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MR. MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM If the Hasbro toy company elects to issue an updated version of its popular board game Clue, it can dispense with Colonel Mustard in the billiard room with the lead pipe as one of the murder scenarios. Readily available to replace it is Mr. Magorium in the wonder emporium with the gag reflex. Suffering from a fatal attack of the "cutes," this family-aimed fizzle marks the directorial debut of Zach Helm, who caught everyone's attention last year with his innovative script for Stranger Than Fiction. Helm's screenplay here, though, is as lackadaisical as his previous one was inspired, with Dustin Hoffman cast as a kindly 243-year-old man who decides it's time for him to graciously depart from this earth (his reason being that he's down to his last pair of comfortable shoes). He hopes to leave his magical toy store in the care of his assistant Mahoney (Natalie Portman), but she doesn't think she can handle the responsibility, even with the shop's workaholic accountant (Jason Bateman) and a lonely little boy (Zach Mills) around to assist her. The G-rated film combines Peter Pan's message – the "Clap your hands if you believe in magic" spiel – with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory's stuffed-to-the-gills set design, but with no dramatic tension (where's Kevin Spacey as an obvious villain when you really need him?) and a visually drab shop that remains cluttered rather than captivating, the end result is a bland confection that features an atypically bad Portman performance. And, perhaps most critically, with no playthings on the order of Buzz or Woody to enliven events, this proves to be one toy story that's easy to skip. *1/2
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN The Coen Brothers have always been known for genre-hopping, and their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel smacks of both a contemporary Western and a crime thriller. But may I add the classification of monster movie to the mix? As I watched Javier Bardem's seemingly unstoppable Anton Chigurh shuffle his way through the picture, killing left and right without remorse, I realized that it's been a long time since I've seen such an unsettling creature on the screen. No Country for Old Men is a delirious drama that often echoes such classics as Psycho, Touch of Evil and Chinatown, not only in its intricate and unpredictable plot structure but also in its look at an immoral world in which chance and fate battle for the upper hand and in which evil is as tangible a presence as sticks and stones. Chigurh spends the film, set in 1980 Texas, on the trail of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a cowboy who stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong and walks away with $2 million in cash. The cat-and-mouse chase between Chigurh and Moss is enough to propel any standard narrative, yet tossed into the mix is Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a weary sheriff who, baffled and deflated by the wickedness that has come to define his country, nevertheless trudges from crime scene to crime scene, hoping to save Moss and stop Chigurh. This isn't the first great movie certain to have its ending criticized even by many who enjoyed the rest of the picture (Apocalypse Now also springs to mind), yet love it or hate it, accept it or debate it, it's perhaps the only proper conclusion for a movie as uncompromising as this one. ****
