TWO JENNIFERS, TWO CLAIRES

Opening this week:

Cake—Jennifer Aniston plays Claire, who lives in both L.A. and hell. She’s scarred from the accident that took her little son’s life and left her horrifically injured. She lives alone, apparently in financial comfort, separated from her husband (Chris Messina) but served by her tirelessly loyal housekeeper Silvana (Adriana Barraza, wonderful in a potentially clichéd, Sancho Panza role).

Claire’s near-constant chronic pain is nothing, of course, compared to her bereavement. She’s retained a sardonic wit, which only serves to keep her distant from her own healing and from those who want to help her. The only help she wants is in securing refills for the bottles of Percocet she has stashed around the house.

The movie, directed by Daniel Barnz from a script by Patrick Tobin, detail’s Claire’s very gradual, very tentative steps toward reconnecting with life. In off-kilter dialogue and quietly abrupt transitions, we’re shown how small encounters—with a teenage runaway, with a possum—prod her back toward reengaging with the world. Eventually she forms a bond with the widower (Sam Worthington) of a young woman who committed suicide, and whose smirky ghost (Anna Kendrick) drops in now and then to taunt her. It’s from this strand that the movie draws its enigmatic title.

Cake has been much discussed lately for the snub its leading lady, who was also its Executive Producer, seems to have received from the Academy. A cynic might point out that it hits many of the points of shameless Oscar-bait for actresses: No glamour makeup, physical disability and disfigurement, booze, pills, numb sex with the pool guy. Aniston doesn’t do full frontal or an accent, but that’s about all that’s left out.

And maybe lust for gold statuary really was the motivation behind Cake. But it’s ridiculous if that perception is really why Aniston was shut out. I’ve always thought she was a very good actress within her range, and this role fits her casual, sensible, unhistrionic style perfectly. A more demonstrative actress could easily have ruined it, but Aniston is touching, entirely convincing, admirable. I don’t know that it’s the best performance of last year by an actress, but I would have put it in the top five that I saw.

The Boy Next Door—Spectacular in—and sometimes out of—a variety of maxi tube dresses, pencil skirts, lingerie and music-video-librarian specs, Jennifer Lopez looks like a million freakin’ bucks in this quickie. I hope she got paid at least that much, because her appearance is the only remotely worthwhile time-killer in the length of this preposterous melodrama directed by Rob Cohen, who has made far more entertaining work.

J-Lo is another Claire, a high school teacher separated from her cheating putz of a husband (John Corbett). Her teenage son is befriended by Noah (Ryan Guzman), the obsequious, six-packed hunk next door, and one weekend when the son’s on a fishing trip with dad she impulsively sleeps with him. She apparently hasn’t committed a felony by doing this—he says he’s nearly twenty, anyway—but even so she almost immediately realizes what a mistake it was. Noah is a twisted stalker, dangerous to her and her loved ones.

For a while The Boy Next Door feels like a Lifetime movie with a bigger star and slightly more graphic sex. But after a while I decided that this was unjust to Lifetime movies. I hadn’t gone in expecting a lost work by Bergman, but I thought it might be hot, kitschy laughs. Alas, once it gets past a few weary double-entendres about Claire’s home-made “cookies” and that sort of thing, the movie is too banal, slow and unpleasant to be much fun even as camp.

Well, OK, I admit that the final life-and-death grapple made me cackle out loud. But that shouldn’t be taken as any kind of recommendation. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a big-studio offering that was quite this embarrassingly inept and lifeless. Lopez is game and committed, in addition to looking sensational, and Ian Nelson has a certain callow charm as her son, but everybody is defeated by the flat direction and Barbara Curry’s implausible, disjointed script.

With dialogue this inane it probably isn’t fair to judge him on the basis of this performance, but Guzman comes across so fawningly that it reflects poorly on our heroine. Cut though this dude is, Claire seems dopey for falling for his sugary come-ons. It’s as if Mrs. Cleaver had slept with Eddie Haskell.

MARRIED TO THE FLASH MOB

There is, presumably, a socioeconomic as well as a choreographic connotation to the title Step Up. The series of dance movies, which began in 2006, is about struggling urban youths using hip-hop and break-dancing to escape “The Street.”

Opening today is the fourth film, Step Up: Revolution. It’s set in Miami, and focuses on “flash mobs,” the vogue for attempting to turn real life into a movie musical. Our hero Sean (Ryan Guzman) and his buddy Eddy (Misha Gabriel), waiters at an upscale beach hotel, lead a large, semi-surreptitious, racially-mixed dance crew called “The Mob” in elaborate public performances—on the street, at an art gallery opening, in an office building’s lobby. The Mob is trying to win an online contest, though it looks like the production materials, costuming and work hours that would go into each number would pretty much negate the cash prize.

Trouble rears its head before anyone figures this out anyway, in the form of rich girl Emily (Kathryn McCormick) an aspiring classical dancer with whom Sean falls in love. Emily joins The Mob, and encourages them to turn their performances into protest art against the plans of a skunky developer (Peter Gallagher) to raze their neighborhood. But Sean neglects to tell Eddy or any of his pals that Emily is the developer’s daughter.

In short, the plot of Step Up: Revolution is as insipid as that of any Beach Party movie. Unlike a Beach Party movie, however, the tone is very sober and lacking in (intentional) comedy.

But so what? It’s a dance movie; all that finally matters is if the dance numbers are any good. And they are, in a slick, Super-Bowl-commercial sort of way. They would be better if the music was better, but most of it is just techno-crap in support of the leaping around.

Said leaping around is pretty mesmerizing at times, though. The synchronized acrobatic athleticism on display is remarkable, so much so, indeed, that I found myself wondering if it might have been digitally enhanced. I would be disappointed to learn that it was, but in any case it’s fun to watch. For a while.

One number is singularly unfortunate in its timing, however: The Mob crashes the developer’s fancy party, and the performance opens with gas canisters tossed into crowd, after which the dancers enter dressed in black, wearing gas masks. After Aurora, this may not go over big with moviegoers.