Opening This Week: Bolt, Twilight

There's some great movies opening this weekend

By TRICIA OLSZEWSKI

Updated 9:45 AM EST, Tue, Nov 25, 2008

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From the Washington City Paper blog City Desk

Your local multiplex will be a dangerous, dangerous place to be this weekend. Unless you like to hang with the tiny barbarians known as toddlers, who will be herded en masse to Walt Disney’s Bolt, the John Travolta- and Miley Cyrus-voiced story about a cute little dog who thinks he’s a superhero and not just a television star.

Slightly larger barbarians of the teen and tween variety, meanwhile, will be descending on a little movie called Twilight, a girl-meets-vampire story that would be so Blacula if not for its apparent status as OMG, the biggest thing since Harry Potter!. I’ll be braving an afterschool showing today and posting my review here if I make it out alive.

And anyone who’s looking for cinema instead of Hollywood has the following choice choices:

I’ve Loved You So Long, a respectable weepie (not always an oxymoron) that stars Kristin Scott Thomas as an ex-con trying to rebuild her life after 15 years in the pen;

JVCD, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s more serious version of My Name Is Bruce in which he plays himself, i.e. a somewhat beloved but more often mocked action star who can’t roundhouse-kick his personal demons;

A Christmas Tale, a 2 1/2 hour French take on dysfunctional holiday reunions; and

Lola Montes, a restored version of Max Ophuls‘ 1955 drama — and his final film — whose plot summary I leave to one Volker Boehm, helping out on IMDb:

“The film tells the tragical story of the life of Lola Montes who was a great adventurer and stopped being the attraction of her circus after having been the lover of various important men.”

Though it’s tragical, loving various important men can still keep a woman from being a circus attraction. Let’s let Lola Montes remind us of how far we’ve come.