Review: Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

Reviews

O Heroi | The Hero

3.0 stars

By PETER KEOUGH | February 9, 2006

3.0 Stars

HOMERIC Vitório has it more difficult than most.

No veteran demobbed after wartime has it easy, but the case of is downright Homeric. Snatched up at age 15 to fight in the Angolan War of Independence, he serves for 20 years before losing a leg to a land mine. Back home he’s given a medal, a pair of crutches, and a home on the streets. A kindly doctor pulls strings for a prosthesis; a street punk steals it. Director Zézé Gamboa unloads this misery with a matter-of-factness and a lack of sentiment that intensify the authenticity and heartbreak. He interweaves Vitório’s plight with the lives of other Angolans: Manu, a troubled 12-year-old whose soldier father never came home; Joana, Manu’s teacher, an upper-class woman trying to make a difference; and Judite, a prostitute who befriends Vitório. Uniting them is the unlikely fetish of Vitório’s artificial leg, and the ensuing crossed destinies surpass the contrivances of Crash. (O herói is the opening-night film of this year’s African Film Festival.)

Langevin plays to the middle in seeking fourth term
When President George W. Bush last month used his first presidential veto to reject legislation on embryonic stem cell research, US Representative James R. Langevin again found himself in the spotlight.
Portland hopes to bridge cultural divides
This February marked the six-year anniversary of journalist Daniel Pearl’s horrifying death at the hands of Islamist extremists.
Round-trip Cruz
Volver may be a rich and moving film that celebrates the triumph of the feminine spirit, but it’s already best known as the movie in which writer/director Pedro Almodóvar fitted willowy leading lady Penélope Cruz with an ample prosthetic ass. Watch the trailer for Volver (QuickTime)
The call of the future
As technology advances over the next two decades, cell phones will morph into new shapes and assume new features.
Last of the Tuba
In a 2006 performance in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, Italy, MaryPat Warming wore a costume with a third prosthetic breast, stood with the Madonna’s poise at the edge of a wall with the vista of Florence unfolding behind her, and endeavored to consume the contents of several wine bottles full of whole unpasteurized milk.
Company man
In at least one of its toss-away scenes, Joshua Seftel’s War, Inc. rises to the level of brutal bad taste that distinguishes master satirists from Jonathan Swift to Stanley Kubrick.
Inside looking out
Visiting Elizabeth King's "The Sizes of Things In the Mind's Eye" at Brown University's Bell Gallery (64 College Street, Providence, through December 21) is a bit like visiting Dr. Frankenstein's lab — all glass eyes, artificial limbs, and automatons.
Culture war games
Karen Finley sat at the edge of the stage of Emerson College’s Cutler Majestic Theatre last week and spoke about a woman who got off on war.
Firewall
You could trace a history of American anxiety through the bad guys Harrison Ford has had to fight to protect his on-screen family: industrialization in The Mosquito Coast (1987), the IRA in Patriot Games (1992), Russian terrorists in Air Force One (1997), himself in What Lies Beneath (2000).
Who’s the real Dem?
Here in Massachusetts, Congressman Stephen Lynch has a primary challenge from a guy named Phil Dunkelbarger.
What's going on?
Five years into the Iraq War, we can catalogue a person’s every move with Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
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[ 02/19 ] 4-9 pm | Tom Tom Sunday: Celebrating the Big Beat of Tom Ardolino @ The Met

[ 02/19 ] Mary Poppins @ Providence Performing Arts Center

[ 02/19 ] "Nostalgia Machines" @ David Winton Bell Gallery

ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

REVIEW: CORIOLANUS | February 16, 2012
In a line of fascist-style stagings of the Bard from Orson Welles's 1937 black-shirted Julius Caesar to Richard Loncraine's brown-shirted Richard III (1998), Ralph Fiennes sets his lean and hungry take on Shakespeare's tragedy in a mo dern-day war zone, paring the play to a brisk two hours.

REVIEW: SAFE HOUSE | February 15, 2012
Daniel Espinosa's over-edited but engaging spy thriller delves into edgy territory untouched by any of the numerous movies it imitates: it has Brendan Gleeson do an American accent.

REVIEW: THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY | February 15, 2012
The most touching love story and best children's movie in a long time, Hiromasa Yonebayashi's adaptation of Mary Norton's book The Borrowers employs old-fashioned animation techniques to create a world that is familiar, uncanny, and luminous.

REVIEW: RAMPART | February 15, 2012
The rotten cop flick has become a mini-genre of sorts, a subset of noir, going back at least to Orson Welles's Touch of Evil .

REVIEW: THE OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS 2012: DOCUMENTARY | February 10, 2012
The films in this program contain some of the most powerful images to be seen on the screen this year.