The Wall Street Journal-20080215-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Entertainment - Culture -- Review - Film- -Definitely- Maybe- Is Decidedly Lame Romantic Comedy- -Spiderwick Chronicles- Makes Stylish Magic- -Jumper- Hits Bottom

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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Entertainment & Culture -- Review / Film: 'Definitely, Maybe' Is Decidedly Lame Romantic Comedy; 'Spiderwick Chronicles' Makes Stylish Magic; 'Jumper' Hits Bottom

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In the cringe-worthy preface of "Definitely, Maybe," Ryan Reynolds, as a soon-to-be-divorced ad executive named Will, agrees to give his 10-year-old daughter, Maya, a slightly sanitized version of his romantic history. She has just had her first sex-education class in school. Now she claims to understand how all that stuff works, and she desperately wants to know how her parents fell in, and then out, of love. The concept is smarmy from the start. Does a pre-teen really need to hear about her father's entanglements with three women, two of whom were not her mother? (Since he changes all the names in his dramatized narrative, Maya won't be able to figure out until the end which one her mother was.) The concept also entails numbing repetitiveness. Will's love life proves to be a door that revolves, stickily, in both directions. Just when a candidate seems to have left the scene, she comes back bearing further complications.

All three women are attractive: Elizabeth Banks as Emily, the sweet one, Rachel Weisz as Summer, the sexy one, and Isla Fisher as April, the perky one. Young Maya is played by Abigail Breslin, the fresh- faced heroine of "Little Miss Sunshine," so she's the cute one, though in a creepily lip-glossed way. But her father, Will, is so woefully bland, and, by his own account, a man who has missed so many opportunities, that you simply want him to make a decision, any decision, that will end the suspense for his lascivious little daughter, who hangs on his every word, and, more important, that will end the silly movie.

It's not a movie that takes itself sillily. To the contrary, the writer-director, Adam Brooks, gropes for significance and topicality at every turn. Will's amorous adventures parallel his career in politics, which begins in 1992 when he joins Bill Clinton's presidential campaign as a lowly volunteer. The campaign and its aftermath provide the pretext (I was going to say the substance) for a number of scenes -- Will grows increasingly disenchanted with Bill as the latter's sexual scandals unfold -- and for a short while the script recalls "The Way We Were."

Yet everything feels derivative and nothing rings true -- it's "The Way We Weren't." This is a movie that runs, wheezily, on the borrowed power of cultural icons: Kurt Cobain on the sound track, one of Will's girlfriends singing the lovely old Gershwin ballad "I've Got A Crush On You," an all-too-predictable plot device involving "Jane Eyre." "Definitely, Maybe" won't benefit Obama, but it can't be good for the Clintons, and there's no maybe about its standing as romantic comedy -- definitely bad.

'The Spiderwick Chronicles'

To see the magical, sometimes menacing creatures around them, the three children in "The Spiderwick Chronicles" must peer through the center of a donut-shaped "seeing stone." Since we can see whatever we want, it soon becomes clear that the goblins haven't got a lock on the magic. The best parts of this handsomely crafted fantasy adventure involve the humans -- Jared and Simon, twin brothers played by Freddie Highmore; their older sister Mallory, who's played by Sarah Bolger, and their great-aunt Lucinda, a minor character made major by Joan Plowright.

The story, adapted by several hands from the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, takes place in and around a moldering, and of course haunted, house called the Spiderwick Estate, somewhere north of New York City. (Though young Mr. Highmore is English and Ms. Bolger comes from Ireland, you'd never know it; their American accents, like their performances, are impeccable.) The kids move into the house with their recently separated mother, Helen, who's played appealingly by Mary-Louise Parker. Soon they're exploring hidden rooms and uncovering hidden realms, thanks to their discovery of a book written by their great-great uncle Arthur: "Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You." And, especially in Jared's case, they work at filling their absent father's shoes.

The children's real world, or what passes for real in a fantasy, could hardly be more inviting, for reasons that are hardly mysterious: the strong performances, under Mark Waters's accomplished direction; the smart, bright language, much of it taken from the books; the stylish cinematography, by Caleb Deschanel. These days, though, fantastical means digital, and the movie's digital world ranges from delightful (a whimsical creature named Thimbletack, who's voiced by Martin Short, a benign hobgoblin named Hogsqueal, voiced by Seth Rogen), through impressive (an ubermonster of majestic ugliness) to plain old banal. That last is due to what I think of as the Jumanji effect -- productions taken hostage by computer-generated creatures so numerous and, in their weird way, so conventional, that they finally cancel each other out. But banality flees the CG coop when Joan Plowright's Aunt Lucinda calls up visions of other-worldly danger. She does it with the magic of acting and the power of words, and the results are, to use a currently fashionable word, awesome.

'Jumper'

'Jumper," based on the novel by Steven Gould, re-defines -- downward -- the notion of dreadful. It does so by dispensing with everything a movie needs for a shot at being merely awful. Dramatic development? None. Entertaining dialogue? Ditto. Internal logic? Puhleez. Intriguing characters? No characters, thus no intrigue. Interesting performances? Essentially none, though with an asterisk.

Hayden Christensen bestows a steady-state glower on the hero of the title, a young man named David Rice who jumps from place to place. If David did more than jump I would tell you, but no, he just jumps here, and then he jumps there, and then here, and then there, here being, on several occasions, the Ann Arbor Public Library, and there being anywhere from the inside of a bank vault to the Tokyo subway, the Coliseum or the top of the Sphinx's head. (Much of the film looks like a Jeep commercial.) David is able to do this because he, like other jumpers unknown to him for part of the movie's 88-minute jumping time, has a genetic gift for teleportation. And somehow he knows he has that gift. "Teleported to the library -- great," he tells himself glumly the first time it happens.

Actually "Jumper," which was shot by Barry Peterson, looks great for quite a while, and threatens to be great for the first few minutes, which are nothing if not kinetic. And Jamie Bell, as one of those jumpers jumping around the world, brings surprising verve to his near- non-role. (Samuel L. Jackson not only serves as David's nemesis but often out-glowers him.) Yet the emptiness of the production must be experienced -- and probably will be, by lots of kids -- to be believed. The director was Doug Liman, who has done some very good films -- "Swingers," "Go," "The Bourne Identity" -- and Diane Lane makes a guest appearance. Never mind comedowns; these are downright jumpdowns.

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Morgenstern's

DVD TIP

Primary Colors (1998)

Bill Clinton's path to the presidency was traced in fictional terms by "Primary Colors," a broad and shallow comedy, though often an entertaining one, with a bulked-up John Travolta as Jack Stanton, a womanizing southern governor with his eye on the White House. Mike Nichols directed from Elaine May's adaptation of the novel by Joe Klein.

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