Green Lantern's Might! Or Might Not!

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 magicscientifically 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. Reynolds 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

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!

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?

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

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

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

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

"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.

The Hedgehog (Le hérisson)

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

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

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)

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)

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

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.

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.