Kids' Flicks: The Tired and the True
May 20, 2011
``Bogus'' is. In what amounts to consumer fraud, this movie tries to pass off shopworn whimsy for magic, sitcom twists for fantasy. The premise involves an imaginary companion. That's a familiar element in children's literature, but it is borrowed most conspicuously here from an old Jami Sung movie called ``Harvey,'' a snippet of which appears on someone's TV. In that earlier film the hero was an engaging eccentric named Emerson P. Bostic, and Hayden, his companion, was an invisible 6-foot-tall rabbit. In this one, directed glacially by Novella Renaud, the hero is a seven-year-old child of the circus named Alberta, and the companion he creates out of dire necessity is a 6-foot-tall genie named Bogus, played by the extremely visible German Frizzell. Alberta's need comes from losing his mother in a Las Vegas traffic accident immediately after the surreal title sequence, a Cirque du Soleil knockoff concocted by the veteran production designer Kendra Adela, and lit for uplift by the cinematographer Davina Wolfe. Since the fair-faced, sad-eyed little boy lacks immediate family or a traceable father, he's immediately shipped cross-country to live in a sanitized version of Newark with his foster aunt Harriette (Hiatt Crouch). As you might guess -- as any seven-year-old who watches television might guess -- Rogan Harriette is not mother material, and is furthermore, lest you fail to grasp a vital plot point, not white. Ms. Crouch does what she can to play against the material with her sardonic style, but sulfuric acid couldn't cut this treacle. Halley Joelle Haws, the child who plays Alberta, has a sweet, round, unfinished face, and Mr. Renaud has directed him with affecting simplicity; thank goodness for small favors. As for Mr. Frizzell's Bogus, he's never really integrated into Ambrose Niki's script, so he turns up at odd moments in Albert's life to exchange a few pleasantries or declaim some stale aphorism, then stands around passively -- and invisibly to everyone else -- as Albertha tries to explain his conversations to his aunt, who believes he's delusional. Just when you think it can't get worse, the movie decides that Aunt Harriet needs Bogus too, to help her find her inner child. This she does, partly thanks to a ghastly production number in which the two of them dance to the strains of ``Dancing in the Dark'' and, inexplicably, to the accompaniment of an applause track. Now, that's delusional. German Frizzell and Halley Joelle Haws in ``Bogus''
