17 Again Review

If it does nothing else, 17 Again - in which a tired, middle-aged Matthew Perry revisits his robust teenage self (Zac Efron) and finds it's a wonderful life - proves the durability of the body-swap fantasy.

But 17 Again also showcases the previously unseen acting talents of Efron, the Tigerbeat cover boy best known as the shaggy haircut of the High School Musical series and the pompadour of Hairspray. (His latest coif combines comb-over with the bowl cut, which produces the effect of a freaky friar.)

Much to my surprise, in 17 Again I wasn't conscious of watching Efron at all. I was watching a 37-year-old in the body of a 17-year-old, a father of teenagers flabbergasted at how his kids were acting in school and at how much senior high had changed in 20 years.

While the movie - a little Big, a little Back to the Future, a lot 13 Going on 30 - feels shelf-worn, Efron's performance is fresh. (His quizzical face and unfamiliar body remind me of Steve Martin's performance in All of Me, in which crotchety heiress Lily Tomlin inhabits the body of public-interest lawyer Martin.)

The film opens in 1988, when Mike O'Donnell (Efron), a high school hoops star hoping to be scouted at the Big Game, chooses love over basketball.

Fast-forward 20 years and Mike is now paunchy, Grinchy Matthew Perry, whose life did not work out the way he planned. He is on the brink of a divorce from his high school sweetheart, Scarlet (Leslie Mann), when he falls into a wrinkle in time and reverts to his 17-year-old self, but in 2008 and with the consciousness of a 37-year-old.

Unevenly directed by Burr Steers, who made the fascinating teen dramedy Igby Goes Down, this overlit and underwritten film gets many of its laughs from age-inappropriate encounters. As when the teenage Mike acts like a father to his teenage kids (Michelle Trachtenberg and Sterling Knight). As when the strapping, youthful Mike fawns over Scarlet, who can't understand why she is so attracted to a boy her son's age.

This leads to one of the film's squirmworthy moments, when Mike's daughter comes on to the teenage Mike, which in Jason Filardi's rough script is decidedly not handled with the grace of the comparable scene in Back to the Future.

Though the film rests on the enviably sculpted shoulders of the spirited Efron, Thomas Lennon and Melora Hardin provide some comic relief as Mike's nerdy friend and the fetching high school principal on whom he nurses a crush. For me, 17 Again is mildly diverting. For the tweens who are its target audience, Efron's outside shot is a three-pointer.

By Carrie Rickey Inquirer Film Critic

Soloist (2009) Review

"The Soloist" is actually a duet on the theme of redemption. It's scored for two very different though equally remarkable actors, and performed with uncanny bravura. Jamie Foxx is Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenic street musician who was once a distinguished student at Juilliard. Robert Downey Jr. is Steve Lopez, the Los Angeles Times columnist who first befriended Ayers in 2005, then wrote about their friendship in a series of columns and a book that inspired the movie. The fictional version, directed by Joe Wright from a screenplay by Susannah Grant, occasionally suffers from a surfeit of inspirationalism, but its core is marvelously alive and complex. My sense of the experience was summed up by a moment when Nathaniel, sitting in on an L.A. Philharmonic rehearsal at Disney Hall, says with intense pleasure, "It's the way it should be."

Robert Downey Jr. as Steve Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers in 'The Soloist.'Should be, and seldom is. Films have romanticized mental illness, as in "Shine," or surrealized it, as in "A Beautiful Mind," but this one plays essentially fair with it. Music is Nathaniel's only refuge from the terrors and confusions of a merciless brain disease that ravaged his talent, destroyed his shining future as a classical cellist and defies anything resembling a cure. The movie is no less successful in its portrait of a journalist working at his craft. Other films, most recently "State of Play," reach for the fraught drama of contemporary journalism, but this one nails a host of authentic details -- Steve Lopez's paper has already begun the slide that imperils its future -- along with a special spirit. Far from being a bleeding heart, Lopez starts his journey of discovery as a self-ironic reporter on the trail of a good story.

Although movies often borrow the emotional power of great music, "The Soloist" boasts its own rich dynamics and contrasting tonalities. Mr. Foxx's musician provides the passion. Nathaniel cuts a bizarre figure as he plays a two-stringed violin in a downtown park near a statue of his beloved Beethoven. Still, his garish clothes barely hint at the florid disorder of his mind, which makes itself known through enthralling soliloquies that sound like the spiritual equivalent of a racing engine and a slipping clutch. By contrast, Mr. Downey's columnist provides a bracing coolness, at least at first. Equipped with the actor's characteristically clipped vocal rhythms, Steve tries to resist taking on responsibility for his subject's tumultuous life. It's hard to imagine these roles played by anyone else, even though Mr. Foxx played another passionate musician, Ray Charles, not long ago. The co-stars are both virtuosos, and their styles combine to create a harmony of friendship that cannot fix the unfixable, or redeem the irredeemable, but gradually grows into mutual help and a kind of love.

At certain points less might have been more: the overuse of orchestral power; the over-lyrical flight of symbolic birds (and camera cranes); the decision to make Nathaniel a musical genius right up there with Rostropovich rather than a merely notable talent; the false note that ensues when he seems unfamiliar with Bach's peerless cello suites. Instead of the hell on earth that was skid row in downtown L.A. when the story begins, the movie evokes a circle of Dante's Inferno. The religious zealotry of a professional cellist is a clumsily written intrusion. The script, which fictionalizes Steve Lopez into a divorcé, insists overmuch on similarities between his fear of becoming responsible for Nathaniel and his failings in married life (although Catherine Keener, wonderfully appealing as his ex-wife, is especially so in the scene that draws the parallels most closely.)

Yet these are smallish blemishes on a beautiful whole, and a beautifully photographed whole: Seamus McGarvey, who shot Joe Wright's previous film, "Atonement," has done superb work in sequence after sequence, including some downward-looking helicopter shots that juxtapose the eerie sprawl of Los Angeles with the spacious grandeur of a Beethoven symphony. Mr. Wright and his colleagues have made a movie with a spaciousness of its own, a brave willingness to explore such mysteries of the mind and heart as the torture that madness can inflict, and the rapture that music can confer. Bravo to all concerned.