“Confessions of a Shopaholic”
Is Rebecca Bloomwood the embodiment of irresponsible consumership? Absolutely, which makes the timing of the film either genius or fatal, but two things weigh in its favor: One is Isla Fisher. The other is that the film is oblivious to its own gravitas.
Rebecca is the Lucy Ricardo of profligate spending. She desperately wants to work for the fashion rag, Alette magazine, run by semi-satanic Alette Naylor (Kristin Scott Thomas).
An opening has arisen at a sister mag, a personal-finance journal edited by the dashing and secretly wealthy Luke Brandon (Hugh Dancy), and Rebecca lands the job.
There’s lots of comedy filler, including the digressions involving Rebecca’s parents (Joan Cusack and John Goodman). And 12-step shopaholic meetings.
Rated: PG for vulgarity and adult themes
“The Pink Panther 2”
Maybe one could expect more from a film that co-stars Jeremy Irons, Emily Mortimer, Andy Garcia, Alfred Molina and Lily Tomlin.
Each of those blue-chip performers is criminally wasted in this sequel to the 2006 update of the old Peter Sellers comedies, which plays like a series of disconnected skits in a cut-rate “Saturday Night Live.”
Clouseau calls one of his fellow detectives, a Japanese computer whiz played by Yuki Matsuzaki, “my little yellow friend.” I know, we’re not meant to laugh at the victim, but at Clouseau’s bigotry, which is supposed to be just another example of his comic ineptitude.
In the context of these by-the-book pratfalls, is it funny enough?
Rated: PG for slapstick violence and brief suggestive humor
“Waltz With Bashir”
Directed by Ari Folman, the film tells the story of the September 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila, Iraq. Twenty years after the massacres, Folman has blocked the war from his memory.
Only when his friend Boaz tells him about a recurring dream does Folman start to question himself. Was he at Sabra and Shatila? Why can’t he remember? What is meant by the memories he does have? And are they his?
Craftily, the details of Sabra and Shatila unfold, via interviews Folman does with his old army buddies, who are rendered, like Folman, animated, via the process known as rotoscoping, which transforms photographic footage into cartoon and reduces us to something basic and primal.
Rated: R for disturbing images of atrocities, strong violence, brief nudity and a scene of graphic sexual content
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