Oscar vaguely looks like a noseless, unsexed, de-coolified Smith. Angie, Oscar's angelic angelfish Whale Wash co-worker with a secret crush on him, doesn't resemble Renée Zellweger a bit, and you can barely hear her distinctive vocal stylings. Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres came across loud and clear in Nemo, but Smith and Zellweger are snuffed out in DreamWorks' turbid waters. As aggressively unangelic dragon fish Lola, the gold digger who steals Oscar from Angie, Angelina Jolie is still more remote from the quality that makes her worth millions.
Lola wants Oscar because he wins overnight fame as the Sharkslayer, but he's not really a slayer; he just happened to be there when an anchor crushed the skull of Frankie (an unrecognizable Michael Imperioli from The Sopranos), the son of the shark Godfather Lino (an all-too- recognizable Robert De Niro, again parodying himself like some fat loser has-been doing dinner theater in Dubuque). So now all the fish revere and sharks fear Oscar, except Frankie's brother, Lenny (Jack Black, suppressing his entire persona), a vegetarian shark hiding out with Oscar in the fish community to avoid his dad's wrath. (Also in the random aquarium are Martin Scorsese, Peter Falk, and Ziggy Marley.)
Pierre Dury
Charlize Theron commits career suicide in Head in the Clouds.
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While Nemo brilliantly depicted sharks as addicts battling their urge to view fish as food, not friends, Shark Tale bungles the whole shark-fish relationship, and muddies it by superimposing worn-out Mafia clichés on top. Nemo taught an honest lesson about finding yourself. Shark Tale is a clichéd and sleazy showbiz fable about defying sleazy showbiz values.
Shark Tale also breaks little ground in animation art. Its Times Square–like seafloor milieu looks fakey, like its characters' motives and actions. Nemo looked like a real place where we saw real (if finny) people tackle real problems. Shark Tale is more like bait and switch. (PG) TIM APPELO
The Yes Men
Opens Fri., Oct. 1, at Harvard Exit
We dutifully chuckled (and cringed) through Fahrenheit 9/11. We snoozed through sections of The Corporation, Bush's Brain, Outfoxed, and Uncovered. And the question remained: In this Year of the Political Documentary, why couldn't a nonfiction film be both pointed and hilarious without the Moore imprimatur? The Yes Men manages this rarely attempted feat.
Its premise is simple: Two activist performance artists, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano, mastermind increasingly outrageous pranks as members of the Yes Men, a collective of malcontents who believe that the emperors of our age—Dubya and the World Trade Organization (WTO), for instance—should be denuded by pretty much any means necessary.
Their preferred method: impersonation—or, as they put it, "identity correction." After snapping up the Internet domain name www.gatt.org —justa suffix away from the then-official WTO site—Bichlbaum and Bonnano begin accepting invitations to speak at trade meetings on behalf of the WTO. With his loyal assistant at his side, Bichlbaum—a handsome, smart-looking fellow who shape-shifts brilliantly— gives talks at conventions in Finland and Australia; he also appears solo on a major British news program. Using a colorful array of pseudonyms, Bichlbaum makes the WTO look buffoonish and callous at every turn. (The Yes Men started their ongoing WTO satire just before our own 1999 protest/meltdown.)
The Yes Men reaches its climax at a 2002 accounting conference in Sydney, where the duo announces that the WTO is shutting down in order to construct a much less exploitative business model; afterward, several conventioneers say the move is long overdue. It's a poignant scene, suggesting that almost everyone wants, deep down, to value people over profits. It's also moving because Bichlbaum delivers his speech so sincerely that part of you wishes his wonderful lies were true. (R) NEAL SCHINDLER
