High School Musical 3: Senior Year
Screenings
Jumping in with the third film in the series presents no continuity problems: The teens from the previous two films are getting the inevitable heave-ho from high school, and they weigh their futures while younger classmates are introduced into the mix (HSM4 is already in the works). And all the while, they burst into song and dance with a frenzy that's almost beyond human. The music (by David Lawrence) is heavy on the power ballads and fairly undistinguished, but the dancing oh my goodness. Director/choreographer Ortega is the best thing to happen to movie musicals in decades. Ortega, who also directed the first two films in the series, seizes the possibilities afforded by the big screen and pushes the frame to its outer limits. Full of color, energy, precision, and creativity, Ortega's choreography unleashes the true spirit of movie musicals, which exist to remind us that if the beat is right, it can't be wrong.


Soul Men
Screenings
Thirty years ago, Louis Hinds (Jackson) and Floyd Henderson (Mac) were back-up singers in a top-selling soul trio whose lead singer (played by John Legend) left to start a solo career. His two former partners slipped into obscurity and depression and, in Hinds case, a life of crime and poverty. Flash forward to the present day: Hooks has died, a star-studded tribute concert is being arranged in his honor, and Hinds and Hooks, who haven t spoken in years and whose dancing and singing abilities have been diminished by the forces of time and disuse, are on their way to New York to grab a little bit of the celebrity life back for themselves before their time is up. Along the way, they engage in all manner of cheap Hollywood preposterousness, straining the boundaries of narrative plausibility as they go and becoming less and less funny as their bitterness gets the better of them. Soul Men, in other words, is pure mediocrity.


Bombón: El Perro
Alamo Drafthouse South
1120 S. Lamar
707-8262
Tue, Nov 25, 7:00 PM
When an auto mechanic in Patagonia is given a pedigreed dog in exchange for a job, the animal changes his life. They become a prize-winning pair at dog shows. Se p. xx of this week's Screens section for more on the series.


Saw V
Screenings
It's now been two sequels back since Jigsaw, the unlikely star of this the original torture-porn series expired on an operating table while his protégé(s) continued dicing and slicing. Keeping Rube Goldberg's evil twin Jigsaw (Bell) in the game and the Saw series has become nothing if not a game has become a matter of which flashback to insert where and when. To their credit, writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan (Saw IV, Feast) find plenty of screen time for their cadaverous dispenser of poetic justice. Unfortunately, only the most forgiving of fans will find this particularly convoluted outing interesting. As series' tradition dictates, Saw V opens with a cunningly devised bloodbath, but from there, the film becomes a sluggish police procedural. The Saw series is officially self-cannibalizing now, rehashing plot contrivances that felt oddly familiar the third time around. Truly, the greatest torture of all is boredom.