Film Bytes: 'Defiance', 'Last Chance Harvey', 'Hotel for Dogs'

Photo by Karen Ballard/Paramount Pictures, Karen Ballard/Paramount Pictures

Jamie Bell and Liev Schreiber are brothers in arms in the World War II Jewish resistance film "Defiance."

'Defiance'

Rated R for profanity and violence.

"Every movie with Jews, we're the ones getting killed," says the Seth Rogen character, sitting in a bar with his friends, in "Knocked Up." " 'Munich' flips it on its ears. ... If any of us (picks up a girl) tonight, it's because of Eric Bana and 'Munich.' "

If that's true, Rogen and his pals should be eligible for the stud hall of fame after "Defiance," a fact-based film in which the new James Bond, Daniel Craig, plays Tuvia Bielski, a sort of Moses with a machine gun who leads hundreds of Jewish refugees to hard-fought freedom in the forests of Nazi-occupied Poland.

Photo by Karen Ballard/Paramount Pictures

Jamie Bell and Liev Schreiber are brothers in arms in the World War II Jewish resistance film "Defiance."

Photo by Laurie Sparham/Overture Films

Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson star in the romantic encounter film "Last Chance Harvey."

Directed with characteristic earnestness by Edward Zwick ("Glory"), "Defiance" does, in fact, flip the typical Jews-as-victims Holocaust movie on its ears by depicting the more-or-less true story of the Bielski brothers, resistance fighters (in the tradition of the ancient Maccabees) who escaped into the woods to avoid Nazi massacre, eventually assembling and protecting a group of close to 1,000 men, women and children.

In the film, second brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) is the violent hothead who chooses to join the Russian partisans so he can actively kill Nazis. Tuvia warns him not to embrace death. "Our revenge is to live," he says. "Every day of freedom is like an act of faith," says another refugee.

Beautifully photographed (the shots of the peaceful, snowy woods offer a contrast to the suffering of the characters), "Defiance" devotes much of its time to the refugees' effort to create and sustain a viable "forest culture" and Jewish community in exile, despite the threats of starvation, disease and extermination. Stock characters include the Rabbi and the Intellectual ("If my friends at the New Socialist Club could see me now!" the latter marvels, while hammering a log). The material is engrossing, but the execution is somewhat ponderous; when Zwick intercuts an idyllic forest wedding ceremony with the violent ambush of a Nazi caravan, the irony becomes as thick as a snow bank.

'Last Chance Harvey'

Rated PG-13 for profanity.

Young people who think old people are boring will have their prejudices reinforced if they stumble into a screening of writer-director Joel Hopkins' "Last Chance Harvey," a determinedly sweet but draggy work about a pair of lonely sad sacks who find unexpected romance after a chance encounter at Heathrow in London. (Before seeing this film, I never would have thought of Emma Thompson as an easy airport pickup.)

Hoffman is a divorced and rumpled writer of commercial jingles, in London for the wedding of the daughter he rarely sees; Thompson is some sort of airport employee. I might have sympathized with Hoffman's character more if he wasn't exactly the type of person I dread encountering: In a scene aboard an airplane, he begins talking to his seat mate, who clearly isn't interested; later, he repeatedly interrupts Thompson when she's engrossed in a novel.

Actually, Hoffman is 22 years senior to the 49-year-old Thompson -- an age gap that is pretty much ignored in the film (even though it's almost four times the difference between Hoffman and Anne Bancroft when they shot "The Graduate"). Honestly, the intentionally comic contrast in heights is more noticeable than the duo's age inequality; even so, the film offers pundits another opportunity to point out that a movie that romantically paired a septuagenarian woman with a 49-year-old man would never get the green light unless it was intended to be as spooky or weird as "Sunset Boulevard" or "Harold and Maude."

'Hotel for Dogs'

Rated PG for some crude humor.

This Nickelodeon adaptation of a 1971 novel by Lois Duncan offers an appealing wish-fulfillment fantasy for kids, with Nick and Disney cable alumni Emma Roberts and Jake T. Austin as resourceful, dog-loving foster siblings who secretly transform an abandoned inner-city hotel into a luxury home for strays, complete with such makeshift Rube Goldberg contraptions as a "fetching machine," automatic poop-disposal toilets and a vending machine that dispenses shoes for chewing.

Although these gizmos suggest the old Three Stooges short "Calling All Curs," and the presence of mean animal control officers may remind parents of a "Little Rascals" episode (in which the bad guys simply would have been called "dog catchers"), the movie isn't all fun: The script connects the (presumably) orphaned 16-year-old girl and her 11-year-old brother with the plight of the stray dogs, unwanted because "they're not puppies any more."

Don Cheadle brings his usual quiet authority to the role of a sympathetic social worker; Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon strain for laughs as the kids' latest foster parents, an awful pair of would-be rock and rollers.

The script could have used another rewrite and the film could have benefited from a tighter edit -- it takes the kids 20 minutes to stumble onto the old hotel. Still, the dogs (including a rough-coat Jack Russell, a Boston terrier and a gruesome-looking Chinese Crested named "Romeo") are charmers, and the movie's kindness- promoting message (think of the "Shelter Stories" interludes in the newspaper comic strip "Mutts") is welcome.

-- John Beifuss: 529-2394

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