Duplicity

Plus: Baseball Boys, Garrison Keillor and more

By Volcano Staff on March 19, 2009

BASEBALL BOYS: This week’s selection of the Blue Mouse Theatre’s Food & Film Festival, from China. (NR) – Bill White


DUPLICITY: Julie Roberts and Clive Owen star as CIA and MI6 spies who go private, working for enemy soap companies.  Their secret is, they’re in love.  Or do they each only think they’re in love?  Or that the other is?  Romance and intrigue in a plot so complex they could end up double-crossing themselves.  Written and directed by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton). (PG-13) Three stars – Roger Ebert


GARRISON KEILLOR: THE MAN ON THE RADIO IN THE RED SHOES: A look at humorists, radio show personality and “everyman philosopher” Garrison Keillor who has been compared to Mark Twain, Robert Frost and Will Rogers.  This untraditional biography attempts to show why. (NR) – BW


I LOVE YOU, MAN: I Love You, Man is above all just plain funny. It’s funny with some dumb physical humor, yes, and some gross-out jokes apparently necessary to all buddy movies, but also funny in observations, dialogue, physical behavior and Sydney Fife’s observations as a people-watcher. I heard a lot of REAL laughter from a preview audience, not the perfunctory laughter at manufactured payoffs. You feel good watching the movie. That’s what comedies are for, right? Right? (R) Three and a half stars — RE


KNOWING: Knowing is among the best science fiction films I’ve seen — frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome. In its very different way, it is comparable to the great Dark City, by the same director, Alex Proyas. That film was about the hidden nature of the world men think they inhabit, and so is this one. The plot involves the most fundamental of all philosophical debates: Is the universe deterministic or random? Is everything in some way preordained, or does it happen by chance? If that question sounds too abstract, wait until you see this picture, which poses it in stark terms: What if we could know in advance when the Earth will end? (PG-13) Four Stars — RE