The Bit Maelstrom

A Separation

2012-01-29T22:59:00.000-08:00

Iran sucks. Just thought I'd get that out of the way before looking at this (legitimately) acclaimed tale of a woman who separates from her husband because he won't leave the country with her. I thought at first this was going to be the woman's tale, following in the footsteps of other "Iranian women take it in the burka during the Islamic Revolution" genre, but it turns out that the 1979 look of thing hearkens back to Iran sucking.

Which is a shame. Iranians seem like good people. We should have helped them more.

In A Separation, Simin leaves her husband Nader to live with her parents for a while because he won't leave the country, but is also not forbidding her to leave—with their daughter Termeh opting to stay with her father. Nader's reluctance centers primarily around the care of his father with Alzheimer's, and when Simin leaves, he must hire a woman, Razieh to take care of him.

But, of course, the father is deteriorating, and Razieh, a devout Muslim, finds her in the position of having to clean the old man, which she considers inappropriate. She contrives a plan for Nader to contact her unemployed husband, Hodjat, through a mutual friend, so that he can take the job. (She can't tell her husband directly because she's been keeping the house of a non-related man.)

But Hodjat doesn't make it and Razieh comes back the next day, when bad things happen.

The subsequent story that unfolds is complex and rich, with each of the characters showing their strengths and weaknesses as they choose between what is easy, what is right, what is true, and what helps them survive.

This rightly has an Oscar screenplay nom, and some are saying it should be up for Best Picture (not just foreign language picture) which is also right—but in part because of the really weak field this year. The Boy pronounced it a "solid" flick but he felt it was over-hyped.

In that sense, it's much like The Artist: A solid movie of the kind Hollywood used to make, done with certain modern sensibilities—though perhaps ironically, The Artist is far more modern than this simple, yet subtle film.

Overall, though, this is a fine film of strong but flawed characters struggling to make it in an unforgiving world. The movie causes you to empathize with each character in turn and even share in their occasional moral indignation, only to reveal their own flaws, and humble the viewer.

Definitely a good film, worth seeing.

Haywire

2012-01-27T10:06:00.000-08:00

The deafening sound of the collective eye-rolling on Twitter—yes, I know eye-rolling doesn't make much sound, but that's the point—when awareness of the plot of Haywire rippled through the community was, um, deafening.

See, this is why I don't try to be clever.

Haywire tells the story of a secret agent who is betrayed by her superiors and must use all her powers to stay alive and avenge herself against evildoers.

Sure, we've seen it before. But have we seen it with a female secret agent?

Well, yes. A lot.

What about if the female is also a real-life athlete?

Well, yeah. It was Cynthia Rothrock's bread-and-butter in the early '90s.

What about if she's surrounded by over-the-hill former A-list actors?

Oh, yeah, big time. Also a staple of '80s and '90s actions flicks.

Well, what if it were directed by an A-list director! And! And that director was the critically acclaimed Steven Soderbergh, who could totally be directing Ocean's 14 or something?

Never seen that before, have ya, smartypants!

And, back-peddling a bit, the A-list actors supporting our heroine are actually still A-list: Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan MacGregor and rising star Channing Tatum.

But the point of this movie is to showcase MMA champion/former American Gladiator Gina Carano.

And for Soderbergh to do to the rogue-spy genre what he did for the outbreak genre. That is, make a reasonably intelligent, somewhat emotionally distant film that avoids most of the usual tropes and is never copied by anyone ever again. (OK, I'm guessing no one will copy it, but Soderbergh is largely blazing his own, unrepeatable trail these days.)

Hiring an actual athlete to play a part is full of all sorts of pitfalls, of course. They often can't act, for example. And sometimes that even matters. Sometimes the desire to showcase the athlete results in shoehorning inappropriate physical motions into—well, Gymkata, okay?

And, of course, when the athlete is female, it's customary to exploit the crap out of her figure from every conceivable angle.

So, the good news is that Carano has a fair amount of charisma and can deliver lines convincingly. She also moves convincingly in the action scenes, which are appropriate and not gratuitous. Soderbergh also resists the urge to show us Carano in the shower, or in lingerie, or even in shorts, dammit.

I mean, that was very mature of him.

The whole movie is very mature, really. Much like Contagion, Soderbergh seems to have asked himself, "Well, if this were really gonna happen, what would the plausible results be?" Carano isn't super-powered, just super-competent. Her opponents are less so, necessarily, but not ludicrously so, as is often the case in this type of film.

For instance, there are a couple of drops in this movie: Once where she falls, and another where she jumps off a roof. If you've ever fallen (or jumped) from a height, you know it hurts a lot and it doesn't take a very high fall (in movie terms) to end up with broken bones. Action movies tend to completely ignore this—and the challenge of most other physical tasks—resulting in increasingly goofy action sequences.

Not here: The fall winds her. When she jumps from a high point, she uses a couple of tricks that (while difficult) are fairly plausible.

The same goes with the fighting: It's not like she stands toe-to-toe with her male attackers trading punches. She positions herself to use more of her body weight. And she's no Kate Beckinsale, either, prancing around in a catsuit: Her fighting weight is a good 30 pounds heavier. She looks believable doing this stuff because she's doing this stuff.

You know how when there's an action scene involving some slip-of-a-thing starlet and it's all done with reverse shots and below-the-neck shots? And you know it's because there's no way that woman could do that. Sometimes they can't even get a stuntwoman who's even close to the body type?

My favorite example of that is Her Alibi where Paulina Porizkova is supposed to be climbing a rope (with just her arms, no less), and in the reverse shots—where they actually show the stunt woman climbing—her ass is five sizes bigger. They couldn't find anyone with Porizkova's body type who could climb a rope like that.

When Soderbergh does a neck-down shot, you know he's doing it so you can see the action, not because he's trying to hide something. This worked very well for me.

The breast implants are distracting, sadly, both because they don't fit with the character and because—well, large breasts, you know? There was something about her skin that was oddly distracting, too.

Overall, it's not a great movie—The Boy said he couldn't get into it at all, though he didn't blame this entirely on the movie itself, but more a prejudice toward the genre—but it's a solid one. It actually makes sense and proceeds logically from plot-point to plot-point. Soderbergh uses a cute device where half the movie is told in flashback to a clueless, frightened guy, which allows Carano to reinforce the significance of certain characters and elements of the plot so that we can follow as well.

The other thing is that it feels like a pilot for a TV series. It has a very B-movie feel. But it is good, and my reaction to it is much like of Contagion: It's good that he avoids the sillier tropes of the genre, but sometimes he seems to be trying to hard to remove a lot of the dramatic tropes that really engage.

Carnage

2012-01-26T21:53:00.000-08:00

So. Yeah. Roman. Again. Sigh. And Kate Effin' Winslet. John C. Reilly, in one of his arty outings (versus, say, teaming up with Will Ferrell or Jonah Hill again). Jodie Foster. Christopher Waltz.

Foster and Reilly play a middle-class couple whose son has been hit by Winslet and Waltz's son. With a stick. Hard enough to knock his teeth out. The two have gotten together to handle the legal and insurance and school issues (apparently) and to try to show that they're above the attendant emotions.

Which, of course, they don't.

This is based on a play. That means you've got 80-90 minutes of four people in one room arguing. Forewarned is forearmed. (The Flower was not forewarned, though I tried.)

Comparisons have been made to Virginia Woolf but I think that's a much darker film. This is a trivial movie about trivial people. And as far as that goes, it's not bad. The alliances shift during the film, and of course, all four are the finest of actors. They manage to convey varying degrees of likability that aren't entirely warranted by the nihilistic script.

And the moral of the movie seems to be "having kids messes you up".

I laughed at those parts more than The Boy or The Flower did. Obviously.

Polanski over-directs a bit. I mean, the camera doesn't need to move half as much as he moves it. It doesn't really matter much.

I like this kind of one-room deal and this was okay. Last year's Jack Goes Boating was better, though darker and more dysfunctional. One of my favorites is actually Cube, the horror flick. Actually, Wait Until Dark—though it has a decidedly different dynamic—is also a better example of the genre.

The kids didn't hate it. It wasn't funny enough for them. On the dramatic side, it's—well, it's just not very. Everyone's sort of desultory. The movie kind of trails off without any big reveal or point or purpose, which is all very post-modern, I guess, but not very interesting.

I thought maybe Kate Winslet would turn out to be pregnant. Oh—this movie features the most on-screen vomiting of any play I can think of, enough to put it in the running with Bridesmaids. So, you know, if you like that sort of thing and you're on the edge, there ya go.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

2012-01-21T00:24:00.000-08:00

It's not exactly fair to call Tomas Alfredson's interpretation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy incomprehensible, but between the three of us, I was the only one who could figure out what was going on, and it took me an hour.

I did warn the kids in advance that spy movies could be rather difficult to follow. They don't really know that much about the cold war. (We won! Wooo!) Someone I know who read the book said it was impossible to follow without having read the book, so I can feel reasonably smug—or if I'm wrong about what went down, comfortably deluded.

The Flower didn't seem to mind too much. The Boy actually liked it, while conceding he didn't have the faintest clue what was going on.

I'm not quite sure why that is. There's a good atmosphere. (Alfredson's last film was the moody Let The Right One In.) The music is used judiciously and sparingly.

Acting? Well, Gary Oldman plays George Smiley, the lead spy and—well, what can I say? It's a dramatically understated part. He mostly has to be there. There's a quiet righteousness to it, but I suspect the garnering of nominations for Oldman are because he's Oldman, in spite of the part. (At least, I don't see award ceremonies really appreciate subtlety.)

There are more excitable characters around him, though not very. Toby Jones plays an irascible Scot, but most of the remaining cast are degrees of moody. Mark Strong (last seen in Green Lantern), Ciaran Hinds (of The Debt), Colin Firth, etc. Well, it's the cold war. Nobody was laughing.

Ultimately, this is what you'd expect from a cerebral espionage movie. A little murky, paranoid, effectiveness somewhat blunted by the occasionally confusing delivery.

What's probably the most noteworthy thing about it, is that the story works, even if you can't follow it. Compare that with so many of the movies this year, where you can follow the events perfectly, and yet there seems to be no actual working story.

It's A Small War After All

2012-01-18T22:51:00.000-08:00

War Horse tells the tale of a demonic horse who curses all who cross his path for the rest of their dramatically shortened lives.

Well, not really. But you couldn't prove otherwise.

This is one of the two Steven Spielberg movies we've been blessed with this holiday/award season, and it has Spielberg's trademark subtlety.

"Heh."

OK, the story is that, in a moment of pride, an Irish dirt farmer gets into a stupid bidding war with his landlord in order to buy the titular, completely inappropriate horse. In doing so, he gets his farm in hock (to same landlord), and his boy falls in love with the horse. Then the war comes, and the horse gets drafted, goes AWOL, and has many adventures. Or something.

I mentioned Spielberg's subtlety ironically, of course, but not sardonically. There's nothing necessarily wrong with bombast even if, like Spielberg, you don't even bother to hang a lampshade on it (which can feel a little insulting).

But this is a bizarre, bizarre movie that doesn't move fast enough to make you (or me, rather) overlook the weirdness of it.

This movie came from the mind of someone who felt that we're so inured to the horrors of war, we could only experience it if it were suffered by an innocent horse.

I know, right?

Especially World War I? That most wasteful, inhumane, horrific war. The Great War. The War To End All Wars? You know, the war that gave us All Quiet On The Western Front, Gallipoli, Joyeux Noel, A Very Long Engagement. Hell, even Hugo gave us the horror of war as it pertains to film.

But, no, Spielberg says you'll only get it if it happens to a horse.

As a result, Spielberg has the horse sort of anthropomorphized sporadically. Sometimes it seems like just a horse. Other times, it's acting noble, and saving the day, etc.

It's a children's story, but it's about the horrors of war. In WWI, cavalry lines met machine gun nests for the first time—an encounter which ended the cavalry line for all history, as horses were mowed down in a horrifying slaughter. (Actually the Poles would set their cavalry against German tanks in WWII, but the less said about that, the better.)

Since this would be a nightmare to watch, Spielberg does this bizarre thing where the charging horses are somehow spared, and break through the German lines completely riderless. As if only the cavalry soldiers themselves were killed. The effect is surreal.

And yet, later, we're treated to an extended scene of a horse being chewed up by barbed wire. I mean, you guys know me: I sat through all the Saw movies (but the last one) but this was truly horrifying.

For some reason (supporting my horse-of-the-damned theory) the last 20 minutes is shot in a kind of hellish red. I mean, clearly, the idea was that it was sunset, but they must've done it with computer color correction, since the scene lasted longer than any sunset south of Reykjavik could last.

The Boy's reaction to this was "That was a long, damn movie!" He didn't dislike it (or like it) particularly. He just thought it was long. And it is. Over 2-and-a-half hours long.

The funny thing is that there are a bunch of different strands, accounting for this length, and yet the various story resolutions seem contrived or abandoned.

However, The Flower liked it, as I suspected she would. I mean, it had horses and sadness and some happiness and some kids. She's ten.

Thing is, I don't know that I could call this a children's movie. Like, the violence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom didn't bother me—it's cartoonish, and really didn't deserve the hubbub (that resulted in the PG-13 rating). This movie is chock full of dead kids and horses.

I don't regret letting her see it, and she was fine, but I think the audience for this movie is real narrow. Much older and she'd see the flaws. Much younger and she'd be traumatized.

I dunno. It gets a 7-point-something on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, though Metacritic gives it 7.2/6.0 (critic/audience). I can't really recommend it, though, beyond that demographic of relatively sturdy tween girls.

The School Idea

2012-01-17T09:18:00.000-08:00

When I was younger (ah hah) I fantasized about creating a school. This was in college, and as someone who had been in school since 21-months of age, I had begun to realize that the education I was waiting for was never going to arrive.

The entire premise of The School was that academic studies would be balanced with practical application that supported the institution and, yes, brought in money. Like, if you were teaching the arts, you'd put on shows. I was at UCLA at the time and it amazed me how little cooperation there was not just between the various disciplines, like art and music, but within just the music department itself. For example, if you're teaching music history, you have people listening to recordings of Gregorian chant and what-not, but those chants are never actually sung by the choir.

I thought this could extend nicely to occupational work, too, and you could end up with a largely self-sufficient school that provided a really broad experience to all the kids while also letting them get deep into their preferred subjects.

The various *-studies-type programs were just taking off back then; I don't think you could major in them. They were more points-of-interest than vocations. They wouldn't survive in this model, except through people who had a strong interest in them and were willing to work hard in other areas to support that interest.

The thing that stuck with me back then was the insurance. Inevitably some kind would get hurt and that would be that.

Newt Gingrich's comments about kids being janitors, cafeteria workers and clerks put me in mind of this.

There is a faction in this society that is dead set against kids working, like working is some horrible thing that adults have to do, and people should be spared it as long as possible. And I think this probably indicates that, you know, they feel that way about their lives and jobs.

But the side-effect of this has been to create adolescence. Wild teens. Juvenile delinquency.

As horrible as it is to communists, our sense of self-worth as human beings utterly depends on exchange. We value ourselves to the extent that we can produce things that other people want. And in a cruel trick of nature, we start out with very little to give and in tremendous need of help.

A lot of what is mistakenly perceived as attention-seeking in children is just their attempt to entertain. The parent who dismisses this shuts off an avenue for the child to pay back.

What's also difficult is the custodian-ship of the child's development into a genuinely helpful member of the family (and society). At first, when they "help", it's more work (sometimes a LOT more) than if they don't. (If I helped my mom clean up, she'd tell me how good I'd done, and then do it over. Heh.)

My kids aren't much like me. The Boy is very money-minded. Last year (at 15) he got a job (programming), and he's been walking dogs in the neighborhood. He's almost finished a pen-and-paper RPG he's going to try to build something around. He's been in college for a few semesters, primarily business and economics classes.

The Flower's industriousness is astounding. For money (and we pay her well), she cleans the dog stuff out of the backyard. For fun, she cleans the bathroom or the bedroom or the living room or the closet. She makes and sells her own wallets. She works for The Boy—he's programming a game and she's doing the art.

The Barbarienne, on the other hand? She's young yet, but I sense a different mind-set in her. (Probably closer to my own, growing up, than either The Boy or The Flower.) She's definitely more difficult to mentor through things.

They would all have benefited from the school I imagined as a young man, but I was too busy having them to build it.

Plus, you know: Insurance.

The Artist

2012-01-14T21:04:00.000-08:00

Big-name silent era movie star loses it all when talkies come into vogue while the girl of his dreams hits it big in those very same pictures. Sure, we've seen it before. But have we seen it in the past 40 years? (I'm thinking the Kristofferson/Streisand Star Is Born.) Have we seen it good in the past 75?

The Artist is a love song to '30s movies—more '30s than '20s in my estimation—done in beautiful black-and-white and pseudo-silent. George Valentin is Douglas Fairbanks-style action movie hero, on top of the world, who gives an ingenue Peppy Miller (a sort of Mary Pickford-type) her big break in the movies after a chance meeting throws her into the public eye.

Fortunes are reversed when talkies appear and Valentin refuses to talk even as Miller's star rises. What follows is a story of loyalty and love as people move in and out of Valentin's life.

This movie is filmed in black-and-white and is mostly silent, and is a wonderfully simple tale told elegantly, with Jean Dujardin in the lead role. He channels a mix of Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and Gene Kelly, and he manages to do it with just enough broadness to make him feel like an authentic '20s actor and enough warmth to feel an authentic '20s person.

Bérénice Bejo is somewhat less successful, though not because she doesn't have the mannerisms down. She's a little broader, a little more like a zany Ziegfield girl, but ultimately very winning. Her only weaknesses are that, at 35, she's a bit old to be playing the ingenue and, as a modern actress, she's way too lean. (Modern actresses tend to be so lean their skin looks positively stretched over their faces.)

It feels nitpicky, but it's a bit jarring.

Director (and husband to Bejo) Michael Hazanavacius manages to capture a lot of the '20s/'30s directorial style while taking advantage of some modern shots to avoid the more static elements of old-style movie making. And his script manages to comfortably move between the depths of despair and comic lightness in a way that feels very true to the era and is still affecting nearly a century later.

This is the first (and so far the only) unalloyed success of the season, I would say. It reminds me how little we ask for in a movie, really: There's no complex plot, no fancy sets, no CGI to speak of (I assume there's always some in movies these days), the score is traditional... There's a heroic, loyal dog. It's just over 90 minutes, minus the credits.

Oh, it's not for everyone, I guess. Some people won't be able to accept the straightforwardness of it. The simplicity of the characters. The silent/colorless aspect. And it's very French in parts, with a couple of things you'd never have seen in a movie of the time.

But The Boy and I both liked it quite a bit. It'll be easily rewatchable.

Some stunt casting of American actors, presumably to try to draw in the American crowds: Penelope Ann Miller as Valentin's wife, Missi Pyle (who got high billing!) has a small part in a few scenes, Malcolm MacDowell, Stuart Pankin, and even '80s B-movie starlet Jewell Shepard has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role.

John Goodman has a meatier part as the producer who sees the changes on the wind, and James Cromwell is the #3 character, playing Valentin's ever faithful man-servant.

This is worth seeing over the other Oscar-bait movies this year, and even in spite of its Oscar-bait positioning, if you have any love of the old films.

Greece Is The Word

2012-01-08T23:37:00.000-08:00

In his transition to conservative, the great Frank Miller penned a comic book called 300, based on the story of the Spartan's stand at Thermopylae. It was a romantic retelling, but well researched, and true to the cultural spirit of the story. When Zack Snyder gussied it up for the big screen, he made it more comic book-y (ironically, I guess) by adding some monsters here and there.

The new movie Immortals, which follows in this tradition spits in the eye of 300 and kicks Greek mythology in the 'nads for good measure.

Which, frankly, I expected.

And yet, I was retroactively disappointed when the credits rolled and Tarsem Singh's name appeared as directory. Singh's two previous credits were the J. Lo vehicle The Cell and the under-rated The Fall. If I had expected the level of imagery in those movies here, I would've been utterly deflated. The imagery here is fairly standard CGI-superhero fare, with the exception of a lot more cool gore effects.

This does not a movie make.

This barely rises to the level of a movie, too, which is typical of a Tarsem flick. There's a real poetry to his earlier works, and this allows one to overlook, for example, that the actual plot of The Cell is about five minutes long, and the whole "entering a killer's mind" premise is completely superfluous.

The same is true here, minus the poetry. In the opening scene, we learn that...uh...crap...I've forgotten. It's a retelling of the story of Kronos and the Titans versus Zeus and the Olympians. These are the titular immortals. Except that we learn in the first few seconds of the film that they discovered a way to kill each other.

The first rule of immortals is: there aren't any immortals.

Anyway, this leads to a war (though it seems like it should be the other way around, with a war leading to discovery of mortality) and the gods lock up the titans in 10x10x10 cubicle. (These are decidedly non-titanic titans.) And the only thing that can set them free is a magical bow.

The thing that makes this bow magical, I think, is that it's the only bow in all of Greece. Seriously. There's a big battle scene. There's a siege. But nobody has a bow, except for the guy with the magic bow. Which, by the way, looks like something out of Diablo.

So the plot is that Mickey Rourke—who is back to being sleazy and unappealing after a brief hiatus—plays the conquering Hyperion (who in the actual mythology, all we know of is that he was a Titan) whose big plan is to—well, he's got two plans. The first is to rape all of the known world, a la Genghis Khan. The second is to find the magic bow of Epirus (who, in actual mythology was a mortal girl who died young and relatively uneventfully) and use it to travel to Tartarus (a city/mountain and the place with the titan-cube).

Tartarus seems to be the closest thing this movie makes to a hit to actual Greek mythology. Some Titans were imprisoned in Tartarus, but it was considered to be a place in the underworld.

OK, so, shutting off the part of the brain that knows anything about Greek mythology about five minutes into it, we're left with a bunch of incoherent plot lines and unsupported character backstory.

Like, the fact that Rourke's two evil plans contradict each other. He releases the titans, they destroy the world: So much for all the raping he wants to do. (He never talks about ruling the world or looting or pillaging. He's all about the rape.)

There's a kind of Star Trek-style prime directive going on with the gods: According to Zeus, the law is that no god may interfere directly with mortals as a god (biting tongue) even though he's apparently been going down in the form of John Hurt to raise the atheistic hero of our piece. That's not "as a god" so, loophole!

Now, this could make sense as a dramatic device, right? Just like in "Star Trek," it could prevent deus ex machina type escapes and keep the tension high. If the audience knows that the gods can intervene at any time, after all—just stop right there, buster. This movie completely depends on deus ex machina.

Actually, not just deus ex machina but villain ex machina. The villain manages to have henchmen everywhere. Including, at one point, an artifact fetching jackal/hyena/dog thing. Who happens to be right where the artifact is. Even though the villain had already left that spot. And the movie goes through great pains to make sure we know the villain doesn't know where the artifact is.

Truly, the hero's actions are completely irrelevant, or possibly negative. There's really nothing heroic about him. He fights good, I guess. And he's good to his mom. He's less offensive than the other characters, so he's got that going for him. He also has some casual sex that would seem pretty reckless in terms of the whole saving-the-world thing (avoiding spoilers).

The Greece of this movie is populated with atheists, true believers, apostates and pragmatists. The hero is an atheist (up to the point where Zeus actually spanks him), the villain is an apostate, most of the rank-and-file seem to be believers, but the residents of Tartarus are more pragmatic. But everyone's chief gripe about the gods is that they don't get involved, and the difference between the villain and the hero is that the hero chooses to believe that means there are no gods while the villain decides it means there ARE gods and they hate him, and so therefore deserve to die (along with the rest of existence).

Good lord, in the beginning of the movie, a well-meaning cleric tells Rourke that he only need ask for forgiveness to set all right with the gods. (You know, 'cause what's the difference between the Greek gods and Jesus?) Of course, the Greek gods would've struck the villain dead for defiling the temple—that's what they did—but setting that aside, there's no space in even the movie-created theology for forgiveness, or much of anything other than a blind partisanship.

The relationship between the gods and mortals seems to be trivial, at best, and inverted at worst, with Zeus emphatically assuring the hero that he (Zeus) believes in him (Theseus).

Weirdly, in the first few minutes of the movie, the narration tells us that the titans were "called" evil because they lost the war of the heavens. We're never given any idea of the gods as being good, or frankly being of much interest whatsoever.

The gods, by the way, look like a campy re-enactment of The War Against The Titans done at Ceasar's Palace. "How will anyone be able to tell the gods apart? They're all unshaven brunette 30-year-old men wearing togas." "I know, let's put 'em in goofy hats!"

It's a greatly reduced pantheon, by the way: Zeus, Athena (who seem to be leering at each other while expositing on how they're father and daughter), Ares, Helios and Poseidon are, I think, all we see. Though maybe Apollo pops in at the end.

Aw, hell, I've already given more thought to this movie's theology than anyone actually making the movie did.

Immortals manages to offend on nearly every other level as well, though. For example, Tartarus is a walled city. Wait, did I say "walled city"? I meant to say it's behind freaking Hoover Dam. They have the technology to build a wall that's a thousand feet high, but they have no means to defend it whatsoever. No bows. No boiling oil. No nothing. Just a wall.

And when The Only Bow In Creation blows through the front of the gate like a bazooka, the villain never ever fires it again in battle. (The Bow is problematic in terms of how much force it can deal. Apparently the answer is "how much do you need?")

It's kind of insulting.

Also, they know where the villain is headed: To free the titans. Post guards? Why no, why would you? The thing there is, the villain could easily have dispatched them (magic bow, remember?), so why not even put out the effort to show us that our putative good guys are kind of thinking?

Some guy named Henry Cavill plays some dude named Theseus. Stephen Dorff plays a lovable rogue who breaks character at the first convenient plot point. Frieda Pinto, as Indian looking a woman as you can ever imagine, plays the Oracle, and has a spectacular body double for her nude scene (which screams body double). Luke Evans, fresh from playing Apollo in Clash of the Titans, plays Zeus-with-a-five-o-clock shadow here. The other hottie is Isabel Lucas, playing Athena.

I have no opinions about any of these people based on this movie. I've liked Stephen Dorff since he was a kid in that goofy demon-summoning movie The Gate. But really, none of them are particularly relevant. This isn't a movie about characters. Or plot. Or continuity. Coherence.

The music is heroic.

I would've gone to see this, on the strength of Tarsem's name. He's doing one of the three Snow White rehashes next year (his is Mirror, Mirror and the other two are Snow White and the Huntsmen and—hmm, maybe there's only two) and I won't be lining up to see it.

P.S. Ares actually throws a hammer in this flick. A hammer.

Puss In Boots

2011-12-26T18:44:00.001-08:00

Well, at least it's not another Shrek movie. You can start there with Puss In Boots, though The Flower declined to see this, stating she wasn't interested in any prequels or spin-offs or any of that nonsense. (A friend of mine went to see this and was crushed that it wasn't about the real Puss In Boots stories.)

In my book, it's probably better to set something in the same universe as another film than to try to wring out another sequel from poor ol' Shrek and Fiona, and the change of focus keeps them from dragging out a bunch of references to the original films that were tired in Shrek 4.

Unfortunately, this replaces them with even older tropes, in most cases.

You don't want to make the cat angry!

I make this look good!

PiB is the story of the rogue cat (voiced by Antonio Banderas) and his childhood pal, Humpty Dumpty (Zach Gallafianikis, of course) who gets him into trouble when Puss becomes a hero and Dumpty a thief. So, it's Dead End with an animated cat and egg.

They're seeking out the magic beans in order to get to the castle where the Goose That Lays The Golden Egg resides, and Dumpty has solicited the help of Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek, of course) in their adventure.

The Barb liked it. People in the audience actually clapped when it was over and I saw no alcoholic beverages being served.

I thought it was by-the-numbers and not all that well done, lacking most of the cleverness of the Shrek movies—though at least seeming less tied into the pop-meme-of-the-moment. Actually the hacky phrases above are pretty indicative. It relies a lot on the "cat's are cute" idea, and clearly the producers had been influenced by "Family Guy"'s Brian (the dog) and "South Park". Not vulgarity-wise, but there's a strong hint of the Pandemic episode of "South Park" at the climax.

Not unpleasant, but way below the bar set by animation in recent years. That's actually pretty true of all the animated films this year.

At some point, with all my "meh" reactions of late, I have to wonder: Maybe it's me?

The (Other) Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

2011-12-26T18:40:00.000-08:00

It gets hard to defend Hollywood—and why would you try, really?—when they seem to reinforce the worst ideas people have. Like cowardice and completely paucity of original ideas.

I mean, when people talk about all the sequels and movies derived from other sources these days, it's easy to note that this has always been the case. Yeah, we have four Resident Evil movies but there were ten Ma & Pa Kettle flicks. Seven—or was it eight?—Saws? Try sixteen movies in the Andy Hardy series. There were nearly thirty Charlie Chan flicks, I think.

Point is, film has always been a derivative medium.

And I wanted to say, "Well, hey, this could be a good example of Hollywood making a foreign movie their own, with David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) at the helm." And there's no doubt this is a Fincher film. Plenty of sickly yellow and greenish lighting, shadowed faces, unusual camera dollying.

Still, it seemed like a sort of pointless exercise. It's actually more lurid than the original (though not enough to warrant the pissy review over at Big Hollywood) but this seems less effective because it's such a slick product. Complete with Macs, Coca-Cola and MacDonald's Happy Meals.

There were a few things I liked better than the Swedish original: The Swedish movie is harder to follow. Not just because it's Swedish but because the sprawling story involves over a dozen characters, and clue-gathering that doesn't really engage you in the mystery per se but that you feel like you have to keep track of to follow the story. As a result, when you finally learn the whole story, it's easy to be confused about who was who.

This version is a bit more careful—and longer—about making sure we know who the important characters are. On the good side, that means when Lisbeth meets with her guardian (social worker) we know who he is and why he's so important, and also gives us an insight into her personality.

On the bad side, the interaction with the bad guy is such a cliché of American cinema, that it's impossible to be surprised by the reveal, even if you've never seen the original films. In fact, even if you never seen any film ever.

There's another funny change. At one point, Lisbeth steals a whole bunch of money with her 1337 hacker skillz. I sometimes roll my eyes at that, you know, because I have some idea of the challenge involved and the movies make it seem like magic. (The American movie does this when Lisbeth reads Mikael's encrypted e-mail like it was nothing. But that actually makes sense to the degree that she's been watching his machine for some time.)

So, the American movie actually shows theft. In extensive detail. And I just wanted it to end. In retrospect, it was necessary for the number one change they made which I'll discuss in a bit.

The Boy and I thought it was okay. Way too long (at over 2.5 hours). The acting is good, of course. I warmed up to Rooney Mara. Daniel Craig is probably right where they wanted him to be (more on that in a bit, too). Chris Plummer—I'm just glad to see him going strong, as strong as ever, really, and getting such good roles in his 80s. Stellan Skarsgaard (apply diacriticals as needed), fresh from his flamboyant role in Melancholia—he's kinda subdued here.

You could do worse, that is, if you don't mind the squalid. (Though Melancholia is pretty squalid, too.) It's better if you haven't seen the original. My mom hasn't, but she had read the book, and said that it was pretty faithful to the book, without expressing enthusiasm for same.

Now I want to talk about the major change from the Swedish movies, which necessarily contains SPOILERS! In a very real way, these movies are primarily interesting because of the relationship between Lisbeth and Mikael, so do not read on if you don't want to be spoiled.

OK?

So, the Swedish movies feature Blomkvist, who's a good guy, and Lisbeth, who's more of an anti-hero. Lisbeth is seriously damaged—the backstory of which forms the basis for the second and third movies, and which is no trivial matter.

In the original, at one point, Lisbeth basically uses Mikael for sex. It's a cold, mechanical and bizarre interaction, her on top until she's done, after which she leaves the room, and leaves Blomkvist bewildered.

This is their relationship in a nutshell. Mutually beneficial, but strained. Lisbeth does, slowly, come to trust him, to a degree. But at no point do you get the idea that we're in for some sort of odd-couple detective TV show pilot, like "Tatts and the Kvist" or whatever. (I guess Larson wrote a fourth book where they fight crime in Canada, though, so the old commie might have been open to that.)

Point is, all (Swedish actor's) Nyqvist's Blomkvist really has going for him is his integrity. He's not an action hero. Lisbeth has to save him. And while he saves her in the second movie, it's after all the action is over.

He's just beta.

This makes a whole lotta sense with Lisbeth's character. She's been abused badly by men for a long time. The actual title of the book (and I think the Swedish movie) is Men Who Hate Women. Blomkvist's laid back attitude is about the only way Lisbeth can trust a guy.

So, in the American movie? Lisbeth is sort of nurturing Blomkvist after he gets injured. She's more timid in approaching him for sex. They interact. She mounts him. Then? He flips her over to be on top.

Pardon my graphicness here, but while the sex is explicit, it's not gratuitous. It's an important part of the character development. And they botched it here.

Afterwards? They cuddle.

So, after years and years of abuse, all she needed was the passing fancy of a sufficiently handsome guy, I guess.

Worse still? The original had Lisbeth vanishing at the end, and striking at Blomkvist's enemy, Vanager. (This was the part drawn out in the American movie.) And she's in love with Blomkvist. And he breaks her heart by not knowing about it.

Really? Really?

Ugh.

Now, it's not fair to bash this aspect of the American movie on the basis of how it compares to the Swedish movie. I mean, it's fine to have a preference, but the American producers can draw the characters however they feel. (I think it fails to ring true to the extent that they didn't really change the other details of Lisbeth's story.)

But it feels like pandering. I was a little sick of Blomkvist's wimpiness by the end of the trilogy, I admit, but however much Craig dials it down, he's still Daniel "James Bond/Cowboys and Aliens" Craig.

This probably some focus testing BS, like what ruined The Lord of the Rings. We can only have one kind of story, one kind of relationship in a film. Bleah.

Another weird change: In the Swedish movie, Lisbeth is confronting the villain and has a chance to save his life. She doesn't. When she tells Mikael, he's not down with that. He doesn't treat her badly over it but he disapproves.

In the American version she asks for permission to kill him—and then he dies without her getting the chance to.

Meh. Maybe they wouldn't detract from your experience if you hadn't seen the original. (Though my mom said the movie was true to the book, not in an especially favorable way though.)

Did I mention it's over two-and-a-half hours long?

Paranormal Activity 3

2011-12-26T16:41:00.000-08:00

They're baaaaaacck! Those groovy ghoulies haunting Katie and Kristi are back knocking over chairs and hating on kitchen appliances. Except that this is a prequel so they're not really back so much as here for the first time. Until the next prequel.

We have speculated that they could keep going back, at least to the grandmother's story, since it seems to have been her supernatural shenanigans that started the demonic wheels in motion. Except, as The Boy pointed out, "accidentally" filming it gets trickier the farther back you go.

If you were interested in telling the story it would make a lot of sense to switch to a more traditional sort of movie. But you're just interested in maximizing profits and number of sequels, you'd just switch to super 8, 16mm, or whatever. So, there's not much doubt as to which way this franchise will go.

This movie takes place in the dark days of 1988, with young Julie and her two daughters, and Julie's boyfriend, Dennis, a wedding videographer (VHS, baby!) all living together happily somewhere in the suburbs.

Then, you know, stuff happens.

The form and technique of this movie is the same as the previous two in the series, as you might imagine. The characters are a little more likable, with Lauren Bittner and Chris Smith in the parental roles. Dennis, in particular, is more in tuned and aware than his wife, unlike the previous two films where the husbands were aggressively clueless.

I'm liking the backfilling of the story, though it's not as tightly integrated as the second film, and things we were told in both the previous movies wouldn't seem to be true. I don't count this as a lack of continuity, as the "unreliable narrative" device is not only logical, it's pretty well explained by this film.

Sadly, since it was Christmas vacation, we had the usual contingent of clueless teens who can't tell the difference between their living room and a public theater and they'd been hitting the bong pretty hard. When the family travels to Moorpark, California, the howling didn't subside for 5 minutes. (We saw the movie just outside of Moorpark.)

We liked it anyway. The devices are holding up, in the sense that if you liked them in the previous films you'll probably still like them. It won't last forever, of course.

Anything else of interest? Well, Lauren Bittner is awful cute. (How cute? One of her credits is "Basbeball Cutie".) Both she and Smith I think look better in their '80s styles than their current looks. The '80s vibe is over-all kind of cute.

They have to use a book on demons instead of the Internet.

Liked it, but I'm not exactly champing at the bit for the inevitable fourth movie.

Shirley's Game of Shadows

2011-12-24T13:47:00.000-08:00

So we saw the second installment in the newer, 'splodier Sherlock Holmes series with Robert Downey Jr as the titular detective and Jude Law as his sidekick, directed by the former Mr. Madonna Guy Ritchie.

Honestly? You could just read my review of the first movie, and it'd do. OK, subtract the matte rant, there's much less of the cheesy THIS IS CGI LONDON 1894, or whatever. Subtract any concern that might have arisen from thinking this was going to be a traditional Holmes mystery, 'cause it's even less justified then before.

Crank it up to eleven. This is Holmes as superhero. His super-smarts give him the ability to anticipate (sorta) how combat is going to play out, allowing him to fight multiple opponents in hand-to-hand combat. It sorta works.

Also, crank up the slow-mo-to-super-speed-camera tricks to about a zillion.

We all liked it, if not wildly. The Boy's reaction to this was exactly the same as it was to the last one. The Flower was okay on it, but really liked the end. Predictably, her favorite parts revolved around Holmes' puckish shenanigans, more than any aspect of the action or "mystery".

Noomi Rapace, the original Girl (with the dragon tattoo/who played with fire/who kicked the hornet's nest) plays a gypsy in this and what first hits you is that she's really cute. I mean, you could see it in the "girl" movies but she plays Lisbeth so well, it's hard to see her as being attractive, exactly. In this, she's much bigger emotionally as she searches for her missing brother. Acting!

Resident Evil—I mean "Mad Men" star Jared Harris plays the eeeeevil Moriarty, set on starting World War 1, and the ever doughy Stephen Fry plays Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes' smarter, nuder brother.

So, there you are. Pretty much what's expected. You know if you like this sorta thing.

Be My Melancholia...Bayyyyyybee

2011-12-17T15:03:00.000-08:00

The third and final pic in our trilogy-of-films-we-didn't-really-want-to-see is Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Trier (the "von" is an affectation) is like Almodóvar, in that I've never seen one of his movies until recently, though von Trier is a bit more avant-garde with his last film featuring all sorts of depravity, mutilations and infanticide, I'm told. Trier famously sympathized with Hitler at Cannes a few months ago, said shenanigans earning him a trip to the principal's office for violating various stupid European laws.

In essence, he proved there was something stupider than sympathizing with Hitler.

That kind of sums up this movie, in a weird way. Just about every predictable criticism you could level against this film is true—and yet...there's some there there.

The movie opens with about a 5-10 minute encapsulation of the film done in super-slow-mo super-high-res glory, culminating with the earth being smashed by a giant planet. To Wagner's Tristan and Isolde no less. And...scene. This is done so that you have no delusions about how this story is going to play out.

Part 1 of the movie involves Justine (Kirsten Dunst), blushing bride, at her reception. Thing is, she's depressed. Her mom's (Charlotte Rampling) a total bitch. She gets up at the wedding to make a speech on the futility of marriage. Also she's dressed really inappropriately (and in the fashion of a rampaging planet). Dad's (John Hurt) a flibberdagibbet who can't keep one Betty straight from another. Her sister (Charlotte Gaisnbourg) and wealthy brother-in-law (Keifer Sutherland) have spent a lot of money on this lavish party to try to make her happy, and all Justine wants to do is hide from everyone and sleep and take baths. And occasionally have some sort of sexual interaction with her husband or, you know, whomever.

What we have, in other words, is an externalized picture of severe depression, possibly manic-depression but I'm not up on my DSM, and there's a high degree of stylization here. I mean, within a few hour period, Justine is in love, married, fights with her parents, gets a promotion, gets fired, has an affair, ruins her marriage, etc.

Nobody really gets that she's depressed beyond depression. Nobody can accept it. It is a really good dramatization of how depressed people feel, I think.

As you might imagine, this is not incredibly entertaining. It's kind of interesting. But it's also kind of self-indulgent. Kind of way self-indulgent. And that makes sense, really, because depression is self-indulgent on some level.

But that ain't peanuts compared to part two, focused nominally on Clair, Justine's sister, who's trying to help her out of this depression. Clair seems like a good woman with a perfect life. She doesn't have Justine's good looks but she's married to Jack Bauer and somehow he's gotten incredibly rich. She has a nice son.

Clair's problem? The world is ending.

The big ol' rogue planet Melancholia is going to smash into earth in about five days. Her husband Jack—okay, his real name in the movie is John—has reassured her that Melancholia is going to pass by Earth, not only leaving it unscathed but creating the most beautiful astronomical event of anyone's lifetime.

Meanwhile, in the most realistic use of the Internet ever shown in cinema, Clair can't help herself from going to the Internet and reinforcing her sense of DOOM! Weirder still, her basket case sister Justine, who can barely feed herself at the beginning of this part, seems to be growing stronger and eerier as The End looms nigh.

As part one is a semi-literal rather narcissistic depiction of depression, part two is a completely allegorical utterly narcissistic and nihilistic depiction of same: Depression isn't just going to destroy Justine, it's going to destroy the Earth and everything that Earth ever was or stood for.

"Life is a mistake," Justine says at one point. "Life is only on Earth. And not for long."

So. Yeah. About as subtle as a hand grenade. As subtle as Wagner. As subtle as Lars von Trier apologizing for making such a perfect movie, and hoping people would somehow be able to find flaws in it to enjoy. As subtle as sympathizing with Hitler.

I could do a whole page of "as subtle as" from this movie. As subtle as the 19th hole on a golf course. As subtle as guessing—knowing—the number of beans in a jar. As subtle as wearing a dress that looks like the surface of an incoming rogue planet. As subtle as showing Kirsten Dunst naked and frail-looking at the beginning of part two and then later showing her naked and erotically bathing in Melancholia's light.

As subtle as making sure everyone knows Dunst appears naked to shore up your box office.

You know, we didn't hate it, The Boy and I, though The Boy had to go out and get a refill on the mega-beverage they give you at the theater.

Trier definitely has some skills. And it's not hard to see why actors like working for him. Dunst gets to have scene-after-scene that's sort of like an actor's workshop. The very artificiality and pretentiousness is grist for the actor's mill.

And it's not consistently boring. The problem with being this unsubtle is that you really don't need to spend an hour on each part, no matter how enamored you are with your various ways of re-stating the same thing over-and-over again. Especially when you go out of your way to beat the audience out of any semblance of hope or meaning.

Not something one can casually recommend to just anyone. In fact, not something one could argue against, if you wanted to say "this is a pretentious piece of self-indulgent crap". But just like I can't really explain why I don't particularly like Scorcese, I can't really explain why I sorta liked this.

Hu Got To Be Kiddin' Me!

2011-12-17T13:55:00.000-08:00

OK, up front: I'm just not a Martin Scorcese guy. I've said it before, I'll probably say it again. I can explain it any number of ways—he makes movies about topics I'm not particularly interested in, with people in them who don't seem to be worthy of the attention, for example—but when you get down to it, I'm just not into him.

I don't deny he has considerable talent. He makes beautiful movies. He knows how to block a shot and how to light a set. All that. But when I see his movies? I don't hate them. They just completely fail to reach me. I was mildly entertained by The Departed and seriously bored by (and slightly offended by the naivete of) Shutter Island but ultimately, his movies are just a big meh in my book.

So, I'll redundantly say of his new family-ish film Hugo: Meh. The Boy echoed that. The Flower thought it was okay, not up there with your average Pixar/Dreamworks film. What's different about this film, compared to other Scorcese pictures, is that I should have loved it, based on the subject matter.

The trailers are really misleading. This is not an animated child's film about mysterious city, robots and adventures. This is a live action movie with ridiculous, atmosphere destroying CGI pull outs to a completely fake looking 1931 Paris.

Yeah, it's Paris in the '30s again. The story is about a freshly-made orphan who lives in the service areas of a train station winding the clocks to cover for his drunk (and missing) uncle, while stealing parts from a toy repairer to try to finish a project he and his dad were working on right before his dad got killed by some really silly looking CGI fire.

The project is an automaton which, contra the trailers, isn't a robot or any sort of fanciful thing, but a genuine wind-up automaton, like they used to have in the 19th century. (Here, buy this $500 book through my Amazon link.) While occasionally Scorcese imbues the proceedings with a certain fantastical aura, the movie is a very literal period piece.

The plot crosses through the work of the grandfather of film sci-fi, Georges Melies, so I should have been in movie nerd heaven throughout most of the film. And yet.

Well, look, I've already said Scorcese just doesn't reach me, so anything I add is going to be gratuitous. That said, this is a self-indulgent film. Not horribly so, but enough to need to be edited down by half-an-hour. Kind of like how I could have edited this entry down and eliminated these last paragraphs.

If you're a Scorcese person, and a film person, you'll probably dig it.

The Dispirited Descendants

2011-12-17T13:25:00.000-08:00

"George Clooney can't act! Whatever he does, whatever his character is feeling, his expression is the same!" So began The Boy's tirade against The Descendants, the Alexander Payne Hawaii travelogue. So I think it's fair to point out that The Boy revised that opinion somewhat for this film, with the additional good news that whatever Clooney has done to his face, he does seem to be able to move it now more than Up In The Air.

So, yeah, this is the first in the trilogy of films-we-didn't-really-wanna-see-but-whatchoo-gonna-do? with Hugo and Melancholia rounding out the trinity of Oscar-bait crap crowding out potentially good films like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil and The Human Centipede 2.

Verdict? Welllll, meh. The Boy had a somewhat favorable response, saying that he hadn't seen a movie like that before so it held some interest. My response was, well, meh, because I've seen About Schmidt and Sideways and Election. The Descendants falls somewhere between About Schmidt and Election in terms of entertainment value, and closer to About Schmidt in terms of characters.

Also, you know how, if you see a Tim Burton film, you're gonna see the director wrestle with his daddy issues? With a Payne film, you're gonna see the director wrestle with his woman issues. Women are going to be some combination of controlling, emasculating, cuckolding.

Having seen all of Payne's feature films (except Citizen Ruth), I think it's fair to say that Sideways is far-and-away the best and that allows a lot to Paul Giamatti's irascible lovableness.

In The Descendants, Clooney's character sets off on a journey around the Hawaiian islands to tell his friends that his comatose wife is dying (boat accident). The kicker is that his elder, delinquent daughter has let him know that his wife was cheating on him before the accident. (This is all in the trailers, and revealed early in the film, so it's not meant to be a twist or nothin'. In fact, I think that dramatic tension is supposed to be the compelling interest.)

So, it's a combination of telling everyone the tragic news, trying to find out more about the Other Man and, as in Sideways and Schmidt, finding some redemption in the journey.

Added to the mix, and giving the movie its title, are the descendants: People who own a big, undeveloped chunk of one of the islands, who are being forced to sell. Clooney's character is the controller of the trust, one of the descendants who makes no money from the trust, but lets it appreciate in value while working his modest legal business.

If I were going to fault Payne for anything, in general, it would be an apparent tendency to be muted. Like, WASPy-muted, as if big dramatic tension or emotional displays are in bad taste. And you can make an argument for that in real life, I guess, but in movie-making it means that, for example, when the cuckold has a chance for revenge, but that revenge will potentially destroy a lot of people around him, Payne will work to defuse that as quickly and quietly as possible.

At the same time, there's this pall of horribleness over the whole thing—a woman with one young child and one troubled child is going to die—so the potentially humorous moments are also very muted.

So, yeah. It's not as low-key and depressing as About Schmidt but the journey and redemption lack the exuberance of Sideways. View at your own risk.

My Week With Marilyn

2011-12-04T18:13:00.001-08:00

We're entering the craptacular award season and that can mean only one thing: Pretentious movies! Our favorite local theater got in Like Crazy, Hugo, The Descendants and My Week With Marilyn. So maudlin romance, mob-genre director does family-holiday pic, desultory director with a thing about cuckoldry doin' what he does, and...well, a by now relatively inoffensive sounding flick about a young British lordling who stumbles into his first film job, and finds himself babysitting Marilyn Monroe.

The Flower wanted to come so...yeah, I felt safest with the Marilyn pic. Can it be a biopic if it's only a week long? Would that be a weekopic? A septimanopic? (It sounds cooler in Latin, eh?)

I digress.

This is a fairly pleasant little fantasy pic with Eddie Remayne as the Brit, Colin Clark, who wrote up his little tale in the '70s (and again with uncensored parts included in the '90s). The Flower liked it. The Boy less so.

I liked it more than they did, of course, but there's a lot of a film geekery that's totally over their head. Kenneth Branagh hamming it up as Lawrence Olivier. Julia Ormond (looking older than her years) as Vivien Leigh, whose concern is that Larry might not just fool around with Marilyn but get more seriously involved. Emma Watson as the wardrobe-girl-next-door who gets involved with Colin despite her reservations, only to be dropped precipitously in the presence of Marilyn.

Dame Judy Dench adds some character as Dame Sybil Thorndike. As much as I enjoyed her performance, her role, as the kind voice of wisdom, was a little too neat. That's why I called it a "fantasy pic". Nothing wrong with that.

Of course, a movie like this rises and falls on Marilyn, or the reasonableness of the facsimile thereof. In this case, we have Michelle Williams, who does a very good job indeed, especially considering how little she looks like Monroe. She gets the mannerisms down, the moves, and she presents a plausible image of the personality behind the icon.

She doesn't have it, alas. I mean, I've never been a fan, particularly, but that Marilyn Monroe had something special is as undeniable as it is opaque. Since I get that she's supposed to be her, I get a lot of the buzz that probably didn't seem that clear to the kids. But it's not like you can CGI that stuff in and the movie does a good job of supporting it.

Overall, it works, much in the mold of other "coming-of-age" type stories. So it was probably the best choice for us at that moment in time.

The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito)

2011-11-23T10:26:00.001-08:00

A mad scientist loses his wife in a automobile fire and seeks solace in recreating her appearance on an unwilling victim. Avant-garde cinema or cheesy B-movie plot from the '50s and '60s? Well, why not both, as we see here with Al-muh-DOH-var's—I assume that's how you pronounce Almodóvar—The Skin I Live In. I'm old enough to remember when he still used his first name (Pedro) but this would be the first of his movies that I've seen. Like Tarantino, Spike Lee and a few others, I've always found the trailers to Pedro's films sufficiently off-putting that I never felt the need to see his movies. (A reaction I've overcome in the last few years with Tarantino, to my everlasting ennui.)

Although it's not the best fit, I kept thinking about The Brain That Wouldn't Die, the '62 potboiler about the scientist who saves his girlfriend's head after a car crash, then spends the rest of the movie scouting strippers for a new body while she hectors him from a lasagna pan about his lack of ambition and nags him to take out the garbage. (Or something, it's been a while since I've seen it.)

It's amusing (at least to me) the extent of this movie's overlap with that older one (and other similar old flicks I'm not remembering at the moment). This is a sleazy film filled with unlikable characters, creepy situations and sexual violence. There are also moments of what today might almost be considered high camp.

When the movie opens, Plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is presenting on a new kind of transplantable skin mutated from human and pig cells he developed in honor of his broiled wife, after which some of his shocked peers warn him of the consequences should SCIENCE discover his lapse in ethics. (Mutating human and animal stuff is apparently a no-no.) This scene is reprised later on, when one of his formers business partners threatens to blackmail him by outing him to the scientific community.

Interestingly enough, the whole pig-human thing doesn't really go anywhere. His victim in all this, Vera (the ridiculously beautiful Elena Anaya of Point Blank) doesn't develop super-powers or get bulletproof skin or anything like that. I thought there was going to be a twist where the science went wrong but the movie plays out straight revenge tragedy, basically.

Not that there isn't a twist, mind you. Oh, yes, there's a twist, though I didn't see it coming until about 10 minutes before it popped.

There are other sorta '60s things about this movie, too. The color doesn't used the washed out blue-gray feel that's so popular (hacky!) today, but a more vibrant one. Not exactly Technicolor but Kodachrome(ish). Antonio Banderas has his hair slicked back and walks around in a tuxedo at one point, evoking a Sean-Connery-as-James-Bond figure that's amplified when he holds a gun.

In fact, if you listen to the semi-techno song used in the trailer (and also in the movie's one chase scene), the electric guitar sound is very mid-to-late '60s. I'm not hitting bulls-eyes today but the '60s surfin' classic "Wipeout" comes to mind.

There are no cell phones, computers or modern devices, except for large-screen viewers, which were pretty commonly faked in '60s movies.

So, what's not '60s about it? Well, there's a lot of nudity and it's pretty pornographic which wasn't common in a mainstream, high-budget '60s flick. It's not gratuitous, but it is gross. (The nudity isn't. Did I mention that Elena Anaya is gorgeous?) The sex is done covered or far-away, but it's still very explicit (and often violent) in terms of the imagery Pedro creates in the viewers' mind.

I see this movie being fetish-fuel for a small but intense niche.

Overall? We liked it all right. It could've been shorter. The Boy found it disturbing but it's a fool's errand to try to create much of an impact on the younger generation through shock or transgression. As for myself, I was expecting something bizarre! titillating! shocking! along the typical lines that certain directors endear themselves to certain critics, and I was only put off-guard by the naivete of the genre.

I mean, really: Who makes mad scientist movies any more? In my lifetime, there haven't been that many. The (speaking of pornographic) Re-animator series, that Peter O'Toole/Mariel Hemmingway oddity from '85, Creator, sorta—but really, the modern science-gone-awry is more likely to feature a noble, avuncular scientist rather than a mad one. The science goes awry (these days) because of the evil businessman or a tangential individual's greed.

This movie's sort of like taking Humanoids from the Deep (where mutated fish-men emerge from polluted water to rape women) or Creature from the Black Lagoon and exploring seriously the potential for relationship between the fish-men and the women they kidnap.

So...odd. Well, done, for the most part. Good acting. The music's a little heavy-handed. The graphicness is going to be off-putting for some, to say nothing of the indecency. Vera is the closest thing to a hero the movie has, and for reasons that can't be explained with spoilage, she's hardly pure.

The Boy said he would have a hard time recommending it, and I tend to agree.

Spy Kids 4: Waste of Time

2011-11-20T15:50:00.001-08:00

I said a few reviews ago that all our great directors suck, which is kind of sad, but to my mind not as sad as all our young turks—the promising film-makers of 20 years ago—seem to have not matured into greatness but stay wallowing in the stuff that made them famous without adding any real polish or sophistication.

I've never been a Tarantino fan but when I express disappointment, everyone tells me to go back to Reservoir Dogs. I could make an exception for Kevin Smith, because he really tries to grow and change—and Red State is supposed to be good—but he says he's going to make one more movie (a hockey movie he's been working on for quite some time) and then retire.

Which brings us to Robert Rodriguez and Spy Kids: All The Time In The World. Rodriguez is one of these guys who acquired his skills through tons of time behind a video camera. His movies have always been fast-paced, a little chaotic, and also kind of sloppy and poorly thought out. He usually overwhelmed his shortcomings with style, but the style is played out a bit.

Sin City may be his best movie, simply because so much was laid out in the comic book and he could follow it (and made the choice to follow it) so closely.

In some ways, the Spy Kids series is the ultimate expression of Rodriguez' style. It doesn't have to make any sense as long as it looks cool, any situation can be resolved with CGI, and there's no limit on how ham-handed you can make your pro-family-time message.

The Flower refused to go see this, with her point being that they just kept getting worse and worse. She's not wrong. (The Barb doesn't really care as long as the popcorn keeps flowing, but I couldn't get more of a "pretty good" out of her.)

This time around, it's Jessica Alba in the maternal role. The story goes that Rodriguez was on the set of Machete when Alba's one-year-old let off a diaper bomb and he thought, "Yeah! Mommy spy with baby bombs!" Or maybe, since the Spy Kid franchise has been far-and-away his biggest hits, he just was looking for an excuse to bring it back after eight years.

Alba plays stepmother to two new kids, a gentle hard-of-hearing boy and his really bitchy sister. I thought the sister was older, and maybe she's supposed to be, but the boy actor is actually a little older than the girl. (The actors, Rowan Blanchard and Mason Cook, are fine; the characters are who Rodriguez made them.) Mom is dead, and Alba has to pay, apparently.

Alba's also an ex-spy who's given up her career to raise her baby with Joel McHale, who's a doofus-y TV personality.

Meh. I've already lost interest in explaining it. None of it really matters. It's just a big mess comprised of smaller messes. There's a whole lot of insulting stupid, even for a Spy Kids movie.

Jeremy Piven has a fun role as head of the OSS, who's doing a fast-talking '40s thing. The original kids are back and all grown up. Vega is a hottie now, and Sabara has gotten even odder looking; but even here Rodriguez is just rehashing the same old themes. You know, how many times do these people have to re-learn their family values before they stick?

Oh, Ricky Gervais is the voice of a robotic dog. The English whore.

I've already said "meh" and I don't want to say it again, because this is not a two "meh" movie.

Into The Abyss with Werner Herzog

2011-11-18T22:17:00.001-08:00

Probably the greatest capital punishment movie ever is Dead Man Walking. The temptation—succumbed to frequently throughout the decades by Hollywood—is to show an innocent man wrongly convicted and killed. It's far more interesting, and fair, to show a heinous criminal being killed.

Werner Herzog takes his own interesting approach in his new documentary Into The Abyss. The German film-maker (Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn) gives us the story of a brutal, senseless crime that echos of Crime and Punishment.

Two young men kill a grandmother, Sandra Stotler, for her car for a joyride. Before stealing the car, though, they go deposit the body in a nearby lake. When they go back to get the car, it's after dark and the woman's gated community is locked up. So they wait for her son (Adam Stotler) and his friend (Jeremy Richardson), in order to lure them into the woods to kill them—in order to get the remote to get into the community and steal the car. Later the two are captured after an extended gun battle with the police.

One of the criminals, Michael Perry, is given a death sentence. The other just barely escapes that fate and gets 50 years in prison.

Herzog shows his brilliance—repeatedly—here. First, he says right off the bat that he's against the death penalty, and he lets Perry make his case for his own innocence. (He blames his partner in crime, Jason Burkett.) But then, he details the horrific nature of the crimes, and lets the victim's families expound on their lost love ones. This takes the first third of the film. Further, he never lets the movie go on very far without bringing back on the families.

Herzog is determined that you never forget what these two young men did. Further, he presents sufficient evidence of their guilt. He never tries to present a case of innocence.

For Burkett, though, he also unflinchingly shows the tragedy of his life. His father's in jail across the street, after a lifetime of drug use and dealing, and he's interviewed. Apparently he's got a brother in jail, too. Burkett's father is a particularly tragic figure, whose closest familial memory is a Thanksgiving dinner shared with his two sons who were also in jail.

Indeed, to my eye, these people, who have escaped the executioner's needle, are far more tragic types. They seem redeemable and our system is almost completely incapable of providing any redemption.

But even here, Herzog's not taking a bleeding-heart approach. Among the people interviewed are a couple of other locals who were touched, indirectly, by the crime. One of them was an illiterate miscreant who learned to read in jail—and also learned to stay out of jail and go straight.

Jeremy Richardson's brother was himself a miscreant who was arrested at Jeremy's funeral, and who laments having introduced him to the Perry (or Burkett, or both, I'm not sure), but he seems to be doing better now.

In fact, one thing Herzog does is detail the incredible amount of violence, crime and family dysfunction in Conroe, Texas, which can't help but throw into sharp contrast that most of the people manage to survive the craziness without randomly killing people.

A couple of other good segments include the opening, where the priest who works death row describes his experiences doing it, and a segment where one of the executioners describes how he gave up his job and pension after facilitating over one hundred executions.

A weirder part is the story of Jason Burkett's lawyer who ultimately ends up marrying him and—well, you'll have to see it. (Or Google it.) I think Herzog was trying to say something about hope and life, but it struck me as a tragic echo of Burkett's own life. Or maybe Herzog was just recording the facts.

Despite Herzog's inclination, he lets Adam's sister (Sondra's daughter) describe how seeing Perry's execution lifted a huge weight off her shoulders. He prompts her with "Would a life sentence also have worked?" She agrees, but also quickly slips back into "Some people don't deserve to live."

Herzog wasn't trying to make a political statement or even an issue movie, and he succeeds. He's crafted something much more genuine and complex. Now, one of his producers thinks this is a searing indictment of Rick Perry's Texas but I'm thinking it's just like Dead Man Walking: People who are for the death penalty are going to see that the system worked.

I'm not pro-death penalty myself, but I felt like the system worked here. It's tragic, but Burkett was (and no doubt is) a dangerous man, deserving of a long sentence.

And Perry?

Well, I don't know how Herzog felt, but after getting over the jarring incongruity of the smiling, boyish looking Perry claim his only crime was being homeless and accepting charity from Burkett, I became quickly convinced that he was a sociopath of the first order, like that other famous murderous Perry.

Anyway, this is about more than capital punishment, and definitely worth watching if you're interested in crime (or punishment).

The Boy also liked it, though he felt it, as all documentaries, dragged a bit.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011-11-18T17:56:00.001-08:00

A woman escapes a crazy cult only to find herself unable to fully get away, psychologically and literally. Sure we've seen it before, but have we seen it with this much nudity? Well, yeah, we probably have, but not recently. That was more a '70s supernatural horror plot and Martha Marcy May Marlene is more of suspense thriller.

We were kind of tepid about the movie from the trailer. The line from the LA Weekly was "A thriller that shifts nearly imperceptibly between dream, memory and reality." If that were accurate, it would probably make for a terrible movie. What MMMM does do is switch between two timelines very rapidly—one post-cult, and one mid-cult. But it was almost always very quickly clear which timeline you were in, which was very important to being able to understand what the hell was going on.

Martha toys with the whole "Is it a dream?" idea, but this is a product of her psychological state. The movie itself stays very realistic.

We see Martha struggling with her traditional family, and constantly flashing back to her cult family. What I think the reviewer was getting at was that the cuts were very tight, and there's no warning as to where you are, so you really have to pay attention.

I can't talk about it much, since at least half the point of a movie like this is how things unfold. The drip-drip-drip of the reveal of info about the cult and the simultaneous unfolding of Martha's normal familial relationships.

This movie hangs together really well. You have all these questions about how Martha ends up in the cult and why others can't see that she's not quite right, and the movie trickles out development that makes it all make sense. Again, being opaque here because the experience is really about the discovery.

It's a little weaker the suspense/thriller department. It's good, but it backs off a bit with the tension. The ending is good, but the movie's climax is more about social embarrassment than any real fear. It's like the shape of the movie is tight, just not propelled forcefully forward, like a great thriller.

The Boy liked it, but not enthusiastically. I liked it, too, especially as it managed to show the creepy cult without spreading the creepiness to the viewer, as these movies often do.

J Edgar Whozits

2011-11-14T18:04:00.001-08:00

One of my outré positions is that the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't really have a right to exist under the Constitution, and that J. Edgar Hoover was an evil little troll who was a horrible influence on this country.

So, yeah, Eastwood does a biopic of J. Edgar? Why not.

Let me say, first, that this is classic Eastwood (as director): Much like last year's Hereafter or (say) Million Dollar Baby, the octogenarian auteur is all about telling the story, whatever it is. And, in this case, the story is about an ambitious, vainglorious, sexually repressed blackmailer (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) as he tells the story on the one hand of the history of the FBI, and as the end of his life (as blackmailer in chief) is threatened by the incoming President Nixon on the other.

I can't help but admire the direction, which is unflinching and unsentimental. He doesn't demonize Hoover—who could arguably benefit from a demonization—but he portrays him gathering his blackmail and expanding his powers, good intentions cheerfully in tow.

And yet. It's not a great movie, and I'm inclined to blame screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. If Tim Burton has daddy issues, and Alfred Hitchcock had issues with being falsely accused, Mr. Black has gay issues.

Actually, before I get to those, I want to also say that it seems like everyone has some issues when it comes to this movie. I read quite a few reviews of this beforehand (which I don't normally) at places like Big Hollywood and PJMedia and I'm not convinced we all saw the same movie.

For example, I read a reference to Hoover's mother, as played by Judi Dench, as domineering, which feeds into the clichéd gay thing, But that really reduces the role to a cartoonish level that isn't warranted. Dench's portrayal is stern and forbidding, but not domineering.

Likewise, getting back into the gay thing, Hoover is (at least initially) portrayed as a complex person, or perhaps if you prefer, a very simple person for whom sex (in whatever form) isn't on the menu. Sex is only going to be permissible if it's of a non-blackmail-able variety, is sort the impression you get.

But then Black goes whole hog (as it were) into "Hoover was a homosexual but refused to act on it." I'm of two minds as far as this goes: One, it's a completely hack and stereotyped way to indulge in a little fantasy; and two, it has the effect of humanizing Hoover in a very unlikely way, a way that makes the movie rather more watchable.

I think there's a little truth to both these ideas, but it also has a couple of other effects: One is that it's complete fantasy. I don't mean Hoover wasn't gay, 'cause I don't know. (I'd always heard he was a transvestite, though, and TVs are usually men—often macho men. But on reflection, it seems unlikely that the king of the blackmailers would ever put himself in a compromising situation.) What I mean is that the completely undocumented aspect of his relationship with Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) gives Black free reign to do this sort of wish-fulfillment thing.

This includes a scene where Hoover and Tolson (Armie Hammer) virtually swish over the gaucheness of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball at Del mar, and Tolson describes Dorothy Lamour as "camp". (That's not the only time that the dialog assaults the ear with a too modern sound, but it's one of the most egregious ones.)

The other effect of this, though, is that we're sort of mired in this (ultimately trivial) aspect of Hoover's life. This is the problem with the modern obsession with private details: The real story gets crowded out. This is sometimes justifiable, say, with something like The King's Speech (another largely fictitious but far more interesting movie).

But here, it doesn't matter that Hoover is gay (at least partially evinced by the fact that he probably wasn't). It could have been just as interesting to see him as bottled up, and tested by his attraction to Dorothy Lamour (who claimed to have an affair with him).

And it's not like there isn't 50 years of interesting dirt about Hoover, you know? The whole thread feels self-indulgent.

It's a flawed biopic. The acting is good. I think Dicaprio—who normally leaves me kind of cold—did one of his better jobs here. A lot of criticism has been leveled at the old age makeup, and it's got some validity to it, but I kind of register that as a big "so what"? Old age makeup is always bad, and always has been.

I would have preferred to see more actual FBI stuff. The fact that the FBI got their guns as a result of the Lindbergh kidnapping perhaps beginning the precedent that states that all laws named after children are bad ones.

HBO did a movie a few years back on the Lindbergh kidnapping which took the point-of-view that Hauptmann was innocent of the charges, whereas this movie posits that he didn't act alone—that he was maybe a patsy for the real criminals. Sorta. He's essentially a vehicle for the bureau's expansion of power.

Then there's the whole FBI rising while denying the existence of the mafia. What up wid dat? I mean, seriously, if you're going to go into fantasy-land about the story, how about bringing in the mafia? As a character study, wouldn't it have been more interesting to know (or speculate) on whether it was pride, arrogance, stupidity or something else causing Hoover's complete bungling of the major crime issue of his day?

Ah, well, lost opportunity. Also, keep in mind that my review isn't much like any of the others I've read, so maybe I saw a different movie from the ones other people saw, or the one you'd see.

As an Eastwood fan since Flags of our Fathers, The Boy was a bit disappointed, and found it overlong, though not especially so for a biopic. As someone more-or-less ignorant of the politics and history, his experience viewing the movie was probably one of the purer ones, and he rated it "so-so".

In Time (and Out Of Luck)

2011-11-10T19:07:00.001-08:00

The Boy's weakness is popcorn so we sometimes end up going to the movies even when there's nothing to see. The choices this week were between Tower Heist and In Time. The Flower wants to see Tower Heist but I refused to take The Boy to see that on the grounds that I don't want to listen to him rant about it for the next day.

In Time is written, produced and directed by Andrew Niccol who also did Gattaca. Now, I've seen Gattaca but I didn't really remember it well. I know that people think it's a pretty intelligent sci-fi, so I thought this might be similar.

Well, the good news for Gattaca fans is this is extremely similar. The bad news is that means it's extremely contrived, kind of dull and frankly kind of stupid. The good news is it's well shot, romantic and occasionally insightful.

Did I mention contrived?

The premise, literally, is that time is money. People buy stuff with time. They work for time. And, the crux of the movie, some have lots more time than others. Also: When you run out of time, you die.

Everyone starts with one year on their clock (shown in handy digital format on your forearm), which starts at the age of 25. At 25, you stop aging completely, but if your clock ever runs out, you die. (And if your clock never runs out, you never die.) The ghetto people are constantly scrabbling for enough time to make it through the next day, while the prices for everything constantly go up.

When we meet our hero, Will (Justin Timberlake), he's celebrating his mother's 50th birthday. His mother is Olivia Wilde, so that's weird. Anyway, Will is a stand-up guy who shares his time with his mom, and ends up saving the life of a guy walking around in the ghetto with 100 years on his arm before a bunch of thugs kill him. Will sets out to get some social justice, and there's your movie.

Oh, and he meets rich girl, Amanda Seyfried, who I think is the only actor in the film who is actually 25. And, yeah, at 35, Cillian Murphy as the copy out to get Will is an awful hard 25.

There are some good parts to the movie. The poor people are constantly running around while the rich people move with not just deliberate slowness but with caution, since they're immortal as long as they don't die in an accident or violent act. There were occasional touches like that had a certain kind of profound resonance.

These are totally overwhelmed by the stupid, though. If you really had 26 years to live, you'd start accumulating time as soon as you could. People in the movie are constantly cutting it close, down to the second, and gratuitously so. Suffice to say, you wouldn't do that. No one would. The chance for a minor snafu to result in death—well, it happens all over the place in this movie, and it's just not plausible.

Then there's the question of where the time comes from. It's not really explained at all. At one point, one of the characters is revealed to have a million years. If everyone starts with a year, though, that would mean a million people had to die at 25 just to accumulate that one million, which is just one of many millions the man is presumed to have.

That's not really workable.

But if the time isn't intrinsic (drawn from living people) then it must be extrinsic, and thereby create-able. That would make more sense and a better parallel with money as we currently know it, but it would undermine the premise of the movie.

But then, the movie undermines its own premise at every turn. Murphy's cop is obsessed with the notion that Will is going to destroy the system with his newfound wealth. Yet, at one point, he delivers a speech clearly designed as an attack on our current system: Basically, the people support the system because they think they might one day become super-wealthy with time, but there's no actual chance of that.

Well, okay, but if it's true that people support the system because they have that hope, then shouldn't someone occasionally make it? Wouldn't Will's success be supportive of the system, just like the occasional American's success causes us all to support the awful American system even though it's all rigged against us. (And, yeah, this basically comes off as an anti-western civilization flick.)

Contradictions, holes, and stupidity is all well and good, but the movie is polluted with time puns, too. People live in "time zones". Thugs who steal time from others are "minute men". The cops are "time keepers". People constantly say "I finally had the time to ..." meaning they literally had some money to spend.

On top of that, the movie manages to be dull. I'm not even sure how. I think it's all the contrivance. Like a lot of the superhero movies where the battles just seem to go on till the director gets bored but the audience was bored all along because it's all so obvious.

Timberlake is good. He radiates good-guy-ness. (I know a lot of people hate this guy but they also seem to begrudgingly admit he's good, and he is.) I'm not sure Olivia Wilde and he pull of a maternal relationship, but it's so incongruous it's hard to tell. Cillian Murphy is good, as always, and the only one whose character development has a certain element of surprise to it.

I'm not a big fan of Amanda Seyfried (I don't dislike her but I don't get her recent super success) but she's surprisingly appealing as the spoiled rich girl.

Anyway, I didn't avoid a Boy Rant. He hated it with a white-hot passion. Claimed it was worse than Atonement, which is kind of our barometer for bad movie-making. Atonement was only populated by icky people versus the stupid here.

The popcorn was good though. And comped. So there's that.

Captain America. F--- Yeah!

2011-11-10T17:30:00.001-08:00

I finally got around to seeing Captain Ameria: The Last Trailer For The Avengers Movie and it was...well, a movie. The superhero things are kind of losing their luster for me; the gee-whiz factor has really been gone for years—a casualty of ubiquitous CGI—but the real thing is just that the movies are getting (predictably) worse.

Captain America starts very strong. It's World War II (the best war). We're introduced to the physically frail Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, who played The Human Torch in The Fantastic Four movies) who, like all red-blooded young American men in 1943 wants to enlist in the armed forces. But he's just a wreck, physically. 4F.

He finds a way in when he's picked out by an army scientist for a super-soldier person. The scientist (Stanley Tucci, who seems to enliven every movie he's in, no matter how otherwise banal) reasons that an honorable, frail man will respect the power that the super-soldier program will give him in a way a naturally powerful man might not.

This part of the film is really good. It's unabashedly pro-American. Rogers is a truly heroic character in his wimpy form. And the transformation from wimpy dude to muscle-bound hero is great. (Well, really, it's the imposition of Chris Evans' face on a frail body that's so impressive.)

It's after he becomes Captain America that things start to drift. First, he's off selling war bonds. This is kind of cool and realistic, but it goes on too long. But then it gets into the action. And the action is, well, meh.

You know, director Joe Johnston has made one really excellent film: October Sky. But I guess that stuff don't pay the bills, so he does stuff like Wolf Man and Hidalgo—which, upon reflection all suffer in the same way. Johnston likes his characters, and you see this in a lot of little ways. Every character seems to matter.

But the action is just dull. It's all of the "fight until the scene is over" kind of stuff. The story progresses as it should but lacks tension and excitement.

Acting-wise, Evans seems to have gone to charm school since his Johnny Storm days, which is good, given the role. Hayley Atwill is appealing even if her character is somewhat stale even by comic book standards. Tommy Lee Jones is Tommy Lee Jones. And Toby Jones is Toby Jones, but with an English accent.

Then there's the villainous Red Skull. He's played by Hugo Weaving, who's been a popular heavy since his days of menacing Keanu Reeves in the Matrix movies. (He also made elves a lot more menacing than I imagined them to be in Lord of the Rings.) Thing is? He's actually way scarier without the Red Skull makeup.

The Red Skull's villainy is another place where director Johnston seems to lack conviction. I mean, he's a Nazi and he's got all kinds of blasty weapons, but there's no blowing-up-a-planet moment. I never felt like he was a real threat to the Captain.

Suffice to say that The Boy was mildly offended at the stupidity of the action scenes. Even with low expectations, they weren't met. And we did find ourselves talking about how bad the scenes were. Like, when the Captain is conducting his first raid amongst a crowd of laser-gun equipped Nazis, you can see the various Nazi extras waiting for their turn to attack. And the Boy felt it was unrealistic for a bunch of soldiers to be firing with automatic weapons at point blank range and not hit anything.

I've always kind of liked Johnston's movies, even when they weren't popular (like Hidalgo), but this whole movie felt a lot like padding. I'm feeling a little milked by the Marvel folks. This bodes ill for the Avengers movie.

Margin Call

2011-11-05T00:04:00.000-07:00

We were even less enthusiastic about Margin Call than The Rum Diary, not really feeling in the mood to have a bunch of people who know nothing about high finance lecture us on the evils of high finance, but The Boy's grandfather recommended it (mostly on the strength of the acting). The Boy likes to tell people why their opinions are wrong, so he figured there'd be at least that going for it.

We didn't hate it, but on reflection it does sort of seem exactly like what we thought: People who don't understand high finance trying to lecture on the evils of high finance. But there's a kind of honesty there: They don't try to demonize everyone involved which is good, but at the price of there being no really strong moral dilemma.

Basically, the story is that a finance company has found that the commodities (mortgage-backed securities) it's trading are worthless, and therefore must figure out how to save itself. The story trickles up from a recently fired risk assessor (Stanley Tucci) to a young ex-rocket scientist (Zachary Quinto, who also has a producer credit) and his younger, money obssessed buddy (Penn Badgley), their boss (Paul Bettany), his boss (Kevin Spacey), his boss (Simon Baker) and his boss, the owner of the company (Jeremy Irons). Also, Demi Moore, who seems to be above Spacey but maybe catty-corner to him.

And this is after three layers between the top and the bottom have been eliminated in a big layoff.

The movie gets away with not understanding what's going on by having most of its characters not understand either. (Quinto and Tucci's characters are really the only ones who get it, and most of the characters aren't even interested. This may be true.)

So, I liked the acting, sure. And I thought the characters were well developed, although The Boy disagrees, finding only Bettany's character of interest. The dramatic tension boils down to will they or won't they dump all this worthless stuff on the market, thus ushering in financial disaster. Which characters will go along and which will follow their consciences?

The narrative really, really wants Kevin Spacey be the good guy, but Jeremy Irons—who's pretty clearly meant to be villainous—makes the best points.

Worst of all, the movie uses a sledgehammer of a metaphor, in the form of Spacey's character's dying dog, whom Spacey has been spending tons of money and emotional capital on, but doesn't have the heart to put down. Sheesh.

The Boy was particularly uninterested, but he was 12-ish when the crash occurred and so he didn't have the necessary baggage to understand what the whole impact of everything was. I did, but I was far from bowled over.

The Rum Diary

2011-11-04T23:43:00.000-07:00

"Is it me, or was that a little...murky?" quoth The Boy upon departing the new Johnny Depp tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary. Or was it The Rum Diaries. Well, whichever, the key thing is the rum part.

The movie is based on HST's novel, which I'm sure I started reading at one point, and pretty sure I never finished, and reminded me of the people I've known who were heavy drug users: They start with good ideas and then just wander off in a haze.

The story concerns a hard-drinking journalist (aren't they all) in 1960 Puerto Rico who writes for the island's ailing rag and stumbles into a role with a developer who plans to turn the island's gorgeous coast into a row of hotels serving doughy, white middle-class bowlers. (Apparently, midwesterners went to Puerto Rico to bowl in the '50s. Who knew?)

The movie opens fairly strong, capturing the kind of gonzo feel HST communicated at his best. At its worst it's self-serving, self-indulgent and elitist. (Is it really so awful that someone puts up hotels that employee 10,000 people?) Then there's the drug use.

Point is, the movie defuses itself and seems to be really more about HST than, say, the audience. It's all kind-of proto-'60s, counter-culture, anti-establishment which doesn't seem all that relevant today.

Good acting from Depp, reminding me of his work in Ed Wood. Richard Jenkins plays the cranky (aren't they all) editor-in-chief. Aaron Eckhart plays to type as the evil developer. Amber Heard is beautiful, wild and vulnerable. Michael Rispoli, whom I'm not familiar with, does a fine job as Depp's sidekick. Giovanni Ribisi plays their crazy, drunk, Nazi-loving sort-of roommate.

Cinematographer Bruce Robinson hasn't directed a film since 1992's Jennifer Eight but I think he does fine with the material, which is what it is. Maybe a few too many scenery shots of PR.

You can probably guess if you have any interest at all, based on your feelings about gonzo novelizing and Hunter S. Thompson, but even if you're a fan, I don't think you're going to find this satisfying.

The Way of All Estevezes

2011-11-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

I just saw the new Emilio Estevez movie! How many times do you get to say that in your life? I didn't see Bobby and I don't count his made-for-cable semi-biographical story of the Mitchell brothers Rated X. So, for me, the last time I could say that would be for Wisdom, the first movie Estevez directed in which he starred with Demi Moore as Bonnie and Clyde-style bank robbers of sorts.

Not a great movie but not, I thought, at all unwatchable. So, 25 years later, I was actually kind of favorably inclined toward seeing this film, and I can honestly say it's the best Emilio Estevez movie ever. That sounds kind of snarky but it's not really.

In fact, it's kind of cool: This is the third movie in as many weeks we've seen where the question of religion and spirituality were central to the story. Machine Gun Preacher is (far and away) the best and boldest (probably too much for some) of the three, but Take Shelter has its own quiet depth in its smaller scope.

The Way has an even smaller scope still, as the story of a father—played by real life father Martin Sheen—who goes to collect his son's remains in Europe after he dies attempting The Way of Saint James, a thousand year old pilgrimage. The younger Estevez' role is virtually a cameo; this movie could be seen as a vehicle for Sheen, who I kept hoping would say "Campostela. I can't believe I'm still in Campostela."

Basically, the son, Daniel has dropped out of school a year before getting his PhD in Cultural Anthropology and decided instead to walk The Way. His father, Tom (an optometrist) objects strenuously, tells him he's ruining his life, and that real people can't take a month off their life for this sort of thing.

Of course, I'm sitting there thinking "Emilio Estevez is 50. If he hasn't gotten his degree by now, he's already wasted his life." I mean, if he's still in that "studying in preparation to launch his life," he's kind of missed the boat. Now, he's playing a guy ten years younger (nearly 40, I think the movie says) and so is Martin Sheen ("over 60" compared to real life over 70), but even then I gotta wonder how much a difference a month makes.

But I rolled with it. The movie wanted father-son tension in a neat package, and this was reasonable shorthand.

Anyway, next thing you know, Daniel has died on the first day of his journey and Tom must go to France to collect him. (The Way is mostly in Spain but can start in France.) Once there, Tom becomes possessed with the idea of traveling The Way for Daniel, and spreading his ashes along the route.

This is basically the start of the movie—really, you can get all this from the trailer.

So we got ourselves a road picture. A pilgrim's progress, if you will. The elder Tom taking the 650 mile walk using Daniel's supplies and carrying his ashes on his back. Naturally, he ends up with companions on this trip: a fat, jolly Dutch man, a sexy, bitter (Canadian?) divorcee and a drunk Irishman with writer's block.

Yeah, it's a little cliché. Occasionally, the dialogue gets precious in its attempt to be profound, but for the most part the younger Estevez stays his pen and lets the imagery and the action speak for him.

The four travelers are making their pilgrimage for non-religious, nor hardly even spiritual reasons, which is interesting. The Dutch guy, Joost, is just trying to lose weight. The divorcee, Sarah, is trying to give up smoking. Jack, the drunk Irish writer, is not on a pilgrimage so much as interviewing pilgrims for a travelogue piece. (Apparently, travelogues of The Way are about as old as The Way itself.)

Nonetheless, religion is everywhere, and the movie evokes a kind of Chaucerian feel, with characters drifting in-and-out, and giving a sense of this-is-how-things-have-been-for-centuries. (Maybe it's more Dickensian, but I kept thinking Canterbury Tales.) There's an interesting effect to all this, like God is watching all, and providing some sort of proving ground for the travelers.

In other words, the spirituality of the thing catches up with them, even if they don't quite recognize it. Where this struck me—and maybe this was just me—was with Deborah Kara Unger, who plays the divorceé, and Angelina Molina who plays the caretaker at the pilgrims' first overnight stop. These are both women who are famous, to a large extent, for being beautiful (and Unger's figure, while well covered, does attract our male travelers' attention), but they are not made up or shot in glowing light or anything of that sort.

Angelina Molina has the hand of death on her face. When Tom asks her if she's ever done the trip she says, "When I was young I was too busy. Now I am too old." She's only 55! But she really does look dramatically old.

The whole thing comes off very well, as a very nice movie, with a kindness and depth that maybe isn't really warranted. (Heh.) But it's good. It's not boring. Certain choices are interesting: Jack, the Irish writer, is a cute device for teasing information about Daniel out of Tom, and thereby Tom and his relationship with Daniel—but after setting it up, Estevez just has Tom do a short, very generic (like horoscope-level) bit of exposition and then pulls back, so you can't hear what Tom's saying.

The result is we don't ever really know what Tom or Daniel is like. We only know Tom on his path from grief—another movie-based convenience is that he has to basically go through his catharsis about Daniel in 30 days. I think it's too soon. Reality might be closer to a year of mourning, followed by doing the pilgrimage, but narratives work better when compressed.

Anyway, it's a choice. And I'm not sure the movie suffers much, if at all, from it. They're a father and son. They don't always see eye-to-eye. Specific issues might have ended up seeming overly cute. At the same time, the movie isn't necessarily going to resonate deeply as a result.

Overall, a job well done by Emilio, and a tour-de-force for Martin.

Take Shelter

2011-10-30T15:55:00.000-07:00

Michael Shannon is acting weird again! This fine actor who gave such a touching performance in Machine Gun Preacher and of course haunted the creepy movie Bug, is having terrible dreams in this new brooding little flick called Take Shelter.

These are really bad dreams, that affect him through the rest of the day. A storm's a comin', and all hell's gonna break loose. So, naturally, he starts to build out his storm shelter. In fact, he becomes obsessed with it, spending too much money, time, and social capital. However, he's not sure he's not crazy, either. So all the while he's doing this, he's going to various medical and psychological doctors, and visiting with his mother (Kathy Baker, who was also in Machine Gun Preacher) who went schizophrenic at about his age.

And there's your movie.

This movie's been a bit overhyped. OK, you probably never heard of it, unless you're into these little films like we are, but if you are, you've seen that it won at Cannes and has high ratings at IMDB and gets glowing reviews and so on.

And it is a good movie. But it falls just short of greatness.

The first act is action packed. We see Curtis' (Shannon) nightmares, and they're quite horrific. Of course, as the audience, you're more inclined to believe what you see, so you're inclined to believe that these visions are literal prophecy. Or at least true portents.

The second act, though, takes us out of most of the dreams which has the dual effect of reducing the intensity of the film and making you seriously doubt whether he's sane or not. This works but it radically shifts the tone of the film.

The third act is a rollercoaster, threatening the worst possible ending at one point.

Ultimately, it works, although the ending poses some interesting problems, not least geographically concerning the distance between Columbus, Ohio and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Shannon is good, of course, as always. He brings empathy to roles that might—heh, well roles that might not warrant it, though not in this case.

What really makes the movie stand out, though, is Jessica Chastain, and her role as Curtis' wife Samantha. She loves him, she's proud of him, she's grateful to him, she supports him, she does what she can for the family, she's strong but not mean or stubborn—and it's all put to the test by his deteriorating mental state. She's basically the perfect wife and mother.

There used to be more of those in movies. Someone somewhere decided that was a demeaning or too secondary. And yet this movie wouldn't have worked without it. Curtis' challenge becomes her challenge, becomes the family challenge—even the community's challenge as the normally stalwart Curtis' starts to bring his life down around his ears.

The Boy said something on the way out, though. "It's strange that there was no God in the movie."

It was, kind of. I think any actual Presence would've made the movie less popular with critics and would have necessitated a different ending.

It's also kind of interesting that the last three movies we've seen have all dealt with spiritual issues: Machine Gun Preacher, Take Shelter and the new Emilio Estevez movie, The Way. Religion was definitely a thread throughout this film but Curtis' visions are never put into any religious frame (nor even incidental symbols that I picked up).

We recommend, but less enthusiastically than others.

The Zookeeper

2011-10-22T21:04:00.000-07:00

So, apparently, Kevin James is a bit overweight and hilariously awkward. Surely no more evergreen premise for a film since the days of (the wrongly maligned) Fatty Arbuckle. Remember what I said about being a dad in The Smurfs review?

Yeah, double that here. The Barb loves her some movie popcorn (though she doesn't like to share a bag) and The Flower wanted to see this comedy about a zookeeper who takes advice from animals in order to win over an ex-girlfriend.

Profoundly stupid. Like, Tron: Legacy level stupidity.

The premise is that animals can, apparently, speak English and relate to each other more-or-less exactly the way humans do, but they don't because it doesn't end well most of the time. They make an exception for James' character because he's having such a hard time of things and he's such a swell guy to them.

So, naturally, when a wolf tells him he needs to pee everywhere, well, that's what he does. Because, of course, that's what you'd do, right? A wolf tells you you need to mark your territory to entrance a mate, you'd naturally pee all over a fancy restaurant.

At least he didn't start throwing feces, like the monkey suggested.

Actually, in the "small favors" category, I was at least pleased that they mostly kept the story out of the gutter. Of all the suggestions made by the animals, I don't remember any references to penis size or the sex act itself. I suppose that may be partly because actual animal mating isn't very funny when transposed on to humans. ("Beat the crap out of the other guy, then hunt her down and take her." More horror movie material, really.)

So, this was an hour and forty minutes of me trying to figure out who the animal voices were. I spotted Sylvester Stallone as the lion easily enough, and Nick Nolte as the Silverback Gorilla. But Cher (as the lioness) and Adam Sandler (as the monkey) bugged me through most of the movie. I spotted Maya Rudolph as the giraffe somehow, but not Judd Apatow as the elephant, Don Rickles as the frog or Jon Favreau as the bear.

But then I didn't really care much.

Sandler's fingerprints are all over this movie, which wouldn't have to a bad thing, of necessity, but it sort of feels like second-tier hand-me-down vehicle Sandler himself wouldn't star in. (I guess they'd have had to make do without all the fat jokes.)

James is pretty talented. He does some good work. But the set pieces really don't work. There's a "wacky" bicycle race between him and Joe Rogan which comes off neither as particularly wacky and just plain unfunny, unless you're going for "look at the fat guy on the silly three wheeler", which they probably were.

It was sort of interesting to see "Game" concepts come up: James plays a classic "beta male" nice guy trying to get back Leslie Bibb from the clutches of major douchebag Joe Rogan. Bibb somehow sees "potential" in James—a high income earner, if only he'd leave his true love: The zoo.

The bigger the jerk James is to Bibb, the more she likes him, and it's a credit to James that he can pull off both characters with ease. But meanwhile, working at this same zoo? Rosario Dawson. She shares his passion for all things zoo-y and doesn't seem completely repulsed by him.

I don't need to spell this out for you. It so by-the-numbers, you know exactly how the climactic scene is going to play out the first instant you see Dawson come on screen. (And, really, last-minute-rushes-to-save-the-day really work best if you provide some back story, but The Zookeeper streamlines your experience by not providing any support whatsoever.)

It did strike me as dumb. There's never any doubt about what's going to happen in this movie, which would be fine, if it were funnier and more plausible. (Hell, strike the "more plausible" part.) And Dawson, somehow, has become the ultimate beta-loser's girlfriend (see Clerks II and The Rundown). I'm not sure how that happened. But we're supposed to believe that James overlooks Dawson somehow, until she puts on an evening gown. It's almost insulting the intelligence beyond the whole talking animal thing.

At least they didn't put her in glasses, and have her take them off dramatically.

Pfeh.

The girls liked it okay. The Barb was clearly bored in parts but offered no particular complaints. But then, she's five and it has funny talking animals. I didn't hear either of them laughing much. I did, a couple of times.

I am grateful for the little things, particularly that they kept it clean outside of a way too many scenes of James peeing on things. But it wasn't worth my $3.

My Afternoons With Margueritte

2011-10-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

Continuing 2011's French-a-palooza (which includes Sarah's Key, Point Blank, The Hedgehog, The Names of Love and Incendies) is the Gerard Depardieu vehicle My Afternoons With Margueritte. Depardieu's relentless approaching of a bowling ball in shape notwithstanding, this is a lovely, lovely film.

Depardieu plays Germain, a laborer of no small skill set—he does construction, raises vegetables to sell at market, carves wood—but of very small brain. Well, not really small brain, but (as we see) very horrible childhood. His mother shames him. His schoolteacher humiliates him. And the upshot is that he's averse to all things reading, and as a result quite ignorant indeed.

He takes his lunch in the park, where he names and tallies the pigeons, and one day, as he's counting, an old lady, Margueritte, already sitting there says "There are nineteen." They discuss the pigeons for a while, and Margueritte says that he reminds her of a passage from The Plague, which she's reading. She takes it out and reads the passage and the somewhat thick-headed Germain is entranced.

She offers him the book, but he demurs, is logophobia still intact. So, instead, she reads to him from the book over the next ten days in the park, and a friendship is born.

The story takes us through Germain's life in flashbacks, and through this new future where he becomes a different person to his friends—an educated man, almost, though still disastrously thick sometimes.

Depardieu's performance is truly wonderful in the subtleness of the transformation.Gisele Casadesus, who was in both Sarah's Key and The Hedgehog, has a sweet and generous turn as the motherly Margueritte (two "T"s for her father didn't know how to spell it). Sophie Guillemin is the ridiculously gorgeous bus driver and girlfriend to Germain who somehow makes that work without being creepy. Claire Maurier (whom I last saw in Amelie) plays Germain's complex and, sometimes, frankly insane mother.

If you have any affinity for reading or the printed word, you'll probably be charmed by this film. The Boy, who's not a big reader—and who maintains his loathing for the French despite all the movies (heh)—really enjoyed it.

I loved it, of course, and find it a shame that this will probably fall into the forgotten dust heap of history, missing an audience that would love it greatly.

Smurf Me With A Smurfin' Smurf

2011-10-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

As you probably know, I'm a dad. And the spread between my children means that, at any given moment in the past 20 years, I've had to see dumb movies. Given our limited time and the existence of Pixar, I've been fortunate enough to steer the kids mostly to the better films, but I have not escaped the occasional Alvin and the Chipmunks, Dungeons and Dragons (okay, I probably would've seen it anyway) and, now, Smurfs.

The Smurfs is a comic strip from the '60s, by a Belgian dude who probably got drunk with one of his buddies and decided it would be hilarious to replace arbitrary nouns and verbs in a sentences with "Smurf". I mean, seriously, that's how it started, though the word was "schtroumph". From there he made little blue dudes, basically in the mold of Disney's dwarfs, where each Smurf's name matches their personality, like Happy Smurf, Sneezy Smurf or Sleepy Smurf—at one point everyone agrees that they don't much like Passive-Aggressive Smurf. Or, rather confusingly, if not their personality, their name matches their trade, like Plumber Smurf or Gigolo Smurf.

Kidding, of course. There are no plumbers or gigolos in Smurf village. There is a lot of toilet humor in the movie, however. I mean that literally, with Smurfs constantly falling into the damn things. And there are no gigolos because Smurfs are all male except for one, Smurfette.

Smurfette was created by the Smurf's evil nemesis Gargamel in order to destroy their society. Seems all it takes to mess up paradise is a chick.

Gargamel is a degenerate middle-aged wizard who wears a bathrobe and is constantly after Smurf essence for its magical powers, which are considerable. Considerable, but completely unavailable to the Smurfs themselves for some unexplored reason. Fortunately, Gargamel's incompetence is only exceeded by his general creepiness.

The story, such as it is concerns, Clumsy Smurf accidentally leading Gargamel to the hidden Smurf village, and the ensuing rampage (which is kind of horrifying) causes a group of Smurfs to go to the forbidden zone which contains a portal to New York City, wherein they meet up with a young(ish) ad exec on the verge of either great success or failure. So they have to get back before Gargamel captures them and, I dunno, takes over the world or something.

There are some problems with this film, to say the least. The first and foremost is that it's a really stupid concept. I mean, Smurfs in general are. There's just not much to hang your hat on there. You know what Grouchy Smurf. Gutsy Smurf and Clumsy Smurf are gonna do at any given moment.

The second one is that the voices don't work. Not that they're bad, exactly. It's just that they don't really seem to be coming out of the Smurfs themselves most of the time. Sound mixing fail.

The third is that Gargamel usually comes off like a creepy perverted avuncular figure than exactly evil. I mean, he is evil. His intentions seem to be to enslave the Smurfs, after all. But, probably to avoid being too scary, he's more of a weirdly comic figure. His cat, Azrael is a CGI disaster, combining a completely literal cat with human facial expressions and movement. Pure nightmare fuel.

The fourth is the (not new) idea that old, stale catch-phrases are still funny if a Smurf (or a talking CGI animal, or a cat with a hat and a sword) says them.

The fifth is the movie's 80% commitment to itself. Mostly, the movie is done sincerely, and that's good. It leads to some awful "be true to yourself" crap at the climax but that was probably inevitable. The remaining 20%, where the movie sort of winks at you grossly and says "We know. We're all better than this, really," makes me want to leave.

There are moments when Gargamel points out (facetiously) that Papa Smurf lives in the village which his 99 sons and one daughter—and there's nothing weird about that—or when the word "smurf" is clearly being used as a substitute for something lewd. that the movie both recycles 20 year old Smurf humor and snarks at itself at the same time where I really wanted to leave.

You're not better than this movie: You're making this movie. You took the cheapest (narratively speaking) route, going with a fish-out-of-water story and struggling-young-man-wrestles-with-his-conscience-but-Smurfs-show-him-the-way story. Own it. And this brings me to the last major failure.

See, the cast and CGI are pretty top-notch. It's not quite an A-List cast: Neal Patrick Harris is the lead human, and Hank Azaria provides most of the movie's scarce moments of genuine humor. In fact, Hank Azaria unintentionally invokes Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, in that you can't help but think to yourself, "Wow. They spent $120 million to make this piece of smurf."

And you sort of end up thinking, "Well, they got NPH because they couldn't get Justin Timberlake, Jayma Mays is his girlfriend insetad of Katherine Heigl, they got Hank Azaria instead of, I dunno, F. Murray Abrahams, Sofia Vergara instead of Penelope Cruz," and so on. Down to the cameos: Tim Gunn instead of Stacey and Clinton, Liz Smith instead of Mary Hart, and Joan Rivers instead of someone living.

And this carries down to the voice level. Anton Yelchin plays clumsy, maybe instead of Jesse Eisenberg, Jonathan Winters (still alive!) is Papa Smurf instead of Bob Hoskins, Smurfette is Katy Perry instead of Lady Gaga, George Lopez is Grouchy instead of, well, anyone else at all.

Not that any of these people do a bad job. Azaria, as I've mentioned, does what he can to buoy the proceedings. Yelchin has a nice, mild nasality to his voice. Alan Cummings does an excellent Scottish Brogue. And it's cute when Katy Perry says "I kissed a Smurf and I liked it."

But overall, it's a soulless exercise in budgeting and overseas gross receipts. (The movie grossed a modest $120M domestically but three-times more world-wide.) Probably the only indispensable cast member was Frank Welker, who's the cat-voice of Azrael. Apart from Welker, Narrator Smurf Tom Kane, and John Kassir, every voice is stunt casting. Welker and Kassir were both voices in the '80s Smurf cartoon, in fact.

This movie is the epitome of modern Hollywood, really. A movie so calculated, pre-packaged and lab-tested to make money, the chance of any actual art occurring is near zero.

The Barbarienne proclaimed the movie "smurftastic" and I couldn't disagree.

But I don't think we meant the same thing.

50/50

2011-10-22T16:36:00.000-07:00

The trend of trailers revealing all the plot and most of the best lines of a movie continues apace with the new movie "from the makers of Superbad", 50/50. I guess the trailer guys don't care about anything other than opening weekend.

It's a credit to this movie's acting, editing, direction and just heart, that those lines are still funny in the movie, even after you've seen them in the trailer a dozen times.

"From the creators of Superbad," the trailers tell us and, yeah, this is pretty much the Superbad guys ten years later, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the Michael Cera role and Seth Rogen in the Jonah Hill role. That is to say, Seth Rogen is finally playing himself. (Both films are autobiographical of Seth Rogan, though in Superbad his skinny friend is childhood buddy Evan Goldberg,and in 50/50 his skinny friend is Will Reiser.)

Anyway, the two leads are a big leap in the looks and charm department from the earlier film, but the heart is still very similar: Gordon-Levitt's character Adam is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and his buddy Kyle is there to help him through it. Kyle is crude, a little reckless, and more than a little insensitive but he's a friend, and this friendship goes a long way.

Adam's girlfriend is played by rapidly-becoming-stereotyped-as-a-high-maintenance-bitch actress Bryce Dallas Howard, whose behavior is as predictable as it is tragic in how Adam fails to see it coming.

The movie basically concerns how Adam handles his cancer—the 50/50 of the title referring to his odds of survival, and how those around him handle it, and does so with a fairly light touch. Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer provide a little perspective as (much older) patients receiving chemo at the same time as Adam. Angelica Huston—who for some reason I kept thinking was Olympia Dukakis—plays Adam's mother, and their relationship (as well as his relationship with his senile father, played by Serge Houde).

The other interesting relationship is between Adam and a brand-spanking new counselor, Katherine. The two have a kind of tension as Katherine tries very hard to help Adam, but her constant assurances that what he's feeling is "perfectly normal" isn't as soothing as she thinks it should be. (I've noticed that a lot these days: People trying to comfort others, at least in movies, by saying "That's perfectly normal." I don't get why that's supposed to make someone feel better either.)

Katherine is played by relative newcomer, Anna Kendrick, who is as cute as a button, in stark contrast to her shrewish, slutty character in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Also, she has a great nose, that I hope she keeps. (Nobody keeps their noses in Hollywood any more.)

All in all, this movie accomplishes the difficult task of dealing with a serious subject with a light touch, but without trivializing that. It deals with a lot of heavy emotions without being glib or mawkish—this is probably a big part of the autobiographical influence. And you don't really know till the end whether or not Adam will live.

The Boy, The Flower and I all liked it.

Machine Gun Preacher

2011-10-13T23:58:00.000-07:00

I don't have much use for the movie sites' ratings any more. IMDB is still the best, I guess, but it's not good. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are both unreliable. But the latter two have an interesting feature where they split the critics' opinions from the masses'. So while the newest Marc Forster (Kite Runner, Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction) film looked sort of dubious from the (spoiler-ridden) trailers, and had an awful rating on IMDB (5.7 out of 10), I noticed that on Tomatoes the critics rated it a savage 25% while audiences gave it a 75%.

This warranted a look.

Sure enough, the movie has elements you could predict would turn off the hordes of movie critics, and a share of the audience with similar mindsets.

I think it's the best film of 2011 to date.

This movie is an epic spiritual journey (told entirely without sitars or psychedelic imagery) . It is the true, astounding story of a very bad man named Sam Childers who finds Jesus and becomes—well, a crusader, really. Almost literally. In Uganda and the Sudan. So let me recount the five strikes that would virtually guarantee this movie bad reviews:

A completely sincere representation of evangelical Christianity that converts a very bad man into a very good one. (Not a perfect one, to be sure.) This is only barely tempered by a few scenes of Christian hypocrisy, and the Christians shown in worship are prone to doing things that embarrass sophisticates, like hold their hands up skyward.
Muslims brutally killing defenseless Christians. (This happens a lot in real life but we're not supposed to talk about it.)
The reformed Childers loves him some guns. A lack of guns is a serious problem for the Christian resistance. (This is generally true of people being slaughtered but again, we're not supposed to talk about it.)
Africa is completely and totally screwed up, and there are no white people around to blame.
The priggish English chick who sniffs at Childers efforts probably echoes the feelings of your average sensitive movie critic—and the movie entertains but doesn't exactly endorse her point-of-view.
Lots of other stuff I can't talk about without spoilers.

It's a little hard to talk about the movie in depth without spoilers, and this is a movie, though not rife with twists-and-turns, that pushes the envelope and earns its two-hour-plus length, so I'm going to keep it fairly abstract.

Although the Sudanese civil war is the backdrop for the movie—and I'm sure what Childers himself would most want the spotlight on—the heart-and-soul of the movie is that of a man obsessed. He's found forgiveness in God, but he hungers for greater meaning, which he finds by constantly expanding his sense of responsibility.

As it must in this vale of tears, this brings him to confront an evil that is greater than he is, and in which confrontation brings out many of his old devils. He's found God but can he keep Him in the face of horror after horror? It's really this struggle that powers the movie on a Shakespearean level.

By the way: The horrors? They are truly horrible. Much like Childers' own evils, they're watered down for the movie—thank the Lord (or at least director Forster's sense of restraint). You get a strong enough sense of them without wallowing in them. (True horrors like these remind me why I like the fantasy of the horror genre.)

From what I've heard, everything in the movie's been dialed back a bit because audiences wouldn't believe the truth. And I can see that. Indeed, the common critical response I've heard is that it's too much for one movie.

I disagree. (Actually, less charitably, I think critics hated the movie for the abovementioned points and then made up rationalizations for that.) The movie actually has a laser-like focus on Childers, and that keeps it squarely in "epic" and out of "sprawlng". If you've read this blog at all, you know how I am about movies that express self-indulgence through length, and I never felt that here. There were times when I couldn't believe there was more, but it never felt gratuitous.

Honestly, I can't remember caring so much about a movie character—and it's not because it's a real person, because (if you've read this blog much) you know how I feel about "based on a true story" stuff, and I tend to assume that the movie is only barely based on the facts. (It's gratifying to find out otherwise here. There's a major narrative point that's almost too neat to have actually happened but it wouldn't be the most incredible thing of the film.)

It's also an edge-of-your-seat movie, as Childers keeps taking greater and greater risks, and you can't help this feeling that he's going to end up dead—or worse, with his dreams crushed.

Amazing performance by Gerard Butler that should win him a nom, if not an Oscar, but will probably be ignored. Michelle Monaghan is both appealing and complex in her portrayal of the woman who saves Childers' soul only to risk losing him over and over again. Michael Shannon, Kathy Baker, young Madeline Carroll, Soulemayne Sy Savane—you know, it's weird to compare this to Cowboys vs. Aliens but there's a similarity in that just about every character who got screen time established a distinct personality, a real depth of character.

Combine that with heart-wrenching tragedy, stomach-churning brutality, soul-lifting inspiration, and a few (perhaps too few) moments of lightness, and you have yourself a picture worth watching.

This movie might challenge you, though, too. Not in the sort of intellectual, abstract ways that most people prefer to be challenged, mind you. Not in the typical avant-garde fashion of "challenging" norms by laughing at people who believe in them. Rather, it challenges in the real "What are you doing about it?" way that I can't imagine a lot of people are comfortable thinking about.

And it does this without being preachy, either, which is an interesting feat.

The Boy and I were both very favorably impressed.

Still, I can't recommend for everyone. There are lots of people who find expressions of faith offensive or in poor taste, and they won't like this (or parts of it, anyway) one bit. Also, I couldn't really bring The Flower to see it, both for Childers' evil ways in the beginning, and the greater Evil of the Sudanese slaughter.

But if you can dare it, if you have that much of Childers' spirit in you, you should see it.

Moneyball

2011-10-12T15:10:00.000-07:00

OK, so from what I can gather via the non-sports sports movie Moneyball, about ten years ago, Brad Pitt (I think that's the right title) got around his ball club's limited budget by hiring Jonah Hill to crunch numbers, assembling a complementary team rather than a bunch of prima donna ball player celebrities. This allows them to go on and lose many important playoff games.

I may have that slightly askew. As may the movie, which is based on, inspired by, or at least partially suggested by the real life story of Oakland A's GM Billy Beane and Peter Brand.

I found the premise of this movie not entirely plausible.

I think it's totally possible that a sharp-minded baseball fan/geek could crunch numbers in such a way as to locate prejudices that might keep a ball club from hiring certain players. I think it's plausible that a sports franchise can recklessly pursue and overpay superstar to ill effect (Kobe? A-Rod?). But this movie suggests you can put together a winning team just by number-crunching and I just don't believe that.

On the other hand, I didn't really care.

Arch-liberal Aaron Sorkin and Oscar-winning Steve Zaillian—okay, Sorkin has an Oscar, too, but for the pile of meh that is The Social Network—have penned a story that is as entertaining as it is implausible. Bennett Miller, the director of the slightly better of the two Capote biographies that came out five years ago, directs things briskly and keeps stuff moving.

Brad Pitt's likable. It was a good role for him. He's fairly convincing as a charismatic huckster looking to make the most out of a losing hand. Somewhat surprisingly, Jonah Hill is likable, taking a break from a nearly unbroken string of unsavory, vulgar characters to play a nerd with real number crunching skills.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was...okay. He looks the part of a baseball coach, but only sorta. Hoffman has the doughy body of an ex-job, but he also has a kind of softness to him that doesn't quite gel with the hard edge old ball players seem to have. Robin Wright has a small role as a kind of condescending ex-wife, which she plays very well, but mostly seems notable because she looks so much better than she did as the haggard Lincoln assassination Conspirator.

Kerris Dorsey really stood out in her small role as Beane's daughter. She and Pitt have some real chemistry that provides some unexpected depth.

So, yeah: Good performances, lively script, brisk direction, lotsa fun, seemingly preposterous to this non-baseball fan.

Worth a look. Worth an Oscar? Dunno.

Green Lantern's Might! Or Might Not!

2011-10-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

I can't really explain why I wanted to see Green Lantern. Yet, there I was, in the theater, on the last (well, penultimate) day it was showing because I just wanted to. I've mentioned before that I was a DC kid. I read very few Marvel comics. I never could get into Spider-man or the Fantastic Four or the Hulk or whatever.

For me it was Superman, Batman, The Flash, Green Arrow, The Atom...and Green Lantern. Green Lantern was actually my bud's favorite (just as mine was The Flash). And Green Lantern—well, green is a very good comic book color, and CGI color for that matter.

But the buzz on this movie was just horrible. Like this was an awful, awful film with no redeeming qualities, that was just a bad idea all around.

And, frankly, it's not.

It's a little far out. Green Lantern's story is basically a space opera, a comic book version of Doc Smith's Lensmen. Though, from memory, I don't recall all that much sci-fi from the comic book. (The parts that I do remember, this movie nails, though, like the whole planet of Oa and the Lantern Corps.)

But it's a lot like Thor, really. Half the story on Earth, half in space. And with the same kind of goofy comic book science I love so well. In this case, it's colored energy. Green is the color of will and yellow is the color of fear. The former is good and empowering, and the latter is corrupting.

The story is that one of the Guardians (the hyper-intelligent/advanced beings that created the Lantern corps), long ago tried to harness the power of yellow energy, but instead became corrupted and evil (and newly christened as Parallax), so they had to lock him up on a far away planet, encased in green chains. An opportunity arises for Parallax to suck the fearful souls out of some unwary travelers, and he breaks free and begins to wreak havoc, mortally wounding the Lantern who was his turnkey.

And that's just the opening sequence. The wounded Lantern flees to the nearest inhabited planet which happens to be Earth, where cocky jet pilot Hal Jordan is sleeping with hot chicks and crashing expensive planes, in between the occasional fugue where he freezes thinking about his father's fatal crash 20 years earlier.

The ~~magic~~scientifically advanced ring gives Hal a nifty costume and flies him off to Oa where he undergoes training under the supervision of Michael Clark Duncan as Killowog, and disdain at the hands of the supercilious Sinestro.

There's a lot of plot here getting in the way of the story, as Joe Bob Briggs would say. But I mostly wasn't bored, which was my real concern. I thought the CGI mostly worked. I didn't think the suit—which was roundly critiqued for being CGI—was bad. For me, the space stuff in this movie worked better than the stuff in Thor. GL doesn't have the fun fish-out-of-water aspect that was the best part of Thor.

Some of the critics seem to fault it because Hal is kind of a traditional alpha male type—no struggling Peter Parker here—but it really wouldn't have been exactly fresh to have it be the other way. The macho guy who gets superpowers is at least as common as the nebbish who gets them. Neither is particularly more valid dramatically than the other.

In this case, Hal's fear of dying like his father (sorta) acts as his own weakness, and it works pretty well, if it feels a little movie-of-the-week-ish, as the premise is offered that he's a cocky jerk who can't hold down a relationship because of it.

Hal's counterpart is Hector (Peter Sarsgaard, looking a bit less suave than he did in An Education), a nerdy xenobiologist who gets a dose of the Evil Yellow Energy and becomes even more hideous and an even greater disappointment to his charming but evil Senator father (played with conviction by Tim Robbins, natch).

There's a very funny, spoiler-laden takedown of this movie at Topless Robot, but I think it's wrong in spirit. You can always pick apart these things, no matter how widely regarded the movie. Even The Dark Knight or Spider-Man 2 or any of them. It's that you choose not to. It's not a matter of suspending disbelief, it's a matter of the film engaging you to the point where you say "I don't get why he did that but I'm rolling with it."

And obviously this film failed to do that with a lot of people. (It'll make its money back, though. It just throws the next episode into doubt. Which is a shame, really, because a follow-up could be much better.)

No, I think, apart from a few issues, the main problem is the story being crushed under its own weight. Superman? Rocketed from the planet Krypton, has magic powers on earth. Batman? Dead parents, vengeful spirit, lots of training and money. Spider-Man? Radio-active spider bite confers magic powers.

Here, you've got an under-developed love triangle between Hector, Hal and Carol Ferris (who carries about as much weight as Pepper in Iron Man and Jane in Thor), un-resolved parental issues for both Hector and Hal, government contract shenanigans with the Senator and Carol Ferris' father (Jay O. Sanders), un-resolved extended family issues (Hal has a nephew—but we didn't even know he had a sibling, presumably a brother?), un-resolved labor contract disputes (Hal gets a lot of people fired, somehow), and all that's just on Earth.

There's all kinds of stuff going on on Oa that is under-developed.

Beyond that, there are conceptual issues with the Green Lantern character. His ring can do anything he can focus his mind on. Only, you know, green. Well, that's basically god-mode, right there. No upper-bounds to his power—a problem that's plagued Superman, too.

In a more concrete example, Hal's first use of his ring evokes, more than anything, that '90s Jim Carrey movie The Mask. In fact, a lot of the uses of his ring evoke cartoon-ish comparisons.

Combine that with film's tendency to double-back on itself and contradict itself within seconds (as described in detail in that Topless Robot breakdown), and the whole space opera thing, and it's not hard to see why it wasn't more popular.

For me, I thought the director (Martin Campbell, who made the greatest Bond movie ever: Casino Royale) did a great job with the patchy script, and I think the acting was really very strong, too. Philippe had a tough role and contra that Topless Robot thing, I found him likable. (It felt like he wasn't bad, he was just drawn that way, if you can grasp that. The actor trumps the script.)

Blake Lively didn't register any more than Natalie Portman did in Thor. Not their faults, really. Fun voice acting from Geoffrey Rush, Michael Clark Duncan and Clancy Brown. The best drawn character and the most standout acting was done by Mark Strong, as Sinestro. (In the comic, Sinestro is GL's arch-nemesis, so I kept expecting him to turn evil, but I guess that was planned for the sequel. Which is good; it would've been overkill here.)

So, I get why people think it sucked, and I don't disagree, but I liked it anyway. To hell with you.

Drive, Too

2011-09-30T02:32:00.000-07:00

We haven't seen a documentary in quite some time, and The Flower has maybe never seen one in the theater. (I didn't to take her to March of the Penguins; I just can't see her taking the more tragic aspects of nature documentaries very well.) The Boy's kind of a hard sell, as far as documentaries go--he has to be in the mood for it (as do I, really).

So, we went to see Moneyball. Once there, however, the theater was chock full. Of old people. So we moved over to the showing of Senna, the documentary on the great Brazilian Formula One racer, Ayerton Senna.

This is one of those documentaries that gets raves, and they assure you that even if you don't know anything about racing, you'll still find it a great documentary. And that's true, mostly. (I'll get to the exception later on.)

Ayrton Senna was a young, handsome, confident but not arrogant go-cart racer who moved up from go-cart and Formula Three racing to join the big leagues at the age of 24 (in 1984). There, he quickly makes a name for himself until 1988, when he moves to the McLaren-Honda team. His first team pairs him with an arrogant French driver, Alain Prost, and the two of them dominate Formula One racing.

Tension, dirty-pool and politics abound as the French man out-maneuvers Senna politically when he can't beat him on the track. Ultimately, the team breaks up as Prost moves to a different team which is using computer-balanced cars that apparently take a lot of the skill out of racing.

The next year, after Prost retires, the F1 rules change, eliminating a lot of the computer gear and consequently making the races much less safe. Many crashes result, including two that lead to fatalities, Senna being one of them.

Now, I'm sure I've made hash of the actual history here. While the movie does a good job constructing a narrative about Senna--maybe too good, as this humble lover of God, and hero of the Brazilian people, struggles against corruption and favoritism against the evil (or at least dickish) other guy--for those of us who don't even know what a chicane is, it was occasionally hard to follow.

The real story is more complicated, too, then what I gleaned from the movie. For example, there's a race where Prost forces Senna off the track "accidentally", and even when Senna comes back to win the race Prost runs to the refs to get him disqualified for missing a chicane. The movie shows this as an egregiously political move on a technicality the F1 judges have never enforced before.

Not only was he DQed and thereby eliminated from the championship, he was fined and suspended.

The next year, when the situations were reversed and Senna pulled a similar move on Prost, it's sort of presented as an accident that Senna didn't mind much. According to Wiki, Senna confessed later to having driven Prost off the road deliberately, but this isn't shown in the movie. (And maybe it's not true. I sure don't know.)

Also, Prost ends up chairing Senna's literacy institute after his death, and there's a suggestion that Senna not just forgave Prost when he retired, but perhaps later came to appreciate their rivalry as a source of inspiration. It's just not clear in the movie.

Anyway, it's a good story, whether accurate or not, and I'm content to think well of this Brazilian hero and mourn his premature passing, even though I'm really murky on what changes precipitated the accident that killed him. And, we are reassured that Senna's favorite track doctor was put in charge of making the races safe again, and no one has died in F1 since.

So, I did enjoy it, as did the kids, though they had to contend not only with unfamiliarity with racing terminology (I, at least, know what the "pole position" is from an early arcade racing game), but also partially obscured subtitles and heavy Brazilian accents. Also, they had a hard time telling Senna from Prost.

Even so, they did enjoy it. If you're in the mood for a documentary, it's a good one. It's almost entirely source material, too, with tons of archive footage of Senna, and there's a lot of car-camera shots which add a level of excitement you don't usually get with documentaries. On the other hand, you do see a couple of fatal car crashes, which I found disturbing.

I Just Driiiiiiiiive!

2011-09-21T22:10:00.000-07:00

In Drive, the 14th (of 29) Ryan Gosling films due out this year, Mr. Gosling plays—wait for it—a driver! Actually, I like the guy, which is a good thing, since he's in, like, everything.

In this flick, he plays a guy with three jobs: Mechanic, stunt driver for the movies, and wheel man. The story begins when he gets involved with his cute neighbor Irene (the adorable Carey Mulligan) and her cute son.

When I say "involved," I mean sort of minimally involved. They pass in the hallway. He helps her with her car. He smiles at her kid. It's a testament to Gosling's acting that his emotionless, possibly sociopathic, affect is humanized so easily with a few reticent smiles. You do end up liking the guy, especially when Mulligan's jailbird husband Standard (Oscar Isaac, of the recent Robin Hood) comes back.

As it turns out, Standard is a pretty good guy. And Gosling's (nameless) character wins us over by helping him out, despite his obvious attraction to Irene. But there's something not quite, let's say, well-adjusted about him.

I don't want to spoil the story, but let me warn you: This movie turns suddenly and shockingly violent about at the mid-point. You might think you're going to see a fun caper flick, but no: This movie decides that not only does it need violence, it can't be the fun, semi-campy violence of an action flick. It needs graphic violence and extreme brutality.

I'm not knocking this, I'm just pointing it out for those who don't like that sort of thing.

The Boy and I liked it, though The Boy felt that the violence represented a somewhat unsuccessful tonal shift, and that the movie had a couple more shifts toward the end that didn't work. That didn't bug me, particularly, because this movie was basically a homage to the '80s, where it was common to put some grittily "realistic" aspect into your heretofore semi-dopey genre flick.

Call it "Miami Vice Syndrome". Or "Michael Mann Syndrome" if you're film-literate.

The movie imitates (and improves in a lot of ways) on the '80s crime drama, which a Moog-y synth pop track, slow-mo moments, inappropriately beautiful music over violence, and even hot pink opening credits! (The Flower noticed the hot pink "Drive" written on the movie poster and asked why it was pink. '80s, baby!)

There is a lot of fun stuff in this movie: Bryan Cranston plays Gosling's loser boss who's trying to get money so Gosling can do stock car racing. Albert Brooks as the mob-ish boss he's trying to get the money from. And Ron Perlman as his brutish Jewish mob-ish friend (that's a lot of -ish, but how these guys are syndicated isn't really explained). It's nice to see Perlman not only get to play without heavy makeup (Hellboy, "Beauty and the Beast", Quest for Fire) but also play a Jew!

Also, if you're a native, the movie is full of street and overhead shots of the City of Angels, which is kind of neat. Though at one point, Irene takes her beater from Echo Park to Cranston and Gosling's garage in Reseda, which strikes me as as improbable as Gosling living in Echo Park and commuting to Reseda. But these are of course just fun details.

Talented crew. Confident direction. Artsy, bordering dangerously close to pretentious. The ending doesn't really make sense, and is a little murky to the actual details.

The Boy and I approved. I more than he, as he didn't really get the '80s homage and hasn't driven the streets as much.

I would reservedly recommend for crime drama fans, for '80s crime drama fans especially, but not for the squeamish.

Contagion: Sickos?

2011-09-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

The thing about disease movies is that they're almost always dumb action flicks. Sometimes they're dumb horror flicks, but not usually the big name ones. Nope. Usually, you got some horrible, fatal disease that will kill the world, and the action revolves around people chasing a vial of either the disease or the cure. And it usually flies up in the air at some point, with people scrambling to catch it.

Steven Soderbergh's latest, Contagion, isn't any of that.

It's basically a straight-on look at what would happen if a midwestern floozy (Gwyneth Paltrow) contracted a horrible new disease in China and brought it through a bunch of airports on her way home. There are biologists having trouble isolating the disease, a CDC dealing with political issues, crazy internet theories, riots, crime, murder, people who were prepared and people who weren't, and so on. It's never suggested that everyone in the world will die from the disease, but 1% or 2% dying seems horrible enough—and at one point, it's suggested that maybe 20% will die.

It's basically a hyper-realistic look at things. Which is to say, a lot of the usual dramatic conventions are not used. There is music, but there are long stretches with out it. There isn't a single character whose journey we follow, but many characters, many of whom die. There is no hero, but there are isolated actions of heroism. There is criminality but far more human frailty.

It reminds a lot of Soderbergh's earlier work, Traffic.

Dramatically, the aversion to certain sensational conventions has made Contagion somewhat muted, emotionally. It's not a bad thing, necessarily: The film engages on a lot of levels, but not necessarily the ones that cause people to marvel at the film making.

I kind of did. You don't see a lot of restraint these days. At the same time, as The Boy said, you didn't know who was going to live or die, and you cared, but not necessarily very much. The aversion to mawkishness led to a certain distance.

Nonetheless, this may be the best movie about a disease ever, and it's certainly the least stupid.

Cars 2: This Time, It's Impersonal

2011-09-16T17:14:00.000-07:00

There is a great moment in the short that Pixar assembled describing the process of making The Incredibles. In (creator) Brad Bird's original vision, Elastigirl had a sidekick who managed her hardware—the supersonic jet and what-not. In fact, in the scene after said jet is shot down, there's a moment where she looks down at the wreckage that seems a little out of place.

The great moment is Brad Bird explaining how important this character was to his concept of the story and how badly he wanted him in, then cutting to John Lasseter explaining that the movie was already too long, and there were too many characters, and so on. And the two of them go back and forth, with Lasseter saying he had to let Bird do what he felt was right, no matter how wrong.

Bird finally realized that Lasseter was right, and he removed the sidekick. That out-of-place wreckage scene is the only remaining vestige: It's there because Elastigirl is basically watching her friend sink into the deeps—but since he's been completely removed from the movie, it's just a momentary oddness.

I've always imagined Pixar to be that sort of place, where artists battled over ideas, and the ideal battled with the practical.

That's why it's tragic to see Cars 2, supposedly directed by Lasster, now head of all Disney animation, forget such basic rules and become the first not-very-good Pixar film.

There's so much right about this film. It's chock-full of Pixar's attention to detail. There are stunning visual moments. The movie is centered around Mater, the lovable tow truck voiced by Larry the Cable Guy, so that it avoids being a rehash of the original Cars.

But it's waaaay too complicated. Not just for kids, but for drama. A lot of people accused Cars of being an animated version of Doc Hollywood, to which I say "so what"? You got to know the characters—a whole town full of characters, so that it mattered whether or not Lightning stayed or went. It was squarely in the Pixar model of movies about service to community (cf. Disney films which are almost entirely about being yourself), so you had a struggle over what one wanted as an individual and what was right.

This movie almost sets it up that way. Mater is a rube, of course. And he embarrasses his friends. And he gets almost to the point of recognizing that he does and changing his ways, when everyone says he should be himself and the rest of the world needs to adapt to him. (Really? You shouldn't maybe hold that flatulence in until after you've met the Queen?)

That wouldn't necessarily be bad by itself, except that the whole thing is tied up in an Evil Big Oil plot. The Big Oil thing is neither here-nor-there, but the plot requires the introduction of a whole fleet of new characters. Notably, Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer play Finn McMissile and Holley Shiftwell, straight out of a 007 film.

But then there's the chief villain, half-a-dozen or more mook cars, Guido and Luigi's family in Italy, a new, snotty competitor for McQueen (voiced by John Turturro, who actually does a quite memorable turn), and there's just not really any room for much in the way of real dramatic storytelling.

The second major issue has to do with action.

The whole concept of Cars is fraught with all kinds of weird imponderables. When Tex Avery did his car and plane-based cartoons in the '50s, the anthropomorphosization of which was just like Cars, the implication was that cars were sort of biological creatures, having children and parental issues and what-not. Cars just sort of ignores the issue, but it's actually pretty central to the plot and concept of the "lemon".

What does this have to do with the action? Well, in order for Finn to impress us all these incredible spy things, we have to have a concept of what it is a car can do in the first place—what its limitations are, in other words, so that we can marvel at the extraordinary actions. Almost immediately, for example, a car falls off a high point into the water, and the fall kills him. Then Finn jumps into the water later and is not only fine, but able to turn into a (very Bond-esque) submarine.

Well, okay. Why not? There's a difference between falling and diving, and he's a spy and all that. But it kind of lampshades the whole problem: If there's going to be suspense that the audience can relate to, doesn't there need to be a way to grasp the limitations of the characters. (This is a really common action movie issue these days, at least for me, but they keep doing it.)

This ties into the third major issue, which has to do with mass. In the early days of animation, animators simply exploited their animated-ness: They'd have the characters use their own thought bubbles for rope, or climb up walls, or whatever. I'm sure it was entertaining for a while, but ultimately they had to come up with a kind of physics or they'd never have passed the phase of "Gee! Look! Animation!"

CGI, similarly, doesn't weigh anything. It's particularly conspicuous in action movies where the character is throwing something supposedly heavy around and it doesn't look real. And in low-rent CGI, you get a lot of gags like you'd see in primitive animation. Pixar has always been exquisitely careful about the physics of their films.

By the end of Cars 2, crap is flying around so fast it's just hard to invest in any of it. It's almost like the standard, crap summer action flick has infected Pixar.

Now, it's really not that bad. It's a little boring because of the points I've mentioned. And hugely disappointing after what must be the longest unbroken streak of great films in any movie studio's history. But this makes a modest stumble seem like a huge fall. It's not, of itself.

The Boy and The Flower declined to partake, but the Barb liked it. She wanted to see the original one right after, of course, but she didn't complain.

The Debt

2011-09-05T12:39:00.000-07:00

The Israelis make some good movies, though much like us and the French, they tend to flagellate themselves rather a lot. Back in 2007, they made a film called The Debt, which never got released to theaters here but which captured the eye of someone here enough to encourage an English-language remake.

This was the last film made under the Miramax banner before its acquisition by Disney and with delays and (probably) dubious marketability, it's only now coming out, in the last gasp of summer. But, hey, Helen Mirren got spend a couple of years getting into character.

Which pays off.

The story is—and you can see this all in the trailer, no spoilers here—back in the '60s, Rachel, Stephan and David are sent behind the iron curtain in order to extract the Mengele-like character Dieter Vogel, who escaped capture after the war to set up a practice. The mission goes awry and the three are stuck behind enemy lines with no way out, and a hostile hostage to transport.

Now, since the movie is told in flashbacks 30 years later, we know they survive. But something else happened when they were out in the field, and it's something nobody knows about.

The Boy said, afterwards, that this was a remarkably suspenseful film considering you already knew that they lived through the adventure. This is true and a good storytelling trick: To create suspense even though the audience knows how it turns out.

Because we don't know exactly how it turned out. And the Devil is in the details, as it turns out. The '60s-era stuff is high tension, interesting and also creepy. There's a brief part that takes place in 1970 that is necessary but kind of unpleasant and sad. Then the rest takes place in '97, when the three character reunite as a book about their adventures has been written.

This leads to a rather improbable but satisfying close that works dramatically and on an action-movie level.

Simon and Chetwynd (of Poliwood) loved this movie and have gone so far to say that our movie critics are somewhat dense for not liking it. Roger Ebert gave it 2.5 stars apparently because he had trouble distinguishing between David and Stephan, which he says is vital in a thriller. We (The Boy and I) suck at that, and I was confused initially, too, except that it didn't really matter from a thriller standpoint. You had plenty of time to straighten out the young actors from the old actors during the dramatic closing parts, when it mattered.

So, yeah, I'm going with "not too bright", too. Also, anti-semitic. Just to be safe.

That said, I think they've over-rated it a bit. Don't get me wrong, it's well above average. It marries espionage thriller with some pretty heavy drama, against which some interesting social questions are asked. But somewhat like Sarah's Key, the issues of the modern world against the backdrop of the Cold War and Nazi-ism tend to feel sort of trivial. Though here the modern issues are considerably bigger, at least, than Sarah's Key.

A helpful guide for the Ebert-esque:

Jessica Chastain turns into Helen Mirren.
Martin Csokas turns into Tom Wilkinson.
Sam Worthington turns into Ciaran Hinds.

Sort of amusingly, to me, Helen Mirren is the oldest of the old actors, but looked far-and-away the best. She's also the closest in age now to how old her character would be now but since the movie takes place nearly 15 years ago, she's actually playing someone ten years younger. It works 'cause, you know, Helen Mirren.

Csokas and Wilkinson look similar enough to where you can see the former aging into the latter. Ciaran Hinds, on the other hand, looks like death warmed over, and I can only assume this was deliberate, if heart-breaking to the ladies in the audience.

Needless to say, the acting is top-notch, not the least of which is done by Jesper Christensen (Quantum of Solace) as the Nazi doctor. It recalls Bruno Ganz in Downfall, as he transitions smoothly from a doctor-like patter of sympathy and concern to explaining exactly why the Jews deserved to die.

Chilling.

And you know how I am about the whole Nazi thing. If you're going to do a Nazi story, you better be giving me something other than "Nazis are bad." The strongest dramatic parts of the movie occur between Jessica Chastain and Christensen, both in the doctor's office and later on. It works so well that when Helen Mirren confronts him later, the character continuity is seamless.

Messr. Ebert notwithstanding.

Solid flick, and above-average in a summer sea of average and sub-par crud.

A propos of what I was ranting on in my review of The Guard, this movie strives and achieves a verisimilitude without worrying about authenticity. I don't think a lot of Nazi war criminals escaped behind the iron curtain, for example, and I don't think Mossad performed any extractions (although I believe they helped the Refuseniks to some degree). But it all has a plausible feel, to where you start to wonder if they did do something like that, or could have.

Definitely recommend.

Our Idiot Brother

2011-09-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

My mother gave me the scowl when I mentioned The Boy and I were going to see Our Idiot Brother. Momma has a very limited range of comedy she approves of which completely excludes anything involving Stooges, Marx Brothers, Abbot and/or Costello, Lewis (and possibly Martin), Mel Brooks, Woody Allen (though she liked the Paris thing), anyone who was ever on Saturday Night Live (except for Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin), or anyone who looks like they might have been on SNL.

She particular hates "stupid" comedy. So Will Ferrell is right out.

I mention this because the trailers for Our Idiot Brother apparently play it as a dumb Ferrell-style comedy which it most assuredly is not. Not really a mystery: Those dumb comedies draw in the teens and make a lot of money, and this sort of gentle, realist kind of comedy aimed at an older audience does not.

This movie is more in the mold of, say, a Simon or a Being There. (I don't know why I decided to pull two 1980 movies out for comparison but there it is.) That is, it's a fish-out-of-water story (like Thor or, as a character coyly comments, The Guard). But it's a particular genre of FooW story, where the character is an innocent, trusting, pure soul in a dark, cynical world. In Simon and Being There, the innocent takes on messianic qualities, but Paul Rudd's Ned is nothing so grandiose, which makes this movie very watchable.

The innocent in these movies tends to cut a wide swath through the other characters' lives, as his goodness tends to reveal the corruption they wade in, having a tendency to then blow those fragile lives apart, and in this case, it's Ned's poor sisters who are this victims.

Our movie opens with Ned selling pot to a uniformed cop. Not really selling. The cop begs him for it, playing for Ned's sympathy and Ned freely gives. The cop then insists on giving him money which Ned reluctantly takes. Next thing you know, Ned's in jail. Theme song, title, credits. (Actually, I don't remember if they did that there, but the could've.)

This shows up a bit of a problem, of course: How does Ned get to be 42 and not have had this happen so much that he doesn't get cynical, or at least aware enough to not fall for tricks like this?

But it's Rudd who's 42, maybe Ned's only supposed to be in his 30s. And lucky. And...look, just roll with it.

After eight months of prison (model prisoner, inmate-of-the-month) Ned tries to return home to his girlfriend and his organic farm, but she's moved on. Which is to say, she's taken his farm and gotten a new boyfriend (TJ Miller of Cloverfield and How To Train Your Dragon in an amusing turn). Also, she won't give him his dog, Willie Nelson, back.

And so, this is really a story of a man trying to get his dog back. Which is the sort of story my mom would like, if she'd ever go see it.

Ned visits his sisters in the manner of a Big Bad Wolf, except that all three have built their lives of straw. Settled-down Cindy (Emily Mortimer, Shutter Island) is married to insufferable sleazeball documentary director (Steve Coogan), and both are working hard to insulate their older child from anything fun or boy-like, forcing him to do ballet while he really wants to do karate.

It doesn't take long for Ned to be a bad influence on the boy or uncover the sleaze, leading to a short stay with sister number two, Miranda, played by a brunette Elizabeth Banks (who was Paul Rudd's love interest in Role Models). Miranda is struggling at Vanity Fair after landing an interview with a hot celebrity who doesn't want to dish about her personal life. Meanwhile, she and neighbor Jeremy (Adam Scott of The Great Buck Howard) have the hots for each other, which remains unexpressed since she's a bitch.

I mean, not to put too fine a gloss on it.

Miranda is particularly unlikable, but Banks does a good job with this somehow. You should despise her for a lot of reasons, but somehow there's something at her core that seems redeemable.

After her, Ned ends up staying with the sexually chaotic Natalie (Zooey Deschanel, who played Rudd's wife in the short "House Hunting"), who is hooked up with Cindy (played by Rashida Jones, who played Rudd's wife in I Love You, Man). She thinks it's love but she's, well, a slut. A recovering slut, anyway. By the time Ned's actually staying with her, he's managed to potentially ruin and save her life as it is.

Normally, I really find Deschanel appealing but not here. She plays an unfunny, foul-mouthed comic.

Honestly, though, none of the three sisters are particularly attractive, which is the point. They tend to take out their self-made frustrations on Ned, who rolls with it mostly, but suffers because he doesn't know all the rules about lying to get what you want or to not rock the boat.

An enjoyable, surprisingly mature flick that will not do very well precisely because it's not a slapstick fest and also (significantly) because it's been marketed that way, apparently. It is a little sleazy, of course, but at least it appears to suggest that people shouldn't be that way.

It works, at least for me and The Boy, precisely because Ned isn't cruelly mocked in a way that the audience is encouraged to join in on. We could all be a little more Ned-like. Also, the ending is satisfying in an unexpected way, with a nice little closing to the story.

Not sure if mom would have liked it, though.

The Guard

2011-09-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

"I'm Oirish! Racism's part of me culture!"

That line alone was enough to make The Flower want to see the new Don Cheadle/Brendan Gleason collaboration The Guard, in which a murder in a Gleaon's sleepy Irish county draws the attention of CIA Agent Cheadle.

Gleason is sort of a Bob Beckel character, happily getting stoned and whoring around while sort-of doing the occasional bit of police work. Besides a complete lack of political correctness, he apparently has complete contempt for the service.

I don't know what a "Guard" is, actually. I Wikapedia-ed and everything. In the movie, they seem like sheriffs—and the movie draws a strong parallel with the western genre, though almost a "piss take" as the Brits say—but they're apparently some sorta military outfit.

Not really important: Gleason is playing an Irish Clint Eastwood. So take a kind of edgy, hard-boiled, mysterious man who's not afraid to do violence, make him fat and drunk, not really keen on the violence part and really not all the mysterious—you know, maybe this comparison isn't working out.

Let's try this: The writer and director of 2008's sleeper hit In Bruges, Martin McDonagh is the executive producer of this film, and it has a very similar feel to it. It's not as dark, but it is a kind of buddy picture/tale of honor and redemption.

Actually, it's sort of High Noon-ish, as it turns out that Gleeson is the only honest Guard in Ireland. And after the rest have been bought off (with advances secured through the trafficking of over half a billion dollars in drugs, a financial estimation of considerable consternation throughout the movie) he has to face them down alone.

Well, alone with Cheadle, of course.

Also similar to In Bruges, our three villains are philosophical sorts. Less believable as actual criminals than as meta-criminals who commit atrocities while examining their own motivations and character flaws while they do it. That may sound like a dig but I find it appealing, personally.

I mean, having grown up in a time where "natural" was de rigueur, I'm distrustful of all these highly artificial things that seem less focused on verisimilitude and more on a putative authenticity. It's all fake; sell it enough to make it work, not so much—a la reality shows—that people walk around believing they've seen something real.

But I digress. The point is, you get villains that are the sort of villains you love-to-hate. Liam Cunningham is the evil mastermind, Mark Strong (whose career will survive his turn as Sinestro in The Green Lantern) is his smart muscle, and David Wilmot is the psychopath—or, wait, no, he's a sociopath, if I recall correctly. (The issue of "psycho" versus "socio" being a debate from the movie.)

Fionnula Flanagan plays Gleeson's dying mother, whom the Guard smuggles booze (and the occasional joint) to in her hospice care. She shares her son's irreverence, and the scenes between them are really quite touching without even the barest hint of mawkishness.

All-in-all, a lively mashup of police procedural, western, comedy, drama—something that defies easy categorization. The Flower enjoyed it quite a bit, except for the end. The ending is not spelled out, and she took it to mean one thing when the closing song ("Leaving on a Jet Plane") really leaves no room for doubt as to what happens.

Of course, it was no Gran Torino—pretty much her reaction to every film these days.

The Boy and I also enjoyed it greatly, no comparisons to Gran Torino required.

although it was no Gran Torino (the pinnacle of cinema for her), and she didn't like the end.

The Hedgehog (Le hérisson)

2011-08-23T20:43:00.000-07:00

Ze Frenchies, zey are everywhere this year!

Well, what can I say? If you can't find a decent movie in English, you have to turn somewhere. Last year, it was Sweden. This year, France.

The Hedgehog is a neat little French film about a building full of rich people that is managed by a grumpy, frumpy concierge. Well, really, it's about the 11-year-old daughter of one of the rich families, and her countdown to killing herself on her twelfth birthday.

I know, French, right?

It's dark, obviously, but—how to put this?—childishly so. I don't mean that as an insult: Paloma is a child, maybe a future "goth" or "emo" or whatever, but her grasp of the significance of things is distinctly childish. The upshot is that you have this dichotomy of knowing that she's perfectly capable of killing herself and intent on doing it, and at the same time being amused by her thought processes. Bemusement, to use the word correctly.

The story begins with her making this decision, but the catalyst for the subsequent adventures begin with the death of one of the tenants in her building, and the appearance of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu. This elderly Japanese fellow clearly likes Paloma, but more importantly to the story, he has an eye for the apartment's concierge.

It's helpful to realize that, apparently, the concierge of a wealthy building is rather low on the totem pole. At one point she exclaims that she's the janitor (or so the translation has it). Point is, she's way down on the social scale, expected to be a coarse woman who watches soaps all day long and to be generally unnoticed by the upper crust clientele.

Our movie concierge is a frowsy, frumpy, crotchety old woman, immediately off-putting to all who meet her, except for one little thing. When Kakuro asks about the family that lived there before and the agent (that's probably not who she is, but that's who would do that here) says they were a happy family, Renée (the concierge) says "Happy families are all alike."

To which Kakuro, naturally adds, "Every unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way."

OK, I'm not going to pretend I've read Anna Karenina, but I recognized the quote. If they'd quoted from Crime and Punishment, I'd've been all over that.

And so the movie is basically about how the two of them form an unlikely bond through a love of Russian literature. Also, how Paloma's ennui is lifted, sort of, by watching this. (She actually curses her luck of finally having something interesting happen just as she's about to end it all.)

The three principals are incredibly appealing which contributes greatly to this movie's watchability. The characters are strongly written and the acting has a certain je ne sais qua. (That's French for "I'm too lazy to come up with a better joke".) Togo Igawa projects a quiet dignity as the charming widower, and Garance Le Guillermic does the angsty pre-teen with a subtle depth that makes her likable throughout.

I mean, that's a real potential landmine: Though she's young, Paloma is much in the mold of the rebellious teenager, and lord knows they can be insufferable to watch—even when you're one yourself. My father thought The Breakfast Clubbers were a little whiny. I couldn't figure out why James Dean was pissed off all the time. It's not that they don't make good observations, it's that the observations tend to be incomplete or shallow, which makes the subsequent arrogance (to repeat myself) insufferable.

Paloma is still a child, and her mother has spent her whole life indulging her neuroses. Her older sister is monstrously self-important and self-involved. Dad is feeble and placating without being engaged. The audience's heart goes out to her, naturally, but they manage to keep empathy even when Paloma seems a little cruel.

Which happens.

Josiane Balasko, as the concierge (and the titular hedgehog), is the key to making it all work. She really makes herself unattractive. Not in that Hollywood, slap-a-pair-of-glasses-onto-Kathy-Ireland way, either. And it's not just skin deep: There's an unhappiness, a little bitterness, prickliness to it all.

Her transformation is amazing. Not her physical transformation. She does get a makeover, and it helps, but it's very understated. But when you first catch a glimpse of happiness, or warmth, or even joy on her face, it's a moving experience.

Balasko has been playing homely middle-aged women for 20 years at least, since she played Gerard Depardiu's lover in Too Beautiful For You. But some time before that, I'm pretty sure she was a French hottie, romantic-lead-with-occasional-nude-scene type.

I mention this for a couple of reasons. One, I often wax poetic on these pages about the way the French let their women age, and how I think it's far more attractive than the botoxed/tightened/implanted look of the American never-get-old style. This is a weird case of that, in that Balasko isn't an Isabelle Huppert or an Isabelle Adjani (who are peers), yet there is a respect afforded her that I can almost not imagine in an American film.

The other thing is that I can't imagine—can't think of a single American hottie in a similar career path: Used to be hot, now plays homely. Mostly they'll do anything to stave off aging. Like, say, Morgan Fairchild or Victoria Principal. I could see Nancy Allen maybe doing it, except she's aged more gracefully than either of the aforementioned.

Maybe a propos of nothing. It's a remarkable performance on its own, but seems amazing given the context.

Anyway, The Boy was once again able to overcome his loathing of all things French to enjoy this film. His main comment was something like "it got French at the end, but it didn't go full French". And this is true.

Worth seeing.

The Help

2011-08-22T18:44:00.000-07:00

Spunky young wannabe journalist "Skeeter" (Emma Stone) returns to her small town in Alabama looking for some kind of entreé into the world of writershipitude, and ends up discovering a rich vein of stories by the colored help of the town's middle class families.

You know who should be crying over this?

Lindsay Lohan.

I mean, seriously: Crazy Stupid Love, Friends With Benefits, Easy A, Zombieland, this movie—a share of those probably should have gone to the Lohan, but for the whole life-is-a-trainwreck thing. She's sort of the unwritten meta-tragedy here.

And completely off-topic. The mind, it plays tricks.

This movie is, dare I say, a chick flick. And, at nearly two-and-a-half hours, it's long. It's also dangerously "socially relevant" and Baby Boomer pander-y, taking place in the early '60s.

Nigh miraculously, it all works. It wasn't till the end of the film that I realized how long it was getting and both the Boy and the Flower sat through it without complaint. The acting is all solid, the music has the right mix, and the pacing is lively.

This is one of those reviews where I don't say much about the actual events that unfold in the movie, even though you could probably take ten minutes to guess them all from a light outline. Well, most of them; there are probably a few surprises in there.

The movie does a very good job of drawing the characters and granting them their frailties. There are no "magic negros" and it's not really (as it might first seem) about the white (wo)man coming to set them free. It's also not about how bad white folk are, though there's plenty of bad behavior from them. The black women seem to less ill-behaved, but one could see this clearly as a function of not having much free time.

What I'm getting at is that it navigates the historical minefield of race relations—and more importantly, for the sake of the moviegoing audience, the cinematic minefield of portrayal of race.

If there's one perhaps politically correct oddity, it's a near complete absence of black men. Though the only white men of significance are those who interact with our intrepid journalist.

It's a chick flick. If Bridesmaids is the chick-flick-as-comedy, The Help is chick-flick-as-historical fiction.

It's actually kind of reassuring. There need to be good chick flicks.

There's Oscar scuttlebutt—fairly—and lots of talk about how the movie is racist—predictably. I've heard a lot of research went into the source book, and I tend to believe that, but there is a fair amount of wish fulfillment here, too. There wasn't such a book, as far as I know, and the movie can feel a little pat in its resolution.

But there's nothing wrong with that. It's not as extreme as, say, La Vita E Bella or Dances with Wolves, and it's a grand Hollywood tradition to give the audience an upbeat, if not exactly happy, ending. Writer/director Tate Taylor has achieved something well above par here, something worthy of recognition.

And Lindsay Lohan should be dying, watching Emma Stone take a swing at a pitch she could have had, and knock it out of the park.

Rio

2011-08-14T19:03:00.000-07:00

I couldn't get the Flower to go see Rio with me, but after it had been playing for four months, the Barb realized she hadn't had any popcorn lately and when she pressured me into taking her to see something, Rio was still playing.

For a movie that's been playing for four months, I expected better.

It's not bad. It's even good. Just not very good. Not very anything, even. The animation is good, of course, but nothing spectacular. Actually, the animation is probably the strongest part: It has a nice subtlety to it (except for an early scene where the girl's hair is blowing in the wind the way nobody's hair blows except in cartoons).

The story is pretty strong, too. A cerulean macaw is transported to Minnesota where its found by a nebbishy young girl who raises it for the next fifteen years. As an adult, a Brazilian ornithologist comes to her bookstore and says that Blu (the macaw) is almost the last of his kind, and that he needs to mate with the last female to keep the species going.

Linda, the bookish girl (Leslie Mann), is not thrilled with this idea, and neither is Blu (Jesse Eisenberg), who is just as nebbishy and domesticated as his owner. They're even less thrilled when the female macaw Jewel (Anne Hathaway) is a feral, unfriendly creature focused on escape.

The birds are immediately captured by smugglers and this leads to a kind of buddy picture with Blu and Jewel trying to find their way to freedom.

So. Cute.

But not that cute. Not in the sense of, say, Despicable Me, which was in danger of being too cute (but pulled back). It's also not that clever like, say, a Ratatouille. It has a passel of animal characters voiced by celebrities that are instantly forgettable. Even now, I know there was a fat bird and a skinny bird and a toucan, but I couldn't tell one from the other.

This movie takes stunt casting to the extreme. Eisenberg and Hathaway could've been Cera and Bynes or Mintz-Plasse and Gomez. In fact, I kind of think maybe they wanted Cera, because Eisenberg sounds like he's doing a nicer, wimpier version of the character he usually plays. Jane Lynch and Wanda Sykes are in here as a couple of geese--for one 30 second scene.

It's, like, why?

The one truly standout voice is done by Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords.

Amidst the passel of forgettable characters are a few desultory musical numbers. I don't even remember how many. You're not going to be whistling tunes from this after leaving the theater. I was actually forgetting the songs as they were being sung. Which was sort of disturbing in a Memento way.

At one point, Blu has a tantrum and says he hates samba because it all sounds alike. Yeah. Well, at least in this movie?

The score by John Powell overall is actually good, though, as is the song he co-wrote with Powell and performed as the movie's villain. But it's an expository character piece that is never again referenced in the rest of the film.

You can do this sort of thing and still be very successful if you pull it out in some other fashion: Being very funny for example (nope) or having a lot of thrilling, suspenseful moments (better).

One of the things I've noticed lately is that animators will take an idea from a Pixar flick and run with it in such a way that it works on a new level. For example, the minions of Despicable Me are very reminiscent of the green alien dudes of the Toy Story series. (Their intonations, their tendency to do things en masse, etc.) But Despicable Me takes it to a higher level, imbuing the minions with individual personalities and basically providing fodder for humor whenever things threaten to get too slow or serious.

The penguins from Madagascar are—well, I can't remember where they're derived from, but I remember thinking how cliché they were at the time, but they also provide a lot of interest for an otherwise plain movie. (Though the rather original King Julian and his entourage are significant.)

This movie has a monkey crew reminiscent of the penguins, but they're bad guys. So they're not very funny and they're kind of creepy, and they don't have any personality.

There are other weird things, too. George Lopez plays a family-man toucan (I think) who uses the macaw's predicament to get out of the metaphorical house, but later on lectures to Blu on how he's going back to his family rather than enjoying Carnival.

Why? Was that something Blu needed to learn? Was Blu in danger of turning to a life of fleeting carnal pleasures? Blu can't even make it with the last female (cerulean macaw) on earth!

You put enough of these things together and it comes out like mush.

But again, the core parts (story, animation, voice acting) are all solid, just never really taking flight (ironically, wah-wah).

When I asked the Barb if she liked it, she said "Of course!" (And aren't you a moron for asking?)

"So, it was good?"
No dignifying that with a response.
"Did you have a favorite part?"
"Yes."
...
...
"Well, what was it?"
"When Blu was a baby."

OK, so she liked the first 3 minutes. And the popcorn. I dunno. You figure it out. Can't wait till she's a teenager.

Point Blank (À bout portant)

2011-08-14T15:49:00.000-07:00

The Boy and I love suspense/thrillers. Hitchcock fans to the bitter end. And, let's face it: If a movie is a thriller, the one thing you know is that it's not going to be boring. Right? Except, of course, when it's mis-labeled melodrama. Which it often is. Especially if it's a foreign film. Especially French.

But the French can make some good potboilers and, happy to say, this movie, Point Blank, is one of them. It's a simple (Hitchcockian) premise: A nurse on duty (male nurse, it's France, remember) saves a man from an assassination attempt, and ends up being a pawn in a game of dirty cops and robbers.

The action is breakneck. The twists are twisty but not overblown. We get some character development as our hero Sam (Gilles Lelouche) must transform from a mild-mannered good guy nurse into a something a little grittier. This actually is worth a pause: He doesn't become, Police Academy-style, a complete caricature of an action hero. He barely qualifies at all, really: He just gets more desperate and it's more like we see the quality of his character (showcased early on in a normal situation, that's foreshadowing, people) proven over the course of the adventure.

And it doesn't really let up till the end, which involves a chaotic brawl inside a police station.

Fun!

A couple of points right at the end made me wonder if they were going to get all dark and French and stuff, but they avoided that for a nice climax and satisfying denouement.

Good stuff. Not weighty or serious, but the fast, fun, quick movies (this clocks in at 84 minutes, including credits) aren't as easy to do as people think, clearly.

The Boy and I liked it. The Boy even mentioned it a couple days later as being good. And he hates the French.

Sarah's Key (Elle s'appelait Sarah)

2011-08-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

Gendarmes pound on the door of a French apartment in WWII to collect the Jews who live there, and a little girl thinks to save her brother's life by locking him in a closet. The rest of the family is taken away and the little girl desperately tries to get back, or to send someone, to fetch him.

So begins the French film, Sarah's Key, which is this story and also the story of a journalist (Kristin Scott-Thomas) who moves into that apartment with her family 60 years later, who happens to be researching the story for a magazine article.

The coincidence bugged me a bit, but then it occurred to me that with tens of thousands of Jews having been rounded up in France, it's not as huge a stretch as it first seems that there'd be a connection, even an intimate one.

Mélusine Mayance plays the eponymous Sarah, and her struggle to free her brother from the closet is suspenseful, moving, riveting and heart-breaking as Sarah's story crosses those of other children.

Julia Jarmond's story is necessarily far more low-key. She's obsessed by the story, moving into her husband's family apartment in Paris, and newly (surprisingly) pregnant with a child her husband doesn't want.

The Boy and I deconstructed it immediately: The climax is a little past the middle of the film. We find out what happens to Sarah as a child, and follow Julia as she tries to find out her fate as an adult. This doesn't have the drive of the first part of the film, and—well, it's all sort of denouement.

As I've noted, when the French aren't beating up America, they're beating up themselves, and there's a little of that here, though not as much as you might think. (Not like, say, the moving Indigenes.) But there's an undeniable triviality of modern life compared to World War II and the Holocaust. The Boy said at the end he was reminded of that scene in Crazy, Stupid Love (the giddy "It's just a divorce!" celebration).

And yet. For both of us, the movie seemed to get better and better in the ensuing hours. It's a tricky (some would say dangerous) juxtaposition, and the reviews for this movie indicate that the critics were less likely to accept it than the general audience. Maybe this is because Julia is an American and she (rightly) has a certain moral concern over the possibility her French in-laws may have acquired property from Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and American moral superiority isn't big among our elite these days.

But maybe it worked for us because we're humbled by the experience. The events of our lives are happily trivial compared to those of who came before us, thanks to their efforts. And maybe we could relate to Julia and her peers trying to find some meaning at the peril of re-prioritizing things in favor of what's important rather than what's convenient.

Excellently acted throughout, of course. Beautifully rendered in two different styles (for the flashback and the modern times). Effective, understated music. If I am jaded about Holocaust movies occasionally, this one had a different, challenging aspect to it that made it worthy of viewing.

Cowboys and Aliens

2011-08-06T23:38:00.000-07:00

The inestimable @Darcysport, who's sort of become my conservative conscience as far as movie-going goes, goaded me a little bit about last week's Cowboys and Aliens comment, pointing out that Ed Morrissey liked it.

I retorted that I knew that, but I thought his whole equating the holocaust with KFC rendered his judgment questionable.

I can be obtuse that way.

Anyway, I knew Morrissey had liked it, and I don't know much about his taste in movies, but it got me thinking: What if some of the negative reviews had not been based on the actual quality of the movie per se (that's Latin for "I'm a pretentious dork") but on themes that might be regarded as right-wing, and therefore not worthy of any praise?

We have a winnah!

OK, let's say it up front. This movie is what it says on the label: Cowboys (check) and aliens (check). A mysterious stranger wanders into a town on its way to being a ghost town, and runs afoul of the cattle baron with a maniac kid, when the western clichés are interrupted by an alien attack.

And it works.

There's some stupid here, necessarily. But way less stupid than you might expect. Way less than (say) Independence Day. Allowing for the fact that any alien invasion movie is going to have to have some stupid in order for earthlings to have a chance at fighting back, this movie does a good job of setting up the seeds of the aliens' potential failure.

Director Jon Favreau does what he does best, I think: Deliver more than you expect from some thin material (see Elf). And how does he do this?

Primarily, he refuses to pad things out. Especially with summer blockbusters, you get lots of padding. Movies tend to be padding between special effects, and then the special effects are padded! (Think the Star Wars prequels.) Every scene here has a purpose: characterization, plot development and even the occasional special effect.

The effects are light in general. Favreau seems to have opted for filming real places instead of a bunch of people on a green screen, and the plot is pretty straightforward, too. So what you get is a lot of characterization.

I don't get why action directors don't figure this out: Action sequences (and special effects) are nothing if you don't care about the characters. Super 8 knew this, but it lampshaded it to the point where the characterization felt forced.

Here you have The Mysterious Badass, The Upright Sheriff and his Ward, The Evil Cattle Baron, The Preacher, The Nebbishy Saloon Owner and his Hot Wife, The Indians—pretty much stock genre characters. But each one is imbued with a certain, unique life by their time onscreen, no matter how short.

The Outlaws and The Indians, e.g., have very little screen time between them, but you can tell 'em apart with the short time they have. Favreau did the same thing with Ironman, you may recall: If there's a character on-screen, they're not just filling in a plot point or being sucked into a special effect. The characterization is positively thick, with The Hero being layered in a Jason Bourne kind of style and The Evil Cattle Baron being by turns merciless, racist, ruthless but also with a toughness that seems to come from an almost sentimental place.

In other words, there's something to hang your hat on.

It doesn't hurt that the lead is played by Daniel Craig, who lacks the bulk of a John Wayne, but is damned convincing as a wiry, tough bastard. There is one shot that reminds me so strongly of a comic book image—I don't read a lot of comic books but I can't remember where I've seen it—that I completely overlooked how impossibly well his clothes fit him.

While Craig does excellently, Harrison Ford almost steals the show as the Evil Cattle Baron. It's a little weird to see him as a bad guy, but he's more complicated. You could argue, even, that he's the main character, since his story has the most clearly defined arc. (Craig's arc is there, but it's subtler.)

Olivia Wilde is about a million times more appealing than she was in Tron. Her role is a bit odd and she manages to bring a real warmth to it completely missing from Legacy. Sam Rockwell plays the nebbishy bartender while Paul Dano is the snotty son of the cattle baron—a role that probably would have gone to Rockwell ten years ago.

Clancy Brown plays the preacher man, once again. Seems like he's a preacher a lot, though the only thing I can swear to offhand is his role as the evil radio preacher in "Carnivalé".

It's his character that really gets up and slaps you in the face with the movie's right-wingedness.

It's not really a right-wing movie, though, any more than Iron Man was. It's just that, working in a genre where traditional American values are celebrated, it's just going to come off that way. And I think that's why it rubs some folks the wrong way.

And being rubbed the wrong way, they come up with stupid other reasons for not liking it, like "What do the aliens want with gold?" Really? That's your idea of a plot hole. We're told early on that gold is as rare on their world as on ours. What more do you need? A giant gold space laser?

Sheesh.

This confirms my thesis that most people (including, say, Roger Ebert) react to movies on a gut level, then just sort of backfill the reasons why they hate something or like something to make it seem logical.

That's why I try to let you know my biases and tastes.

Anyway, this movie is full of western tropes that seem remarkably right-wing now. The Preacher is a decent, tough man who tries to help out the bartender. The Indians are savages (though we do get a little Indian medicine magic). The gun is celebrated, whether six-shooter, Winchester rifle or alien laser doo-hickey.

The Cattle Baron is a racist, but he has a good heart.

I don't know why that last should be "right-wing" except that political correctness seems to require certain things be signifiers of pure evil. Things like racism, or smoking.

There's some smoking, too. The hero smokes! Primarily to look cool to his friends!

So, yeah, I'm willing to guess that this stuff shaved a few points of the ratings.

We all liked it. Me, The Boy, The Flower. We weren't really blown away, but we agreed it was fun and under-rated.

Crazy, Stupid, Love.

2011-08-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

Cowboys and Aliens wasn't really getting the top notch reviews, and The Boy is a hard sell on "high concept" movies anyway, so I took him and The Flower to see the new Steve Carell flick Crazy, Stupid, Love. And that punctuation (including the period) is part of the title.

It's a simple premise: Middle-aged, nerdy Cal and his wife Emily are splitting up, and Cal ends up under the tutelage of Jacob, a top-notch player who shows him how to score women. Meanwhile, Jacob has his eye on the sexually modest Hanna, and 17-year-old babysitter Jessica has a crush on Cal while fending off the advances of Cal's 13-year-old son Robbie.

So, of course, it's not the plot but the execution.

This is a fairly light movie. Carell is pleasant, of course, and likable even in his wimpy mode, and he's supported by Julianne Moore, who seems pleasingly vulnerable in this role. Ryan Gosling plays Jacob, managing to be charming and strong without seeming sleazy, sort of doing the opposite of his Lars and the Real Girl role. Analeigh Tipton (Jessica) and Jonah Bobo (Robbie) are both very appealing, as well, and the supporting cast includes Kevin Bacon, Beth Littleford and John Carroll Lynch. Oh, and Emma Stone as "good girl" Hannah and Liza Lapira as her slutty friend are a delight.

The comedy moves pretty quickly and consistently, too, with no serious lags or lulls. It's not entirely fluff, as we do see some of the consequences of (multiple, frequent) casual sex, but obviously not the worst ones (or it would cease to be a comedy, most likely). It highlights some of the crazy, stupid aspects—but not really of love so much as sex and infatuation.

There are some technical issues. One of the plot points involves Jacob's strategy of always buying a girl a drink, for example, when everyone knows you don't buy a girl a drink. This sets up a nice awkward moment for Carell to riff on, though, so we can overlook it, along with some of the other aspects of Jacob's "game" that seem improbable.

A more serious issue, to my mind, is the ease with which Carell's character, Cal, falls into his new lifestyle. Given the sort of person he is portrayed as being, his history as we learn it, and his reaction to circumstances later on, I don't know if I really buy that. I also don't know if the movie's resolution makes sense, given all that.

There's another, less obvious issue that raises its head twice in this movie, with regard to male/female relationships. In both situations (involving different characters), a female becomes unhinged because her relationship with a male didn't work out the way she thought it would.

Now, obviously, this is true to life enough.

In one case, though, we're more inclined to believe that the character is a little unstable, while in the other case, the character is meant to be admirable. But from what we're shown, both cases involve the woman making assumptions that are never stated anywhere, and in both cases we're invited to blame the males for this.

In one case, a one-night stand, this is ridiculous. The other case involves a long-term relationship—but one in which we're given no reason to even understand the woman's attraction to the man, except as a demonstration of her superior character, much less why she would have the expectations of him she does—except, again as a demonstration of her relative superior value.

Not to say I haven't known hot chicks who went for less-than-hot guys because they valued kindness, stability and all the other things that aren't supposed to turn women on, and who didn't end up being just as badly used by them as they would have been by bad boys. But just that the movie doesn't show us any depth, so it sort of looks like women have no responsibility for relationships, men are just supposed to meet their needs (however unspoken), and it's men's fault for not doing so.

Come to think of it, that might have been the over-arching message of the film.

Can't say I approve of that.

But I'm over-analyzing things, I suppose. It's a cute movie, with plenty of laughs. You'll probably enjoy it. Both The Boy and The Flower did, as did I.

There was a distinct shortage of both cowboys and aliens, however.

A Better Life

2011-07-26T18:47:00.000-07:00

So, this movie about an illegal immigrant gardener living in East L.A. has been hanging around the theaters lately and I really wasn't going to go see it. These things almost always work out the same way, with the good-hearted Latinos being oppressed by the evil gringos or, say, the immigrants teach the repressed white man how to really live.

Meh.

Then @Darcysport mentioned that it was written by Pajamas Media founder Roger Simon.

Meh.

I actually don't know much about Roger Simon. I remember Althouse mocking him mercilessly when he was recruiting bloggers for PJ Media. That was almost six freaking years ago. So, I guess her estimation that they would flounder didn't pan out.

Anyway, I think Simon's shtick is that he's a Hollywood outsider by choice, due to his political conservatism, which in this town sounds like "no one will hire me". Not that I have any insight into his career that IMDB doesn't give.

What I'm getting at is that I wasn't all that enthusiastic going into this thing, with a story by Simon, directed by Chris Weitz (About A Boy) and screenwriter Eric Eason, and a cast of people you maybe have seen around...places...maybe on street corners...

And?

It's a solid movie. It's the sort of movie that people say "Why don't they make movies like that anymore?" only to have you point out that they do, and that they just watched it, you moron!

Though it has been a while.

Carlos is an illegal, living in L.A. for about 15 years, raising his son, Luis, on his own. He wakes up early, gets driven around in a truck by his boss, and does gardening all over the fair City of Angels. He works hard, lives in a mean little hovel in East L.A. where he tends his own mini-garden. He's not relating well to his teenage son, who skips school and runs with a bad crowd.

Pretty standard stuff, right?

Carlos' boss is going to sell the truck and equipment to the highest bidder and take his money to go buy a farm back in Mexico—something he refers to, without irony, as "the American dream". This puts the pressure on Carlos, since he doesn't have the money to buy the truck, and doesn't have the necessary papers to hold on to the truck if he could buy it. (That is, he has no driver's license and if he gets caught, he'll get shipped back to Mexico.) If he doesn't buy it, on the other hand, he's back out on the curb with the other day laborers. (An interesting and accurate depiction of the various strata of illegal society here.)

Meanwhile, Luis is a snotty, spoiled teenaged brat who disdains his father, disdains the day laborers, hates his own poverty and really has no sense of how bad it could be. He is, at least, smart enough to be running with the gangs, but there's an attraction, and it doesn't help that his girlfriend is part of the baddest crime gang in the neighborhood.

Once again, pretty standard stuff, right?

Ah, but it's character, plot, tension, story arc—all the basics covered here.

And it works. Well.

Why? Because it's a depiction of a good man, working hard to get ahead—to the live the American Dream—and the forces arrayed against him are formidable but not insurmountable. Demian Bichir plays Carlos, and he's an excellent everyman.

The whole cast is convincing and authentic feeling, and the (presumably) low budget doesn't work against it.

You care, but more than that, the movie is always engaging you with narrative "effects" a lot of dramatists avoid: Just because this is a serious drama (some say melodrama) doesn't mean it can't have moments of suspense, mystery, action, etc. These enhance the drama, just as drama can enhance those sorts of scenes.

What I'm getting at is that the movie doesn't take your caring for granted, constantly giving you moments to make you care a little bit more. For Luis's character, this is critical, because he's such a tool you feel like slapping him at first. But he gets to have his highs and lows, his moments of glory and, well, inglory, and he evolves as a character.

Given my bent, I'd like to say "This movie shows that socialism (and other forms of big government) ruins everything." Because to my way of thinking, the Carlos' of the world are never an immigration problem. If it weren't for the government offering freebies to illegals and regulating the jobs market so much that they price the native poor out of the jobs immigrants do, I think we'd have a lot less of an issue.

But as much as I'd like to say that's the message of the movie, I can't any more than I could say "The problem with immigration, according to the movie, is the gringos oppressing and exploiting the brown peoples." (Racism, and white people in general, barely make an appearance in the film.)

The point being, the movie is basically politics-free. You can say "Well, that sure is stupid" at various points of the film, but that's just honest observation. Politics gets into the why (like my preferred "why" mentioned above) and the how to fix, and who's to blame, which would make for an insufferable film.

The Flower had a little trouble following it with all the subtitles (the movie slips in and out of Spanish frequently) but she liked it. The Boy really liked it. And I did, too. I was glad we went and glad that a movie like this—on many levels—could be made.

Harry Potter And The Last Goddamn Movie

2011-07-18T21:30:00.000-07:00

It's over! Hallelujah! After ten years, 19-and-a-half hours and eight movies, There are no more Harry Potter movies to sit through!

Thank God.

Actually, all things considered? This is a very solid series of movies. Especially after the first couple of cutesy-poo Chris Columbus flicks (Sorceror's Stone and Chamber of Secrets). The uneven third flick had some edge and real heart, with Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) at the helm, and Mike Newell (Prince of Persia) made the silly plot of The Goblet of Fire overlookable.

The last four films (Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, Deathly Hallows I and II) were all done by David Yates who has done a fine job, st least as far as creating watchable movies, I can't speak to faithfulness to the source material.

So, what to say about this one? Well, Ace of Spades lamented, when he heard the last book had been split in to two movies, that there wasn't enough material.

Not a problem. Part 1 moved along briskly, and Part 2 is actually pretty breakneck. There's a lot to wrap up here, and the Big Reveal to be revealed, and what-not.

The Big Reveal isn't going to surprise anyone, I don't think. My kids saw it coming around the fifth movie—well, The Boy did. The Flower was born the year the first one came out so she wasn't even prepared to be surprised by the twist.

Well, that's one reveal. The other reveal—well, that seemed obvious to me from the get-go.

This is not a bad thing, mind you. If they had really been shocking at this point, halfway through the last half of the last book, it would have felt like a cheat. (Though this theory about Neville would've been fun.) Really, for a movie series that's based on a fair amount of slapdashery, the final chapter hangs together and brings things together.

The movie could actually be stitched two the first half to make a seamless four-and-a-half-hour movie (yow!) beginning as it does at the point where Valdemort robs the Elder Wand from the grave. Meanwhile, Harry, Ron and Hermione are off to destroy the horcruxes (the vessels that hold Valdemort's soul and preserve his immortality).

This leads to a bank heist (with shootout!) and then takes them back to a thoroughly occupied Hogwart's (apparently Valdemort thought it would be a good idea to keep two horcruxes in the same place). And thus begins the last stand.

There's not much to say really. At this point, you know whether you're going to see it or not. Are you really going to see 6 1/2 chapters of a story without seeing the last? Although, in fairness, I know a guy who has only seen the last three or four films and enjoyed them.

To the film's, and the series', credit, this isn't the Star Wars prequels or Lord of the Rings, where I really did just see the last ones because I'd seen the first two. The Boy shares my opinion here: While far from a fan, he's been liking these later movies more.

The Flower, on the other hand, hates them. Not that she thinks they're bad, necessarily, but she's sort of picked up on the fact that Rowling basically dumps on Harry. He can't get a break. The Flower doesn't care for that sort of thing. (She hates Charlie Brown, too, for stuff like the ever-escaping football. "The most depressing series ever.")

Her opinion? "It's no Gran Torino, but it wasn't bad!"

High praise, indeed. (Gran Torino is one of her favorite movies and the funniest she's ever seen, she says.)

The movie suffers a bit from a few things. For one thing, if you primarily watch the movies when they come out, you're basically seeing the second half a movie after you got interrupted 6-8 months ago. It takes a while to catch up.

For another thing, you're wrapping up this near 20 hour story. If you've come to care about any of the characters, there's a good chance you won't find out what happened to them. A lot of creatures drifted through the stories over the years and are left to drift.

Also, a lot of the characters die. Now, it's a war, so you expect that. But you just see them stretched or crumpled over and you don't really get a chance to—well, hell, you're wondering who it is when they flash by and by the time you think you've puzzled it through, a bunch of other characters end up dead.

And when it's over, it's over. They very wisely did not do the LOTR thing with the four hundred different endings, but the price of that is a sort of anticlimactic denouement, if that's even possible. It's almost a "monster's dead, movie's over" situation, though there is a nice (short) epilogue.

So, yeah, good ending to the series.

The Chameleon

2011-07-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

The movie well is pretty dry, as it tends to be mid-summer, if you're not into loud, obnoxious and dumb. And I'm actually into any two of those, but all three at once sort of turns me off. Anyway, the upshot is that we ended up seeing a movie called The Chameleon which has two cuts: One which is apparently crap, and one which is apparently good.

We, of course, didn't know which cut it was. But I hope it was the bad one.

The premise is intriguing, and based (very loosely) on a real events: A missing Louisiana child turns up four years later. Only looking a lot more than four years older. And having a (Continental) French accent. And just generally not seeming much like the missing child.

The family with the missing child is apartment and trailer dwellers, so there's no monetary motivation for him to lie. They're also seriously dysfunctional, with a con half-brother and a half-in-the-bag mother (played by a very anti-glammed Ellen Barkin). On the other side, you have to wonder why any family would pretend that an impostor was their missing son.

So, you have a mystery. And one that's irritating the crap out of an FBI agent (Famke Janssen), who pursues the situation when no one else cares to.

The con half-bother (Nick Stahl) also seems to be constantly on the verge of killing the kid (Marc-André Grondin) which gives the movie a kind of a thriller aspect to it.

In fact, it was the mystery/thriller aspect that inclined me to take a shot at this flick, but it really fails at both. (Or the cut I saw did, and frankly, I don't know enough about French director Jean-Paul Salomé to vouch for him.) The problem is, the mystery comes from murky motivations. What happens doesn't entirely make sense from any point of view apart from a sort of surreal, highly emotional one.

The Boy and I were trying to figure out who the main character was, with no success. The only real possibilities are the kid, the mother or the FBI agent. The kid and the mother form a bond, and the former has a sort of character arc, but it's a very strange and muted one. The FBI agent doesn't really have a character arc.

It's one of those movies that seems more like a series of events than a focused narrative. That makes it sort of listless, despite the rather interesting subject matter. It comes off sort of like an episode of "The Closer", except "The Closer" is a pretty tight show with better production values. And less on-screen drug use, I guess.

The most compelling drama is between the kid and the mother, but their moments seem sort of stilted. Janssen's character has some real depth, and since she's in less awkward situations, her character is revealed in ways that seem more natural. They also tried de-glamming her, but it didn't really take.

I think, sometimes, if you're doing a "ripped from the headlines" type story, you have some obligation to the truth, and that can tie your hands, dramatically speaking. But that presumes you're trying to stay true to life, which I think was pretty secondary here.

If you're not, you should go to town and do whatever it takes to make an artistically satisfying film, facts be damned. I think this movie wasn't concerned with the actuality, at least as production wore on (if ever), but they didn't cut loose and give us either a good mystery or a good thriller. And in the long run, aspersions were cast. Cast, slung and sprayed all over the damn place.

The Boy and I were not impressed, and we couldn't recommend what we saw. I'm suspicious how much better another cut could be, though. The flaws seemed to be structural. Thinking about it, while the audience does not know what's going on, the film's characters pretty much all have to. The exception is the FBI agent, of course, and if the movie had gone from her perspective the whole time, you might have had something.

As it is, it's just us trying to figure out what's going on and the movie basically refusing to tell us. There is a scenario strongly suggested throughout most of the movie, which then seems to be potentially refuted by the last scenes. And without any particular suspense, really.

So, view at your own peril (as always).

The Names of Love (Le nom de gens)

2011-07-10T22:08:00.000-07:00

Holy cow. A French movie about a coupla French socialists. How the Hell do I sell this to The Boy?

Popcorn. Lots of popcorn.

The Names of Love is one of those quirky movies that only the French can make and—unlike so many things they do—can make completely unselfconsciously. It's so backward from an American point-of-view you can't help but be a little charmed and a little, like, "Hey! I thought these guys were sophisticates!"

Here's the story: Buttoned-up Arthur Martin, Parisian dead fowl investigator, is chided by "liberated" (read slutty) Baya Benmahmoud during a radio show where he's warning against bird flu. She says, astutely, "You're making us all crazy with your panicky talk" or something of that sort. Arthur, for his part, says stuff like "We must be constantly vigilant, but not too alarmed" and other very official, meaningless things.

After rejecting Baya's offer of sex (she only sleeps with men on the first date) the two part ways, only to meet up again on another occasion. This time Arthur takes her up on her offer, but they split for a minute, which is long enough for Baya to become completely disoriented, caught up in three other obligations, and wandering the street naked.

Arthur rescues her and they become a sort of item. We learn that Baya is a committed socialist who targets right wingers and converts them from their wicked ways by having sex with them.

I know, right? French!

Arthur is different, of course, or we wouldn't have a movie. Arthur is already a committed socialist and the two share a love of Lionel Jospin, the socialist candidate beaten in 2002 by (right wing) Jacques Chirac. ("Right wing" in France means "not completely committed to the total control of the economy in all its facets by the government", I gather.)

Actually, in some ways, this movie is thematically a lot like the last movie we saw, Beginners. Arthur and Baya are sorta messed up in their own ways that go back to their parents. But in this case, the problems seem to be cultural. Baya is the daughter of an Algerian solder and a hippie mother, while Arthur's Jewish mother escaped concentration camps in WWII. Arthur's paternal grandparents, on the other hand, were actually deported from France back to Greece.

Given the Martins' policy of never talking about anything, we don't learn anything else about the Greek grandparents.

At one point, Arthur realizes he can attract the girls with stories of his grandparents' persecution, but it makes him feel unclean to do so, and he simply stops talking about it at all. Baya, on the other hand, regrets that she hasn't experienced the persecution that is her due, as a half-Algerian.

At this point, it's hard to regard the French as anything but a sort of naive, muddled provincials. I mean, seriously, Arthur and Baya are riddled with angst over questions of birth that would register a shrug in the United States! Can you imagine an entire modern American movie based around a mixed couple? Didn't we do all those in the '70s?

But I digress. It's still an issue for the French, apparently.

One of the cutest moments is when Arthur confesses to Baya that he thinks, right or left, political parties tend to do bad things. Baya cannot absorb it. If it's true, she reasons, nothing makes any sense at all. The left is good, the right is bad, she asserts existentially. (I don't know if that's the right word, but it should be.)

The murkiness doesn't end with politics and race, though. Sex is an issue, too, of course. Baya is "liberated", in Martin's words. Maybe even "too liberated". Of course, she's not "liberated" at all: She's a slut. And nuts. She was molested as a child—French comedy, remember—which would seem to cast doubt on the whole sexual free spirit stuff.

And maybe this kind of muddled messaging is why the whole movie works. Director Michel Leclerc doesn't try to assert the rightness of any of it. A lot of it is played for laughs, thought always with a gentle touch and empathy for the characters. The movie suggests that, somehow, the characters will survive the success of such right-wing heavies as Chirac and (gasp!) Sarkozy.

And maybe, just maybe, a whole lot of fuss is being made about politics and race and freeing crabs (you'll understand when you see it) that pales next to the business of actually living and loving.

Which also seems very French.

Leclerc co-wrote the script with Baya Kasmi whose name and appearance evokes that of the Baya Benmahmoud of the movie, suggesting some autobiography here.

The cast is excellent, but unless you're an afficianado of French film you probably don't know these guys. I see more French flicks than most, but I couldn't place Jacques Gamblin (who plays Arthur) and Sarah Forestier looked really familiar but I think the only movie I've seen her in is the unusual Perfume: The Story of a Murder. Zinedine Soualem, who plays Baya's dad, was in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Michele Moretti (Martin's mom) played a role in the enjoyable Apres Vous.

But that probably doesn't mean much to you. There are typically 2-3 French films a year I get to, so unless someone's having a very good year, I'm probably not going to see them enough to be able to recognize them. And all the hot stars from 5 or so years ago aren't getting into movies that make it out here very much.

C'est la vie, eh?

Anyway, worked for me. Worked for the Boy, even with the odds stacked against it. Pretty good recommendation, overall.

Beginners

2011-07-10T16:25:00.000-07:00

Longtime readers know how I feel about teh gay, at least as it appertains to indie cinema, and I didn't exactly stampede to see Beginners, the new(ish) movie with Christopher Plummer and—uh, what's his name. That guy who did the kick-ass Alec Guiness impression in the Star Wars prequels. Not Ethan Hawke...Ewan MacGregor! That's the guy.

Sorry. I'm getting older. The names aren't coming as fast as they used to.

Anyway, the story is about Oliver (MacGregor), a wan sort of graphic artist, whose mom has just died. His 76-year-old father, Hal (Plummer) has since come out of the closet and devoted his last years to pursuing his sexuality. Also, Hal has terminal cancer.

The story takes place along three timelines: One in the late '50s, where we meet Hal's mom, Georgia (played by the lovely Mary Page Keller, best known to me as the star of the early Fox sitcom "Duet", who's actually a little too old to be playing a mom in the '50s, but I didn't mind), one from 2003 showcasing Hal's life after Georgia dies, and one from 2006 where Oliver tries to sort out his head after Hal dies, and make a relationship with the beautiful Anna (Mélanie Laurent, of last years fun Franco-Russo flick The Concert).

Wow, does that read as awful as I think it does?

It's really not. It's actually a very enjoyable movie.

Yeah, Oliver's a mope, but he's sort of a whimsical mope. He loves his dad, and is supportive of him. A central player in this drama is Hal's dog, who has occasional subtitles, which works better than you might think it would.

I guess what it comes down to is, none of the characters are bad guys, they're just sort of befuddled. Hal is as unapologetic about his relationship with Georgia (who entered the relationship knowingly, if deluded) as he is about his 11th hour aggressive pursuit of homosexuality. Oliver and Anna struggle along, being sort of weird, hurting each other by sheer emotional awkwardness.

It wasn't boring. You're rooting for everyone.

The movie largely stays away from being glib or simplistic, although I had a little trouble with the central premise, which I took to be "I'm screwed up because my dad was gay and married to my mom."

But what do I know?

The key may be that The Boy enjoyed it, and that says something about a movie that features a fair amount of dudes kissing.

Anyway, if you up for a low key drama that's not too heavy, and you're not, you know, adverse to the dudes kissing thing, it's a good bet.

(Also, if you're a Christopher Plummer fan, check out The Man In The Chair.)

Super 8

2011-07-10T15:30:00.000-07:00

What if a bunch of kids in 1979 were making a movie and they saw a massive train wreck? And what if the train were carrying some kind of mysterious menace? And what if the kids embarked on an adventure to discovery the mysterious menace, while being further menaced by menacing military madmen?

Now, what if Steven Spielberg happened to catch all this on film?

Or, okay, J. J. Abrams filmed it, which is sort of like Spielberg-plus-lens-flare.

Well, then you'd have something like Super 8, the modern day Goonies flick which seems to have registered a collective "meh", given its pedigree. The Boy and The Flower both failed to register any enthusiasm for it, though they didn't really complain, either. They didn't have high expectations going in, and they weren't disappointed or surprised.

The story is about a group of kids making a movie in 1979 on the titular film. Said film stock, by the way, is never referenced by name, so I imagined a substantial percentage of the audience saying, "Huh?" That is, if they paused to ask themselves what "Super 8" meant.

Anyway, the kids are shooting their film when there's a train wreck right before their eyes (and camera). Throw in a mysterious, incoherent teacher injured in the wreck, strange noises, and menacing G-Men, and you got yourself a picture.

It's well shot, of course, moves briskly, has some laughs, and the kids all carry off their acting duties. Special effects are good, too.

So why isn't it boffo?

I have some theories, as you might expect.

First of all, in one of the early scenes, the fat director kid is explaining to the main character that he's rewritten the script to have the cute chick in it because adding the character development will make the audience care what happens to the hero when he's eaten by zombies.

So, we have this sub-plot where the main character's mom dies and this is kinda-sorta the fault of the cute chick's alcoholic dad, and the main character's dad is a hardass, and there's a love triangle, sorta, between the main character, the fat kid and the cute chick and...

Well, it all feels like they lampshaded it in that early scene. "Look, now we're making you care about the characters!"

Strangely inartful.

Sorta like the very first scene where the camera pans down (with dolorous music a-playing) to a factory, then cuts to the inside where a worker is solemnly taking down the counter from a "days since last accident" sign, to replace with a "1". (At least, I hope it wasn't a zero. That would be too much.)

Feels like an exercise from a screenplay writing handbook. Also, it conjures up a whole lot of humor. I think "Family Guy" and "The Simpson's" both have done a gag like that. Pretty sure I've seen it in a "Far Side" cartoon. As a joke, I expect it goes back to WWII, or to whenever those signs were invented.

Little risky using that for your "telling the audience someone has died" serious moment.

The drama comes off as a by-the-numbers exercise.

It doesn't help that the big dramatic connection between cute girl's dad and hero's mom's death is really tenuous. I mean, when the big reveal came, I just kind of thought everyone was sort of stupid. I guess that's not entirely unrealistic, but it wasn't very involving.

The whole thing kind of comes off that way. A lot of near misses that sort of remind you of more successful endeavors. People are disappearing right and left, but the why of that isn't really clear, for example.

Another thing: The climactic scene isn't, very. And I can't for the life of me figure out why they left a perfectly good opportunity for a suspenseful conclusion on the table. The kids are really barely involved with the final resolution of the story.

Which is just sort of weird.

There's also no real resolution about the nature of the mysterious menace, in a moral sense. It also feels like a plug-in menace right out of a '50s sci-fi movie. You're just supposed to fill-in-the-blanks, apparently.

Now, they nailed 1979. This was of little interest to the kids. But the lingo, hairstyles, clothing and technology was all pretty dead on. (There was a "bogus" and a "totally" which struck me as more '80s, but that's kind of splitting hairs.)

Like I said, it's not bad. And if you're not expecting the return of—I dunno, whatever, 1980s-era kiddie movie floats your boat (I pretty much hated all of them)—it's a not unpleasant way to pass a couple of hours. Bonus points if you've got any 1979 nostalgia. (But if you do? You should be ashamed of yourself.)

Anyway, all three of us were, like, totally, "Yeah. OK. Not bad."

So there ya have it.

Quote of the Day: That's Not Irony

2011-07-03T22:42:00.000-07:00

Meghan Casserly, of something called ForbesWoman, made the following statement in an article about how women won't marry guys who don't have jobs. (According to "Red Eye".)

It is ironic that women place more weight on love than money, yet won't marry if they or their potential suitor is unemployed.

Ms. Casserly, that's not ironic, that's just wrong. If they placed more weight on love than money then money wouldn't matter.

On "Red Eye" this was followed up with Kayleigh McEnany saying:

I'm all about finding true love and what-not but...if you don't have a job, if you're homeless, I'm probably not going to love you.

So much for "true love". But note: This is about marriage. The implications for non-marriage, non-loving relationships are left as an exercise for the reader.

The Least Likely and Most Awesome Tax System Ever

2011-07-02T17:05:00.000-07:00

Looooooong time readers will remember my "fair tax" proposal, the only one that is truly fair. But with Independence Day coming, I thought I'd try for another (ridiculous) tax idea. It wouldn't be fair in any sense of the word; it'd be better than fair, though.

As Barbie knows, a government's authority should derive from consent of the governed. The government never has the entire country's full consent, of course, but it does things that are more or less popular, like social security, health care "reform" or giving money to gang members.

So, how about this: How about no taxes?

Now, I realize they tried this with the Articles of Confederation, and it was a great weakness. But at the time we were a lot more States and a lot less United.

"But Blake," you say, "that would be the end of the government!"

"You have something on your cheek," I say. "Also, stop texting and driving."

It wouldn't be the end of the government if the government had the consent of the governed. I'm pretty radical, I know, but even I wouldn't want to see the government to go away completely. But when we allow the government to set its own levels of taxation, well, we get the current state, where we all pay about half of everything outright to various agencies with an added bonus suppression of our economic activity worth another half or more.

Run the government on donations. Run all of them on donations.

Also, allow taxpayers to allocate their money. Hate war, love handouts? Allocate your tax money to Welfare. Or, if your preferences are reversed, send it to Defense. Maybe even take it to the micromanagement level: Allow your donation to social security to be used for poor handicapped kids, but not rich old people. Or support the war in Afghanistan but not the one in Iraq.

Now, would this lead to some phenomenally bad decision making? Oh, yes, guaranteed. I don't know if we could have won the war in Iraq had we not persevered through unpopular times. On the other hand, we probably would have won Vietnam. Also, maybe Iraq wouldn't have been so unpopular if the administration had known that their success was tied to its popularity, and put some effort into explaining it.

Americans tend to be isolationists, though, so I suspect we'd see a quick drop in overseas military bases. Foreign aid—some of it would drop dramatically, of course, but some might actually go up.

War on drugs? I don't think there'd be huge support for it. But maybe if funds were limited, they could focus on the really bad stuff, and stuff aimed at kids.

The sort of business-squashing regulation industry that's bloomed over the past 100 years would be interesting. How many people would pay to support that? The real danger there would be that various industries would put a lot of money into regulation, then use that squash the competition.

Kind of like they do now. So, it's not a panacea. We'd still have to be paying attention. (Eternal vigilance, eh, what?) But, wow, what a feeling it would be. You'd really feel like you had some control. And various government agencies would bloody well have a good reason to treat you like a customer rather than a subject, wouldn't they?

I mean, hate the DMV? Don't fund it. If it has to shut down, the state could make a different plan up to better serve people. The IRS (and various state mini-IRSes) would be completely gone. Absolutely no need for a tax authority. The TSA would be a bad memory.

Tax time would be whenever you felt like it. The government could produce estimates of how much it needed to collect, monthly, quarterly, yearly. There'd be strong motivation to save a little cash in reserve for lean times.

Oh, yeah, the government would absolutely not be able to borrow.

Me? I'd pay $3,000-$4,000 a year for government. Maybe more. It's a little hard to gauge, since if it were drastically smaller, I'd be drastically better off, and feeling way more benevolent toward it than I currently am.

If you're thinking, as a lot of people probably would at this suggestion, that there's just no way that a government can exist without using force to collect money from people, I submit to you that no government really has the consent of the governed or could.

Now, if you want to argue that it's not fair, I agree. There would be tons of free-riders, just like the 50% or so of the population that pays no Federal income tax, or actually gets money back. I suspect, though, that quite a few of that 50% would donate. A lot of rich people wouldn't, probably more than the number of rich people who find ways out of paying taxes now.

But it would all be voluntary. A select few carry the burden of national defense for all of us. It's horribly unfair, but the only times you hear people complain we need a draft are when they want our national defense to be unpopular. (That's why some agitated so strongly for a draft at the height of the Iraq war's unpopularity.)

Some people would be exceeding generous while others would simply not donate at all. But there could be few complaints if none were forced into paying for things that they didn't want. And in this age of high-speed information, it's eminently do-able.

And if this couldn't work, the more interesting question become why not?

Midnight In Paris

2011-07-02T16:02:00.000-07:00

If I were going to write the executive summary for Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, it would probably be: "This is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen for nebbishy dweebs who think they're too good for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."

Screenwriter Owen Wilson takes a trip to Paris with fianceé Rachel MacAdams and her parents Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy, when they run into friends Michael Sheen and Nina Arianda. As taken as his fianceé is with the male half of this duo, Wilson himself is put off and takes to wandering around Paris rather than going out with them. When he gets lost, and the clock strikes midnight, a car shows up and takes him to 1920s Paris where he meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter and Ernest Hemmingway. Then Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, Matisse, Bunuel, and on and on.

Meh.

I don't like Woody Allen. This goes back to when I was a kid, knowing nothing about him. His movies occasionally made me laugh, but I also always felt a little icky and hollow after watching one. The last movie of his I saw (prior to this) was Match Point, which I saw without knowing it was him. I sat through it thinking, "Well, this is well done, but it seems to reek of a kind of malignant narcissism," and then, roll credits, "Written and Directed by Woody Allen".

Oh.

So, my first gripe with this film is the League thing: If you're going to represent yourself as worthy of writing for the giants of literature, you better write some damn good stuff. Similarly, if Woody Allen wants to put words in the mouths of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, etc., etc., he better bring it.

By the way, if you like Woody Allen, you might find his representations cute and charming.

My next gripe is that, if one were picking a time in history to idealize, and one were a Jew, one might think 1929 Paris wouldn't be first choice. France hated her Jews by the '30s, and one presumes that it didn't spring suddenly out of whole cloth from a totally egalitarian '20s, but you could rationalize this by presuming the time would never change and would always stay in that ideal moment (I guess). Or maybe by arguing that Owen Wilson wasn't a Jew, but I'm not sure that the responsibility can be sloughed off in that way.

My gripe after the last gripe is that if you had gone back in time, maybe your first instinct shouldn't be to get laid. In fact, unsurprisingly, the movie has an appalling sexuality to it. Our "hero" is engaged to a woman the script makes only the frailest attempt to demonstrate an attraction to—making the relationship resolution a foregone conclusion from scene one—but he's immediately hitting on a different woman in his time travelling. And on museum tours. And just walking the streets.

Meanwhile, his fianceé is fawning over a pedantic fop whose main service to the film is to be more insufferable than the lead. Actually, that's about every "real" main character's role: To be awful in comparison to the poetic hero. The Boy, who's never seen a Woody Allen flick before, leaned in at about 5 minutes and said "Everyone in this movie is a dick."

Astute, that.

He exempted the hero's in-laws, because they didn't have many lines (at least at first). Early on, though, we learn they're horrible because they're Republicans. Easy-peasey. No need for character development, huh, Woody?

My mother, who sees very few movies in a year, was going to see this because of the various raves she'd heard about it. But they were all from people with radically different tastes from her—Mommah likes her some action flicks—and she hates Woody Allen. (The Old Man hated him, too, while admiring his prowess as a cinematographer, so maybe it runs in the family.)

I told her to go see Win-Win. She loves sports movies. She loves Paul Giamatti. She hates Woody Allen.

And if you hate Woody Allen, this movie isn't going to change your mind. On the other hand, if you like Woody Allen, you're going to like this in all likelihood. Even I would say it's fairly entertaining, if you can stand it. I found myself constantly irritated by—well, call it Woody-Allen-ness.

The Boy said it just made him want to take a nap. He realized early on he wasn't going to care about the characters, the historical references are largely lost on him—and I tend to think that the giants of Woody Allen's literary mind are not necessarily going to be remembered long past what's very possibly undeserved late 20th century renown—so the gratification of the character's ego on this fantasy altar was not just narcissistic to him, but largely meaningless.

Good cinematography, of course. And music. And women. (Carla Bruni, Marion Cotillard and Lea Seydoux are his love interests.)

Excuse me while I go shower.

Submarine

2011-06-27T22:57:00.000-07:00

If you've seen the trailer or poster for the Brit flick Submarine, you're probably thought "Wow, they discovered a rejuvenation serum and wasted it on Bud Cort."

Well, okay, that made me chuckle, but unless you remember Hal Ashby's cult classic Harold and Maude—ok, look, I'm not gonna apologize. You know what kind of blog this is. Deal with it.

Anyway, eerie resemblances notwithstanding, Submarine is the story of a nebbishy, pale kid named Oliver who manages to score a girl he's been longing for and figures he's got something of a chance with because she's also kind of pale and nebbishy.

Oliver's an oddball who monitors his parents' sexual activity (by checking the dimmer switch, you pervs) and suffers considerable anxiety that they'll split, which is only compounded when a smarmy aura-reading motivational speaker moves in next door and puts the moves on mom.

So, we watch as Oliver manages his first adult relationship with Jordana (who is complex and has worse problems than his) and struggle to keep his parents together. This is occasionally funny, and warmer than the rather sterile trailer suggests, but it's pretty heavy overall. It's a little over an hour-and-a-half, but just slightly too long, with the denouement dragging out a hair.

The acting is superb, of course. It's British, after all. Craig Roberts (late of Jane Eyre) and Jasmin Page are more than credible as the—well, they don't drive, and they could convincingly be middle schoolers, but I think they're meant to be 15 or so. (In real life, they were both 19.) Noah Taylor (who played Mr. Bucket in the Burton Wonka) and the very English-y cute Sally Hawkins (also of Jane Eyre and Never Let Me Go) are odd without being ostentatious. Paddy Considine is great as the smarmy motivational speaker.

This movie is conspicuous in its a-temporality. It never says what the year is. While this is a deliberate choice, it sort of draws attention to itself: There are no cell phones, computers, CDs, and the music is original so that you can't pin it to any specific time (other than, well, 2010, because that's the year the movie was made); but there are video tapes, and Considine has a distinctly late '70s/early '80s vibe, with his disco van and track suit. Noah Taylor, who slumps through the movie with a wild mop and beard, which would fit that period.

Meanwhile, Crocodile Dundee is in the theaters (1986/1987) and the book the movie is based on is set in 1997/1998, I think.

So. The director (Richard Ayoade, best known here for, I guess, "The Mighty Boosh" series on Adult Swim?) didn't want a time and ends up making the whole thing feel old.

The Boy and I liked it, though neither of us were overwhelmed. This is in that broad "slice of life" category which suffers a bit from being, maybe, too real. High drama is eschewed for the prosaic, the banal, the ever day. Oliver is, by turns, amusing, jerky, shallow, noble (in spirit), cowardly, possessive. Sympathetic, often, but not always likable.

I'm still a sucker for "flawed character overcomes all to make heroic stand"-type movies, but I can't fault this movie for not being that, since it never presents itself that way. Oliver is just a very human character, with features and flaws like any other. There is, at least, some dramatic arc if no particularly heroic one.

Which is, like, cool, man. If that sort of thing is your bag. If not, well, it's also relatively short.

The Trip

2011-06-22T23:53:00.000-07:00

So, Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden take a trip and they make a movie out of it.

Wait, who and who do what and why?

If you're like me (and I know I am), you barely know who Steve Coogan is and have no clue at all about Bryden. Well, if you're like me five years ago, anyway, when Steve Coogan teamed up with Michael Winterbottom to make Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. And, really, if you've seen that movie, you've practically seen this one, too, even though the stories are completely different.

I liked Shandy, but I wouldn't recommend it for most Americans. It's extremely British and extremely focused on the art and business of cinema. On top of that, it's roughly based on the very fractured narrative of Tristram Shandy, upon which they laid the narrative of Coogan—a vain, self-important actor who feels the world hasn't rewarded his talent appropriately. (Who manages, both because and despite, to be endearing in his frailties.)

I had a hard time interesting my British somewhat successful actress friend in it, you know?

The Trip is a similar movie, smaller scale, primarily involving Coogan and Bryden travelling into northern England doing restaurant reviews for a British magazine. The set-up is that Coogan arranged the jaunt to get cozier with his American girlfriend (Margo Stilley) but she bails on him beforehand and Bryden is at the bottom of a long list of people who refused to go with him.

So, we have a buddy/road movie, where the buddies aren't very buddy-buddy, and since it's England, there's actually not all that much road.

Bryden and Coogan have a tension: Coogan wants to be appreciated for his greatness, and he's genuinely unhappy for not receiving this appreciation. Bryden, on the other hand, is quite happy with his modest success which is vaguely galling for Coogan—but worse, seems to be able to compete (and beat) Coogan in the little competitions they have.

The comedy largely comes from the form these competitions take: primarily impressions of Michael Caine, Richard Burton, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro—and mostly Michael Caine. Also, while Bryden pines over his wife (they have goofy phone sex), Coogan beds a series of different women while trying to win back his girlfriend and connect with his son.

The dramatic tension, in a big way, comes from the fact that Coogan is 45. He had a huge success in his late 20s that never materialized into the kind of success he wanted as a serious actor (he's jealous of Michael Sheen), he's divorced and his girlfriend has moved back to America, and he's being offered a 7-year gig in California for an HBO show—possibly the "big break" he's always wanted.

The characterization is developed through little vignettes, such as Bryden asking whether Coogan would trade his children's health for his own success. Of course not, right? But then, Bryden phrases it more as, "Would you, for a best actor Oscar, allow your child to suffer a minor, temporary illness?" As the old saw goes, "Now, we're just haggling on price."

Of course, for all his flaws, Coogan comes off rather endearing. He has a self-awareness that makes the movie possible, and at the same time isn't used to mitigate or flinch from said flaws.

Once again, I liked it. But I wouldn't recommend it to many people. The Boy enjoyed parts but felt it went on too long—at the same time he missed bunches of the references and has little awareness of British culture. There is a dramatic arc to the film, but it's very low key.

Also, this is a middle-aged man movie made by middle-aged men. So, you know. Not exactly the target audience.

Acclaimed director Michael Winterbottom reminds of a sort of British Christopher Guest, in the sense that this feels a bit like a mockumentary in the vein of A Mighty Wind or Best In Show, with lots and lots of improvised footage being shot and then edited. Except Winterbottom is way more serious, doesn't cut nearly as much away, and got his start with the pornographic 9 Songs (featuring the same Ms. Stilley).

You probably know, sight-unseen, whether this is your sort of movie. But if you're a bit of an anglophile, a bit of a cinema geek, and not looking for an adrenaline-fueled high-octane rush, you might enjoy this for an hour-and-a-half.

X-Men: First Class

2011-06-22T19:41:00.000-07:00

We just can't get enough of the superhero movie thing, can we? Well, yeah, I guess we can. I'm getting spandex fatigue, I swear, which is bad for even good superhero movies, like this one.

X-Men: First Class is the story of how Professor X comes to set up his school for exceptional children and Magneto becomes an anti-human villain. The movie starts with a fleshed out version of the scene shown in the first X-Men movie (from eleven years ago) with the future Magneto being torn away from his parents at a Nazi concentration camp. Then it flips to, I dunno, Westchester County or someplace in New York, I think, where Professor X finds a naked, underage Mystique in his kitchen.

The Boy and The Flower had trouble with telling young Magneto and Prof X apart, which caused some confusion early on. I would have, too, actually, but I had a clearer view of the narrative going in.

Professor X grows up to be James McAvoy and Magneto grows up to be Michael Fassbender, so there's no shortage of acting in this movie. Naked child Mystique grows up to be Jennifer Lawrence, who is mostly clothed throughout the rest of the movie—unlike previous Mystique, Rebecca Romijn, who remains the only actress in modern movie history who actually looks sexier than the comic book character she's based on.

Also, unlike Rebecca Romijn, Lawrence's features don't seem to translate all that well to being blue. Which is actually nothing compared to January Jones' Emma Frost, who looks positively homely somehow. Maybe it's just me, though. People seem to like her on that Angry Man show. Er, "Mad Men".

But this is getting lost in the weeds. Lawrence is a fine actress who does a fine job.

Also doing a typically fine job is Kevin Bacon, as the Nazi torturer/mutating mad scientist bent on destruction of the non-mutant world.

The backdrop is the Cuban Missile Crisis, as X and Mag rush to create a group of mutants to defeat Bacon's mutants and prevent the world from being destroyed by World War III. (Memo to self: Tell kids that the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved without mutant help, most likely.)

This allows the costume department to dress up the girls in cute mod outfits, and for McAvoy to say "Mutations are groovy, baby" (or something similar) when trying to pick up chicks. It also caused a twinge for me, as the film featured Citroëns like the kind my dad had when I was a kid. (He actually offered me one of them when I hit sixteen but they were really old and my mom nixed that idea.)

Good acting all around, even in the smaller parts (including Rose Byrne of Bridesmaids and Insidious) and even bit parts, which feature Oliver Platt, Ray Wise, Michael Ironside, James Remar—just tough to complain.

The actual action is occasionally muddled, especially in the two big fight scenes, which really didn't grab me much. Director Matthew Vaughn did better with the more mundane fighting his last effort Kick Ass. Though it's only decent to point out Vaughn's 4-for-4, with his other two movies being the entertaining and very different Layer Cake and Stardust.

It didn't really thrill me, though. All of us walked out with the same approximate attitude: Fun, entertaining, but a little long, and not really knock-your-socks-off great. Which, come to think of it, is how I felt after Vaughn's other three films: Pleased. Warm, even. But not excited.

Might be the director or might just be comic book fatigue, as mentioned earlier.

In any case, I would recommend it if you're not adverse to comic book movies, or not feeling over-saturated with them.

Insidious

2011-06-22T18:57:00.000-07:00

What do you get when you mix Paranormal Activity with Saw? A subtle, spooky ghost story where everyone falls into a wood chipper at the end!

No, actually, you get Insidious, which The Boy pronounces "a really good horror movie" after pointing out that most horror movies suck. I reminded him of Sturgeon's Law but I think he figures horror movies beat the average for suckiness. (I can't argue, and they were way worse when I was his age.)

This is a marvel of a film, really. It combines the chills and tension of the Paranormal movies with the grit and suspense of Saw—and it's PG-13. It's also gore-free, which tells you something about the PG-13. The Boy has a bit of an aversion to PG-13 as a rating (but I don't really check).

I'm not going to talk about the story because there are some nice twists you don't usually see.

Patrick Wilson (Watchmen, Hard Candy) plays the feckless dad, Rose Byrne the mom. (We've seen Byrne three times in the past two weeks, with the other two being Bridesmaids and X-Men: First Class.) Barbara Hershey, who's had her own problems with the supernatural in the past (i.e., repeatedly raped by a ghost in The Entity) looks both remarkably well-preserved and slightly odd in a way that to me detracted from her actual acting.

Fundamentally, this is an "old, dark house" movie, a lower-budget and much lower key Poltergeist. The effects (not special effects, just horror effects) build quickly and keep coming, with only a few clunky points. A few conventions are subverted and the audience—a typical summer horror movie audience full of obnoxious teens—was a little more shrieky and even subdued at (a few) moments than with your average horror.

Where the movie is weakest is in the dialog about what exactly is going on. As cheesy as Poltergeist was, it dealt in familiar terms of lost souls and the afterlife—though it did substitute cheesy pseudo-science for religion (as does Insidious). This movie deals in terms of astral projection, which is okay, but refuses to say "Hell" when it clearly means Hell.

The actual main boogen is weak, too, though it's really only on screen for a few frames, it bears a remarkable resemblance to a villain in a late vintage science-fiction franchise.

Overall, a very successful outing made for a paltry $1.5M, which says something about something.

This hits the sweet spot for audience appeal, too, I'd say: If you like the Paranormal and Saw franchises, you'll like this. If you liked Saw but not Paranormal, you'll probably like this (unless you were just there for the torture). If you like Paranormal but not Saw, I'd say it's almost certain you'll like this.

Everybody Was Kung-Fu Panda 2 Fighting

2011-06-13T21:43:00.000-07:00

The Boy and I spend his birthday together every year (since he was two, in fact), and that traditionally involves seeing a movie. There wasn't much out—he's tepid on the PG-13 action flicks, meaning X-Men: First Class was out of the question—but we hadn't seen Kung Fu Panda 2 and, hey, popcorn is popcorn so off we went.

It sort of reminds me of The Hangover 2, in the sense that it's virtually a remake rather than a sequel. Po, the titular panda, starts out with some skills and gets to go crime-fighting with his buddies, but once again he must face a challenge that requires a new level of Kung Fu. So, now he's struggling less with basic competency and more with hyper-competency mixed with the sort of basic competency that allows him still to be a comical character.

And ya know what? The inevitable sequel will be exactly the same.

They set up Kung Fu Panda 3. It's an inevitability. I mean, they've done this since Back to the Future. A movie's a big success, so they shoot two sequels back-to-back. Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek—though, with Shrek they swore their story arc would require five movies, I think they still only planned the first two sequels after the first was a hit—and on and on. Doing two movies together reduces production costs, too, I believe, which offsets the diminishing box office for the third sequel (which is almost, but not always, certain).

Anyway, it pissed The Flower off. She likes her movies to end, dammit.

So, you probably want to know a little bit more about the actual movie. This film revolves around Po's struggle to find his real origin. Kind of a bummer, actually, since one of my favorite parts of the first was that the obvious silliness of a panda having a goose for a father—a joke lampshaded when his father reveals the deep, dark secret of the noodle sauce.

But I suppose they couldn't leave it like that. (Although, I swear, it wasn't that uncommon when I was a kid for a cartoon to mix animal type families with utter disregard for genetics. I mean, it's not that big a deal when you start by having talking, anthropomorphized animals, right? These days, only Spongebob Squarepants does it, that I know of, and Mr. Krabs' great whale daughter's mother is unknown.)

Anyway, the origin issue provides Po with the distraction he needs to be unable to defeat the villain, voiced this time by the incomparable Gary Oldman, who is a less bombastic villain than the first, though his plot is maybe more convincing.

The cast, by the way, is otherwise identical, except for stunt-casting Jean Claude Van Damme, Michelle Yeoh and a couple other dudes as kung fu masters. There seems to be a lot less of everyone, though. Not sure if it's because there are so many people on-screen or the demand for action crowded out a lot of dialogue but character development is light. (There's a little more depth to Angelina Jolie's tiger, though.)

Ultimately, it all works, if not as well as the first one, nearly as well. It moves quickly—a little too quickly in some cases, with the first action scene being a little, eh, chop suey—has plenty of laughs, and it's almost too beautiful to look at.

The Boy and The Flower (who had already seen it) both liked it, but neither was particularly blown away.

The Hangover, Part Deux

2011-06-05T19:57:00.000-07:00

In the least-surprising-sequel category, a sequel 2009's blockbuster hit The Hangover finishes only slightly behind the eighth Harry Potter movie. A comedy doesn't make half-a-billion dollars these days without a sequel. The Hangover, Part II is a sequel like Escape from L.A. is a sequel: That is to say, almost a remake.

I thought the first was over-rated. I enjoyed it, but it's not on my list of greatest comedies. (It was in my top 45 movies for 2009.) This movie looks to be under-rated. Again, I enjoyed it, but it's not actually going to be on my list of greatest comedies. (And it'll probably make the top 45 cut for 2011.)

You can read an Ace of Spades mega-review here. I have a lot less to say. I had about the same sporadic chuckling throughout this as the last one. I enjoy Ed Helms' character and performance tremendously, and he's got quite a niche as a sort of nerd-plus (see Cedar Rapids). He takes center stage from the too-cool Bradley Cooper and the mostly-idiot-but-savant-when-the-plot-requires Zach Gallafianikis. Newcomer Mason Lee has a small but pivotal role in the story which makes it a little "nicer".

The chemistry seems better this time. Characters recur from the original, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a gimmicky way.

It is more vulgar, darker and has a hint of ominousness to it not in the original. Also: a monkey.

What I'm gathering is that people who loved the original were somewhat disappointed by this. If you just liked the original, you'll probably just like this, too.

In any event, you know if you want to see this based on how you felt about the original. (I guess you'd miss out a bit if you haven't seen the original first, but not that much.)

The Boy was not displeased.

If I had a gripe, it's probably that this movie was called "Part II". As if the first left so many unanswered questions, they had to give us closure. It's not a "Part II" guys. It's not even a "II". It's just a "2". Deal.

Conversations From The Living Room, Part 33: Lady Gaga Need Not Apply

2011-06-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

Me: I'm just the way God made me!
The Barb: God made you like that?

Bridesmaids: A Non-Tragic Chick Flick

2011-06-03T19:51:00.000-07:00

Ace of Spades has one of his shorter mega-reviews up for this comedy Bridesmaids in which his first argument is that it's not a chick-flick, but is deceptively marketed as one. I'm going to disagree, but using the official Bit Malestrom definition of a chick flick:

A chick flick is a movie about women who treat each other badly, until one gets fatally ill and they all rally around her in her final days.

Don't talk to me about Romantic Comedies. Those are not traditionally chick flicks, and eventually they're gonna stop letting Nora Ephron make them, and the general audiences can claim them back.

The thing is, in recent years, most chick flicks seem to be tragedies, hence the getting sick and dying part. But it doesn't have to be that way. A Chick Flick can be a comedy, as this one is, we just don't see them very often. And, as this movie proves, Chick Flicks can be enjoyed by men, too. (And I know a lot of guys who will admit—in private—that they loved Steel Magnolias.)

But this movie is very chicky. Ace is definitely right, though, that it's not a genial slice-of-life movie about wacky things that happen leading up to a wedding. Rather it's a comedy about how two women who view themselves as rivals for the affection of another (woman) savage each other while smiling the whole time.

So, you know: true life.

The story begins with Wiig being really down. Her business went bankrupt, taking all her money with it. Her boyfriend checked out at the same time. She lives a with a creepy set of Brit siblings in a small apartment. She drives her crappy car to her crappy job at a jewelry store, which she does crappily because she's bitter about love and life. She doesn't have a boyfriend, just a guy who uses her for (apparently bad) sex that she tries really hard to impress and wheedle her way to real girlfriend status with.

Then her best friend, played by Maya Rudolph, gets engaged.

She gets engaged to a rich guy whose boss is really rich, and his gorgeous socialite wife, ~~Jessica St. Clair~~Rose Byrne, latches on to Rudolph like a leech. This movie is basically Wiig crashing on the rocks of her feelings of inadequacy and actual inadequacy compared to ~~St. Clair~~Byrne.

Rounding out the cast are "Reno 911"'s Wendy McLendon-Covey as the disenchanted married-with-boys one, "The Office"'s Ellie Kemper as the bubbly newlywed-virgin one and "Mike and Molly"'s Melissa McCarthy as the butch might-be-lesbian-except-she's-also?-after-the-guys one.

What you might notice, first, is that there's no hot one. Particularly, the lead isn't being played by Jessica Alba or Jessica Biel or Jessica ~~Lange~~Chastain. ~~Jessica St. Clairr~~Rose Byrne is good-looking but she's more the sort of beauty that women are jealous of than men lust after, I think.

The next thing you might notice is that, with the exception of McCarthy, these are all comediennes. McCarthy is hilarious in this and a great actress, but I don't think she has the sketch comedy background the others have. (And she does a cute bit with her real life husband, whom she's convinced is an Air Marshall in the movie.)

What I'm getting at was that it felt like there was no stunt casting. No casting because someone said "We gotta get the 18-25 male demo." Some material apparently came from the cast hanging out and doing improv, which gave a more natural feel to things.

These ladies set out to make a funny movie, their femininity presumably essential to their characters, but not going to stand in the way of a good laugh. And there are some good laughs. I think one essential element of this movies' femininity was the closer attention to character development than you might get in a similar guy flick (like I Love You, Man) while avoiding the trap (for a comedy) of letting sentimentality overpower humor.

There's a scene involving a cake and a raccoon which exemplifies this.

The men are virtually incidental. We don't see the fiancée hardly at all. Wiig's F-Buddy is generic. Even her love interest, Chris O'Dowd (remember Pirate Radio?) is virtually a prop around which Wiig's character has to evolve.

In other words, the men in this movie are like the women in more male-oriented buddy flicks.

We laughed all the way through, with The Boy approving strongly. He feels comedies tend to spread the laughs too thin in the late second act.

My main concern going in was, as much as I enjoy Wiig, I was concerned I was going to be seeing two full hours of social awkwardness. Sort of like a female Larry David. (I have a hard time sitting through "Curb Your Enthusiasm".) But Wiig has a very winning way about her; she doesn't alienate you. Even though she's bound to lose throughout most of the movie, she does have her moments; It doesn't feel like the writers are being gratuitously cruel.

So, generally recommended.

Also featuring Jill Clayburgh in her last film role.

WARNING: There is a hardcore gross-out scene as bad as any you've seen in a guy movie. So beware.

Finally! Mel Gibson in Jodie Foster's Beaver!

2011-06-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

Now with the obvious joke out the way, we can take a serious look at a movie about a man who is down on his luck, and is subsequently rescued by a hand puppet of a Beaver.

No, really, it's a serious movie. Damn serious.

Mel Gibson is a man in a serious funk. He sleepwalks through his work day at the toy company his father left him (which is tanking). He's uninterested in his wife, Jodie Foster (stop snarking). His teen son (Anton Yelchin of Star Trek) keeps a record of the ways in which he's like his father, so that he can stop being that way. He can't even muster a smile for his younger son.

Out of desperation, his wife kicks him out of the house, and he picks up a whole bunch of booze—and the eponymous beaver, fished out of a dumpster—and crashes in a hotel where he drinks himself silly, then tries to kill himself and fails. Only to be woken by the beaver puppet, who starts ordering him around.

The Beaver narrates, by the way.

This works better than one might think. Foster (directing) keeps a light touch for as long as she possibly can, given the heaviness of the subject, and she's very careful about juxtaposing the puppet and Gibson during the dialogue.

She's probably not going to get the credit she deserves, really. The audience laughs at the right parts and not at the wrong ones, and stays away from any kind of heavy-handed approach, really just focusing on how crazy folks cope.

Do I need to say the acting is good? It's arguably the best stuff Gibson's ever done. He and Foster have a genuine chemistry, that your heart goes out to her as she's trying to figure out how to save the man she loves. Yelchin is very good, too, being in that Jesse Eisenberg/Michael Cera mold without the wimpiness of the latter and the bitterness of the former. The little brother (Riley Thomas Stewart) also did a fine job.

Jennifer Lawrence shows up as Yelchin's girlfriend, who has troubles of her own. You may remember her from Winter's Bone, and as my pic for last year's Best Actress Oscar. I liked her but it seemed like her scenes with Yelchin detracted from the film's intensity.

This was probably deliberate. This movie isn't trying to be allegorical. At one point, it looks like Gibson and his crazy puppet are going to become media sensations, offering an almost What About Bob? approach to life.

But besides not being a comedy, the movie doesn't try to be neat. There is fallout from the crazy—serious fallout. And we see the crazy hurting lots of people in lots of different ways: If they had tied everything up in a neat bow, turned Gibson into a kind of crazy savant, it would have cheapened the whole story.

At the same time, it's not quite great. Solid. Memorable. Great performances. Respectful.

And short. Foster doesn't wallow in it. She tells her story—in 90 minutes—and gets out. The movie is much the better for it.

Obviously not for everyone. The Boy enjoyed it, but he classed it as one of those movies that looks like it might be really funny, but is really serious instead. (Longtime readers may recall we had a spate of those throughout 2009.)

Me, I was sort of expecting a supernatural overtone, as movies about puppets are wont to speculate on the liveness thereof. There's never even a hint of that, so when the puppet does seem to defy Gibson's will, it's incredibly chilling. Also, it sounds a lot like Michael Caine to me. And that's sorta scary (since it is of course Gibson).

Not a joke of a movie.

The Incendies Conundrum

2011-06-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

The thing about the Oscar-nominated French film Incendies is that I can't use the adjective that best describes it without giving it away totally.

Taking place in an unspecified place and time where Christian Nationalists are warring with Islamic groups, and evoking a whole lot the mid-'70s Lebanese civil war, this is the story of a woman named Nawal who dies and who leaves behind a will instructing her children to find their father and their brother, and to not give her a proper burial and headstone till they've delivered letters to them both.

Thing is, bro and sis knew of no brother and thought their father to be dead. Also, Nawal was apparently a kind of crappy mom, so bro isn't really interested in the mission.

The rest of the movie is a segment of Nawal woven in with a segment of her children trying to discover the truth.

Along the way, we see the sorts of atrocities that might make a woman off and that generally remind us, while war is Hell, war in the Middle East is a special kind of Hell. This is a brutal movie, and the brutality is as senseless as it is horrifying; You can probably tell from this whether this is the sort of movie you find worth seeing.

A lot of people who do will also find it moving. If you don't, and you see it anyway, you might just be disgusted.

For myself, I thought it was good-ish. I'd watch it and remember some good performances and not think too much more of it, but it insists on itself, as the kids are saying these days. It wants you to think about it, and it doesn't really hold up to a lot of sustained thought.

It is ridiculously contrived, which is necessary in order to get to its desired shock ending. That's not really the sort of thing that bugs me, really, but with no factual basis, it also means they worked very hard to put all this brutality on to film. It was supposed to have meaning.

Was it warranted? Well, the point of the movie is to show the horror of war and how it shapes Nawal, with the problem being that we only see the horror and not the shaping. She has a character arc but the movie doesn't really tie it to what she's experienced. She's like a little piece of flotsam floating upon the tides.

And then they choose not to show certain violence that would seem to be central to her character development. I mean, they put us through some crap early on, and it's almost like they ran out of heart in the third act. We also don't ever see the direct after-effect, so Nawal jumps from situation to situation in what (to the viewer) seems almost random.

Like I said, I thought it was good, but I don't think it warrants thinking on too hard. It feels like there was an agenda overpowering the story. I liked the Oscar-winner much better, where the story seemed to complicate any attempt at simple messaging.

Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Familiar Tides

2011-06-03T15:05:00.000-07:00

The latest installment of the greatest movie series ever to be based on an amusement park ride has recently launched to tepid-to-negative reviews.

It's like these people haven't seen any of the earlier Pirates movies.

I have, fortunately, so when The Flower said she wanted to see it, I was not especially surprised at all by the content found therein. I was largely pleased, in fact, that they'd dialed it back a few notches from the previous two movies excesses.

I love Gore Verbinski's way of making a lot of movie out of a little material, but he also can make way too much movie, flogging the crap out of the material. Rob Marshall helms this entry, somewhat inexplicably, but he does a good job at keeping the proceedings moving and fairly well grounded

The plot—does it matter?—is a race to the Fountain of Youth. The English (with Geoffrey Rush as a pseudo-reformed Barbossa, having nicely recovered from his death in the first move), the Pirates (with Ian McShane as Blackbeard himself, and Penelope Cruz as his comely daughter) and the Spanish (who act largely as a convenience for plot points and a sort of deus ex machina).

Johnny Depp, of course, is back as the mascara wearing, mincing trickster, Jack Sparrow, along with his First Mate Gibbs (Kevin McNally) being the only original cast member I could spot reprising his role from the original trilogy.

You got all the expected stuff: Ships a-sail (though no ship-to-ship combat), sword fights (Sparrow has become a good swordfighter, it seems, inexplicably), swashbuckling, and general shenanigans. These are competently done and fun enough.

Good stuff you might not have expected: Depp and McNally have a sort of buddy movie thing going on. This actually works well. Gibbs is loyal without being naive, and Sparrow seems to earn the loyalty plausibly enough. (A far cry from the original's refrain of "pirate!" to excuse any and all bad behavior.)

Depp and Cruz have a pleasant sort of chemistry, which I wasn't really expecting. Cruz is sort of a mystery, part jilted lover, part schemer, part pirate—and I say this as someone who has gone through much of the past years saying "I don't get it" whenever anyone brought up Ms. Cruz. You never really get a good sense of her real backstory, because she's so willing to lie to get what she wants, in which wise she makes a perfect companion to the scurrilous Sparrow.

Bad stuff: The main criticism I've seen leveled at this is that none of it mattered. That events sort of move one to the next without any real flow. And, honestly? The Flower had insisted on eating at Denny's for breakfast which is punishing on my digestive tract. The significance of this being I missed about five to ten minutes in the middle of the movie.

And it didn't really matter.

I don't know if that's a bug so much as a feature for a summer flick. I mean, you could miss huge hunks of Star Wars and it wouldn't really matter, just for example. We don't go to these things for the tightly constructed plots—and, really, the plot in this is quite good (stolen from an unrelated pirate book, I believe). It just doesn't matter that much.

These movies are really about big name actors chewing scenery in between special effects. Nothin' wrong with that. The actors are really good and the effects are better for the restraint lacking in the previous two films.

So, I liked it. Met my expectations, even slightly exceeded them. The Flower liked it, though she wished more of the original cast had been in it. The Boy—who can be quite savage of this sort of thing—was also not displeased. None heaped praise. None heaped scorn.

Conservatives vs. Libertarians

2011-05-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

I like AlfonZo Rachel, even if I disapprove of such liberal use of capital letters in the middle of his name, but I wanted to address the fallacy in his latest polemic, embedded herein. It's a good piece, worth watching for his take on Herman Cain as leader vs. representative. Trouble starts at about the 5 minute mark, though. Let's watch:

Money quote:

A libertarian is just a liberal who doesn't have a love/hate relationship complex with capitalism.

Whoa. That'd be like a libertarian saying "a conservative is just a liberal who's hung up on using the power of the state to control your body instead of just your money."

Which, come to think of it, a lot of libertarians do say. (These days you have to add an addendum that liberals want to control your body, too, just with regards to fat, salt, smoking, condoms and healthcare.) The irony is that this statement comes after a talk about getting ideas outside the conservative tent and is followed up with a rant on how libertarians want to claim to be conservative.

I've never, ever met a libertarian masquerading as a conservative. (OK, I haven't met Ron Paul, but he might qualify, though he's more masquerading as a Republican than a conservative.) In fact, what I see more is conservatives masquerading as libertarians, because the conservative cachet is mega-uncool, while you can be libertarian and still get invited to liberals cocktail parties. (I believe this is because liberals rightly perceive libertarians as no threat. But a lot of Tea Partiers are libertarian, and we know how liberals feel about them.)

Now, there's always been a grain of truth to the argument that libertarians really just want to engage in whatever vice they're saying the government shouldn't be meddling in. Some libertarians do just want to smoke their dope in peace, in-between whoring around and playing online poker with their winnings from their stock portfolio.

Whoops. See what I did there? Conservatives get all uptight because libertarians don't want the awesome power of the state used to shoot someone 71 times while "liberals" get all uptight because libertarians want to let people do what they want with their money. One says "How dare you do what you want with your body!" while the other says "How dare you do what you want with...", well, actually, anything at this point. Your body, your money, all your property—all of this is fair game to the modern "liberal". (I keep putting "liberal" in quotes because, remember, our Founding Fathers were all liberals back when the word meant libertarian. Co-opting the word "liberal" was the greatest trick the communists ever pulled.)

But let me get back to Zo, here. His next argument seems to be that you can't legalize drugs, prostitution and abortion without an entitlement society. There's no doubt that the two go hand-in-hand in a lot of ways, but it's the entitlement that makes destructive lifestyles not only possible but not even particularly unpleasant (financially).

This is where his argument really falls apart. What he (and other social conservatives) tells us is "Government is terribly ineffective in the economic arena, but it's oh-so-important in the social arena." Both are indefensible positions. One reason that social conservatives need to start (and are, in fact) trending more libertarian is because the government actively undermines their positions.

Government power cannot be used to strengthen the values that so-cons love, because government power is inherently self-serving, and the government hates the competition that socially conservative values rest on. Government is pro-abortion, anti-religion, anti-family, pro-casual-sex, pro-euthanasia, anti-culture, etc., etc., etc.

If conservatives don't trust the government to handle poverty, education and the economy, why on earth should they trust it to handle their most sacred values? (Conservatives actually did trust the government with education, long ago, and look how well that worked out.)

The exact same powers used to enforce conservative morality are used to justify "liberal" views of morality. Huckabee is much hated by some conservatives because of his fat kid initiatives when he was governor. But there was nothing illogical about what he did. If you start from the premise that the state must pay for children's health care, the logical conclusion is that the state must also have the power to dictate the activities of those children that impact their health. (That is, all of them.)

Is Huckabee a conservative? Why is it okay to regulate temperance and lust but not avarice and gluttony?

There are more bad arguments, but see if you can connect the thematic tie between Zo's arguments and most "liberals'":

We're going to have to have more government intrusion, he argues, to enforce alimony and child support with all the broken families. Well, no, the Libertarian solution would be "You made a bad choice with whom you chose to have a child with. Deal with it."
"To a libertarian, real freedom means being able to use drugs if you want to. Really?" He goes on to explain how awful drug dependence is (and says that alcohol is bad enough). Well, yeah, Zo: Really! The libertraian argument isn't that "drugs are good" it's that "government is bad".
The black market, he says, won't go away, it'll just target minors. Honestly, the true libertarian argument here is: That's why they have parents. But assuming that's too extreme, he doesn't explain why it wouldn't be easier for drug enforcement wouldn't be easier if the various agencies involved only concerned themselves with minors. (I did smile at his notion that rich kids are "ripe for the pickin'". Sorry, dude, I grew up around rich kids and they never had any trouble getting drugs and never, ever, ever got into legal trouble.)
Weirder, he then says these drugged out kids are going to want abortions paid for by the state. Well, they wouldn't go looking for it if it weren't possible to get them, Zo. (Also, being pro-life is not necessarily incompatible with libertarianism.)

Did you see it? Fiscal conservatives argue that people need the freedom to fail economically. Businesses need to fail. People need poverty as a motivation to improve their lots in life. Propping up bad ideas smothers good ideas.

This is no difference socially. People need to have the freedom to fail with their lives. (This is where social conservatives come in, as I'll explain at the end.) Trying to protect people from their failures also limits their possibility to succeed—and in the case of social issues, grants the government near omnipotence.

In the end, Zo conflates thinking drug use is good with wanting to decriminalize drug use which is exactly like "liberals" conflating conservatives objection to social programs to conservatives being for the problems those programs are meant to solve. Against Social Security and Medicare? You hate old, sick and disabled people. Against welfare? You want widows (these days "single mothers" as if that were a condition visited on women randomly) and orphans to die.

I know that some libertarians posit that the country would magically become nearly utopian if government got out of all of our lives. They even point to the first century of this country's existence as proof that you don't need all these vice-laws and their attendant limitations on freedom.

In reality, the truth is that removing the various vice-laws would cause an uptick in the various bad behaviors they're meant to restrict. How big, nobody knows (and some data seems to suggest it might eventually go down, even, in some situations).

There can be no doubt, the removal of the various nanny policies—and I'm including the left's economic programs and the right's morality programs—would have bad consequences. Poor people would be worse off. Some people would use drugs and ruin their lives. Exploitation. Sorrow. Despair.

But that's what we have now! With a bonus that we get massive government intrusion into all of our lives. Poor people are trapped by welfare. Drug addicts are not only trapped by drugs, they might get thrown in jail for good measure. Divorce rates are enormous and somehow I'm unconvinced that legalizing prostitution would be a huge factor (free sex has never been easier to get).

Point is, while it would be worse for some, it would be better for most, because we would have the autonomy our Founding Fathers fought for.

It's not that simple, of course: The Founding Fathers had a common, fairly rigid culture to conform to. A culture that valued honor, diligence, frugality, family, God and community. What we have now is a repressive government combined with a licentious culture—which is not a recipe for survival.

Traditional values are extremely important for our survival, but social cons should note how badly it works out when the government tries to enforce them. Social cons should also note, as Zo does, that the current "anything goes" point-of-view of the culture is highly destructive, and present their alternatives in that arena.

Not the government. The society. Social conservatives need to forge the bonds that tied us together in the past—and you can't do that with laws, even if you could get the laws passed.

I've heard that kids today are having lower divorce rates than their parents. Why? Because they come from broken homes or have seen what broken homes did to their friends. I know people who swore off drugs (or alcohol, for that matter) when they saw what it did to their loved ones.

People can observe. They can learn.

What social conservatives have to realize is that the government is not their friend, and the libertarian point-of-view prevents the government from working against them—and the government will always end up working against them. A lot of groups and individuals think they can master the power of the state, but it can't be tamed—it must be minimized.

In A Better World (Hævnen)

2011-05-19T23:22:00.000-07:00

Despite the dearth of worthwhile movies at the beginning of the year, the local theaters weren't using the space to let in the foreign films, and it had been a while since anything non-English had come through until the year's Oscar winner showed up in the form of the Danish flick In A Better World (Hævnen).

Of course, in recent years a lot of foreign films have followed the Hollywood potboiler format (and quite successfully) but In A Better World is Scandinavian to the core. Well, neo-Scandinavian—it's hard to imagine the Vikings of yore signing on to this sort of thing.

The story is about two pre-pubescent boys, Christian and Elias, their fathers and, well, conflict resolution. Elias is a nerdy little kid who gets bullied in school until Christian comes along. Elias' father is a doctor who splits his time between an African refugee camp and his quaint little Danish town, and also has apparently at some point split his attention between his wife and another woman, such that his wife has separated from him.

Christian's mother has just died, and his father has relocated him from London to wherever the hell they are in Denmark, either because his grandmother is around or perhaps because he has a lover there (Christian accuses him of moving for the latter reason).

Christian sees Elias being bullied and he doesn't like it. We learn right away that he has a strong sense of justice. We then quickly learn he has an even stronger sense of revenge and a lot of pent up rage. Elias finds himself navigating a tricky friendship that tests his own sense of right and wrong. This is the movie's strength.

The boys' struggle is thrown into contrast by Anton's (Elias' dad) African adventures. Anton is struggling to teach the boys that violence is not the answer, but life isn't making this lesson easy to transmit. Home in Denmark, he faces a bully of his own, and demonstrates tremendous courage in front of the boys facing him down. Meanwhile, in Africa, he's constantly patching up victims of a warlord whose betting on the sex of unborn children, and then splitting their mothers open in order to resolve the bet.

The movie feels a little unfocused when it spends time on Anton and Claus (Christian's dad) without the boys; it's a little like the message was more important than the story.

That said, the message is not a simple one. We see violence as cathartic, helpful, pointless, savage, chaotic—but the director and writer don't take the easy way out. Ultimately, it's this nuance that makes the whole thing work.

Solid performances from all the actors, whose names you do not know. Good writing, direction, cinematography. All around solid production, and done on the cheap (by American standards) which is a good reminder that you can actually make a good movie without a lot of CGI.

I also learned from this movie that Danes hate Swedes, which is just adorable.

The Boy approved highly.

Everything Must Go

2011-05-17T23:12:00.000-07:00

A lot of Will Ferrell's recent political stuff has pissed me of, I confess, and I wasn't expecting fireworks out of Everything Must Go, his latest movie which is about a man who comes home from work after being fired only to find all his stuff out on his lawn.

I figured this would be a semi-serious screwed-up-guy-gets-a-chance-to-redeem-himself movie, but about five minutes in we discover that Ferrell's drinking binge is what cost him his job and his wife, which puts this squarely into the "alcoholic" genre.

Now, alcoholic movies can really only go one of two ways. The guy either reforms or he drinks himself to death, and nobody makes a comedy out of a guy drinking himself to death (which isn't to say some people don't laugh uproariously all the way through Leaving Las Vegas). You also know that the 2nd act climax has gotta be a drinking binge or something really close to that.

So, right away, you know the shape of the movie.

Which, of course, isn't the point at all.

Do you like Will Ferrell, is the question? This is an hour-and-a-half of Will Ferrell. Not Anchorman Will Ferrell, though, more like Stranger Than Fiction Will Ferrell. He's funny, but not in a way that undermines the drama. He's likable but he has an arrogant streak. It's a tough balance, but he pulls it off.

Ferrell's main companion during his journey is a chubby black boy whose mother (we never see) is a hospice care worker that leaves him to ride his bike around the neighborhood while she works. The actor (Christopher Jordan Wallace) does a good job here, playing off Ferrell without being cloying or sassy, and generally avoiding the worst of the clichés.

Rebecca Hall plays the pregnant across-the-street neighbor who watches Ferrell's meltdown, and Michael Pena is his sponsor/police detective friend who buys him a few more days on the lawn while his uptight neighbors (including character great Stephen Root) want to roust him.

Ultimately this worked for me because I like Will Ferrell (dammit!). He manages to be likable even when he's being a jerk, and he always looks like he regrets it. It's hard not to root for the guy, which is critical for this kind of movie.

That said, I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. Ferrell's constantly got a beer in his hand, which hangs a constant heaviness over the proceedings, such that the funny parts can never get too funny. (By contrast, see Blake Edwards' Skin Deep, where John Ritter does pratfalls and penis jokes. Blake Edwards was the master of tackling difficult subjects with slapstick without cheapening the subjects. And also, as with S.O.B., of injecting dark humor suddenly into a light subject.)

Another element is that the premise of the movie itself—that Ferrell must shed himself of worldly goods to achieve enlightenment—is not really substantiated. You could argue that Ferrell was using his possessions to not not confront his alcoholism, but it's not a position the movie makes very well. You could say they were representative, say of his emotional baggage, but that's sort of heavy-handed (all the more because the movie makes the connection at times).

But it does manage to be serious without being depressing and completely without humor.

The Boy approved, though he also thought it would be a little less serious.

Thor? Why, I'm Furiouth!

2011-05-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

OK, now that I've seen the movie, my kids can breathe a sigh of relief because I'll stop doing that dumb joke. (Probably.)

Thor is the latest in the Marvel-Takes-Over-The-Movies rampage that started in earnest with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man and has led down such inglorious blind alleys as Daredevil and Hellcow. (OK, they haven't done Hellcow...yet.)

I was always a DC guy, I think I've mentioned, and Thor was one of the reasons why. As a big fan of Greek and Norse mythology, the idea of a Thor superhero struck me as stupid. Whereas, I dunno, Metamorpho seemed perfectly non-stupid? (I find the whole Marvel/DC dichotomy interesting, because obviously both companies made good and bad comic books, and certainly I didn't have any peer pressure, yet I never liked Spider-Man, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, etc.)

Anyway, here we have the tale of the Norse god as a sort of sci-fi/superhero mash-up. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) lives in Asgard with his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins), mother Frigga (Renee Russo) and his possibly evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) where they hold off the definitely evil Frost Giants with their United Colors of Benneton Super Best Friends.

Through a variety of wacky adventures (or an evil plot, mayhap?) Thor ends up powerless, hammerless and banished to earth, where he falls into the lap of plucky cosmologist Jane (Natalie Portman). Thor's got to get back to Asgard to save everybody from all the badness. But of course, there's some ass that needs kickin' down on earth, too.

Kenneth Branagh directs and does a fine job with some occasionally thin material. It's done in sincerity and without the wink-and-a-nod of a critic's darling but also without taking itself too seriously. (My favorite Branagh-directed movie would be another one of his less artsy films, the thriller Dead Again.)

The movie takes place at both ends in the Flash Gordon-esque world of Asgard, and in the middle on Earth in New Mexico. The Asgard stuff is—well, I liked it? But it's not exactly Lord of the Rings. And while I'm not a fan of the trilogy, it looked epic, whereas Asgard sometimes came off as cheesy.

The movie really picks up when it comes to earth. Chris Hemsworth does an oustanding job, even though it may seem like not a difficult task. You know, "Stand there. Look gorgeous. Take off your shirt. Smile." But I think we've all seen it done badly, and there is some subtlety here.

We have to like him, for example. But we also have to see that he's a bit too cocksure—arrogant, even. Too self-involved and not overly concerned about what happens to others. Imperious. And he has to do all that without us disliking him and while being a complete White Knight, a la Superman.

It doesn't hurt that he looks the part. Am I right, ladies? He towers over Portman, and most of the cast, which reminds me a little of my experience at The Graves premiere. That is, he looks huge, but he's also about the same height as The Boy, who is only slightly taller than I. Heh.

Point is, he looks and acts the part. Reminded me (favorably) of the young Chris Reeves.

Tim Hiddleston is the other really strong part of this. Ace of Spades has a mega-review up here where he talks about many of the same things I do, only in much greater detail. (He praises it, only faulting it for not trying to be a great movie.) Ace doesn't seem to be impressed by the comparisons of Loki to Shakespeare's finest villain, Iago, but I have to admit, it occurred to me, too.

There's a lot of complexity and subtlety in that character, and Hiddleston did a fine job with it.

I'm not (ever) as impressed with Portman as everyone else seems to be. She's fine here. Her whole job is to fall pretty much instantly in love with Thor, and she does a serviceable job. Her role is—I'm not sure, exactly whether she's a cosmologist or an astrophysicist, but she provides the bridge between the science-fiction and fantasy elements of the story in some of the finest comic book logic since Doc Ock started his fusion experiment by making autonomously intelligent tentacles for his back in Spiderman 2.

I love that sort of thing.

But Portman comes off fine, though Kat Dennings (40 Year Old Virgin) steals scenes from under her and comes off sexier—and I'm not really a fan of Dennings looks, either. OK, if you twist my arm, I'd have to say Jaimie Alexander as Sif comes off the hottest. Ass-kicking Viking women! And 5'9" she can tower over the tiny Portman and Dennings, so it looks a little more plausible than it—well, then it normally does when actresses go around kicking ass in action films.

What else? Music: Good. Setting? Nice: New Mexico makes a nice change from the big city shenanigans. It felt more intimate. Climactic Plot Point: I liked it, but a lot of people have said there wasn't enough on the line. I felt it fit in perfectly with a white knight story. Tie-ins with other Marvel Properties? Meh. I have a bad feeling about all that.

Overall, I'd recommend it if you can hang with the comic book thang. The Boy and The Flower both liked strongly, but were not terribly enthused. No requests for "Thor" underwear have been made, e.g.

Atlas Giggled

2011-05-06T22:44:00.000-07:00

So we went to see this film Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. You may have heard of it. It's based on a book or something.

Can you tell this is going to be impossible for me to write without snark?

Let me get this out of the way: The Boy liked this movie. He said, "At first it was too much qq and not enough pew-pew," which I gather means something like "it started slowly, evoking concern in the viewer that it would never get off the ground, but when it finally got moving, it was interesting."

I always like to get The Boy's opinion first so mine doesn't influence him. In this case, I really had to bite my tongue. I've heard a lot about the book, and of course, you can't ever believe what you hear, because this movie has a MESSAGE, and it's a message book-reviewing commies have never liked. So they trash the book. And the movie could expect (and received) similar treatment.

Still, two words: Hot mess.

Wait, one word: Rifftrax.

Or two words: Cinematic Titanic.

Or a portmanteau: Fanfic.

I had this feeling when I was watching this movie that I was reading fan fiction. I realize it's an original story but the protagonist, Dagny Taggert, comes off as a Mary Sue. Seriously, you know who's good and who's bad based on how they feel about Dagny. And her dialog is stilted, to say the least, especially in the opening scenes.

It actually gets worse when Henry Rearden shows up, with his super-steel that's poised to save Dagny's railroad. This culminates in the most awkward sex scene since Watchmen.

I'm not inclined to blame the actors here. The dialog is awful. I mean, let's say I was trying to make a point about hating coffee, and wrote a dialogue where character A says "Yeah, it all went to hell when people started liking coffee!" and character B responds with "Why are people so crazy about coffee these days?" (Don't hurt me, Darcysport! It's just an example! Coffee is wonderful!)

Point is, Taylor Schilling and Grant Bowler (Taggert and Rearden respectively) aren't looking good here. Some of the supporting actors do okay, I think largely because they have fewer actual words to speak. Patrick Fischler as Taggert's assistant does well, and the great Michael Lerner manages to power through as the villainous Wesley Mouch, while Armin Shimerman is compelling as the weaselly state scientist.

The frustrating thing is, there is a good story here and there are so many echoes with modern life. Basically, Dagny is trying to save her family railroad from the mismanagement of her brother, while Taggert has invented a new steel that can quadruple the load capacity for high speed transport. Dagny and Henry are constantly being flanked by their competitors who prefer to go to the government rather than compete fairly.

And all the while good, competent men are vanishing, leaving behind only the mysterious phrase "Who is John Galt?"

And the movie does get better when the train stuff starts. So, what holds this movie back?

Dialog, as noted.
Characterization. Dagny and Henry are off-putting. I assume this is according to the tenets of Objectivism. They not only are against altruism, they seem to have no comprehension of it. Besides ringing false, the two of them come off as almost Asperger's.
Worldview. There seems to be the view not just that the big players are titans, but also that everyone else utterly depends on them. I don't doubt there are titans in the world, but if the last 15 years have shown us anything, it's that the economy is powered best by lots and lots of little players. Which brings us to...
Archaicness. Railroads? Steel? Really? Good lord, the government's machinations are so unConstitutional that—well, they look a lot like a health care mandate, only not quite as bad as that—and yet the whole focus on rails and steel and ore comes off as a little silly.
Music. I'm not sure I blame the composer, but the music actually competes with the dialog for clunkiness, the way it's used to create emotion that really doesn't seem to be there. (Fun fact: Composer Elia Cmiral scored After Dark Horror Fest flicks Tooth and Nail and The Deaths of Ian Stone.)

Elia Cmiral also scored Battlefield Earth, which this movie reminds me of. It, too, was made over the course of many years, and it, too, was a hot mess worthy of Rifftrax.

Ace of Spades was planning to do a review of this film, and chided his readers for not seeing it when it first came out, arguing that if conservatives want conservative movies, they need to support conservative movies.

This isn't a conservative movie, though. It's a movie about the perils of unlimited government and populism which, while I can get behind that and push with both hands, actually undermines its own case by making its leads be amoral.

I mean, I can't swear Dagny's had an abortion, but it wouldn't surprise me.

It seems to me that the stronger argument for limited government is that people do the right thing when left alone by the government, not people are as shallow as you think but that's no excuse for limiting freedom. I agree with the latter point, but it makes a crappy movie.

That said, the left-wing attacks on it that take it on from a philosophical POV have been largely absurd. The enemy in this film is the collusion of government with business. In no way are businesses in general the good guys here, just a few good guys fighting the world.

I'll go see part 2 if they make it, but I can't really recommend it, except as a curiosity. It was really hard for me to sit through, actually, and I laughed out loud inappropriately at several points.

But I'm used to being the only guy laughing and, as I said, the Boy liked it.

UPDATE: Ace of Spades' review here.

The Conspirator

2011-05-04T23:34:00.000-07:00

I had to explain to The Boy who Robert Redford was (he's seen The Castle), that he was a director of some merit, and also that he was pretty far left wing, just to prepare him to see The Conspirator, Redford's movie about the trial of Anna Surratt, who was accused of conspiring to kill President Lincoln.

So what we have is a pretty good movie that is (I understand) fairly reasonable in its historical accuracy, but which also brings the Big Clown Hammer down on the audience about the naughtiness of trying American citizens in military court. (And I must confess, I don't think we're actually doing that.)

The good parts are James McAvoy's portrayal of Union war hero Frederick Aiken, Robin Wright and Evan Rachel Wood as women caught up in public sentiment after being on the losing side of a war (and being Catholic), Kevin Kline as ~~Dick Cheney~~ Secretary of War, Andrew Stanton, and a bunch of always welcome character actors, like Stephen Root and Colm Meaney.

McAvoy's character development as the lawyer who learns to have a kind of sympathy for a client he does not sympathize with is good. The military tribunal is a kangaroo court, and we're invited to share in the outrage that the system is being perverted for political ends, which is easy to do. The social toll it takes on him to vigorously defend his client (as he must!) is interesting, if not well followed through on.

It's also good that the message is a truly liberal one, not a modern "progressive" one. That is, the message of the movie is that the power of the state should not be used unjustly against an individual, and we should all be able to get behind that. (But see the spoilers below for why this movie doesn't work at that level.)

Less good is Stanton's almost uncompromising evil. Redford specifically allows him some chances to defend himself so that Redford himself can defend himself from charges that he's got a one-sided view of things. But it's weak tea. Maybe it's not historically accurate, but Stanton had to have some reason for thinking it be necessary to hang the (possible) traitors—and whatever the reason is, it goes a lot further than just Stanton.

A better movie would have given us some reason (beyond the character's words) to believe there was some merit to their concerns.

I've never been a huge Robin Wright, either looks or acting—nothing against either, she just never really made an impression on me—but here the former Princess Buttercup looks harsh, hard and ragged. This was deliberate, of course, but: Mixed feelings!

The Boy and I did like it.

But to tell you the bad parts, I have to spoil the movie, so if you don't want the movie spoiled (and you don't know the history, in which case, the movie is already spoiled), then don't read on.

SPOILERS!

The movie is about a kangaroo court. This removes a whole lot of possibilities for tension. The Secretary of War wants Surratt dead; you can be pretty sure she's going to die.

The biggest problem (for me, anyway) comes at the end of the first act, when Surratt confesses to a skeptical Aiken that she didn't know about the conspiracy to kill Lincoln—only about the conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln, which was an entirely different conspiracy altogether.

In other words, she was guilty.

Yes, it was a kangaroo court, and kangaroo courts are bad. Yes, witnesses gave false testimony against her. No, they didn't have enough evidence to convict her.

But she was guilty! We're splitting hairs. How would a plot to kidnap the President actually be better? Is that really an ameliorating factor? "Yes, your honor, I knew there was a plot to kidnap the scumsucking tyrant who killed all our young men, but we wouldn't dare have harmed him!"

Even worse? She was really just sort of hanging around the conspirators, and covering for her son who doesn't show up in time to save her from her fate—but when the son shows up after the Supreme Court demands that civilians be given civilian trials, he gets off!

And he was REALLY guilty! He's out there on the road waiting to intercept Lincoln's carriage but Lincoln ends up changing his plans and accidentally thwarting the scheme.

So you have to really be into the process to have this movie resonate with you, I think. It seems to me that the question is far messier than the movie would like to be, to the movie's detriment.

But, hey, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

The Lincoln Lawyer

2011-05-04T22:37:00.000-07:00

I didn't really have any plans to see The Lincoln Lawyer. A Matthew McConaughey where he doesn't take off his shirt? What's the point? But the Old Man wanted to see it, and I was eager to get him to the movies whenever he was up to it. Every time I asked, though, he was too tired.

Then he died.

That night, I drove his convertible with The Boy riding shotgun and The Flower in the back to see it in his honor. Although I had cultivated my love of movies independently, over the years the Old Man and I had seen a movie a week (or more). Literally, hundreds of films together—much of it during the '80s, when it was a challenge to see a movie a week, even in Los Angeles. Everything from schlocky crap like The Forbidden World and high budget actioners like The Road Warrior, to foreign films like The Tin Drum and classics—we saw The General together at a revival theater.

He would've been pleased by The Lincoln Lawyer, I think. This is (fittingly enough) a very '70s-style mystery/action thriller with McConaughey as a mercenary lawyer who nevertheless has a pretty strong ethical code.

The plot revolves around Haller (McConaughey) taking on a case where a very rich client (Ryan Philippe) is accused of raping a hooker. When his mother (Frances Fisher) accedes to all of Haller's financial demands, Haller takes the case.

From here, the plot hits a couple of really common tropes (like—and I hope this doesn't ruin the movie for anyone—everyone's lying) but it hits them fast, and then sort of inverts, changing the focus of the movie. It does this kind of zigzag several times, keeping the straightforward premise from getting stale. Make no mistake, though: this movie covers a lot of familiar territory.

It's kind of like the titular Lincoln. Very '70s feeling in a lot of ways, but classic.

Also '70s-feeling was the subplot with Marisa Tomei as Haller's divorced wife, who snarls at Haller when they're not having sex, or he's not being the World's Best Dad, and William H. Macy as the private dick who uncovers a shocking clue!

No car chases, though. The Old Man would've wanted some chase scenes.

The Boy liked it, and all he knows about McConaughey is the shirt thing.

The Flower thought it was funny—I think she had a hard time following the plot—but not as funny as Gran Torino (which she regards as one of the funniest movies ever).

I liked it, too. But I missed talking with him about it afterward.

Jane Eyre

2011-04-27T22:55:00.000-07:00

Like Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre is one of those Gothic Romances that Hollywood can't get enough of filming. This latest version, though, emphasizes the Gothic part of the story.

This Jane is full of menace: Doors creak, curtains billow, things burst into flames. Mystery abounds as well. What tortures poor Rochester? Can a wealthy sarcastic gentleman find happiness with a caustic, homely orphan girl?

Is this the original bodice-ripper, or what? (It's not, of course, what with the Gothic tradition going back to Horace Walpole and, most famously, Mrs. Radcliffe. But I'll refrain from getting all English Major-y on you.)

So, yeah, this is a chick flick, but it's a good, pre-Ephron style chick flick, where the heroine isn't a whiny pain-in-the-ass. Mia Wasikowski (from Tim Burton's Alice) as plain Jane manages to be likable despite exhibiting very few pleasant characteristics. (She's also pretty good at being plain, though her profile in the movie's many "cameo"-type shots is just flawless.) Michael Fassbinder (300, Inglorius Basterds) similarly combined prickly with compelling. Billy Elliot's all-grown-up Jamie Bell (more recently in Defiance) is noble but unappealing when rejected by Eyre. Judi Dench—what else do I need to say besides Judi Dench?

I enjoyed it, though it was a bit slow in places; the spooky atmosphere gave the drama a little extra depth, and the story is particularly an apt fit for the supernatural-feeling elements. The Boy also enjoyed it quite a bit, which says something about him or the movie or possibly both.

Limitless

2011-04-25T22:49:00.000-07:00

If you could take a pill that would make you so smart and prescient that you could predict and plan complex events far into the future, would you take it?

Of course you would. What are you, An idiot?

Limitless is the latest entry in the underserved human-given-super-intellect genre of films and it breaks from the tradition in some refreshing ways. The basic premise is that Eddie (Bradley Cooper of The Hangover and Case 39) a sort of a loser in life, due to his inability to focus on anything—unrealistically, he's not being distracted by the Internet—when he runs into his ex-brother-in-law, a shifty "pharmaceutical salesman" and his magic pills. He slips our hero a free sample of a pill which he claims will turn things around for our hero.

It's not too long before Eddie's hit the skids, and takes the pill out of desperation. Lo and behold, the pill works as advertised. Suddenly Eddie can write his long languishing novel, figure out his landlady and come up with some money-making schemes. Obviously, it's very addictive.

Predictably, there are side-effects.

What sets this film apart from others in the genre is that most such films dwell heavily on the amazing-ness of super-intellect (Charley, Phenomenon) and what it means for humanity, for being human, Limitless is a thriller, and mostly centers around the magic pills as a MacGuffin.

This leads to some huge cheats and paradoxes, but the resultant soup is fun and sometimes clever.

I enjoyed it; it's a good summer flick in ... what month was it? February? March?

The Boy said he completely disengaged his brain and had a good time, though he literally could remember nothing from the film subsequently. I was poking over pot-holes, and he was sort of acting like he hadn't seen any of the scenes I had talked to. He really disengaged his brain.

But he didn't seem to unhappy about it.

Inadequate Words

2011-04-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

My dad died Sunday morning. The call from the hospital came in at about 3:30 and I pounded out a few thousands words, which I never posted because, in all, they seemed inadequate.

I have this problem when anyone dies. Last year Freeman Hunt's father died and I think I could only manage to choke out a short tweet of condolence, even though (or maybe especially because) I felt the loss deeply. Just as I do when DarcySport mentions her dad and you can feel the love and longing in the words. (One of my dad's favorite movies was Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married, particularly when she goes back in time and sees her grandparents. I remember being singularly unaffected by that at the time and him saying something to the effect that I should wait a few years.)

So if you've sent condolences and gotten only a terse reply, understand it's not that I'm not grateful. I am, and thank you all for your support.

Win Win

2011-04-03T23:43:00.000-07:00

Thomas McCarthy is an odd duck. A moderately successful character actor—one of those guys you say "Hey, he was in Law and Order or something, wasn't he?"—he's also directed three very successful little indie films.

What's truly odd about it, though, is that if you had to describe his movies, you'd be inclined to use words like "benign", "good-hearted", and even "moral". His debut was the unique slice-of-life film The Station Agent, and his follow-up was the widely acclaimed The Visitor.

Now we have Win Win, the story of a struggling lawyer/wrestling coach whose life is changed when the teenage grandson of his ward wanders into his life.

When this movie was first promoted, I was saying "I wonder if Paul Giamatti will be John Adams cranky, Harvey Pekar cranky or Miles Raymond cranky?"

Probably the biggest shock of this movie is that Giamatti isn't cranky at all. He's genial. Amiable, even. He's a hugely decent New Jersey lawyer (!) named Mike Flaherty who specializes in helping old folks out. After regular hours, he coaches the local high school's awful wrestling club. And he's in some financial trouble.

Relief, of a sort, comes in the shape of Burt Young (who, at 70, looks healthier to me than he did in his 30s). Burt Young plays Leo Poplar, a rich old man whose early onset dementia requires a guardianship that can bring in a small amount of needed cash.

Mike is a really decent guy, so you're a bit taken aback—disappointed even—when he commits his sin. He maintains his decency in almost every regard (though he is forced to do some lying to cover it up, of course) and so you're almost inclined to give him a pass.

This feeling is reinforced when Kyle shows up. Kyle is the 16-year-old grandson of Leo, who's run away from home (sort of). His mother is in rehab and his mother's live-in boyfriend is an abusive jerk, so Kyle decided to come see his grandfather (whom he has never met).

Kyle ends up staying with Leo and his hard-bitten wife (Amy Ryan) and their two daughters, where he blossoms in a normal, healthy household environment. With Mike's sin sitting there in the background waiting to blow the whole thing to bits.

The first two thirds of the story has Kyle, who happens to have been an excellent wrestler back in Ohio, re-entering wrestling on Mike's team, and rediscovering his talents. Mike coaches the team with his law partner/office roommate (played by the inestimable Jeffrey Tambor) and brings on his rich high school pal (played by Bobby Cannavale, also of The Station Agent).

The wrestling stuff is both entertaining and inspirational, as the team gets better and better with Kyle's leadership.

Cannavale's character's Terry is an interesting counterpoint to the humble Leo. He's a wealthy guy; his wife has left him for a handyman, although not actually left so much as kicked him out of his massive house. He's got himself a condo which he's already fully stocked with furniture, a big TV and a Wii. But he's miserable. He was a terrible wrestler in high school, but comes to see coaching as the only way to take his mind off his troubles.

The contrast is wonderful, as both are completely oblivious. Mike's never even seen a Wii (the cheapest of gaming consoles). Yet you never get a sense of jealousy or bitterness from him. It never occurs to him to ask for help from Terry—the opposite, really, as Terry frequently finds himself envious of Mike.

The final piece of the puzzle emerges when Kyle's mother shows up. I found myself thinking, "Hey, this is the best acting I've ever seen Drew Barrymore do! But that's not Drew Barrymore." It was, in fact, Melanie Lynskey, an actress like Thomas McCarthy, in that you've seen her a lot but probably don't know her name.

Good acting all around, although I've seen some criticisms of young Alex Shaffer's performance as Kyle. I can only assume those criticisms come from people who have never known teenage boys, particularly those who have had traumatic backgrounds. I found his flat affect very recognizable.

The Boy and I both enjoyed this immensely. Interesting, deep characters involved in serious moral conflicts. Easy contender for best film of the year to date.

Cedar Rapids

2011-04-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

Ed Helms, fresh off his portrayal as an uptight dentist who cuts loose in Vegas in The Hangover, plays an uptight insurance agent who cuts loose in Cedar Rapids in the indie comedy Cedar Rapids.

Heh. I just realized that connection as I was typing this.

This is an odd little comedy featuring Helms as a stunted insurance agent named Tim Lippe who looks up to the "high powered" agent in his little town of Brown River, Wisconsin, and who pines to marry his once-a-week lover—his former sixth grade teacher who treats him like a child when she's not using him for no-strings-attached sex.

The catalyst for the story is that the high-powered agent is found dead (in his bathroom, a victim of auto-erotic asphyxiation) and Tim has to represent his company at the Two Diamonds award ceremony in the big city—Cedar Rapids. Before he leaves, his boss (Stephen Root) warns him away from insurance pariah Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly) who's already set about poaching clients from the asphyxiated agent.

When he gets to Cedar Rapids, he meets his roommate—also his first black person, apparently—mild mannered Ronald Wilkes (Isaiah Whitlock Jr., of "The Wire", which is a running gag), and gets to experience his upgraded suite at the low cost of having to share the room with another roommate.

Well, you see where this is going: It's none other than Dean Ziegler, a crude, foul sumbitch, who seems intent on offending the conservative Christian promoter (Kurtwood Smith) and groping anything remotely female. Anne Heche rounds out the crew as the oddly sexy agent from whom Cedar Rapids represents her one chance a year to cut loose.

The movie proceeds in this fashion from a sort of Woody Allen-esque awkwardness to a wild not-quite-Hangover-esque bacchanalia to something sort of like a caper film. It's a genial (if not rollicking) trip, made pleasant by the general good-nature of the main characters and the clear delineation of the film's few villains.

Particularly touching is Tim Lippe's recounting of how he came to want to be an agent. Where the others seem to have fallen in to it, or done it after failing at other things, Lippe sees agents as heroic—a view of agents we do not get much these days, but one which is far more valid than that of the agent as rapacious pirate of others' misfortunes.

Also satisfying is Lippe's growth from idealistic, naive child to real man with real ambitions—becoming more aware without becoming cynical or losing his ideals.

I liked it and The Boy was also not displeased.