Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>Twilight, Were the World Mine</em>
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<p>The vampire romance novel series <em>The Twilight Saga</em> is now a major motion picture that's getting some mixed reviews from critics and <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/11/slideshow_of_twilight.html">preliminary OMG raves</a> from the target demographic. <a href="http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2008/11/turnaround.php">Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere</a> is an unlikely champion, and even <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/11/slideshow_of_twilight.html">the Vulture crowd</a> seems enamored. And <a href="http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1860716,00.html?imw=Y">Richard Corliss at Time</a> writes, "Defiantly old-fashioned, the film wants viewers to believe not so much in vampires as in the existence of an anachronistic movie notion: a love that is convulsive and ennobling...<strong>It revives the precept that there's nothing more cinematic than a close-up of two beautiful people about to kiss."</strong></p>
Stephen Holden at the Times calls Were the World Mine an indie alternative to Disneyâs High School Musical franchise. The musical fantasy centers on a persecuted gay student at a private boysâ school outside Chicago who acquires the magical power of Cupid while rehearsing the role of Puck in A Midsummer Nightâs Dream. He spends the next 24 hours gleefully making unsuspecting homophobes, including the rugby coach, fall madly in love with members of the same sex. Holden calls it "an enchanting, mildly subversive fantasia that reconciles sassy teenage argot with Elizabethan."
Check out the trailer.<p>Documentary <em>Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 </em> concerns a legendary game four decades ago in which the undefeated Harvard football team met undefeated Yale and, despite trailing by 16 points with 42 seconds left in the game, scored twice to end it with a tie. The Village Voice's <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-11-19/film/harvard-beats-yale-29-29-wraps-up-the-boomer-era/">J. Hoberman says</a>, "[Director Kevin] Rafferty's no-frills annotated replay is the best football movie I've ever seen: <strong>A particular day in history becomes a moment out of time."</strong></p>
<p>For over two decades Ellen Kuras (who has shot films for Spike Lee and Michel Gondry), has been working on <em>The Betrayal (Nerakhoon),</em> a documentary that looks at the effects of the illegal U.S. bombing of Laos during the Vietnam war. The film follows along with Thavisouk Phrasavath as he recalls fleeing the country where he was born, after Communist Pathet Lao insurgents came to power in 1975. (His family made it to Brooklyn in the â80s.) Melissa Anderson <a href="http://www.timeout.com/film/newyork/reviews/85948/the-betrayal.html">at Time Out NY</a> writes, "Unlike Carl Deal and Tia Lessinâs Katrina doc <em>Trouble the Water</em>, which includes footage shot by its subjects, <em>The Betrayal </em>avoids the taint of opportunism; Kuras and Phrasavath become collaborators in telling his story. Though Kuras may erase her involvement too much... she remains ever vigilant about the code of the most compassionate documentarians: Never betray your subject."</p>
<p>Disney's <em>Bolt</em> stars the voice of John Travolta as a celebrity dog who plays a genetically altered supercanine in an action television series. Things get complicated when he realizes that he's just an ordinary mutt off the set. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/movies/21bolt.html?ref=movies">A.O. Scott at the Times</a> deems it "a more organic and thought-out piece of work than the usual animated hodgepodge that lures antsy children and their dutiful parents into the multiplexes...<strong>Cat people need not worry â hamster fans will be in heaven, but thatâs another story â since there is enough sly, predatory feline humor to keep the thing from going entirely to the dogs."</strong></p>
<p>For the next 12 days <a href="http://filmforum.org">Film Forum</a> is screening a Carole Lombard retrospective, beginning tonight with a double bill of the 1934 farce <em>Twentieth Century</em> and Gregory La Cavaâs screwball comedy <em>My Man Godfrey</em> (1936). Coinciding with what would have been her 100th birthday (she died in a plane crash in 1942), the series includes many features that are not available on DVD. <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-11-19/film/film-forum-celebrates-carole-lombard/">The Village Voice</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/movies/23raff.html">the Times</a> both have profiles on Lombard, who Howard Hawks once called, <strong>"Marvelous girl â crazy as a bedbug."</strong></p>
<p>This weekend at midnight <a href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Market/NewYork/NewYork_frameset.htm">the Sunshine screens</a> <em><a href="http://www.cockettes.com/">The Cockettes</a></em>, a documentary about a "flamboyant ensemble of hippies (men and women, gay and straight) who decked themselves out in gender-bending drag and tons of glitter for a series of legendary midnight shows. These all-singing, all-dancing extravaganzas featured elaborate costumes, rebellious sexuality and exuberant chaos."</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/event?eventid=999852">IFC Waverly Midnight</a> series continues its program THE SCARIEST DECADE: HORROR FILMS OF THE 80s with <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094862/">Child's Play</a></em>: "Young Andy Barclay gets the doll he wanted. However, he did not know it was alive!"</p>