognize Manhattan lofts. We identify with death; we don’t identify with Denver snow.

That’s why Tyler Perry is so invaluable.

Not because he makes great movies—he doesn’t. Not because his movies make a lot of money—although they do. Tyler Perry is invaluable because he uses cinematic pixie dust to turn authentic black experience into authentic black-oriented art. Also, because Madea is funny as hell (where she’ll probably end up).

Madea Goes to Jail is the latest film entry in Perry’s lucrative drag franchise. He developed the Madea character several years ago on the Atlanta, Georgia urban theatre circuit as a no-nonsense, sharp-tongued but benevolent grandmother. Perry cross-dresses to play Madea himself, adding to the lengthy roster of African-American men who have donned lipstick and leggings. It is a sad peculiarity of the American psyche that its black men must neuter themselves to be palatable to white audiences—Nat King Cole was soft and genial; Sidney Poitier, clean-cut and upright. Cross-dressing negates the supposed sexual threat of a virile black man; it’s not a coincidence that Perry stands an impressive six-foot-five.

However, Perry is smart enough to pull a bait-and-switch. Norbit this is not. Madea features only tangentially in Jail and other films. Perry uses his game granny to pack the house, but once the seats are full, he turns the cinema into a church to preach uplifting messages about the importance of family, community spirit and strong Christian faith.

Madea Goes to Jail is really about a young lawyer on the rise, Joshua Hardaway (played by Derek Luke) and a woman of the night, Candy (Keshia Knight Pulliam, who played Rudy on The Cosby Show and is still trying to cast off its shadow). They meet because Candy is charged with prostitution and the docket lands on Joshua’s desk. Joshua, engaged, is thrown back into his past, where he and Candy share a troubling secret.

Perry wrote, directed and produced the film, which also features David and Tamela Mann, Ion Overman, Viola Davis and Vanessa Ferlito. Go and see it, and then go and rent Meet the Browns or anything from the Perry oeuvre. They’re not masterpieces, but it’s better than buying a mirror. You’ve never looked so good.

Madea Goes to Jail
Written and directed by Tyler Perry.
With Tyler Perry, Derek Luke, Keshia Knight Pulliam.
103 minutes. Comedy.

Going to see an American romantic comedy is like going out on a first date—you spruce up, head out, spend a little money, and try to have a good time. After fifteen minutes, you’ve usually made up your mind. It’s pleasant enough, but by the time you get home, you’ve forgotten most of what happened. Sometimes, you get your hopes up only to get let down.

But once in a while, just once in a while, what seemed like another ordinary evening turns into a night that leaves you smiling.

And so it is with He’s Just Not That Into You, a by-the-numbers chick-flick that becomes more than the sum of its ensemble parts. It’s about the modern yet timeless tensions and trials of love—sex, mindgames and stupid mistakes in the age of MySpace and voicemail.

The film features everyone from the cover of People magazine—Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Connelly, Ben Affleck and others—in a web of relationships worthy of its inside pages. Director Ken Kwapis keeps us perfectly oriented even as his imperfect protagonists become physically and emotionally entangled.

Janine and Ben (Connelly and Bradley Cooper) are married, but unhappy. Beth and Neil (Aniston and Affleck) are happy, but unmarried, and therefore unhappy. Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin) is single, but lonely, and therefore unhappy. Alex (Justin Long) is single, but happy, until he meets Gigi, and… you get the idea. Loving someone, and having them love you back, is a lot of hard work.

Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein rose to their equally difficult job adapting He’s Just Not That Into You from Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo’s self-help book of the same name. The title is one of several chapters (e.g., “if he’s sleeping with someone else”) used in the film, introduced with woman-on-the-street interview segments and tying into various character arcs. The writing is snappy without being self-conscious.

Jennifers Aniston and Connelly stand out amongst uneven cast performances. Connelly has a chance to demonstrate her comic timing, and Aniston is right at home, playing yet another version of the fashion-conscious girl-next-door she honed as Rachel Greene in her hit American sitcom, Friends.

Every film reflects the politics of its day, and the fun in He’s Just Not That Into You is tempered by its re-mythologizing of the inevitability of monogamous, heterosexual union.

It is disappointing, if sadly expected, to see homosexual relationships, and indeed homosexuality in general, used for comic relief in the film. Drew Barrymore’s character is the only woman in an office staffed with uniformly effeminate, flashy gay men, inexplicably more concerned with her love life than their own.

Across the film, homosexual subcultures are reduced to their more tired stereotypes—the tight shirts, affected gestures and supportive ear. This is especially unhelpful in a country like Jamaica, where same-sex intimacy is still illegitimised.

Despite its bothersome bias, He’s Just Not That Into You is the best kind of first date—when it’s over, you want to do it all again tomorrow.

He’s Just Not That Into You
Directed by Ken Kwapis.
With Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connolly, Scarlett Johansson.
129 minutes. Romance/Comedy.

Like its two predecessors, Transporter 3 stars Jason Statham as driver-for-hire Frank Martin as he couriers a dangerous package while kicking ass, getting undressed, and kicking ass while getting undressed. If you are a fan of the previous films, or of action thrillers in the era of Bourne, or of Statham’s impossibly chiseled body, then you’ll like Transporter 3.

This time, Martin is transporting a damsel-in-minidress, Valentina (Natalya Rudakova), from Marseille, France to Odesa, Ukraine in an Audi A8 W-12. The distance between the two is more than 2000km as the crow flies, or roughly ten times the length of Jamaica. So you’ll also like this movie if you’re a fan of long legs, fast cars or impossibly short drives across the Mediterranean.

Director Olivier Megaton keeps things tripping along: along with editors Camille Delamarre and Carlo Rizzo, Megaton captures twice the kinetic energy of Bourne director Paul Greengrass, but with half the coherence. Greengrass always understood the action was in service of the story; Megaton has it the other way round, glossing over dialogue to get to the next hyperactive chase.

The Transporter films always emphasize karate chops over acting chops, so Statham’s performance, dynamic in its physicality, is emotionally static. (It doesn’t help that composer Alexandre Azaria mickey-mouses the entire score; nothing drains a scene like overblown music.)

By now, it’s difficult to watch Statham’s topless roundhouse kicks, grimaces at the wheel, or manic sprint without thinking you’ve seen it all before. His career, full of promise after his terrific debut a decade ago in Guy Ritchie’s Brit-indie heist flick Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, has jumped the shark with one too many jumper-cable, ready-for-cable movies.

Aside from the Transporter trilogy, you can find Statham doing his muscleman-of-action shtick in The One (2001), The Italian Job (2003), Chaos (2005), Crank (2006) and its upcoming sequel Crank 2, and Death Race (2008). Want definitive proof? Last Sunday, he appeared in a high-octane Audi ad during America’s NFL Super Bowl, his entire persona boiled down to thirty seconds of whip, kick, drive a stick.

Even if your appetite for Statham hasn’t been sated (and let’s be honest, with abs like his, it hasn’t), the misogyny laced through Transporter 3 is much less palatable. The excuse that the film is intended for guys is no excuse at all; it only entrenches double standards that need no entrenching.

Rudakova spends all her on-screen time in make-up and heels, by turns helpless, high and horny. And she is the only woman in the film, with no balance provided for her cardboard character. Franchise writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen clearly think, or are comfortable creating the illusion, that the world is a brutal but ultimately simple place where men manage, manipulate and mutilate each other, with beautiful women tagging along for the ride.

For Transporter 3, like a sports car, a shopping spree, or any guilty pleasure, one rule endures: after you’ve paid your money and had your fun, call your friend and confess you’ve done a bad thing.

Transporter 3
Directed by Olivier Megaton.
With Jason Statham, Natalya Rudakova.
100 minutes. Action.

Jamaica For Sale is a labour of love from filmmakers Diana McCaulay and Esther Figueroa — love for our beaches, our mangroves, our reefs, our land, our water, but most of all, for our people. Ostensibly a manifesto against the unchecked growth of large-scale tourism on the North Coast, the film is also a portrait of its inhabitants — the small hoteliers, vendors, fishermen, and squatters who comprise its social fabric. It doesn’t quite work; the environmental message is diluted by the extended interviews, and the social tableaux suffer from the environmental moralizing.

But there is much to praise about Jamaica For Sale. It is, first and foremost, an indigenous product — made by Jamaicans, mostly with Jamaicans, for Jamaicans. In a marketplace long since saturated with disposable American media, this alone is worthy of celebration.

Second, as is so often the case with Third World cinema, Jamaica For Sale gives voice to the underrepresented and unseen. We meet Paletta Watt, a Montego Bay vendor selling local craft to foreigners; Hugh Moncrieffe, owner of Time ‘n’ Place in Trelawny, visibly disturbed by the destruction of the seaside ecosystem; Veronica Tracy, resident of Pear Tree Bottom, St Ann, forcibly relocated from her informal settlement, losing her home and her crops. Her face tells its own rich story; pain and struggle wrapped in unyielding resilience.

Third, the film reaches for a historical perspective, all too welcome in a society addled by Internet-ready attention spans and the concept of inevitable progress. Footage of our independence ceremony, the transfer of power from the British, is mesmerizing both for its truth and its lies. The awesome responsibility of governing ourselves, a responsibility Figueroa and McCaulay seem to say we have shirked, is countered by the sad realization that we only transferred our dependence from one major economy (the United Kingdom) to another (the United States).

One of the film’s subtlest (perhaps even unintentional) but most powerful reminders is that a former Minister of Tourism, the Most Honourable P J Patterson, became Prime Minister for a decade and a half.

Bonus points to Figueroa and McCaulay for their choice of Caribbean and female academics as interview subjects, despite an over-reliance on the American academy. In a film about over-reliance on one American export (its wealthy middle-class), the filmmakers’ dependence on another (its university graduates) undercut their message while underscoring our neocolonialist position.

Formal basics were spotty: voices were sometimes disembodied and unidentified; close-ups at times felt invasive; sound and video quality inconsistent. These flaws have more to do with inexperience and inattentiveness than an inadequate budget, and as such, are inexcusable.

In its best moments, however, Jamaica For Sale gains an almost operatic quality; contralto plus construction (or, depending on your perspective, destruction) is powerful. The film’s best sequence may be its first. As the National Anthem begins, performed by the Jamaica Defence Force Military Band, its brass notes are repurposed, not over images of smiling schoolchildren or powerful athletes, but the irreversible alteration of our coastline. Concrete walls, chained gates, limestone dust clouds from tractors, and through the dust, a familiar sight: our flag, still fluttering in the sea breeze.

Jamaica for Sale
Directed by Esther Figueroa.
Written by Esther Figueroa and Diana McCaulay.
92 minutes. Documentary.

Hotel for Dogs is a perfectly functional movie about American orphan siblings Andi and Bruce (Emma Roberts and Jake Austin) who rescue stray dogs from an ignominious end at the pound. Familiar with the wrong side of the law, the pair take refuge in an improbably-abandoned hotel which becomes home to the hounds.

The simple but strong parallels between the children and their canine companions hold the film together. Suitably awful foster parents (Kevin Dillon of Entourage and Lisa Kudrow of Friends) and an awfully besuited social worker/father figure (Don Cheadle) provide the moral poles. When we meet them, Andi and Bruce bounce from one to the other, unable to find their place. Managing the mutts, however, they make their own family, of a kind, and navigate their problems by proxy.

Friendships are formed, lessons are learnt, obstacles are overcome. And there are a lot of adorable dogs. What’s not to like? Our ratings board stamped it with PG, which means it’s appropriate for your kids so long as you provide, in the lingo, some parental guidance. But it seems highly inappropriate and even irresponsible for Jamaican parents to take their young, impressionable children to see a film that glorifies whiteness while marginalizing persons of colour.

We are a post-colonial island packed with shy of three million eating, sleeping, breathing men and women, most of whom, if records existed, could trace their ancestry to ancient, distinguished tribes of West Africa — the Twi, the Mende, the Ashante, and so on.

Every day, our local media, including this newspaper, are filled with images and stories about our black businessmen, our black doctors and diplomats, ministers and magistrates, pastors and pilots. Our cultural footprint is out of all proportion to our geography; travel anywhere, and the names Marley, Manley, and McKinley will resonate.

You might say we are a great nation.

If you are puzzled and worried, therefore, by the sociological epidemic sweeping across our land, where our women burn their hair straight and our men bleach their skin light, look no further than Hotel for Dogs.

Emma Roberts, as heroine Andi, could be on the payroll for Gap, Dove and L’Oréal; her complexion and coiffure are flawless. Inevitably, a preternaturally handsome boy, Dave (Johnny Simmons), shows up to woo her. Conversely, African-American co-star Kyla Pratt is given coveralls, pigtails, and an overweight, overzealous suitor. Never mind she also has the hots for Dave; she’s just there for emotional support. Don Cheadle, who imbues almost any dialogue with dignity (Ocean’s Thirteen notwithstanding), is here relegated to actual child support. In one arbitrary scene, a plus-size black woman waddles onscreen to provide comic relief.

This is not appropriate entertainment — not for adults, and certainly not for our children, who have the persistent habit of growing into the adults of tomorrow. As the credits roll for Hotel for Dogs, the producers are quick to remind us that no animals were harmed. If you want to say the same for your young loved ones, choose another movie. Its bite is a lot worse than its bark.

Hotel for Dogs
Directed by Thor Freudenthal.
With Emma Roberts, Jake Austin, Lisa Kudrow and Don Cheadle.
100 minutes. Comedy.

Soul Men is the story of washed-up, estranged bandmates Floyd Henderson (Bernie Mac) and Louis Hinds (Samuel L Jackson) as they journey across the United States, into the past, and through each other, to play a comeback performance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York.

Directed by Malcolm Lee, cousin to the African American auteur Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, Bamboozled), the film shows us the unforgiving side of fame, when the music, money and media attention have disappeared, leaving Henderson and Hinds aimless and penniless.

Henderson talks Hinds into their first joint appearance in thirty years, setting the stage for one episodic misadventure after another, including one-night stands, confusion over paternity, and a night in the slammer.

Longtime writing partners Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone are adept at the sniping banter that passes for male bonding between the two musicians. But where the script should have moved beyond cheap shots and cheaper motel rooms, the scribes substitute profanity for profundity.

Director Lee’s pedigree stands in contrast to his résumé. Soul Men joins previous work Undercover Brother (2002) and Roll Bounce (2005) in the uncomfortable space between parody and stereotype. Lee is unsure of his audience, and the result panders to black and white alike. His contemporary, Tyler Perry, hews to safer themes of family, community and religious unity.

Jackson is merely adequate as has-been backup singer Hinds; his characterization is a collection of scowls and squints. Sharon Leal is better as the vocal ingénue the duo discover on the road.

Bernie Mac’s bumbling, blustering, bug-eyed buffoon, while mildly entertaining, calls forth the forgotten films of the 1930s and 40s. Mantan Moreland, Willie Best, Clarence Muse and many talented others built careers playing the only roles available to them–bumbling, blustering, bug-eyed buffoons, or as they were known then, coons.

The coon archetype was born even earlier, in 19th-century minstrel shows, where white actors in blackface lampooned African American life for their own amusement. It has endured, kept alive by actors of colour torn between pride and paychecks, between a principle and a principal, a never-ending line of sycophantic, shining, smiling faces from Bill Robinson to Bill Cosby, from Eddie Anderson to Eddie Murphy.

It is unfortunate that Mac should have Soul Men as his coda; his film and television work showed a man rapidly mastering his craft. His social commentary was sharp, but accessible; his humour broad, but biting. His eponymous sitcom, The Bernie Mac Show, skewered African American family life for the generation born during The Cosby Show.

Soul Men reaches for a bit of history itself–Hinds and Henderson’s comeback performance is a tribute to the deceased third member of their fictional group The Real Deal, Marcus Hooks, played by real-life soul superstar John Legend. Soul legend Isaac Hayes also makes an appearance. It seems that Lee and company understand that while fame and fortune fade, true talent stands the test of time.

Soul Men
Directed by Malcolm Lee.
With Samuel L Jackson, Bernie Mac.
103 minutes. Comedy.