“THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT”
by Jesse Stanchak

Time travel movies are sort of cursed. Beginning with the terribly campy 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” and continuing through 2003’s “Timeline,” Hollywood has been pumping out reel after reel of time travel films whose premise always falters in the execution. At best, they were good but not great, and more often than not, they fell into the “it seemed like a good idea at the time” bin. “The Butterfly Effect,” an unquestionably flawed gem, doesn’t break the curse. But as time flicks go, it’s not too bad.

Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) discovers he can revisit his past by rereading the journals he kept as a kid and uncovering memories that he’d previously blocked out. Evan has had one of the most disturbing childhoods imaginable, so he tries to use his new powers to rewrite the events that left him and his childhood friend scarred shells of the people they could have been. But as Evan tries to save friends, along with his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh (Amy Smart), he ends up making things worse. So he tries again and again, leading the viewer though a maze of alternate pasts, searching for a destiny everyone can live with.

If you want to see Kutcher break out of the airhead mold he’s been typecast into, here’s you chance. But don’t expect him to whip out an award-winning performance. The lovable goof he’s played so many times before comes out at the most inappropriate moments, and most of the films emotionally heavy scenes are carried by the child actors who play Evan, Amy and their friends at ages seven and 13. Smart, in comparison, is simply awful. She has no chemistry with Kutcher in the happier scenes and overacts in the darker sequences to the point where you start to feel that she deserves the rotten life her character has been handed.

“The Butterfly Effect” is an engaging and suspenseful tale, well told by screenwriters J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress, the duo that brought you “Final Destination 2.” The pair also directed the film, a strong first effort that is visually interesting and keeps viewers tense and glued to the screen without confusing them with the story’s alternate timelines. Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, the time traveling ends up producing so many paradoxes, what-ifs and plot holes that they almost swallow the film. As a result, “The Butterfly Effect” really only works if you can resist the temptation to think about what’s going on, or if you try and recast the movie in your head a thousand different ways.

“THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE”
by Zoe Madden-Wood

Halfway through the movie an old lady blows up a pond with several sticks of dynamite in her own unique style of frog fishing … that’s when I decided I liked this movie. For the artsy fartsy types, “The Triplets of Belleville” has it all – it’s animated, silent and French! Well, practically silent; there is plenty of music and percussion, but almost no dialogue. Surprisingly comedic nonetheless, the film’s understated visual imagery conveys a sweet sentimentality along with an inventive humor.

The movie starts out with a young orphan taken in by his grandmother. Unsure what to do to make him happy, she finally stumbles upon a picture of a bike under his bed and buys one for him as a present. It becomes the only thing he enjoys, and naturally he ends up competing in the Tour de France (he’s French, what else would you expect?) During the race, the boy is kidnapped by the mob, and the hilarious thing is that he doesn’t seem to mind. His grandmother frantically chases after him, which at one point requires her to steal a paddleboat. She follows him to a city where she encounters the Triplets of Belleville, three sisters who were once a famous singing group but are now washed up has-beens who eat frogs because they can’t afford to buy food. How they can afford to buy the dynamite to catch them escapes me.

The major downfall of “The Triplets of Belleville” is the animation. It’s obvious the filmmakers put a lot of time and thought into their style, but after so many recent beautiful japanim? films, going back to the grotesque Crumb-style animation is like going back to a VCR after having a DVD player. Even the people who are supposed to be attractive are ugly with caricatured features.

The animation wasn’t enough to deter me, though. The trance-like percussion associated with ordinary objects (think Stomp) coupled with original visual humor keeps the film going and makes it unique. Of course, I must mention that I have a soft spot for really weird old ladies who think nothing of dynamite and frog eating and consider paper a proper musical instrument. This movie definitely isn’t for everybody, but it’s a cute flick and worth seeing for its distinctive qualities. There’s just something fundamentally cool about a little old lady outwitting, outmaneuvering and generally outclassing a big bad mob boss.

“THE COMPANY”
by Christopher Correa

As an edifying experimental film about ballet, “The Company” understands the rigors of dance but softens its edges when politics take center stage.

In truth, the real unity within an ensemble happens before an audience; it can be as natural as the movements and as artificial as choreographed steps. Robert Altman’s film would have us believe this is so during and after rehearsals as well. But for the most part, the dancer’s temperament is astutely represented.

Altman films a pas de deux on an outdoor stage – removing the immediacy – and conjures a rainstorm to further distract from the dancing. His cleverness, however, is evident in the unbroken physical and emotional intimacy between the two dancers on stage. It also provides Altman with the challenge of putting multiple natural elements – actors, live music and weather – on celluloid without the aid of special effects or inorganic, split-second editing processes. What remains is the work – a delicate balance, much like ballet itself.

“The Company” is a movie (in the traditional sense) about as much as it is a documentary (for which an argument could be made, as most of the characters are played by their real-life selves in conceivably apposite situations). Rather than “a day in the life of” its principal protagonist, we get “a year in the lifestyle of” her and her peers.

This gives Altman a chance to stick it to Oscar voters. He’s been overlooked so many times – glaringly so with his recent “Gosford Park” – that he seems to be saying to the Academy, “Fine, you don’t like the way I tell stories? I’m just gonna film stuff as I please!” Harking back to the outside dance sequence, maybe that was his point. As the rain begins to pelt the audience, a crowd of bright umbrellas open like a bed of flowers instantly blossoming. Perhaps it was about the umbrellas all along.

“The Company” presents dancers as unrivaled artists, choreographers as impractical autocrats and ballet as a dangerous beauty that has been bestowed upon the art world.