In 2002, Cedric Klapisch made a film called L’Auburgene Espagnole (The Spanish Inn), and followed it up in 2005 with one called Russian Dolls. We had not seen either of those films, nor were we even aware of them, in fact, until we stepped up to the concession stand and someone said, “Oh, did you see the first two?”

No matter. This is a story of a fairly simple man whose life has become incredibly complicated through his associations with various women, none of whom seem to view any of this as a big deal.

When we begin, Xavier is married to Wendy. They’ve got two kids and his career as a writer is taking off. But when she flies off to America for some movie or TV show or something, she comes back wanting a divorce and to take the kids to the USA.

Xavier goes along with it (not sure if he has a choice given the laws of the land) but quickly misses his kids too much to stay in Paris while they’re in NYC, so he packs up and moves. Whatever money he has for his writing does not equip him for living on Central Park South, where his ex is now living with her American producer boyfriend.

Although he has to scrape by for a living, his best buddy, Isabelle, lives in NYC with her lover and their baby. Allow me to clarify the “their”: Isabelle is pregnant with Xavier’s child because the two wanted a child and someone they knew, so Xavier donated against his wife’s wishes. (Not that she ever finds out.)

But Isabelle argues him into it by saying he wouldn’t be a father in the classical sense, just a donor, which turns out to be true until it becomes more convenient to have a father around. Especially when Isabelle needs someone to watch the kid while she’s out diddling the babysitter.

Rounding out this trio is Martine, who was involved with Xavier before he hooked up with Wendy, and who has two kids she brings to New York for some reason (I forget) and ends up staying with Xavier and his two kids. While there she coaxes Xavier into having sex with her, and they rekindle an old relationship, at least while she’s there.

Meanwhile Xavier is struggling to get some rights to his children, since Wendy’s being a bit of a shrew.

These threads are all woven together, along with a backstory about Xavier’s father, who apparently split from his mother when Xavier was quite young, leaving Xavier to wonder if the two ever loved each other.

And it all takes place against a backdrop that’s essentially a love song to America. In a French film!

That’s always kind of nice.

The Boy and I were rather fond of this film. Entertaining with strong characters, amusing story, remarkably uncynical: You can do worse making a movie (and many do). The acting is la creme de la creme of French cinema with Romain Duris (Populaire) as Xavier, Audrey Tatou (Therese, Priceless), Cecile de France (The Kid With A Bike, Hereafter) as Isabelle, and (English actress) Kelly Reilly (Flight, Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows).

I keep feeling like we’re seeing all these foreign films about the fallout from post-modern familial structures: The reviews are in and it seems like divorce doesn’t lead to happy, together children.

I don’t expect that observation to lead anywhere, of course.

After the pleasant surprise of the low-budget ‘80s period piece Cold In July, I was feeling pretty optimistic about this 1962 period piece starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac.

Which is just how life sets you up for the big falls.

In The Two Faces of January, Isaac plays a grifter named Rydal who’s scamming young tourists out of their money (and presumably other things of value) in Greece. Mid-scam of a young school girl (Dais Bevan) he spies Chester (Mortensen) and his young wife Colette (Dunst) and strikes up a friendship of the sort that can only occur when a good confidence game is at work.

Things take a dark turn early on when a threatening stranger shows up to threaten Chester and Colette, and that’s all I’ll reveal, because a few desultory semi-twists is about all this narrative’s got going for it.

And that’s kind of a shame: It’s a good story; I have no reason to believe that the Patricia Hightower novel on which this is based is not a good read. The acting is fine. The cinematography is okay, though Greece looks like the bunch of barren rocks it actually is rather than the exciting, exotic locale portrayed in so many past films.

It’s not hard to figure out why it fizzles: The movie is not so much a character arc (or series of arcs) but more of a character reveal (or series of reveals). But as we learned from Frozen, revealing characters for plot convenience without hinting at their true nature, or even presenting them falsely (how they behave when no one’s watching) is very unsatisfying.

And that’s this movie in a nutshell. As we learn more and more about Chester and Colette, it seems to invalidate everything we learned about them previously, and so feels less like a twist and more like a cheat.

Furthermore, writer/director Hossein Amini (co-writer of Drive and Snow White and the Huntsman) focuses on this stuff to the point of neglecting good potential action/suspense sequences, taking them down a notch until the final scene which, I think, is meant to recall The Third Man but you really just want to end so you can get up and pee.

Especially if you got that 44 ounce soda.

It’s actually not that long and it actually doesn’t drag out that much, really, probably just a little over 90 minutes excluding credits, which is a good thing. But it doesn’t feel tight. It feels like a lot of missed opportunities.

The acting’s good, though. The music was, well, kind of weird. Not in what it was so much as where they chose not to have any. I think that may have contributed to the lack of suspense in places.

We were pretty meh about it. I don’t think it was that bad so much as disappointing after the pleasant surprise that was Cold In July.

Two thrillers suddenly popped up (how else would they appear, right?) in our theater last weekend and The Boy and I endeavored to see both, with the first being the low-budget indie Cold In July, starring Michael C. Hall, Don Johnson and Sam Shepard.

The first thing that struck me about this film is how good an actor Michael C. Hall is. Fresh off his turn as the eponymous serial killer in “Dexter”, in this movie, he plays Richard Dane, nervous father/husband for whom things go awry when his house is broken into.

This movie is based on a Joe Lansdale story, and oozes with atmosphere, as well as going off in directions you’d never expect starting out. It reminds me very strongly of Lansdale’s short story The Night They Missed The Horror Show, in terms of motifs, not exactly plot.

Dane has the story’s main character arc, shrinking from something that seems evil, only to find himself confronting something horrific in a way that normal people can’t understand. Sam Shepard’s character, Russel, is a lot more opaque. We get that he’s been through a lot and done some things, but he has a real sense of honor that powers the story.

Don Johnson is great as Jim Bob, a private detective who puts the pieces together both in terms of the mystery, and in terms of fleshing out the narrative, providing exposition, for example, where the laconic Russel would never, and keeping things from getting too grim (until they absolutely must).

It’s a really fine noir thriller, complete with plot twists that don’t really add up, and it takes place in 1989, with nice evocative music from Jeff Grace.

The only real shortcoming for me was that Dane’s character arc doesn’t quite work. He goes from a near milquetoast at the beginning who really doesn’t want trouble to virtually seeking it out at the end. And the movie didn’t quite support that change.

Eh, feels like a nitpick. The Boy and I loved it; it was a truly pleasant surprise to have this movie come out of nowhere and give us a classic pulp thriller.

Now, for the review’s twist: The writer and director of the movie are none other than Jim Mickle and Nick Damici! And if you recognize those names, you’re probably a dedicated enough reader of this blog to be considered a stalker.

The team of Mickle and Damici worked together on one of the best (and lowest budgeted) of the After Dark Horror Festival’s films, Mulberry Street. While my review (linked there) suffers from having to write eight in three days, it’s interesting to note that the better aspects of Mulberry Street are still in evidence: atmosphere, suspense, and characterization.

But where Mulberry unravelled, this film stays tight all the way through. If you’re in the mood for a gritty noir thriller, Cold In July is a good bet.

If I said about a movie “Well, this wasn’t as terrible as it could have been,” you’d probably think I was saying it was a bad movie. But it really could be literal, as in “the way the movie unfolded could’ve been far more horrific than it actually did play out, and that’s a good thing.”

Which is my way of introducing writer/director James Gray’s The Immigrant, a movie that isn’t as terrible as it could’ve been. Allow me to elucidate.

The story is that Eva (Marion Cotillard) and her sister Magda, Polish immigrants fleeing—I think it’s Cossacks—after World War I arrive at Ellis Island only to be split up. Magda has tuberculosis, and must stay on the island, while Eva has received some sort of black check on her record during the trip over (“questionable morals”) and so will be sent back so as not to become a public charge, especially since the address she has for her Aunt and Uncle are apparently fake!

My main concern about seeing this film, by the way, was that it would be a big “let ‘em all in” story. As I’ve said, I’m an open borders guy, but as should be obvious by now, imposing current political stories on historical—or even sci-fi/fantasy—narratives ruins them. Since The Immigrant avoids that, and sticks with a convincingly historical storyline, this is one important way that it wasn’t as terrible as it might have been.

Eva is saved by a relatively sane-acting Joaquin Phoenix. I mention the “sane” part because I can’t recall the last movie role he was in where he was sane, and even here, as Bruno, he’s more than a little “off”. But on the 1-to-10 JP-insanity-scale, he’s only at about a three here. Crazy, but crazy in love, and mostly in control.

Bruno saves Eva through some sort of arrangement he has with the guards, and then offers her a place to stay in his apartment and a job sewing across the street. With enough money, he says, she can get her sister out.

Fortunately, since sewing jobs were so profitable in New York City in the ’20s, she gets her sister out lickety-split and they reunite with their lost family and go on to live a happy and prosperous life as hot-dog magnates.

Heh.

As if.

You can imagine how wrong things go for poor Eva, but—I want to stress this again—as bad as they go, they don’t go as badly as they might. That is, the movie never fully descends into “misery porn” as so many of these costume dramas do.

Things get rough. And confusing, especially, when she finds herself enamored of Bruno’s cousin, who seems a lot nicer than Bruno, but may actually be less stable. And that’s always a feat when Joaquin Phoenix is around. (The cousin is played well by Jeremy Renner, who’s taken some time off from pretending to kill people with guns/agitating against real-life guns, to do a more serious dramatic role)

The movie very cleverly avoids giving us a neat narrative. There are villains, but it’s not always clear who they are. The System itself doesn’t come off well, which is fair. They seldom should. There’s also a sort of surprising Act 3 resolution which draws on a perfectly appropriate spiritual resolution, that’s nonetheless not the sort of thing you expect to see much in movies today.

The Boy and I didn’t think it was great, but it was surprisingly acceptable. And we don’t say that lightly.

I was intrigued by the Rotten Tomatoes rating on this new Brendan Gleeson starrer The Grand Seduction, because it had an 81% audience rating but a mere 61% rating from critics. I’m not always on the audience’s side on these splits, especially when there’s no obvious political slant that would entice critics to be extra-critical.

On the surface, the story seems harmless enough: Murray (Gleeson) is an out-of-work fisherman who is trying to lure a doctor to his small town so that a company will build a factory in his little village—wait, no, it’s not a village, it’s a harbor, that’s an issue here—so that the unemployed and depressed folk of Tickle Head (Newfoundland, Canada) can get to work again with pride.

Did you catch it? The little tip that might make a politically leftist critic dislike this movie?

Actually, there’s a bunch: Tickle Head residents file in monthly for their welfare checks, but this doesn’t make them happy. Oh, and why are they on welfare? Well, they can’t fish because of environmental regulations! And they have to trick the doctor into signing a contract to stay there because socialized medicine!

Oh, and Murray’s wife leaves Tickle Head for a job in “town” (Ontario?) which she ends up hating—and it’s sorting recycling. And the factory they’re trying to get in Tickle Head? It’s a petrochemical by-product repurposing plant.

Not that there’s any great love for the oil company behind the factory, and there’s a sardonic quality to the proceedings that makes it seem like “well, the last resort is to work this way” but it’s noteworthy that it’s presented as being preferable to collecting welfare.

That’s the underlying message, after all: Not a political one, just a truism about honest work being better than just about anything else.

Even if you have to lie, cheat and steal to get it.

Heh. The gimmick of the movie is that the entire town, in order to seduce the doctor, has to be part of an elaborate plot of being his dream town. To that end, they investigate him, they tap his phone, the pretend to like things he likes, and Murray goes so far as to pretend he had a son who died, about the same age as the doctor.

They also lie to the oil company, the bank, and anyone else who gets in their way.

I mean, in any cold analysis, it’s reprehensible, but director Don McKellar (best known for being an actor in…uh…Canadian stuff) pulls of a neat trick: He makes the townspeople likable despite this, and transforms the doctor (played by John Carter himself, Taylor Kitsch) from a shallow, unlikable jerk to a sort of lovable patsy whose shallowness masks a naive, even sweet, gullibility.

The intervening hijinks are quite amusing, meanwhile, and the movie passes rather breezily to a satisfying conclusion. The Flower, who is a tough critic, enjoyed it, as did The Boy and I.

There are some excellent bits here, as well: For example, the doctor loves cricket, and the villagers pretend to be cricket fanatics, too. But unlike almost every other sport in the world, cricket isn’t something you can fake an understanding of easily, much less a love of a game that runs six hours and over the course of multiple days.

From a dramatic standpoint, there’s a nice touch with what should be the love interest. In a typical Hollywood film, Kathleen (Liana Balaban) would start by hating the doctor and the scheme, but begrudgingly go along with it, then fall in love, and that would be what would make the whole deception okay, after a tearful confession.

Here, while she plays a pivotal role, she’s barely in the movie, which focuses primarily on the connection between Murray and the doctor. I liked that because I kind of think it’s nonsense to think you can start a relationship with an elaborate ruse (I mean, apart from standard dating elaborate ruses) and then recover it with a tearful confession.

So, while not exactly great, this is definitely more toward the 80% than the 60%, and worthwhile viewing.

The Dancing Skeleton Marionette is back! DSM is kind of a hero around Casa ‘strom, having first encountered him as the only bright spot in the otherwise dreary Gloria. We cheered when we saw him in the trailer for Jon Favreau’s new film Chef, even after we’d forgotten what movie the trailer was for.

“Wait, we gotta go see DSM in his new movie!”
“Yeah! Wait, which one was it?”
[proceed to check all the trailers with no luck]
“Wasn’t it Chef?”
“I think so…maybe we saw a different trailer?”

Anyway, the mystery was resolved when my mother and stepdad announced they had seen it and we yelled, “IS DANCING SKELETON GUY IN IT?” And they affirmed, somewhat confusedly, that he was, though not for very long.

They don’t get DSM: He’s about quality, not quantity.

Heh.

OK, digressions aside, Chef is the latest effort from Jon Favreau (of Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Cowboys and Aliens, Elf, and so on), and it is better than all those, and Swingers (which he wrote but didn’t direct), and very different from those as well, except in one regard.

This movie is unabashedly pro-American. It’s not political in any way, but check this plot out: A chef gets his mojo back by driving a taco truck across country and cooking local foods from Miami (cubanos) through New Orleans (beignets) through Texas (genuine barbecue) and so on, to Los Angeles, while teaching his son the art and ethics of cooking.

So, not only an American adventure but also a father-son movie, which made it two in a row after Peabody and Sherman.

Maybe America, and dads, are making a comeback.

We start with tattooed and doughy Chef Carl Caspar (Favreau) getting a bad review after his douchey (but not necessarily wrong) boss (Dustin Hoffman) insists that he serve a food critic (Oliver Platt) the same menu he’s been serving for five years.

Chef, as he’s known, learns about Twitter from his son, Percy (Emjay Anthony) and his cooking crew (Bobby Cannavale and John Leguizamo), but not well enough to not start a very public flamewar with the food critic.

Mayhem and Internet Celebrity ensue, but rather than try to parlay his notoriety into a reality show, as his ex-wife, Inez (Sofia Vergara) and his ex-wife’s publicist pal (Amy Sedaris, in a short-but-sweet role) would like, he very reluctantly decides to use Inez’ contacts (basically, her former ex-, played by Robert Downey Jr in another short-but-sweet role) to go the taco truck route.

So, he bids farewell to his sweetheart/hostess (Scarlett Johansson) and heads off on his cross-country road trip. And this time, social media, with the help of his son, turns out to be he his friend.

As does money. Which is just awesome. Making bucks doing stuff people like used to be a common sign of “good things”. Teaching your kids to do the same, with pride and honesty, did, too.

The food looks amazing all the way through, and Favreau got his chops (even if they’re pretend chops) from the real chef whom he was imitating (tatts and all) who shows up at the end of the credits. But just the way he makes a grilled cheese sandwich is amazing.

And like all great chefs, he’s not afraid to tell you what you should like, if you have any taste. This makes for some great moments with the kid.

It’s really just a heart-warming tale. There’s some language, some underage drinking, and a little weed, so it’s naturally rated R, but I was sorry The Flower had bailed at the last minute, because it’s really a family film.

We should probably talk about the love interest angle.

Now, if I’m writing/producing/directing/starring in a film, I might make my love interests Scarlett and Sofia, too, but some have, predictably, raised the “aesthetic imbalance” specter by questioning whether the large, balding Favreau could land those two birds.

I didn’t find it improbable. First, he’s a great chef. Chicks dig that. (As do guys, duh.)

But more than that, while Chef’s at a low point through a lot of this movie, Favreau still plays the character with considerable swagger, especially around anything relating to food. His crisis of confidence is centered around a nagging feeling that the food critic might be right.

Almost as if he’s at his low point when the movie starts.

This is only an issue if you think this is a movie about who some guy works for rather than a movie about being a man, and doing the right thing not just for yourself but for your family.

The Boy and I loved it, and it’s easily in the top 5 non-documentary films of the year, possibly the best to date. My mom (who also loved it) sez “Don’t go hungry.”

Plus! Bonus Dancing Skeleton Guy! (Fun ‘strom trivia: Mr. Bonetangles, as he’s called here, was piloted by Will Schutze, who was last seen in a minor role, one of the “triplets”, in the 2010 flick The Final.)

I think we can agree that the film versions of Jay Ward’s satirical and pun-laden cartoons have been largely wanting. Underdog, Dudley Do-Right, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and, really, the shining gem of the set, George of the Jungle.

It’s not a promising track record. Part of it has to do, I’m sure, with the fact that these were originally based on 5-6 minute segments (generally oriented around a pun) ballooned up into a 90 minute (or longer!) movie. Looney Toons have never thrived in long formats, either.

Hopes were not high for Mr. Peabody and Sherman at first, but the reviews were generally positive so The Barb and I went to see it (with The Boy tagging along).

It’s a remarkably pleasant and even heart-warming film that captures a lot of the feel of the original segments while adding enough depth to make it sustainable.

I mean, I think The Lion King is just a overblown mediocrity, but director Rob Minkoff (The Lion King, Stuart Little) has pulled a treat by turning a vehicle that was basically an excuse for shaggy dog (no pun) stories into something with some feels (as the kids say) without losing sight of the absurdity of the premise.

Basically, the premise is that Peabody (voiced by Ty Burrell) is a hyper-intelligent dog who can’t get adopted for being too smart. (“Fetch the stick? Why? You’ll probably just throw it again. It’s an exercise in futility.”) And after mastering all human arts and sciences, he decides what’s missing in his life is a child of his own—so he sues to be allowed to adopt a boy (Max Charles).

It was played strictly for gags in “Rocky and Friends” (as everything was) with Peabody’s supercilious nature being contrasted with Sherman’s regular-boy kind-of dopey affability. Here, although Sherman has much the same personality, his “dopiness” is more comparative: He’s actually quite smart and knowledgeable relative to others his age (he’s 7 ½ here); he just can’t hold a candle to Peabody, whose peers are more like Einstein (Mel Brooks) and Leonardo (Stanley Tucci).

Rather nicely, though, the implication is that Sherman could be that smart and even might be the smart when he grows up.

So despite Peabody’s superficial diffidence, he’s almost a helicopter parent, who has invented the WABAC Machine to teach his boy about history.

So, where does the conflict come from when a hyper-competent parent attentively raises a bright child effectively? Public school and social services!

Heh.

Also, a snotty little rich girl, Penny, and her milquetoast mom (Leslie Mann) and disinterested, snotty dad (Stephen Colbert).

This contrivance results in Peabody and Sherman and Penny (Ariel Winter) hurtling through time at random (although not random enough to be in the 99.9999% of history where nothing famous or interesting is happening, of course) and making all kinds of terrible, terrible puns.

Most of these jokes land pretty well, and are groan inducing, but there’s one about Achilles that was so bad you could hear a pin drop in the theater. As successful as the humor was, it was kind of interesting and noticeable that that particular one bombed so hard. (Later, I realized it was that referencing Achilles’ heel is so obvious, it’s just a setup for a joke, not an actual joke, so you were waiting for a punchline that never came.)

A lot of the same jokes in their Greek adventure were made in 1997’s Hercules, as you might imagine. And if I say “Ancient Egypt”,  you can probably guess quite a few of the puns there, too.

No matter: Delivery was largely good. It’s a good-looking film and the voice acting is well done, despite the profusion of stunt casting. (I spotted Stephen Colbert immediately, and we all spotted Patrick Warburton instantly, naturally.) It’s hard to manage much suspense in this type of film but they did a pretty good job even there.

The Barb liked it but wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about it. The Boy was actually a lot more positive about it. I also liked it a lot, despite my initial reservations.

Ty Burrell (Dawn of the Dead, “Modern Family”) was probably a key factor in this. At first, I was put off by his Peabody, since Bill Scott (who did the original Peabody, as well as Bullwinkle and many of the other Jay Ward characters) really defined the voice for me, but I see why Minkoff went the way he did: Scott’s Peabody is just on the edge of insufferable in his intellectual superiority. Burrell brings a warmth to the character that keeps the edge while tempering it just enough with genuine affection.

The kid, Max Charles—who’s one of your harder working 11 year olds, being a regular on “The Neighbors”, young Peter Parker in the newest Spider-Man movies, and a voice actor in a variety of things from “Family Guy” to “Adventure Time"—also doesn’t sound "quite right” at first, but works out better because he is a kid, rather than adult pretending to be a kid, as on the original show. (Walter Tetley, perennial man-child, played the original Sherman.)

So, overall, a good time had by all, despite the odds.

I have never been a fan of the Giant Rubber Suit movies. I remember them as interminable scenes of tiny Japanese army men firing ineffectively into the air as primitive models were destroyed. And Raymond Burr.

In a lot of ways they foreshadowed the modern superhero movie, with mayhem going on interminably until some arbitrary point.

I love the 1933 King Kong but that has a lot to do with the stop motion animation. I find that more compelling than guys in rubber suits.

And had you asked me, I probably would’ve said Pacific Rim is going to be as good as you can get with this genre. Especially after the awful 1998 version, which really should’ve been good, given that it was in the hands of Devlin and Emmerich who had been so successful with Independence Day.

And yet.

This latest incarnation of Godzilla is quite delightful and kind of the anti-Pacific Rim. To say nothing of being the anti-D&E Godzilla.

There’s nothing hip about this movie. It’s sincere from its backstory about a seismologist (Bryan Cranston) obsessed with the death of his wife 15 years ago, to the current relationship with his estranged son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the navy man who still cares enough to bail him out of jail when he’d rather be with his wife (Elizabeth Olson) and son.

Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins play the scientists trying to figure out what’s going on.

There are some real acting chops here. And complete earnestness in delivering a simple melodrama to serve as the backdrop for giant monster hijinks.

But the movie makes you work for it: None of Pacific Rim’s jumping into battles from scene one. Also, none of the hipster-suave ironic detachment of the ‘98 Godzilla. When Godzilla’s name is spoken, it is with reverence. And when he appears, you are both awed and kind of happy, in that childlike way.

It’s actually kind of nice. There’s no moral ambiguity, no shame, no sense that the proceedings are beneath anyone. No camp. Everybody acts their hearts out.

Oh, yeah: David Strathairn and Juliette Binoche.

This was very much an unexpected and pleasant surprise. The Boy enjoyed it, though he said he lost interest in the human characters once the monsters showed up because, hey, they’re not giant monsters.

I’m not sure he liked it as much as I did, which may have to do with a nostalgia factor that I’m not immune to, even as someone who’s not a fan of the originals. I know that my contemporary tweeps who have seen it (@uncommentari and @The_Monarch) had similar good feelings, so that may be a factor.

There’s a principle around here that if a movie has a dramatic split where critics hate it and audiences love it, we have to go see it. Nine times out of ten, this is a movie with “Christian themes” of a sort that used to be completely unremarkable but now are rather scandalous. (My favorite film of 2011 was Machine Gun Preacher which had a 25/75 split.)

God’s Not Dead boasts an impressive 17/84. And WARNING: if you are allergic to Jesus, just stop reading here, ‘cause this movie is chock full of The Jesus.

We’re actually pretty tolerant at Casa ‘strom, though, I think owing at least in part to my belief that a person should be free to follow his heart and conscience when it comes to spiritual matters, and that people doing so is a good thing.

I also think Man’s struggle with God can be an epic dramatic theme, a la Machine Gun Preacher, and we miss out on a lot with our current aversion to that theme.

So, how is God’s Not Dead? Well, it’s not bad. It’s pretty entertaining, actually. It is a movie that is praying for your soul—yes, you, in particular, and if you have a problem with that, you’ll have a problem with this.

The Boy said it was pretty hokey, and this is also true, though it’s not particularly hokier than, say, Inherit The Wind. I mean, much like that movie, it stacks the deck in favor of its desired outcome, even when that outcome is preposterous. (Also, Kevin Sorbo and Dean Cain are no Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, maybe not even a Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott.)

But you kind of have to love putting avowed Christian Sorbo in the role of militant atheist—a gag Hollywood’s been running the other way for ages. (George Carlin as a Catholic cardinal in Dogma, for example, or Gore Vidal as a conservative professor in With Honors, off the top of my head.)

The story is that Josh (Shane Harper) has to take a philosophy class elective and runs smack dab into Professor Radisson (Sorbo), the dickish atheist who insists that the class start with every student writing “God’s Dead” on a piece of paper and signing it.

This will allow him to skip large, boring and difficult portions of the class and go right to—well, I guess whatever vistas open to you once you dismiss the existence of God.

Naturally, everyone in the class signs, except for Josh, who can’t bring himself to deny God. This leads to the ultimate sucker bet: The Professor offers to let Josh make his case for God, and Josh wrangles this into “Let me convince my classmates, because you’re not trustworthy to judge.”

Now. Honestly. No class full of modern college students is going to go against their professor. And no college student is naive enough to believe that, were God himself to come down to the classroom and turn Evian into Zima, it would matter when GPA is on the line.

It’s just silly. But okay, there’s our premise.

This is also silly because you can’t prove or disprove God. That’s what “faith” means in this context, yet we expend so much energy one way and the other in our media.

Anyway, dramatically, Josh runs into his first test with his ridiculously hot and controlling girlfriend (Cassidy-freakin’-Gifford, who’s now 21, all you fans of Regis and Kathy Lee from the ’90s) insisting that he not waste time challenging his professor, given that their whole lives are at stake. 

Much like the dickish atheist professor, the girlfriend is a character who certainly exists in reality, but she’s such a hard-ass, there’s a kind of interesting (and, of course, completely unexplored) subtext there about the relationship between Christian men and women.

I kept thinking “It’s okay if she leaves you, she’s gonna end up cheating on you anyway, if she’s not already.”

Anyway, if the movie was just student vs. professor, it would be a pretty weak film, because (as I’ve said) it’s a supremely dumb argument. I mean, the entirety of the professor’s arguments are by authority. “God doesn’t exist because all these smart people say He doesn’t.”

Or, in fairness, there’s a brief nod to the other Big Argument of atheism, extrapolation: “We used to think all this stuff, like lightning and famine, was caused by the Gods, but we know better now, so therefore there is no God.”

But mostly it’s argumentum ab auctoritate on a subject one cannot be an authority of. And at one point, Sorbo uses this quote for Stephen Hawking:

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.“

This stumps Josh and provides some dramatic tension, but come on: This both cites authority and begs the question. Two logical fallacies in one! It literally says nothing.

Much like Inherit the Wind, I found myself wanting arguments that I couldn’t refute sitting in a theater chair eating popcorn. (I mean, Spencer Tracey disarms Fredric March with "how long is a day in Genesis?” which has to be apologism 101.)

Anyway, this struggle provides the backdrop for a bunch of other characters: A Muslim girl whose father insists she wears a face covering, but who’s interesting in the Christian God; a Vegan lefty who practices ambush journalism on the Duck Commander, Willie Robertson; her jerky but successful boyfriend (Dean Cain) who’s as shallow and secular as he is handsome; his faithful sister who visits their senile mother and struggles to get respect from her atheist lover; and a pastor who’s trying to take a pastor from “the trenches” in Africa but can’t get his car started.

That last story is resolved when God starts the car.

I’m not kidding about that; I was sort of expecting a more worldly answer to be slipped in, but it actually appears as though the car was started with faith, and just in time for the pastors to unify all the stories and message of the film.

As The Boy said, it’s hokey, but it’s not 17% hokey.

I don’t mind: All art is contrived and our rejection of this kind of thing is more a reflection on us and our cynicism than anything.

The Flower, for example, loved it and thought it was well done. That made me happy. She has plenty of time to learn to be cynical, if such a thing is necessary.

So if, artistically, it’s a little “neat”, well, fine, it’s virtually parable anyway. The ending was overlong, with much jubilation and Christian rock from a group that I’m assuming is known in the community. The movie clocks in at a lively sub-2 hours (about 1:45) and only the end felt dragged out.

If there’s a shortcoming, I think like with Gibson’s Passion, it’s that the movie preaches to the choir. That, I think, makes the movie less accessible overall and probably less effective evangelically.

But really, it’s an uplifting story, if you’re open to it.

Tom Hardy in a car for 90 minutes. Boom, there’s your elevator pitch!

Writer/director Steven Knight (writer of Amazing Grace and Eastern Promises) serves up a tight little drama that features, literally, no other person on screen but ol’ Bane himself. And it works!

I thought from the trailers that this might be a thriller; a crime story where Locke (Hardy) was fleeing mobsters and trying to draw villains away from his family. The Flower, after comparing the trailer to Janet Leigh’s driving scenes in Psycho, speculated he had a body in his trunk. (Heh. My girl.)

This is not that kind of movie. In the most abstract sense (without spoilers) Locke is a guy who’s made a serious mistake, and he’s trying to make it right, even though making it right will cost him everything.

And that’s really your movie. Locke is an extremely decent fellow. He’s holding several worlds together single-handedly, and he’s determined to keep them together from a cell phone in his car.

No joke, Locke is a classic tragic hero. Maybe not even the tragic part, since he’s recognized his error (and even that seems to have stemmed from an improbable, but not impossible act of kindness). But he’s definitely haunted by a jerk of a father and a need to control his life to a degree that suggests near neurosis. But even in this, he sometimes seems like the only ethical guy around.

Obviously, this movies rests heavily on Hardy’s shoulders and he’s well up to the task. The voice acting is done by a variety of quality British actors whom I’m not going to list here, but you’ve seen ‘em around.

With little physical action and just voice interaction, Knight gives us a well-formed story arc, with threats and some positive resolutions, some not so positive, some ambiguous, and makes it all look easy—like what’s with all these other people who need sets and special effects and more than one actor?

The Boy and I both enjoyed greatly.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it has been a weird, weird Spring for us, movie-wise. There’s no shortage of movies out, but a serious shortage of consensus about what the best (or even good) movies are. We’ve done all right, but it’s been a struggle. (And that’s with going to far fewer movies this year!)

Ida was supposed to be slam dunk, with a suspicious >95% critic rating and a suspicious-for-other-reasons 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Meanwhile The Boy had not gotten much sleep, and this is not a movie you want to go to if you’re groggy.

Ida is the story of a young orphan woman in the ‘60s raised in a Polish convent who’s about to take her vows. But before she’s allowed to the Mother Superior insists she visit her one surviving family member—the one who opted not to raise her.

She doesn’t really want to go, and the aunt doesn’t really have anything to say to her at first. But Aunt Wanda, who’s a mucky-muck judge and also a hard-drinking, hard-partying, uh, paragon of independent Communist womanhood warms up before Ida leaves, and the two embark on a journey to visit the grave of Ida’s parents.

Now, Ida, despite being about the aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, is basically the opposite of Aftermath. Aftermath is great action/thriller/mystery film-making, independent of the subject matter, even as it wields its subject matter like a sledgehammer.

Ida is all gorgeous black-and-white photography with blocking that would make James Wong Howe weep. Every shot is set up to reveal the characters’ relationship with each other, with society, with God. And once set, the camera never moves. Not until the very last scene do we get a tracking shot, of Ida walking down a desolate road, suitcase in hand.

As a narrative though, Ida is basically: A, then B, then C, then D. Or, maybe A, B or C? A. D, E or F? D. In other words, the events simply occur one after the other, and they’re resolved with an almost pathological aversion to drama.

It’s definitely an approach, and not an approach for everyone. I was engaged by the photography enough to where I was involved, but I was well-rested. The Boy came out kind of scratching his head, not sure if it was a bad movie or a good movie that he’d missed the point of.

Honestly, I couldn’t say one way or the other. I loved the look of it. There was a compelling narrative there but the presentation was as cold as possible.

This from the director of My Summer of Love, which I deliberately avoided because it had a similar creepy look, and a similar critic/audience split (though audiences liked that movie even less).

Old folks. They’re everywhere. Often on the road, apparently. At least, that’s where they keep turning up for us. This time, though, it’s Shirley Knight.

Shirley Knight, you may recall, was (one of) Paul Newman’s dishy co-star in Sweet Bird of Youth. I sure don’t remember that, or any of her roles until she passed comfortably into a middle age (with an awkward “Mrs. Robinson” thing in Endless Love in the ‘80s.)

Honestly, I know her most as Paul Rudd’s mom in Our Idiot Brother, Kevin James’ mom in Paul Blart: Mall Cop and I forget whose mother she was in As Good As It Gets.

Hey, she gets steady work. And she stars in Redwood Highway, as mom to the doughy James Le Gros, who always impresses me with how young he looks, until I remember he’s not Paul Le Mat.

In this little story, we have the miserable Marie (Knight), whose son Michael (Le Gros) has put her in an old age home. Despite this being the nicest old person home in the history of old people, she hates it and wants to go back to Bend, Oregon where she lived alone out in a cabin in the woods, or something.

This is a bone of contention with Michael, though he’s not super-impressed, since she was apparently not a great mom. He’s not carrying a chip, exactly, but he’s not won over by her free-wheeling, independent, if cranky, ways.

Meanwhile, she’s refusing to attend the wedding of her granddaughter Naomi (former child actress Zena Gray) because she thinks it’s a huge mistake for a 22-year-old to get married, particularly to a 30-something musician.

Our story begins when Marie decides she’s going to go to the wedding after all (though she still doesn’t approve) and she’s going to walk there. She has about a week, and it’s about 80 miles. That struck me as a little slow, but my mom (who’s about the same age) said that’s how long it would take her.

My mom also stated that she could cover a lot of ground the first day; it’d be the second that got her. And so it is here. The second through seventh days comprise the bulk of our movie, as Marie discovers that she’s not quite as tough as she thinks she is—but still, she’s pretty damn tough.

This movie also works as a tourism ad for Oregon, since she consistently meets the nicest people at every turn, many of whom would more than willingly drive her where she wanted to go. This, of course, makes her crazy since she wants to do it her own damn self. She accepts help, very reluctantly from a widowed sculptor (Tom Skerritt) and a sassy bartender (the gorgeous Michelle Lombardo).

Ultimately, of course, the journey teaches her a little something about life, and love, and laughter.

But seriously, it does, and like other movies The Boy and I have enjoyed like this, it has several things that really make it: The characters are interesting and largely likable. There are plenty of bad decisions in evidence both current and historical, of course.

There’s a story hinted at early on, Marie’s story, that is revealed step-by-step which sort of helps explain her, at least somewhat, but doesn’t really excuse some of her bad decisions. So that keeps the interest up without making everything neat and tidy and phony.

Director/Writer Gary Lundgren and Producer/Writer James Twyman have put together a nice little movie with solid acting,

Twyman is strongly connected with the “Indigo” phenomenon which posits that there are ubermenschen among us. (It doesn’t call them that for obvious reasons, but I defy you to define the difference.) And I’ve seen some connecting this movie with the Indigo stuff, but I kind of think you have to be looking for it.

Anyway, the Boy and I liked.

It’s a matter of faith among some that Israel has The Bomb. Part of Middle Eastern brinksmanship seems to be intimating that you have horrible weapons and daring your enemies to come discover the truth (cf. Assad, Hussein).

This movie begins with a coy denial that Israel has the bomb—well, the phrase used is something like “Israel has decided it will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East”, which is kind of a classic non-denial denial. It doesn’t say that they don’t have them, only that they wouldn’t be the first to use them.

Anyway, after the denial (with which the movie also closes), we get a framing story of a young Jewish man in Israel who’s trying to get his mother to work up some sort of anxiety over an incoming Iranian (?) nuclear attack, and she’s not concerned.

The movie proper is the story of her brother, the nuclear physicist who helped Israel develop The Bomb. It’s the story of an obsessed Mossad chief, his “secretary” (who’s actually more like his heavy), peace-loving Jewish hippies who are goaded and tricked into helping (when they’re not being killed to protect the secret), and a semi-incompetent France that is determined to get the bomb but doesn’t actually have the smarts.

There’s this precious song the young college physicists sing about peace with the Arab Muslims that is as preposterous as it would be fatal if anyone took it very seriously. (Of course, these youngsters are deadly earnest.) Just as radical folk music that’s dopey in America becomes a lot more relevant when you transplant it to South Africa, pacifist anthems become a lot less idyllic and dreamy and more suicidal when to transplant them to Israel.

Anyway, this short-ish movie (90 minutes) has a kind of rabbinical story feel to it, which gives it a certain charm, though The Boy was somewhat underwhelmed.

The plot is really the template of a spy thriller, yet the movie engages in few of the spy thriller tropes. There’s no suspense to speak of. When the Israelis start eating their own to protect the secret, you’d almost qualify it as “unpleasant” rather than the shocking betrayal it is.

Also, the mother is supremely calm throughout, so you know there’s never really any danger.

So, where I’d put it in the positive column, anyone expecting a suspenseful action/thriller would be disappointed. And it is kind of an odd thing to say “Well, it’s a story of intrigue and how a tiny country handled its existential crisis by getting the Ultimate Weapon, but it’s pretty low-key.”

Yet it is, and I didn’t mind particularly. Shot simply but well enough, with acting that seemed fairly natural.

One thing noted frequently was that the Israelis had to hide their research from the US, lest the US shut them down. I guess we didn’t want everyone getting The Bomb but that still sort of surprised me.

Anyway, a happy ending (telegraphed from the start) to this entirely fictional (kaff) story.

A recently recovered film—documentary but not a documentary, in the sense that it’s literal documentation of Jews leaving…I think it’s the Ukraine, during one of the particularly heinous periods, though before the horrors of the Soviet revolution.

The parts that we saw showed the Jews getting on a boat, after having paid considerable fees to the corrupt officials to get out, and to pass through—well, there’s the chilling thing: Every thing they sail past I’m thinking: “Oh, yeah, those guys would kill them. So would they. They’re goners if they stop there…”

When they finally arrive in Palestine, it’s kind of amazing to see the barrenness, in which a few institutional buildings have been constructed. Schools, farms, a cultural center, and so on. While it’s pretty upbeat in its way, the children are being physically trained—prepared for the conflict that would inevitably come (as it had so often in the past).

But it’s literally just film. There’s no soundtrack to what we saw. There was a guy actually there, pointing out things. “My great-bubba’s home movies from her trip to Palestine.” (This was part of the L.A. Jewish Film Festival. We have a lot of Jewish film festivals here.)

There is no small significance to this: The Jews had a presence in Palestine, were actually called Palestinians before 1917 if I’m not mistaken, and (despite recent revisionism) didn’t suddenly appear in Tel Aviv in 1946.

That said, The Boy and I were relieved when about 20-30 minutes into it, they wrapped up and showed us a real movie (Operation: Sunflower). We don’t really have the connection to Israel most of the audience had.

You can watch an hour of it on YouTube if you’re so inclined, this narrated by someone in…I dunno, Hebrew? Didn’t sound Yiddish to me. It doesn’t cover all of what we saw, nor did we see all of what is covered here.

The revenge story has been a staple of human entertainment since there has been human entertainment (Samson, anyone?), and while there can be considerable vicarious enjoyment in a well done straight-up revenge, the variety of riffs on the motif can be equally or more compelling (like, say, Hamlet or Death Sentence) whether they subvert the theme through questioning the morality of the premise (as in Hamlet) or through carrying it to an extreme (as in Death Sentence).

Blue Ruin is a revenge picture that’s almost a mix of Hamlet and Death Sentence. Intimate and disturbing, it features a “least likely protagonist”, like Hamlet, who ends up having to go to extremes, like Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon’s character in Death Sentence).

Dwight (Macon Blair), our protagonist, is homeless, living in his car on the beach somewhere on the east coast. He stays out of trouble, though he’s not above a little B&E to use someone’s shower, and the police know him. But when the Sheriff (Sidné Anderson) does come to visit him it’s not to bust him, but to give him some news.

It turns out the thug who killed his father is being released from jail. And Dwight, whose itinerant lifestyle seems to stem from this trauma, takes it on himself to kill his father’s murderer.

And that’s our opening. I won’t give any further details because they all contribute to the experience of the film, which is both complex and deep. Suffice to say that Dwight hasn’t really thought his revenge through and isn’t really cut out for the whole killing thing.

All that would be enough to challenge the formula, but add to that that Dwight’s understanding of the situation is imperfect to say the least, down to the last moment of the movie, and you have—not exactly an anti-revenge flick, but something that challenges any idea that revenge is tidy.

It’s a very good balancing act: I mean, it’s a relatively easy thing to take an anti-violence stance, an anti-revenge stance, and so on. And of course, the staple of revenge stories is to add that element of fantasy that provides a kind of vicarious release with no consequences. It’s a much, much trickier thing to present a story—well, shoot, it’s almost an inverted revenge flick, when I think about it.

Anyway, well done. The Boy liked it.

The acting is fairly low-key given the subject, and has that “natural” feel, like people just showing up and being themselves, which works well for the story. This is aided by writer/director/cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier’s style of shooting, which is very intimate.

As I said, not your average revenge pic, and fairly unsensational—but engrossing.

One of my tweeps, @thekellijane, edited and published her blog detailing four-and-a-half years of her life struggling with, well, life, but specifically life with fibromyalgia (and though she never knew it during that time, celiac) and I told her I would make it my business to see that she had an additional review on Amazon by the end of the week.

I’m writing and posting it here as well because Amazon silently discarded a review I wrote twice, and I spend a long freaking time on writing reviews. It pissed me off so much, I pretty much stopped reviewing. (I was a top 1000 reviewer for quite some time, though not through any concerted attempt to become so. I think they’re better now about not just throwing stuff out but I’m less entertained by the notion of providing free content for them.)

Funny. Weird. Disjointed. Surreal. Moving. Inspirational. Sad. Enthusiastic. Human.

The Lighter Side of Agony is a book based on four-and-a-half years of blog entries written by the author, KJ Adan, a woman in her 30s living in Nevada, detailing her discovery and management of fibromyalgia. That’s my third-grade-book-report-style-summary; it’s much trickier to nail the experience of LSoA down.

The epistolary autobiography, the diary, the author who interacts with an unseen audience all have a long tradition in literature, and this blog-book neatly encapsulates those traditions, with several strange and interesting twists.

Probably the least strange element is simply KJ’s writing style, which is breezy and almost whimsical, except that it belies a kind of underlying intensity. You can get a sense of it quickly by reading a few sample pages: the author has a voice. Nothing non-descript here.

But she’s going through this thing with her health. And by “thing” I mean excruciating pain and semi-fugue states, to say nothing of a ingesting a variety medications. This results in sudden sharp shifts of the topic under discussion—though curiously with no loss in intensity.

Not a few times, detailed descriptions of her dreams become the central topic but, unlike most airy-fairy dream journals, these are vivid depictions of literal actions (no real symbolism here). This lends a decidedly surreal aspect to the proceedings.

It’s probably not quite right to call it “literary pointillism” but that’s how I felt after the first few entries when a clear picture began to emerge.

A remarkable thing to me about this work is that while it’s personal, even intimate, and while it’s about the author’s foibles and the foibles of those around her, it’s remarkably free of gossip and luridness. This is refreshing, and to my mind, a major strong point.

The book has a lot of strong points: KJ’s writing style, as mentioned; the characters and events seem real (presumably because they are); and some epic ranting that reveal a young woman full of contradiction and confusion. It feels honest and, even as it is chock-full of grand ambitions, ultimately humble.

Also humbling. Although she’s quick to point out that many have it worse, it’s impossible not to admire the ambition and joie de vivre, even, of someone who treats her energy and ability that the rare gift it is.

There are some weaknesses, at least for me. It took me a while to learn how to read the context properly: The proper names used are largely nicknames, and there are actually quite a few characters here that make only few (or just one) appearance.

More on context: This whole work is completely saturated in pop culture. More than once I found myself doing a web-search to try to get oriented. And I’m not that much different in age than KJ, though I know nothing of her music, and little of the TV shows and games she mentions.

But if the pop culture is challenging, the medical billing culture is even moreso. Fortunately there’s much less of this. And ultimately, I just had to learn to let go and go with the flow.

I couldn’t always do this. Some typos and malaprops were left in to give the sense of the dysfunction caused by KJ’s condition. Well, sometimes this worked. Other times it just annoyed me and jarred me out of the story. (I will never get used to “as is my want” versus “as is my wont”.)

I wanted a stronger narrative. It’s not that kind of book, but there were so many threads that started out strong and don’t wrap up neatly. (What happened with the Vitamin D? With Tom? With the plans for the movie where Vincent D’Onofrio kills a hooker?) This is realistuc—how many things do we all pursue that seem interesting at first but go nowhere?—but probably more realism than I want.

It’s not really in the same category, but I found the relationship with her fiance profoundly sad. KJ gives herself no quarter on the girlfriend front: she’s quite overweight and no fun, and there are entries where she’s completely pissed at him, often followed by entries of utter love and devotion. It can’t have been easy to deal with.

But you are supposed to deal with such things. As an adult. If for no other reason than an understanding of how often shoes end up on other feet. ‘nuff said.

Probably the most fun aspect for me were the rants (which I’m also prone to). It’s not that I agreed with them, it’s how they often didn’t agree with themselves. Summed up perfectly with this:

Every time I reach a point in my life where I feel I’ve had an epiphany, I make a note of it in some kind of journal or blog. And then I look at it later, & think, “God, what was I talking about? I was still a moron then !” So, five years from now, I will realize I was a moron at 33, too. I hope so. If not, it will mean I didn’t learn squat.

I’m sure this was most pointedly left in as she edited LSoA, especially given the post-scripts.

In the end, this is a unique view into a weird little world largely populated by cool, fun people, one of whom has some crippling health problems—which is way better than a book about a disease.

I’m not a huge Lego fan. I mean, conceptually, I’m okay with the interlocking blocks idea. I pretty much made tall, uniform towers of the same color (except where I ran out of bricks of the right size and shape), but I never really had a sense of how to do the cool stuff.

These days, of course, there are kits, which some in my generation scorn, but The Boy had a pretty serious one as a kid of the Enterprise (I don’t think he even knew what it was) and it was still 1,500-2,000 pieces. A pretty good project, despite the by-the-numbers aspect of it.

I soured on the Lego video games because, as cute as they were, they had some DRM that made them impossible for me to actually play. That pissed me off.

Is any of this relevant to The Lego Movie? Well, sorta. The movie has a similar look to the games (a little more roughly animated, by design I believe) and the plot is all about the struggle between order and chaos—in particular the struggle between predefined kits of related themes and the anarchy of a child’s imagination.

It’s one of the best reviewed movies of the year, actually, so The Boy and I caught it at the discount theater.

It’s kind of a hot mess.

At its best it recalls the insanity of the golden age of Warner Bros (who made this movie) cartoons. At its worst, well, it moves along too fast to think about much.

The story is basically a riff on The Matrix, with regular joe Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt, some guy) fitting into his happy little world of Lego conformity by liking what everyone else likes and doing what everyone else does. (In fact, at one point, it becomes obvious that nobody thinks much of him because he conforms so completely to what everyone else likes, he’s completely forgettable.)

But things change when he meets Wildstyle (Elizabeth Banks, ‘cause why the eff not?) and actually finds himself on the receiving end of a prophecy about “The Special” who will find the “Piece of Resistance” and stop the evil President Business (Will Ferrell, duh) from employing his ultimately weapon of conformity, the Kragle.

Now, a point of amusement to me is that some view “President Business” as a typical left-wing anti-business attack, and some view it as a more libertarian anti-cronyism angle, but it seems pretty clear to me that it’s “Well, here’s something an eight-year-old would think convey importance and a fun-killer.” President. Business. That’s the sound of authority crushing your good times.

As I said, it’s a hot mess, but it’s a hot mess because it’s very much like the inside of a child’s head when playing with Legos and action figures. (The child in this case being Jadon Sand, who’s mostly known for doing voices at this point, which may make him the only real voice actor on the project.)

The anarchic approach means that the movie can chuck in a bunch of “guest stars”, particularly from other WB properties, and they’re not necessarily just cameos. Many “famous characters” appear prominently and play a significant role in the plot.

This is kind of cool, and again, a lot like being inside an 8-year-old’s head.

I liked it, as did The Boy, a lot even. That said, it’s probably over-rated. It’s funny and fast, sure, but I didn’t get the sense it’s something that’s going to persist well. A lot depends on surprise, on chaos, a few gags, the sort of things that don’t necessarily hold up on a second viewing.

If you were to compare it to The Matrix movies that it’s riffing on, for example, it’s pretty much the entire trilogy in an hour-and-a-half, and it’s probably not quite as good as the first Matrix movie, but light years better—and ultimately more meaningful in its shallow, silly way—than the other two Matrix movies.

A lot of animation choices were designed to emphasize the Lego-ness of things, and some of them I liked—for example, water flooding in was shown as a bunch of discrete, cylindrical one-hole legos—and some of them, like the fire and other explosive effects actually kind of put distance between me and the movie.

Actually, I’d ultimately put any serious weakness down to that: Certain animation choices and certain story choices were distancing. In fact, while the meta story was touching (and way better than the Matrix meta story, as noted) it also was a massive deus ex machina that undermined the entirety of the rest of the movie, dramatically speaking.

On the other hand, we are talking about a bunch of plastic bricks, so I guess I should just chill.

As I’ve mentioned, patience for the superhero movie is wearing thin at Casa’strom, so much so, I think I pushed this out of my mind almost immediately after seeing it.

Which isn’t fair, because it’s really quite good, and it avoids a lot of the worst aspects of the superhero movie.

But if we can take anything from Captain America: Winter Soldier, it’s that life isn’t fair.

Actually, I don’t think that’s really the message of any of it, but what the heck.

The story follows Captain America, after he wakes up in the future—er, present—and fights whatever it was “The Avengers” were fighting (do I remember? No, I do not) and now wanders around DC in a sort of emotional isolation.

One thing this movie does very well is bring the feels, but without bogging things down. It’s a nice touch that Steve Rogers is emblematic of war veterans who have trouble adjusting to civilian life, for example.

Hayley Atwell is back as Peggy Carter, though she’s—well, I guess she’d be 100 now—so the movie uses that to get some emotional grounding.

Scarlett Johansson reprises her role as Black Widow, and brings some real depth to her character, who’s mostly been filler to this point. (Though her big sacrifice doesn’t seem to amount to much.) As Cap’s platonic pal, with issues of her own, she contributes a lot to his development as well.

The story is that Cap is working for SHIELD and Nick Fury (Samuel Jackson, of course) though there’s a tension between them since there are things that Fury wants done that Cap wouldn’t do. Black Widow does the dirty work, but Cap isn’t crazy about being used in that fashion.

The big back story involves Fury’s Big Plan to launch a fleet of those awesome flying aircraft carriers that showed up in the Avengers film, and the trouble he’s getting from world bureaucrats. Well, he and his pal Pierce, who represents…I’m not sure, exactly. Civilian command? Intelligence officer? I don’t recall him being given any title or organization designation. He’s just Fury’s ally in handling paperwork and politics or something.

He’s also played by Robert Redford, who’s the best villain since Jodie Foster in Elysium (and you should read this to get exactly how cutting a critique this is). The fact that he’s a villain is a spoiler, by the way. Sorry. I mean, “Sorry, if you didn’t see that coming the instant Redford agreed to play the role of a government intelligence agent building a super-secret army.”

I’ve already said it’s time to pull the plug on Redford, and this role—well, apparently he’s been bitching about not having the chance to play villains previously, which strikes me as an odd statement for a guy who built a film empire—this role is just not flattering for him. Much like Foster in Elysium, there’s no understanding, no depth, just a sad caricature of what he thinks a bad guy might be like. (Just a regular, laid back dude, apparently.)

Weakest part of an otherwise strong film.

All that aside, the action is above par for a superhero film, not going gaga with the CGI, and relying on a lot of standard fighting action where possible. I thought it also hit the sweet spot of “comic book logic” with a few silly surprises that work ‘cause, you know, it’s a comic book. (See, I’m not going to spoil those because those are actual surprises, unlike the what-the-heck-is-he-except-third-act-turncoat-bait Redford role.)

The final set piece is huge, and The Boy didn’t care for it, but it worked for me, mostly. It didn’t make a lick of sense, of course, and some of the fighting seemed kind of silly, but overall it was appropriate.

I mean, if you like superhero movies, there’s no reason to not like this. But, as I said, they’re wearing out their welcome here.

The six-foot-tall poster in the lobby of the North Hollywood Laemmle proclaimed Under My Skin to be “a blazingly brilliant piece of filmmaking” and “best science fiction in a decade”.

I wasn’t fooled. While critics have grown increasingly gaga over this, audiences are decidedly not.

But, as I mentioned previously, it’s an odd Spring, without a lot of wholehearted recommendations, at least among the fiction films, so The Boy jumped on this rather than catch The Lego Movie at the second run theater, and The Flower came with us mostly looking to score some popcorn.

The popcorn was good, she said, but not worth it.

The Boy did not care for it, either. And that’s with oodles of naked Scarlett Johansson.

Ms. Johansson is, by far, the most interesting thing about this film. She gets fully naked, more than once, and:

1) She does not have abs.
2) She does not have a “thigh gap”.

This is something of a revelation, really. Mostly, when actresses know they have nude scenes, they starve, they work out like crazy, they do whatever they can to promote an “impossible” image. Ms. J seems to have just brought genetics.

And if she did do all that stuff, that’s even better, because it means she doesn’t buy into the skinny-boy aesthetic.

I mean, I hate to dwell on the superficial social issues that obsess our society but, really, this is a pretty threadbare movie.

Besides her body, she also, apparently, can act. I think we’ve seen her act before, like in Lost In Translation, but I’m not sure it’s ever mattered that much before. She was also very good in Captain America: Winter Soldier, which I see now I’ve forgotten to review.

But Under The Skin is carried almost entirely by her, and she does a very good job except in one regard that was probably a directorial decision. The acting challenge is akin to Starman/K-Pax/Mork/whatever, where an alien tries to pass as a human without understanding human emotions.

But since the premise has her stalking and seducing men, she’s perfectly normal seeming while she’s doing that, yet completely unmoved by any aspect of their stories or lives, and the fate she condemns them to.

This is basically a punt: It would’ve been more challenging and interesting to have her not be, essentially, a smooth serial killer, but learning how to be seduce awkwardly. (After all, she’s still in that body, and men are very, very dumb indeed.) Arguably, this would have added an unwanted element of humor—but there were actually a lot of those anyway.

So, she has a character arc of coming to be more human, and in (at least) an interesting change, the glibness she has early on fades, and she stops talking much at all.

The kids both complained that the movie had no plot, because the movie simultaneously didn’t spell anything out while beating certain aspects of the story to death. (There were a lot of seductions.)

But, in fact, it did have a plot: It had a plot straight out of a Roger Corman potboiler. Oh, you don’t get the details, because the aliens never talk to each other with words. But this movie is, in essence, a variation on the Not Of This Earth/Not One Of Us/Alien Avengers genre.

Those movies are all from the ‘90s, because that’s the last time I recall it coming up, but they were remakes of (or inspired by) films from the ’50s.

What this movie brings to the genre is no exposition. That’s probably for the best: The exposition spells out the dumbness of such plots, where super-advanced societies for some reason need human blood. Besides that, it allows the filmmaker to indulge in some of the films more memorable imagery without that imagery having to make a whole lot of sense.

But, really, it’s a hoary old trope, the alien harvest. (Impossibly, Alien Harvest is not the name of a movie, but if it were, this would be its plot.) The angle this takes on it, is the change from alien to woman.

You may recall that from “Star Trek” episodes “By Any Other Name”, “Catspaw” and “Wink of an Eye”, presumably only one of which could really have qualified for blazingly original given the similarities of story arcs.

I actually began to suspect that the reviews used on that movie poster were fake, so I checked out the two sites (“Cinevue” and “The Playlist”). Both sites are aggregators and I couldn’t find the reviews so-quoted, but they are, of course, as meaningless as saying “BEST MOVIE EVER — some Internet guy who may have been paid to say so”.

I don’t want to say it’s awful, exactly. There are some good visuals. It’s kind of cute that SJ picked up those guys for real, i.e., they didn’t know they were going to be in a movie. It does give an authenticity to the proceedings. But it’s not exactly a revelation that most guys would accept a lift from her, regardless of intentions.

I’ve sort of gravitated away from Jonathan Glazer’s previous films (2004’s reincarnation drama Birth and 2000’s Sexy Beast) but I don’t really know where I stand on the guy. Props for trying to breathe some life into an old genre, I guess.

But I wonder if using SJ didn’t work against him: The PR is going to overshadow the film, and nobody will see it anyway. They’ll just download the clips from the ‘net.

The trailers for this melodramatically titled documentary, The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came To Eden, had me hooked in a way that trailers just don’t any more. Really, I usually show up in spite of the trailers because they’re just chock full of spoilers. But documentary trailers, perhaps because they’re not just bait to get you to come see your favorite masses of flesh dance in front of a bluescreen, tend to be a little bit more hook-y. (Like the Afternoon of a Faun trailer teases its dark twist excellently.)

And then, when it came out? Audiences were not thrilled and critics were sort of tepid, levelling that worst of all documentary critiques: long, plodding, slow, slog. But you can’t always trust the first reviews, and the film has settled at a near 80% on RT for critics (though only a 67% for audiences). (UPDATE: Currently at 78/72.)

It is nearly two hours, but except for one (very good, but not entirely germane) digression of a young girl who thought she’d escaped the Galapagos only to end up spending her life there, it is not overlong. The interstitials between the dramatic story points are turtles and giant lizards and other fauna, but the movie never descends into Muscle Shoals style: “Here, have another 15 seconds of picturesque windmills” type padding.

The two hours really breezed by for me, if somewhat less so for The Boy. We both ranked it slightly under the near perfect Finding Vivian Maier but I’d put it pretty close up against that.

So, what’s it about? The very essence of humanity. It’s like “Gilligan’s Island” on a diet of coconut milk and narcissism. In five years, seven adults alone on an island end up experience the entire gamut of existence. Well, maybe not the entire gamut so much as a hyper-malignant slice of it.

A lot of great developments that you should experience as you go, so I’ll just outline the broad strokes:

A Nietzsche loving doctor leaves his family, and runs off with a besotted would-be intellectual woman (who also leaves her family) to the Galapagos so that he can live in solitude and work on his philosophy.

But just any old Galapagos island isn’t isolated enough for this guy. No, he picks a completely empty island on which to meditate. Since he’s interested in divesting himself of emotions, and not so much the lovey-dovey stuff, she quickly gets bored and since she is not really an intellectual, and positively disdainful of such bourgeois things as homemaking, she becomes a kind of pain in his ass.

Meanwhile, the newspapers are going nuts over these two, and their crazy nudist cult of satanism. (Seriously, the many varied ways the newspapers sensationalize and misrepresent this story to move copies is positively familiar.)

But this does prompt an interested science vessel to stop by and deliver some much needed 20th century luxuries to our inept intellectuals. This will be important later.

If things weren’t crowded enough with the two of them on this 67 square mile island, it’s not long before two more people show up! Another couple! And, horror of horrors, they’re utterly bourgeois. (Their motivation appears to have been to get away from Hitler and the rising Nazi menace.)

It turns out that the new husband chose the island specifically because he knew the doctor was on it and his wife is pregnant.

Well, there goes the neighborhood. The doctor leads them to some caves far, far away from the little shack near the beach he and his live in.

The middle-class couple, presumably because they weren’t trying to escape their values, immediately set about and make their little cave hospitable, and are soon thriving on the little island. This stokes some resentment among the intellectual class.

But the fun’s not over. One more set of arrivals rounds out the cast. We have intellectuals and working folk, and last arrives royalty. A woman who calls herself a baroness shows up with her two husbands and lays claim to most or all of the island.

Now, obviously, no one with any real claim to a title strands themselves on an island far off the coast of Ecuador, but the Baroness manages to be convincing or charismatic (or possibly just slutty) enough to virtually win over every man she meets. And I guess we should be grateful since the documentary has copious footage due to her ambitions.

The papers go crazy again with her arrival, making up pulp level fiction about her activities.

And, in one of my favorite parts, when the science ship comes back, this time loaded with gifts for our intellectuals, she becomes furiously jealous and demands that the goods be distributed evenly among the island’s occupants.

You can’t make this stuff up. But you don’t have to, because humans are ridiculously predictable, at least when it comes to behaving badly.

To add to the sordidness the Baroness brings is her two “husbands”, one of whom is clearly, practically and literally a cuckold.

It’s just an amazing, amazing story. I like to think that any random three couples on a desert island would most likely form a community and help each other out, and that it was just a particularly unfortunate mix. (People on other islands fared better.)

But as the movie comes close to saying, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

So, using the Bit Maelstrom three-point documentary scale:

1. Subject matter. Obviously, I loved it. Though the characters are of no great note, they are very human indeed. I think it’s impossible not to relate to this on some level, even as we laugh. (It reminds, somewhat, of the great King of Kong.)

2. Presentation. Very, very good. It could’ve been tighter. If all but the story of the seven adults on Floreana were excised, and a lot of the commentary, it could’ve come in 10-15 minutes shorter, probably.

3. Spin. This is one of those cases where, if there were any spin, you’d have to already know the subject coming in. It’s possible, I suppose, but I didn’t detect it.

It’s been a great year for documentaries (Maier, Jodorowsky, The Last of the Unjust, Tim’s Vermeer, etc.) and this fits in among the best. And unlike some of the others, you only need an interest in humanity to find this one fascinating.

It’s been a weird Spring. I mean, Spring is always a little weird for movies, since it lasts from about the end of Oscars (March 1st-ish) to the first Friday in May (the 2nd, this year). And in this little narrow space go all the flicks that don’t fit into the summer scheme of things, but that which aren’t considered likely award candidates for next year.

In this particular Spring, however, there are all these movies that look interesting, and some that look like pure award bait—but which end up horribly received by critics and audiences. Like Walking With The Enemy, which looks to be an amazing story of a guy who pretends to be a Nazi to rescue his family from the Germans in WWII, has been hovering around 50% at Rotten Tomatoes since it came out.

The Railway Man was modestly reviewed (hovering around 70%), but it was our best bet, so The Boy and I gamely trundled off to see it.

And it’s really quite good!

The story concerns Eric (the always sensitive Colin Firth) who seems like a nerdy fellow greatly interested in trains. And who, in fact, uses his mastery of trains to woo the lovely Patti (Nicole Kidman). But we quickly learn that his apparent nerdiness originates in his wartime experiences, and are far deeper than occasional social awkwardness.

Eric’s pal Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard) is similarly distraught, though not particularly informative. Most of what we learn is told in flashbacks, where the young Eric (Jeremy Irvine, War Horse, Great Expectations) and Finlay (Sam Reid) are captured in the South Pacific and enslaved by the Japanese to build a railway.

In this earlier time, Eric’s love of railways lands him in no small trouble, as the increasingly paranoid and brutal Japanese mistake his interest for espionage.

Which may be, come to think of it, why the critics are so meh about this film: It portrays the Japanese as brutal monsters. And, though it doesn’t come close to showing the true extent of their brutality in WWII, it’s enough to make the white guilt kick in, I suppose.

But really, the principals are doing what they do best: Firth is tormented, barely functional and yet impossibly appealing to women. Kidman is super-girlfriend/wife who refuses to just let him work it out for himself. Skarsgard is the brooding guy whose nationality is whatever, but who just has to be Swedish given how dark he is. And Irvine is the bright-eyed young fellow whom the world is about to kick in the teeth repeatedly till he ends up looking like Colin Firth.

Good acting. Fine direction. At first the telling of the story in flashbacks was a little jarring but, I think, primarily because you’re not sure what sort of movie it is going in. It’s really kind of a PTSD movie.

They could’ve stayed in present time, but the flashbacks give you some sense of what Eric endured. Frankly, I’ve seen enough movies that consisted entirely of Firth staring sensitively off into the distance, however good he is at it.

The Boy was very pleasantly surprised, as was I. It’s an engaging, even uplifting story, and it’s based on the stories of Eric Lomax, much like Bridge on the River Kwai was. (OK, it’s not Kwai level, certainly, but it’s a story worth telling.)

Surprise Spring recommendation from Casa ‘strom.

“Oh, Nicolas Cage, don’t you go all Nicolas Cage on us!”
“I won’t.”
“Nicolas Cage, are you going all nanners on us?”
“I’m not. I’m fine.”
[violence and bloodshed ensues]
“Nicolas Cage, you went all nanners on us!”

That’s my (poor) impression of The Boy upon learning about Joe, the new film from David Gordon Green (most normally associated with comedies, like Pineapple Express and The Sitter).

Of course, the Boy does Cage’s voice as well (even if it does sound a little like his Nixon).

However, whether you get “Stoic Nic Cage” and “Nanners Nic Cage”, you know he’s not going to mail in his performance. If the general public finds his choices of movie roles confounding, I think he says to himself things like: “How would a guy whose head explodes into flames react to this?”

In other words, he likes a challenge.

Nonetheless, he has an essential Cage-iness, and if you don’t like him, you’re not going to like Joe. If you do like him, or you only like him in his less absurd roles, on the other hand, this may be the movie for you.

Similar in some ways to last year’s Mud, in terms of number of syllables in the title among other things, Joe is the story of young Gary (also the lead in Mud) who’s out looking for work to support his family. But where Ellis’ family was essentially middle class, if on hard times, Gary’s family is essentially homeless, having squatted in an abandon house outside of town.

And whereas women were the source of all of Ellis’ problems, Gary’s problem is his abusive drunk of a father, whose main competency appears to beating him, his catatonic mother and his autistic-ish sister.

Gary’s a decent sort, who gets a hard manual labor job with Joe killing trees. This was really kind of interesting, like an episode of “Dirty Jobs”: These guys chop a gash out of a tree then pump the gash full of some kind of deadly cocktail. (They do this to clear out unwanted trees so that the landowner can plant wanted ones. It’s, like, a metaphor.)

Gary’s a good worker and Joe likes him. Joe instantly apprehends the situation with drunk, abusive father as well, but Joe keeps his nose out of things. Mostly.

Joe’s got a lot of problems himself; he seems to be kept afloat by sheer work ethic and above-average intelligence. But he’s got a rivalry with a local ne’er-do-well that’s escalating. And with the cops. And with the dog at the local whorehouse.

Yeah, that was one thing that didn’t strike me as realistic about this: This is some kind of one-horse town outside of Austin but the hookers were really good looking.

Anyway.

This movie is powered by several effective sources of dramatic tension: Gary is clearly the sort of kid who will do well, if not stopped by his father, but apart from getting drunk, his father’s sole purpose in life seems to be to grind everyone else down, and the big question is will Gary find an out (for his sister and mother as well) before Dad hits rock-bottom and drags them with him.

Meanwhile, Joe has an oddly similar relationship with society in general: He could do very well if left alone, but society is constantly poking at him, challenging him, daring him to just try to make something of himself. Is he going to go Nanners Nic Cage? Or will he stay Stoic Nic Cage?

It’s a very good film, really, and Mr. Cage is very good in it. Tye Sheridan continues to impress. And the rest of the cast, which is largely little known extras, also does a convincing job.

The Boy liked it a great deal, preferring it even to Mud due largely to the wide variety of colorful characters. I come down more on the side of Mud but I find no serious fault with this film.

Here’s to hoping director Green continues on this path in the future.

Elliot is a nice guy. A devoted boyfriend, brother, son and soon-to-be father, swamped by student loan bills and suddenly out of work, when a mysterious phone call (that manages its own ring tone somehow) offers him fifty bucks if he’ll swat a fly.

Discovering the money instantly dropped into his account, Elliot is intrigued. Then disgusted as he offered substantially more money to eat the fly.

Then the voice tells him he’s part of a game show: For each task he completes, he will receive increasingly larger sums of money, up to a total of $6.2 million dollars.

Well, sure, who wouldn’t agree to such a sweet deal?

For one, anyone who’d ever been to the movies, who knows that the “challenges” are going to not just get harder, but increasingly humiliating and/or dangerous and morally reprehensible.

Elliot, however, has never been to the movies so he signs up. And once you’ve signed up, there’s no way out, of course. Soon he’s looking not just at losing all the money he’s supposedly won, but also losing his life.

This is a tight little thriller, well done, and reasonably fun given a kind of mean-ness that generally underlies these kinds of scripts, and a couple of twists that are especially mean. It’s brisk, short and there’s a fair amount of suspense though, obviously, you have to increasingly suspend your disbelief, since the game “hosts” need to have a supernatural control over the world and environment in order for the whole thing to play out.

Kind of like The Box, if you remember that one, though this is considerably more successful artistically.

Not commercially, sadly. I’d say it’s going to be overlooked but it already has been: It had a tiny release and we only saw it because it got one late showing at our local theater.

Confident direction from Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism), sensitive performances from Mark Weber (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) and Devon Graye (“Dexter”) as Weber’s handicapped brother. Tom Bower plays their despicable father with a palpable venom. Rutina Wesley plays the warm, down-to-earth girlfriend.

Ron Perlman, the Beast his-own-self, plays a detective who suspects something larger is afoot.

The Boy approved which means that the movie won him over enough to allow him to suspend disbelief.

Remake of Thai movie: 13: Game of Death.

After Vivian Maier, it was unlikely that we’d see a better, or even nearly as good, documentary, but the non-documentary stuff coming out has been uninspiring at best. I couldn’t convince The Flower to come, since she’s decided she’s seen enough ballet-based documentaries. (That would be one, apparently: 2012’s wonderful First Position. She liked that, but, yeah, she’s picky.)

I was unfamiliar with “Tanee La-Clare” as she was most often referred to here, but the trailer hinted at some dark disaster that struck her down at the height of her career. Murder? Blacklisting? Gaining 6 ounces?!

Nope. None of those. And I won’t spoil it.

But it’s a doozy.

The story is told in old filmed footage of her performances (and just hanging around) and it appears some stock footage is thrown in there, with oral histories of the people who knew and loved her. Ballet documentaries are always so full of drama, and this is no exception, with old feelings welling up from 60 years ago.

So, how’s it rate?

1) Subject matter: Well, if you are interested in ballet, I have to imagine this is a big deal. Le Clercq apparently was the inspiration for George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, whom you also presumably are familiar with. (I was vaguely aware of Balanchine, though I know Robbins from his stage plays that were turned into movies.)

Even if you’re not, well, here’s a story of an usual, strong woman who faced terrible indignities and cruelties in life, with considerable grace. So quit whining.

2) Presentation: Just a hair long. When we learn the terrible news of Le Clercq’s fate, the footage is stock: Ballerina legs, plieing over and over again to some discordant music. Yes, it’s horrible and ironic. No, we don’t need to see stock footage, and you don’t need to pound that chord 20 times.

Maybe someone more into the dance thing would’ve needed the time to recover from the shock, but I was more interested in what happened next than wallowing in it.

This is a relatively minor point, though. There really isn’t much padding in this film. And just when you think it’s gonna run long, it’s over (at about 90 minutes).

3) Spin: Well, I can’t really speak to that. How big was Ms. Le Clercq? She was tall, but that’s neither here nor there. The movie kind of banged on the “she’s so beautiful” drum a whole lot, which I didn’t really see. She was elegant and lovely, sure, but there were prettier girls in the same classes (at least IMO).

Now she clearly, clearly had no small measure of charisma. Somewhat ironically, perhaps, I think the movie would’ve been better served by a somewhat less infatuated view. It’s actually fairly late on before I really got the sense of the depth of her charisma (to say nothing of her character).

But I’m not a ballet-person. Maybe it’s obvious to such.

I was rather interested in the George/Tanaquil/Jerome love triangle. La Clercq’s true love appears to have been Balanchine, a classic alpha male, aloof and brilliant, but for a brief moment willing to turn a girl into the center of his white-hot attention.

Meanwhile, Robbins, who was probably much the same in many regards, was way more beta when it came to Le Clercq. He poured out his heart, and she reciprocated, at least in writing, while keeping him at arm’s length. But then, she’s heartbroken when he’s not there for her in her time of need. (Their relationship seems to have closed on a rocky note.)

But again, a relatively minor point: It’s a good, interesting story well-told.

Woman navigates tricky later-in-life experiences. Is it Gloria? Thank God, no. I was actually a little surprised The Boy was amenable to seeing another one of these films, but On My Way starring Catherine Deneuve is a much better film (critics be damned).

Writer/Director Emmanuelle Bercot gives us everything Gloria did not: Bettie (Deneuve) is an aged former beauty queen and a widow who’s made a shamble of her life by pining for a married man who, she learns at the beginning of the movie, has impregnated a young 20-something.

Bettie goes for a drive across the French countryside where, apparently, it is nigh impossible to buy cigarettes. Her restaurant is a shambles: She’s disorganized and clearly not a business woman and, oh yeah, she leaves it to go for this long drive (but we’ll cut her some slack). She lives with her mom, but they’re not exactly friendly.

Soon we discover that she’s virtually completely alienated from her daughter, who’s interviewing for a job and needs to her to drive across country to be there by the next morning so her young son will have someone to watch him until the son’s paternal grandfather can take him.

The kid turns out to be something of a brat, damaged by the fractured family structure. Further, the grandfather seems to be an asshole, too. Bettie’s being approached by the organizers of the beauty pageant she didn’t win 45 years ago to make a calendar, and can’t even commit to that.

So, why did this work so well for us while Gloria failed? Well, first you actually get the backstory. Not all at once, mind you, and the first versions are often lies. Bettie is fond of telling the story of her husband’s death: He was with his mistress when he started choking on a chicken bone, the doctor who came to his aid was the mistress’s husband. The doctor was also Bettie’s lover.

French, right?

There’s also the whole story of how Bettie ditched the “Miss France” competition. She seems like a flibbertigibbet but by the end it turns out there’s a lot more to the story than she ever lets on.

Everyone’s human. They all have a right to be pissed off and upset—but they’re also all abusing that right, and as the movie makes clear, the abuse of youth, love and sex is older than any given generation. In a that’s-so-French moment, there’s not even any real pieties like “Gee, maybe the next generation won’t be this foolish.” Nope: It’s just assumed that people will be foolish with love and sex until their youth fades.

So, yeah: The characters develop and are interesting. It’s funny in parts, touching without ever getting maudlin, earthy and romantic, oh, and despite old people having sex, the director felt no need to show us graphic sex scenes between septuagenarians.

Critics like this a lot less than Gloria, and per Rotten Tomatoes, audiences liked it slightly less. I’m gonna guess that’s because there’s a lot more pandering to the sort of audience that goes to see these films. (Gloria is portrayed as a somewhat noble character, while Bettie is more of a fool.)

Deneuve is wonderful. Bercot is arguably brutal in her portrayal of her, posing her in ways that seem geared to evoke the Deneuve of the ‘60s which, no matter how well preserved she is, she cannot possibly compete with today.

I thought that added an extra layer of poignancy to the proceedings but I note that The Boy, who knows nothing of her and hated Gloria, had much good to say about this outing.

My stepfather said, “I saw the trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel and it looked like Edward Norton was doing the exact same lines he was doing as the Scoutmaster in Moonrise Kingdom.” I told him I didn’t know how to tell him this but, not only that, TGBH also has Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, an elaborate open set that the camera dollies through, sideways, etc. etc. etc.

In other words, it’s a Wes Anderson film.

The Flower, The Boy and I really liked Moonrise, so hopes were high for Budapest, and it did not disappoint. My stepfather was finally compelled to see it by James Lileks appearing on the radio and saying it was the best movie he’d ever seen.

Well.

The story is that of M. Gustave, the ultimate concierge, played by Ralph Fiennes, an aging man in an aging hotel, in a fictitious eastern-european country in a fictitious time between World War I and World War II, when a party that is not the Nazis but similar in tactics and aesthetics, who is willed a priceless painting by an aged dowager he used to service.

He has sex with all his friends, you see.

Hijinks ensue as Gustave and his apprentice Zero (Tony Revolori, in a breakout role) flee the officials and search for clues that will clear Gustave’s name and land the perpetrators behind bars.

It is, of course, odd, but it transcends its own oddness (unlike some of Anderson’s earlier efforts). Much like Moonrise Kingdom, the characters feel real, even when they’re practically fairy tale archetypes. The fantasy setting (the unnamed country, the pseudo-Nazis, the exterior shots done with the tilt-shift lens) allows Anderson to tell his story in a familiar milieu without having to cheapen history.

Although many of the repertory characters are there, this is a much larger cast than we’re used to for his films, and to his credit they all end up seeming like they were born to play these roles: Jeff Goldblum as the good-hearted lawyer, Willem Dafoe as the evil assassin, F. Murray Abraham as senior Zero, Jude Law as his interviewer, Tom Wilkinson as the older Jude Law (?), Harvey Keitel, Leya Seydoux are all looking at home here, regardless of the size of their roles. Saorsie Ronan (How I Live Now, which I reviewed but blogger seems to have eaten) is a delight here as Zero’s love, Agatha.

Then, of course, we have Owen Wilson (Anderson’s original screenplay collaborator), Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, and of course Ed Norton, none of whom really have a big role, but whose presence lends a charm of its own.

There’s an odd double (triple?) book-ending here, with the movie starting by having a young girl place flowers on a statue dedicated to “the author”, which then leads to a flashback to the ‘80s, where the author is narrating the book, which then flashes back to the interview the author had to with the aged Zero, and then most of the movie takes place in Zero’s (Abraham) recounting of the tale to the young author.

That was the only part that felt quirky for quirky’s sake, but I think it may reflect Anderson’s journey to the material, which was inspired by the writings by Stefan Zwieg, who himself died in 1942.

It’s funny: I’m so used to seeing the best of our directors become more self-indulgent with age and turn out worse movies, it’s very refreshing to see someone like Anderson (whose movies could be argued started out rather self-indulgent) increasingly hone his craft to make better films over time.

I don’t know about “best movie ever” but we liked it a lot.

A woman makes a special lunch for her increasingly distant husband, only discover it never made it to him, but instead to another man, with whom she strikes up a relationship through messages passed in The Lunchbox.

Writer/director Ritesh Batra brings us a subtle epistolary love story that is especially quaint for being conducted via the dabbahwalas—messengers who deliver lunches to working Indians—rather than via email/chat/Twitter/whatever.

First, isn’t it amazing what you can do when you when your minimum wage is 28 cents an hour? You know what they’re not doing in India? Looking to find robots to replace low skill jobs.

Anyway, food is a critical part of this love story, so it wouldn’t work in another medium.

The always sensitive Irrfan Khan (The Namesake, Slumdog Millionaire) plays an older man retiring from a clerical job he is very efficient at, and dealing somewhat hostilely with his young replacement. Nimrat Kaur plays the young mother who cannot seem to kindle her husband’s interest.

Well, you know. Nimrat Kaur as your neglected housewife…well, okay, I suppose I’ve had to believe less plausible things. (She’s lovely, of course, but they’ve anti-glammed her.)

Anyway, the movie shows how the relationship between Khan and Kaur affects their “real life” relationships and how their bond develops.

There’s not a whole lot to write about it: It’s a simple love story, simply told. My mom, who doesn’t go to a lot of movies, was taken by the premise and went out to see it. Of course, what she wanted was the dabba itself, the neat little circular container that separates different kinds of foods.

The Boy enjoyed it, and that’s my usual sign that my own enjoyment isn’t just a matter of my advancing age. Heh.

What if? What if instead of Star Wars, an amazing, mind-bending Dune had appeared in the mid-‘70s? That’s the teaser for Jodorowsky’s Dune, but it’s not really what the movie’s about—I mean, really, what’re they gonna do, make an alt-history of the ’80s and ’90s where…uh…one movie was a bigger box office hit than the other?

No, obviously what we have is a movie about how this amazing this movie never got made was, er, would’ve been. I quipped after seeing it that it was such a great and amazing story, I’d hate to ruin it by actually seeing one of Jodorowsky’s movies.

Jodorowsky is an artist (still living) who was…well, I’m not sure, exactly. A performance artist, perhaps? He put on plays, I think, and had some success. And then he got into movies. And he had some success there. And then he got it into his head to make a Big Movie.

I don’t mean a big budget movie, though it certainly would’ve been that. He wanted to make a film that was a religious experience.

From the clips they showed of the movies he had done prior to this, there were strong religious overtones, mixed with a ’70s pop-art sensibility that, while quite de rigeur back then, I think we can all agree was really, really ugly, not to mention pretentious and usually shallow and nihilistic.

I found myself cringing at the (very short) clips and even now I cringe at the ambition of creating a sci-fi film as a religious experience—although it suddenly strikes me that Star Wars, Star Trek and the ilk are religious experiences for many, they weren’t intended that way—but a funny thing happened while listening to Jodorowsky: He didn’t seem to be a man of pretentions.

He seemed positively down-to-earth. He had (has, even) tremendous ambitions which he expressed in very interesting and winning ways. Typically, the ugly, pretentious art of the ’60s and ’70s came from a malignant place: A rejection of bourgeois values like beauty, craft and talent.

Jodorowsky showed none of that. It was all vision, all uplift, all positivity. In fact, the common theme of the film is him enlisting acolytes in this happy cult, and then letting them go wild with their own ideas.

This film documents, oral history style, how he gathered around all these amazing and bizarre talents and created a book of shot-for-shot storyboards of Dune, which I’m actually not sure he ever read. He hadn’t read it before deciding to do the movie, and some of the creative people attached never did read it.

Who did he bring on? Well, Dan O’Bannon and H.R. Giger—and if you know your movie sci-fi those two names together rings a very big bell—illustrator Chris Foss, Orson Welles, not to mention Salvador Dali and his muse. The documentary is just a wealth of great stories: Brilliant young people getting together and dreaming a movie into existence.

Well, almost.

In the end, the studios demurred. They loved the concept and the book, but didn’t trust Jodorowsky to direct it. Not that that didn’t stop sci-fi movies borrowing images and concepts from that book for the next two decades. (The sort of borrowing that, in some cases, should’ve probably led to some lawsuits.) Most notably, O’Bannon and Giger went on to give us Alien, launching Ridley Scott’s star and influencing sci-fi ever after.

Even if the film had been greenlit, it’s almost inconceivable to me that it would have actually been made: The budget they wanted was about $15M. Well, say what you want about George Lucas, but he’s a genius at getting results on a low budget, and it took him $17M to make Star Wars. And he wasn’t working with Welles and Dali.

And, frankly, the vision of Star Wars was in trying to make SFX that didn’t suck, not in trying to make a mind-bending philosophical film. (Quite the contrary, Lucas was hearkening back to old serials.)

Yet, it’s sort of hard not to feel a little sad that it never was to be. I think it would’ve been great, whether a great disaster or a great success, it would’ve made a mark.

So, using the three-point documentary weighing scale:

1) Topic matter: Great fun if you enjoy the creative process and/or remember the ’70s.

2) Presentation: Just so. No padding I recall, which is nice. Lots of stories, told by the people involved and on the periphery. The late Dan O’Bannon only appears as a pre-recorded interview, sadly.

3) Spin: Little to none apparent. I’ve heard people say this smacks of “mockumentary”, but I don’t think so. No one is made to look bad or awkward: it’s just an audacious story. You can’t tell it without the golden poop.

The Boy, who isn’t actually big into the moviemaking process, and who probably recognized only Dali and Welles, well, and maybe Giger, found it to be very entertaining.

A breezy sub-90 minutes. Check it out!

Ah…finally, the last of the Oscar films: Ernest and Celestine, the delightful french story of an orphan mouse girl (all mice may be orphans, I’m not sure) in an underground mouse world that send their kids out to scavenge in the above world (populated by bears) to fetch their children’s teeth.

The mice, you see, use the teeth to replace their own teeth, which are crucial to the mice’s survival.

The bears, meanwhile, tell their children about the tooth fairy, but actually freak out at the presence of mice.

So, there’s some tension.

Celestine isn’t meeting her tooth quota, but in her attempt to nab a tooth, she’s spotted, and ends up trapped in a trash can overnight.

Meanwhile, Ernest is an artistic, if somewhat lazy, bear who lives out in the woods and discovers himself out of food. He heads to the city to busk but after having no luck finds himself picking through garbage cans.

Thus, Ernest and Celestine meet. The relationship gets off to a rocky start with Celestine having to convince Ernest to to eat her but, as you might imagine, it improves from there and they become friendly.

Of course, their problems get worse at that point, because they live in a society where associating with the other species is treason.

This movie is really, really cute. It’s saved from going overboard by being also very clever and having just the hint of fairytale style edge. The animation style is traditional, 2D minimalism, showing just enough in each frame to tell the story, like a child’s picture book, and using the medium for some charming sight gags (such as when Ernest paints the car to camouflage it).

It’s barely over an hour, too, and moves at a breakneck pace.

The Flower loved it, naturally, but The Boy also loved it, which is saying something. One of the producers, Didier Brunner, was also behind The Secret of the Kells and The Triplets of Belleville, but I’m not sure what the common theme is other than “ability to get Oscar nominations”.

(On a tangent, four years later, having finally seen Monsters vs. Aliens, I think I like The Secret of the Kells.)

Actually, if there is a commonality between the three movies, it’s that they have just the right style of animation for their story. The big American animation studios look for stories to tell in their animation style (now almost exclusively CGI), whereas these guys seem to be looking for the animation style that’s right for the story they want to tell.

It’s a good thing.

The real tragedy here is that this should be a moderately large hit, perhaps skewing too young and not being edgy enough to be huge, but with proper distribution at least should get $30-60M box office—a goal they can’t make when being shown in less than 40 theaters. Sadly it has made only about $250K in the US (and about $5M worldwide).

Although the English version has the celebrity-voice disease, they are at least celebrities with noteworthy voices: Forest Whitaker, Paul Giamatti, William H. Macy and Lauren Bacall are all featured, though the film is ably carried by Whitaker as Ernest and young Mackenzie Foy as Celestine.

The “Best Animated” feature of the Oscars is, weirdly, the one category where popularity reigns over the arty and obscure. Or maybe it’s not so weird in a town of childless pedophiles. Of the five animated films nominated, you got one Disney, one Dreamworks, and one from Illumination.

Despicable Me 2 was decent, especially for a sequel. As beloved as Frozen is, it’s kind of a mess of a film. (The Boy pointed this out: the tonal shifts from deadly serious to goofy snowmen or inexplicable troll creatures are jarring.) When I mention to The Boy that The Croods got an Oscar nomination, he yells “F*** The Croods!”

Yeah, we have opinions around here. One of which is that Monsters U, was far better than those three films. Bu The Wind Rises and Ernest and Celestine? Much harder to say.

The Wind Rises is Hayao Miyazaki’s latest “last film” capping a 20 year dedication to retiring eventually someday, and it’s some ways it’s diametrically opposed to his previous last film, Ponyo. If that film skewed young, this one isn’t really for kids at all.

The Wind Rises is the story of the aeronautic engineer who would ultimately design the planes that would be used to attack Pearl Harbor and host the kamikazee.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

It’s the ‘30s, so there’s tuberculosis. And lots and lots of smoking. I haven’t seen this much smoking in a cartoon since Fred and Barney were shilling for Winston.

Content aside, this is very much a Miyazaki film. The story concerns young Jiro, who loves airplanes and has a real skill for building them. Apparently they were making Japanese planes out of bamboo or rice or something, and Jiro, who has great ideas, is sent around the world to learn more techniques. Ultimately he brings honor to Japan’s air force with his novel design approaches.

Jiro is a combination of two actual Japanese engineers, necessarily, and whatever the actual history, the movie is a vehicle to express Miyazaki’s take on the tensions between technology and industry, and of art and reality.

A lot of people will say this is a different film for him, but it’s really not: His films are always about these themes. Which, hey, beats making movies about daddy issues. (kaffkaffTimBurtonkafkaff)

In this case, the opening is a delightful, traditional introduction to a boy who wants to fly but has poor vision. In his dreams, he lives in a world with amazing aircraft built by Italian aeronautic engineer Gianni Caproni, who tells Jiro he couldn’t fly either, but encourages him to build airplanes.

This dream world is very Miyazaki, and Jiro and Caproni continue their relationship throughout Jiro’s career, discussing the art and science of plane-making, along with the consequences of developing beautiful, powerful things that you know must eventually be turned to evil.

It’s a theme Miyazaki clearly feels deeply, and because of the realisticness of the scenario, I think it hits home here more than it does in movies like Princess Mononoke. There’s also the contrast of the real world where people fall in love and grow old and have victories and failures and get sick and die. It’s not all just beautiful creation.

Miyazaki’s poetry and pacing is in full flower (not at all like someone who needs to retire, anyway), so if you like that, there’s nothing to be disappointed in here.

The Boy loved it, and picked it as his favorite animated film of the year, and one of his favorites overall. The Flower also loved it but may have been more charmed by Ernest and Celestine.

I enjoyed it quite a lot though it always takes me some portion of a Miyazaki film to stop waiting for the conflict. His movies are about things-that-happen versus, say, the more common villains-and-heroes scenario. The tension is always larger, more vaguely defined: We know there’s going to be war, but we’re not going to see Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito plotting it.

And when there are villains, Miyazaki saves them rather than killing them. Lady Eboshi (Mononoke) is robbing the countryside of its magic, but does so to provide for her people. The Witch of the Waste (Howl’s Moving Castle) is vain and mischievous, but underneath basically harmless. And even Madame Suliman (Howl), who is about as evil as can be is merely robbed of her power over Howl by Sophie loving him. (You can’t really mistake Hayao’s movies for anyone else’s, even his apprentices.)

But sometimes I want the witch pushed in the oven.

Liam Neeson has quietly emerged as one of the pre-eminent action stars of  the last five years (since about Taken), which is just one of those thing I observe every single time he comes out with one of these movies.

This is the best of the five action movies he’s made in the past five years, I’d say, with the possible exception of Taken.

What?

Some sort of controversy?

All right, I’ll get to that.

The story is that Neeson, a Federal Air Marshall who’s on the edge, man, finds himself on a plane with a terrorist who is one step ahead of him at every step. The opening sequences are great paranoid cat-and-mouse suspense thriller, and Neeson gets deeper and deeper in the muck with every new corpse that turns up.

It’s clever, it’s entertaining, and it has good emotional depth. (It’s also preposterous, of course.) It still wound me up enough to where I was wondering whether Neeson was hallucinating about everything. That, of course, would’ve been awful, but it was a cool thing to tease.

Of course, it’s Liam Neeson, so he’s great at eliciting empathy.

Of course, when you get such a masterful set up, the problem comes in delivering an equally impressive villain. And there aren’t a lot of choices. Basically, your choices are evil mastermind or ex-military.

Well, judging by the reaction, a lot of people really didn’t like how it worked out. And I can see that: It was a clumsily inserted bit of inanity that couldn’t decide whether to go Hans Gruber or Magneto.

Honestly, it didn’t bother me much. I had already accepted the lax airplane standards. Plus, I lived through the ‘80s. And the movie is solid up to that point—and after that point, too. Really! The ending is solid.

Still I only buy two or three tickets tops for a flick, and if they pissed off the people who are most likely to go to see this film, maybe they’ll think it through next time.

Neeson is, as always, up to the task. Julianne Moore does a good job as the passenger who might just be in on the whole thing!!

Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra (of the less effective Neeson thriller Unknown and the excellent horror flick Orphan) does a really fine job with the action. But I don’t think we’re getting a “Non-Stop” franchise.

I forgot to review this after seeing it back in February.

It’s probably for the best.

The acting is good: Jessica Lange plays a doting mother to weird, sickly son played by Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy!), when orphan Elizabeth Olsen comes to live with them. You probably don’t know Elizabeth Olsen, but she’s the younger sister of Mary-Kate and Elizabeth—and she can act!

Elizabeth (as Therese) gets railroaded into marrying her sickly cousin, and the family moves to Paris to open a shop. The trouble starts when she runs into her decidedly attractive husband’s friend (Llewin Davis himself, Oscar Isaacs) and they—shall we say?—"hit it off".

Because this is based on a 19th century French novel by Emile Zola, Therese and Laurent (Isaacs) decide their life would be perfect if they murdered Malfoy.

19th century + French = It doesn’t work out well for anyone. Including the audience.

I don’t really fault the direction per se. Charlie Stratton whom I know best from the ‘80s Gremlins knock-off Munchies (not to be confused the Critters or Ghoulies) seems comfortable moving the camera and setting scenes and moving things along. Editing is fine. Music is fine.

But why?

Hey, I have that reaction. I had that same reaction to the last Therese movie we saw. “Is this a story that must be told?”

Or, maybe more accurately: “You’re going to pour millions of dollars and months into your life into making something, and you make this?”

So, I guess it’s a matter of taste. But, in fairness, that’s true of most award-bait movies and I don’t know why they get the end of year “boffo!” treatment from critics and the Academy while this is in the dungheap of winter. (Well, I know part of the reason: pedigrees matter a whole lot.)

As odd as it sounds, it’s fine for what it is. It’s just not something we care for.

As noted in the previous review for Bethlehem, I got the titles of these two movies mixed up. I think I had them juxtaposed in my mind because Bethlehem is a superior film in most respects to Omar, which not only shows the Palestinians completely manipulated by Israeli agents, it also shows them to be kind of awful all on their own, even in matters not relating to terrorism.

Omar is the hero of our film, and he and his crew are “usual suspects” frequently rounded up by Shin Bet (presumably it’s Shin Bet, I don’t recall seeing any identification, though), at which point they’re interrogated until they give up their friends. Although considerable pressure is brought to bear on them, apparently the smart ones know not to say anything, since they won’t be held if there’s no evidence.

But then the fun begins: Omar is pressured into becoming a snitch, which he agrees to while never actually intending to follow through. Regardless, the rumors spread that he has turned, making his life increasingly difficult.

The centerpiece of this story is Omar’s romance with his girl, and the money he’s saved to make them a good life. But as the smear campaign against him ramps up, he’s less and less able to convince her that he’s not a traitor.

It doesn’t end well for Omar, or for the audience for that matter, since the ending (certainly perceived as the only honorable “out” for him among anti-semites) is ridiculous enough to almost qualify as a power fantasy.

Also, while you might be inclined to sympathize with Omar, who’s a straight shooter (heh) in his own tribe, his troubles start when he and his pals murder a random Israeli patrolman.

There is absolutely no guilt for this act. The movie barely recalls this seminal act. It’s almost as if the filmmakers believe that, “Yes, Palestinians are going to kill Jews, and that’s the order of things. It’s the Jews retaliating that is so horrible.”

Once again, we find ourselves at the brink of a good movie which completely implodes unless you’re willing to accept that random acts of violence are a legitimate way of dealing with grievances. But this isn’t even one of the better one of those.

Needless to say, I’m glad La Grand Belleza won over this. Actually, all four of the foreign language movies (The Hunt, The Missing Picture, Broken Circle Breakdown) were way out of this film’s league.

This was the last of the five foreign-language films nominated for the Oscar, and the last entry we actually saw before the Oscars (not counting the animated shorts). The category was tight this year, way moreso than the English language pictures, with The Hunt, The Great Beauty, Broken Circle Breakdown and The Missing Picture, all films with greatness in them.

Then there’s the Palestinian entry, Omar.

The Boy emerged from the theater saying, “Boy, Palestinians are dicks!” Perhaps not surprisingly, that is the common thread running through Palestinian movies (and Israeli movies sympathetic to Palestinians). I don’t think it’s deliberate: I just think when your defining philosophy sanctifies the wanton destruction of innocents, well, you are a dick and there’s no hiding that.

Omar is thematically similar to Bethlehem, which I would swear we’d seen first though the movie listings seem to suggest the former stopped playing the day before the latter started, and which I also realize now I forgot to review. (I get behind, as you know.)

And now, having written this review, I realize that I have the two reversed. This is a review of Bethlehem.

Anyway, the story is that of a young Palestinian (not named “Omar”) whose older brother is a bigwig in a Palestinian, uh, “activist” group who was recruited at a young age by an Israeli agent (Shin Bet?) in the hopes that he would ultimately lead to his older brother, and maybe even serve as a mole inside the more “active” groups when he grew up.

I’m no Jim Bond, but it seemed…dubious to me that the Israelis were going to capture or kill this kid’s brother and then have him be gung ho about continuing to work for them.

Super-spy logic often escapes me.

Anyway, like the other Palestinian movies we’ve seen, it’s really very good except we lack whatever it is that makes it possible for one to say “Oh, yes, I can see why you’d blow yourself and other random people up for that.” The anti-Israeli squad is out in force, as usual, talking about how this movie shows the crafty Jew manipulation of the Palestinian people which, as far as it goes, is true enough.

The Israelis totally make the Palestinians their bitches. Heh. They know so much about what’s going on, they have so many moles, and such good surveillance, the terrorists are in a constant state of paranoia. If they’re not actually ratting each other out, they’re killing each other because they think they’re ratting each other out.

It’s plausible that this is supposed to engender sympathy for them, but it doesn’t. At least not in me. To suggest that there’s something wrong with this is to suggest that Israel shouldn’t defend itself. (The point, of course.) “Mind games with terrorists” doesn’t even rank next to “blowing up cafés”.

Terrorist logic also often escapes me.

Anyway, it’s a plausible and interesting film, up to the end where, much like Omar, it strains credulity. Although Bethlehem is much better in that regard, because it at least sets up the Shin Bet agent to have the necessary characteristics to do the really stupid thing the plot requires.

Like I said, it’s good, but I can’t really recommend it. I’ll review Omar next, though it’s way ickier and the Palestinians are even worse—and it’s actually Palestinian (Bethlehem is Israeli).

We ended up seeing this after dropping The Flower off at a party and so missed a couple of the animated shorts, including the one that ultimately ended up winning the Oscar and the Disney Mickey Mouse short.

We came in at the end of the winning one, “Mr. Hublot” which had a “Despicable Me meets Cyberpunk” feel that was cool, and we saw the Mickey Mouse one at the front of Frozen, and it’s cute. It’s a fun homage to the old Steamboat Willie era with Peg Leg Pete and, uh, the cow lady and what-not.

After “Mr. Hublot” was “Feral”. This was visually interesting as it told the story of a “wolf boy” who’s found by a man and introduced to society. No dialog. Distinctive, non-traditional animation style, which was nice and evocative. Ultimately, it got a little too abstract for me to follow, and I didn’t “get” the message (or more accurately, emotion) it was trying to convey.

“Possession”, the Japanese entry (not nominated in the final five) was also very distinctive, using a CGI technique that I believe is called “cel shading” (after the traditional technique) which I’d only ever seen in computer games before. Anyway, it gives CGI a nice, flat-but-layered look. The story itself concerns a fix-it man who wanders into a haunted house in a storm. The (very Asian) twist being that the house is haunted by things—i.e., stuff that people used for years and years, but discarded.

His haunted night consists of trying to repair or assuage the possessions. A Japanese answer to Toy Story, if you will. This was probably my favorite.

The Boy, on the other hand, greatly favored a silly French short (also not in the final five) called “A la Francaise”, which was about chickens in the court of the Sun King. I mean, it was chickens playing the nobility in the court, dressed in silly rococo gowns and doing silly French royal things. One of them is writing about all the stuff that goes on, until a wind carries her pages away and the court begins to read them. Mayhem ensues.

The Boy sez, “It’s chickens! Acting like people!” I dunno, sometimes his tastes run to the simple. (In the otherwise dull Gloria, there’s a scene with a busker who has a skeleton puppet, which he just adored.) Anyway, funny chickens. Tough to go wrong.

“Room on the Broom” is the longest entry, at 26 minutes, and a little bit too long at that, but one that will probably get a lot of play, having an all-star cast and directed squarely at young kids. Simon Pegg narrates the story of a witch (Gillian Anderson, who mostly has non-verbal expressions) whose familiar cat (Rob Brydon) finds himself with increasing company (a dog, a bird and a frog), all of whom cause increasing difficulty on the overburdened broom, until the whole thing comes to a head with a run-in involving a dragon (Timothy Spall).

Cute, as I said. Mostly entertaining, though I felt it dragged a bit around the 15-minute mark.

There was a Pixar short, “The Blue Umbrella” which was at the front of the snubbed Monsters U, and it’s—well, it’s meh. It’s a love story about umbrellas. As The Boy said, it’s basically Pixar saying “We can anthropomorphize” anything. It’s sort of reminiscent of last years splendid “Paperman” but while artistically impressive, feeling a little like we’d seen it, and seen it better.

The last short was a very funny Irish entry (also not in the final five) called “The Missing Scarf”, which is a simple child’s tale, familiar seeming, but which somehow ends up in the complete destruction of everything. It’s so very Irish. The animation is a primitive but nice 2D-ish thing that looks sort of like origami. George Takei narrates.

The DVD shipped around to theaters has the shorts being introduced by giraffe and an ostrich, doing a kind of “I worked with [this or that animated character]” bit that’s actually pretty funny. For some reason, though, I don’t think they sell this so there’s not much chance of seeing all these films together.

Which is a shame, because it’s kind of a fun way to pass an hour-and-a-half. If you don’t like one thing, you only have to wait 10 minutes for the next. And there’s a good variety. But there it is. Market realities and what-not.

So, the Oscars again, and I care less than ever. I think, in part, it’s because it’s all so rigged. I mean, probably not the winners, but there are never any surprises. There’s no room in the nominations for an unexpected outsider; they know which films are going to be nominated—the ones that get released in November and December.

So, The Boy and I saw nearly 160 films last year. Counting a couple of double-screenings, that’s 160 trips to the cinema, close to every other day!

Despite Jillette’s bombastic voice, and their occasionally strident atheism, it’s hard for me not to like Penn & Teller. I think they are basically good classical liberals with a live-and-let-live philosophy, who are genuinely concerned about the truth.

I mention this because, if you have any kind of P&T baggage, you shouldn’t let it deter you from seeing their new movie, Tim’s Vermeer (directed by Teller and narrated by Penn).

This is a joyous celebration of life, art, and genius. It’s inspirational, compelling, and, at 80 minutes long, manages to avoid PDS (padded documentary syndrome).

It’s a simple story: Fabulously wealthy Tim Jenison has spent his life inventing wild and wacky things, when he’s not inventing industry-defining A/V software that makes him fabulously wealthy.

Well, Tim’s got it in his had that the Dutch master Vermeer was a technologist, too. And, in fact, that he used a special gizmo to get the shadings of light he got in his paintings—shadings which no other painter of the day achieved.

Having established his premise and devised a hypothetical tool, Tim (who has never painted in his life) uses it as a proof-of-concept, painting a simple image of a vase. He shows his tool to other artists like Martin Mull (!) and David Hockney, and all agree that he’s on to something.

So Tim (not a painter, remember) gets the idea to paint Vermeer’s The Music Room to really demonstrate the worthiness of his idea.

The catch is, he wants to (has to, you could argue) do the whole thing using only the technology available to Vermeer, and recreate all the elements of the music room to boot.

This takes years.

Then, when he’s done that, he’s actually got to do the painting.

I have a bias here, of course: Obsession is favorite topic of mine. (I like being obsessed, too.) I sent my mom to see it (she tackles all kinds of projects) and she also found it inspirational.

It’s just so much fun.

Also, while I generally don’t pine for wealth, I do occasionally become aware of a story that makes me think, “Yeah, that’s a good amount of money to have.” This is one of those stories, since Tim and Penn and Co. all jet off to England and Holland, or wherever they need to whenever. Tim buys all kinds of hardware and generally doesn’t let anything (least of all money) get in his way.

(By the way, my favorite “good amount of money” story is George Harrison listening to Erik Idle talk about the uncompleted Life of Brian, and Harrison funding it because it sounded like a good movie and he wanted to see it. Harrison of course went on to fund Handmade Films, which was credited with revitalizing British cinema.)

One of the best documentaries in years.

A French Romantic Comedy! I had to work to convince The Boy and The Flower that French were actually famous for romcoms, not just angsty existential films chock full of ennui. Though not so much romcoms as sex farces, which are sort of like romcoms, except that everyone has sex with everyone else, but it never seems to matter in the end.

The Old Man used to say “sophisticated” was a word meaning “sexually deviant”, which I always think about when I hear someone call the French sophisticated.

So, imagine my delight when A Girl on a Bicycle—while very French and containing a number of amusing sex scenes—turns out to be a sweet, funny, romantic film that I didn’t regret taking The Flower to. (It’s also mostly in English!)

Absolutely rife with European stereotypes. Heh.

Paolo, an Italian bus driver living in Paris, loves Greta, a German stewardess, and so proposes to marry her. (Paolo is an awesome tour bus driver: He describes Paris in terms of all of its monuments—which are all just pale imitations of the ones in Italy, natch.) He’s as happy as a clam when she accepts—despite her stern and ordered nature, she seems to understand and appreciate his Italian-ness—until he’s stopped at traffic light and the titular girl on a bicycle rolls up beside him.

And what a girl!

He becomes obsessed, especially when it happens again and again. His English friend Derek—constantly pissed off that despite years of studying French, no one in Paris will deign to talk to him, except in English—gives him a sensible plan: Meet the girl on the bicycle. That’ll cure him, because no woman could possibly live up to this idealization he has of her.

Of course, things don’t go as expected, and not just for the characters in the movie, but for me. I know how these French farces usually play out and, well, this didn’t. So refreshing.

Instead we get a comedy where a sudden, unexpected humanity from the main character, puts him in an increasingly precarious position.

And it’s funny!

Beautiful cast, though not anybody I knew (except Paddy Considine, who played the English bloke). I had a slight problem in that I didn’t think the French girl was more beautiful than the German girl, especially, but that’s not really the point.

The point, as Derek says, is: There’s always gonna be a girl on a bicycle. How are you going to handle it?

This film has a whopping 8% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, and 78% from viewers. Color me unsurprised.

The Barb had a birthday and the pickings were slim at the bargain theater—Walking With Dinosaurs wasn’t lighting her candles, and I sure wasn’t gonna push it—so we went and paid full price for Frozen, Disney’s latest animated musical fairy-tale extravaganza.

Had you told me that Disney would, in 2014, make a movie of all white people, that wasn’t just a movie with songs but outright musical-with-a-vengeance, and that it would have not one but two princesses, I would have had a hard time believing it.

But for whatever reason (John Lasseter?), Disney seems to have decided they’d rather make a good, fun movie, damn political correctness, and thus Frozen, which is even inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen story (though apart from some names and the general premise of an ice-sorceress, one might be hard-pressed to detect the inspiration).

As a result, they do a damn good job.

It’s got the Disney look (as it should) and it feels familiar but without feeling tired or reticent. It doesn’t try to be hip, as it seemed like Tangled was trying to. The story is one of two sisters who are tight, with the younger one enamored of the older one’s ice powers (and why wouldn’t she be) until an accident nearly kills her.

The King and Queen decide the best approach is to make the little sister forget, and separate the two, and encourage the older sister to fight her powers.

Of course, as everyone but the King and Queen knows, fighting something is the absolute worst way to try to control it, and things go to Hell—the icy 9th circle, if you’re into Dante, the 5th if you’re into D&D—rather quickly (in movie time).

Well, look, they all live happily ever after. Can you imagine otherwise? The point isn’t the destination, but the journey. And it’s a good journey.

The music is unapologetic, as I said, if a little too modern for my taste. I can’t remember any of it, except I guess the big ice number. Similarly with the dialog—it’s a little too contemporary to my ear.

The characters are likable. The anthropomorphic/marketable cute animal is a charming moose. With two unmarried princesses, the movie has a chance to tease us with, well, more than one potential romantic outcome. The ending was refreshing.

The animation is wonderful, happily. The snow provides all sorts of interesting and vibrant scenery, and the attention to detail is there. There’s one sequence of ice growing that looks fakey—but real ice can kinda look fakey, too, you know, when it’s all perfect crystalline and light-reflection. (Hey, I’m an L.A. kid. I don’t see much snow and ice.)

Elsa, the snow queen, has the sexiest sequence in a Disney movie (her “coming out” song) since Jasmine came on to Jaffar in Aladdin. Nothing lewd, just sort of a side-effect of not completely de-sexing her.

It’s also interesting that the cast is not exactly jam-packed with A-List movie stars. Kristen Bell is Anna, the little sister. Alan Tudyk, doing a voice, is an officious duke, who fills in as the evil businessman (gotta have one). And Ciaran Hinds plays the leader of the trolls. But other than that, the names I recognized—Maurice LeMarche, Nick Jamison, Fred Tatasciore—are voice actors.

So, maybe there’s a sea change going on. We can hope.

We all loved it. Great ending, as I mentioned. Pure Disney princess flick. Who’d’ve thunk?

I’ve lamented—frequently—on the trials and tribulations of being a frequent moviegoer at this time of the year. The Oscar contenders linger in the theaters like the smell of microwaved skunk, and the new crap being shoveled out are typically foreordained failures to meet even the meager demands of genre films.

I mention this as an explanation as to why, when a 3:40 minute documentary is the only thing at the local movie house you haven’t seen, it actually doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.

And, in fact, except for the very beginning of the film, the movie flies by.

The Last of the Unjust is Claude Lanzmann’s follow-up to his nine hour Holocaust documentary, Shoah, and I would say, with all humility, that it’s worthy of the 100% ratings (both critical and audience) on Rotten Tomatoes.

These are Lanzmann’s interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the Last of the Elder Jews (a title apparently conferred by the Nazis), who was the last person to “run” the Threisenstadt ghetto at the end of The War.

Well, it’s 210 minutes—what can I say? There’s so much here. I had a little trouble following at first, because Lanzmann is an expert in the material, obviously, and at first he was throwing around a lot of detail about streets and railways and stuff like that.

But by the end, that stuff all comes back, over and over again, and becomes significant, so, yeah, even though it made me nervous at first—’cause nothing’s worse than being five minutes into a 3-hour movie you know you’re going to hate—the initial slowness sets everything up well.

The story? Gotta be one of the most challenging in human history.

Murmelstein was a “collaborator”, a Jew who worked with the Nazis, in this case to make Threisenstadt useful for propaganda purposes. Dreadful! An abomination! He deserves to be hanged, according to one prominent Israeli historian (who had agitated for mercy for Eichmann).

And yet.

And yet.

Nothing about this is simple. Murmelstein had many chances to flee, yet took none. He ascribes this to a “thirst for adventure”. When asked if he likes power, he retorts “Who doesn’t?” When asked if he abused his power, he says, yes, but always in service of the people of the ghetto.

I said of Hannah Arendt that her thesis that the Jews could’ve done more to fight the Nazis may be accurate, but it’s also Grand Champion Hall of Fame Monday Morning Quarterbacking. (More on Arendt later.)

I felt that here.

Would it have been nobler for him to leave? It doesn’t seem to be in dispute that he helped a lot of Jews escape. In fact, what’s clear is that the reason he’s vilified is that he lived and that’s therefore suspicious, but it’s just as clear that he lived primarily because the war ended before the Nazis could muster up the excuse to kill him. (While he was there for a couple of years, he was only in charge for a few months.)

And Murmelstein seems to have viewed his mission to say alive, and keep others alive as well, even if that didn’t make him popular. At one point, the Nazis said, “Hey, get this typhus epidemic under control or…”

The “or” was always a given. The Jews knew the Nazis would kill them but at the same time (at least according to Murmelstein) the Jews pointedly did not know about the camps. There was “out east”, which was known to be worse, but not known how much worse. Murmelstein relates two stories of trainloads coming in from other places where the passengers freaked out about the showers.

And yet, it’s human nature to deny the awful, especially in the face of powerlessness. So when he says they didn’t know, I believe that. When he says he played Scheherazade, spinning stories to keep the ghetto alive, I believe that, too.

And when he says he withheld food from people who refused to get typhus vaccines, that’s not in doubt, and it’s entirely inevitable that this would produce resentment in those who were there. And when he says he ended the freedom-for-favor style of management of the privileged Jews, who traded exit visas for service, sex, or whatever, well, then you can see why he’d really be hated.

It’s not much discussed but the Jews did not behave admirably in the camps (and Threisenstadt was a camp, even if they called it a ghetto). This is expected: Treat people like animals and they’ll become animals.

I’m just scratching the surface here, of course, but it’s just an amazing thing, this record.

It was instructive to hear Murmelstein speak of Eichmann, whom he personally knew and personally witnessed during the Krystallnacht. He wasn’t impressed with the tribunal that couldn’t determine that Eichmann was there at all, given that there were hundreds of witnesses—and pictures!

He was also particularly disdainful of Hannah Arendt’s description of Eichmann with the phrase “the banality of evil”. “He was a monster,” says Murmselstein, and he’s got the anecdotes to back it up.

It does support my observation of the Arendt movie when I said “ it never seems to occur to Arendt that Eichmann is just lying.” There’s no doubt in Murmelstein—the hated collaborator—that Eichmann was no mere paper pusher.

Anyway, I could go on and on, and I’d understand being deterred by the length, but not only did I have no trouble sitting through it, The Boy found it riveting.

Now I’m looking to find the Shoah movie online—that one I’m going to watch over a period of a few days.

Gloria is a movie about a woman living life out loud! Unapologetically! Like a Bossa Nova! Or so the critical reviews would have you believe.

I guess.

Also: Pointlessly, desultorily, and with no small amount of fear.

Also, senior-citizen genitalia got more screen time than I usually like in a film.

Look, the Tomatoes on this are 99% (!) for critics and 68% for audiences. And the audiences are skewed toward the sorts of people who would go see a plotless slice-of-life movie about a 50-something woman.

The story, such as it is, concerns Gloria (the lovely Paulina Garcia), who has a day job, and spends her nights dancing in a club, picking up guys who catch her eye. (Well, we only see one of these guys but the implication is that she’s pretty comfortable doing this.) So, she lives like a 20-something, only she has two grown children and an ex-.

Anyway, she picks up a guy who seems great or at least wealthy and accessible and they have a whirlwind romance complicated by the fact that he’s a total wuss that is “separated” from his wife and fully-grown daughters, who nonetheless call him all the time.

It turns out about as well as you’d expect.

In the process, though, we get to meet Gloria’s somewhat alienated children and her lugubrious ex-husband who laments his absence from the children’s lives. We can infer from that that he initiated the split from Gloria, but it’s never discussed at all. His kids, especially his daughter, are pissed at him, is all we know, really.

It kind of raises the question of what’s going to happen with all the broken families and older parents acting like their kids, but only peripherally. Nothing here struggles to make any sort of statement at all. About anything.

We didn’t dig it much. Not a lot of admirable character shown.

Sort of amusingly, the version of Gloria used in the movie was the Spanish love song lyrics, but the American version would probably fit better, if make an acerbic postscript.

I don’t know. After this, we saw Last of the Unjust, the 3 hour, 40 minute talkumentary about Benjamin Murmelstein and we squirmed a lot less in our seats than we did during this.

If Lone Survivor had me in tears from the get-go, The Broken Circle Breakdown wasn’t far off, though for entirely different reasons. This is a remarkable—dare I say unique?—film just on the surface characteristics.

First of all, it’s Flemish. So, it’s Belgian, but not French Belgian. I’ve seen about two other Flemish movies in the past ten years, the one leaping to mind being the effective thriller Memory of a Killer. Flemish is a lot like English. Every now and again, the actors would speak whole sentences that were perfectly understandable English. (Kind of like Dutch, but more so, to my ear.)

Second of all, the Flems (heh) involved are bluegrass musicians. They do American bluegrass/folk/country with perfect Southern accents. I’m not talking Southern Belgium, either.

Seriously, how many Flemish bluegrass movies are there? Did that ever even occur to you? What’s wrong with you? Have you no imagination?

Third, the music is really good. Besides sounding authentic, it’s just really, really good. Standards, of course, but performed with complete sincerity and not inconsiderable skill. Like, the people involved really loved the music they were making. (Contrast with Inside Llewyn Davis’ "I don’t even like folk music.“

Fourth, the music is absolutely central to the story. Both the individual songs and the fact that it’s bluegrass is critical to both the details of the plot and the major themes.

Fifth, there is an amazing paean to America at one point, and later on an amazing anti-W rant. (More on this in a moment.)

The story, told in broken time (a la 500 Days of Summer) is that of a bluegrass singer/guitarist, Didier, who falls in love with a tattoo artist, Elise, and introduces her to the music. She becomes a singer in his band, and they have an amazing, passionate relationship which culminates in the birth of a child, Maybelle. The child gets sick—that’s actually where the movie starts, in a hospital.

Obviously, the sick child is the pivotal plot point, but the movie isn’t really about that, it’s really about how the two handle crisis/tragedy. And, despite their love of bluegrass, they have none of the cultural roots nor even similarities with the culture that bluegrass comes from.

They have no community, to speak of. They have no family beyond the three of them. The band they play in seem like good guys and sort of like family, but that’s about it. They have no religion. Didier is an earnest atheist. When Maybelle looks to him for comfort at various points, he can’t give it to her.

Nor is he of any help to Elise in that regard. If Didier is an atheist, Elise is a pantheist. She wears a cross, but burns incense on a statue of Buddha. (And while Christianity and Buddhism are not incompatible, this doesn’t seem to be a case of someone who’s studied both carefully and reconciled them; she just believes in everything.)

As such, when they have fights over Maybelle, they have nowhere to turn, and end up blaming each other. Elise accuses Didier of never wanting Maybelle in the first place, and Didier points out Maybelle’s smoking and drinking.

Never are we more superstitious than when we are powerless to help the ones we love.

Didier begins to drive Elise away with his militant atheism, which breaks through in a really ugly anti-George W. Bush rant, where he blames the President for holding back stem cell research.

Now, I saw this in North Hollywood, heart of the TV media district, and I could hear people vocally agreeing with this rant. But, you see, this isn’t an American movie; it’s a Belgian movie, so it didn’t have to take a particular side.

If you’re paying attention, though, it’s hard to not come to the conclusion that this is just another exercise in superstition. (I think the Academy wasn’t really paying close attention or it wouldn’t have nominated this for an Oscar.)

In fact, even if you’re not paying very close attention, it’s hard to avoid the final scenes where the filmmakers seem to be overtly telling us that Didier is wrong. Not about the politics; I mean, who really cares about that? But about his materialism and by proxy his atheism.

He’s so stubborn that he fails to recognize that Elise has embraced the American ideal he said he most admired: The ability to start fresh. He misses it very badly, perhaps to the very end.

It reminded me a little of Steve Coogan’s character in Philomena. We know for a fact where the bulk of the filmmakers’ sympathies lie in that story, and yet it’s hard to not observe that she is the noblest of the characters, and Coogan among the despicable wretches.

I think this is why the film scores lower with critics than regular audiences. The critics who picked up on it I think decided to throw out the term "melodrama” to mean “I didn’t like it but I don’t know or don’t want to explain why”.

Anyway, great acting from the two principals, Johan Heldenbergh (who was one of the authors of the original play) and Veerle Baetens. Adapted from the play by the director Felix Van Groeningen.

The Boy liked it, but he found it music-heavy (he’s not into music, somehow), and, as I pointed out, he hasn’t been outside a hospital tearing his hair out because he’s worried his kid is going to die. (Pointed cough.)

Fun aside: On the way out I was interviewed by a Flemish reporter who wanted to know what Americans thought about this film and why we went to see it. I opened with “Well, we’ve seen everything else…” but really Flemish Bluegrass. That’s a hook right there.

This movie is up against La Grande Bellezza, The Missing Picture and The Hunt, which were all great, and Omar, which we haven’t seen.

When she asked, I told her I thought the Italian picture would win, but they’re all worthy.

I could make a comment on how, if you’re Ashgar Farhadi, you gotta be feeling the heat after your last picture (A Separation) won the foreign language Oscar and you got a rare non-English nom for writing.

But if you’re Ashgar Farhadi, you’ve made a half-dozen or more films, all pretty much hitting it out of the park.

And so we come to The Past, another Dickensian tale of people who are just a little bit crummy.

I can’t actually remember now if A Separation was populated by crummy people. There were some, of course. I think I called them “flawed”, which would be a good summation of the characters in The Past.

But on reflection, I’m thinking they’re just a little bit crummy. For example, we have Berenice Bejo—looking fabulous, I should say—who has called in her husband from Iran so that they can get a divorce. They’ve been separated for years, but she wants to re-marry, and he opts to come in person to sign the papers in court.

He’s been gone for a while, and she’s been living with a new man and her son for a few months, since the man’s wife “got sick”. Meanwhile, her older child, a teenage daughter, is increasingly estranged from her and clearly missing the presence of the soon-to-be-ex, while hating the new boyfriend.

So, Bejo’s character is pretty self-involved and not really getting why the teen is upset. The teen is upset and not telling anyone why. (In American movie, it’d be because the new boyfriend had made a pass at her; nothing so pedestrian here.) The two men are sullen, with the soon-to-be-ex having deserted the family years ago, and the new boyfriend with a wife still in the hospital.

Yeah, about the wife in the hospital: She’s the MacGuffin, after a fact. Her story comes out—not in flashbacks, but in reminiscences by the other characters, that leave room for doubt as to what the whole truth is.

Everyone has sinned. Nobody seems to have sinned quite a badly as they think.

Ultimately, we’re not really responsible for what others do, I guess, but it can sure feel that way.

Much like A Separation, this movie starts out slow, pedestrian even, and then involves you more and more in the details, defying you to come to conclusions about the characters. Judge not, lest ye be judged, it seems to say.

Well, I’m a regular Judgy McJudgerton and I say, they’re all kind of crummy. Even the five-year-old.

Good movie, though. The Boy was, I think, less taken with it than I was, but liked it nonetheless.

It would be a fair assessment to say that my eyes began to tear up at the opening credits of Lone Survivor, and were seldom dry for the next two hours. I’m not unique; the Boy said as much on the way out, along with saying he’d love to see it again.

Yeah. It’s that good. In our world it easily shot to the top of “best films of the 2013”, though it may not be my top—it might be and it will certainly be top five.

I can’t quite explain the emotionalism. It can’t be that it’s “based on a true story” because it is openly ficitonalized—and, in fact, the historical import of the film is nearly irrelevant. Unlike, say, Blackhawk Down, which fit into a larger picture of the military under Clinton and the role of the US in Africa, this movie could be about any four SEALs, sent into any village, and presented with a difficult situation.

Dramatically, that’s a great thing. The real people, the inspirations, are shown in pictures at the end of the movie, which, dulce et decorum est.

So, what is it? It’s partly The Charge of the Light Brigade effect: The opening montage of actual training shows what hardships special forces endure to become special forces. (And let us pause for a moment to marvel at the volunteer army.) And this brutal training—the sort of things the effete cluck at as “unnecessary"—is vitally necessary not just for physical endurance, training and toughening, but to build a brotherhood.

And so, in a way, the opening montage is justified by the next two hours. The hazing, of sorts, of new recruits, the eagerness of same recruits to actually go on a mission, and when things go sideways, the willingness to sacrifice for your brother, or to survive for him when it might be easier to just lay down and die.

And that, I think, is what it is, why this evokes such strong emotions. The note hit over-and-over again is that of male camaraderie, played unironically, straight and true, to the end.

We don’t get a lot of that these days. Male relationships are usually between slackers. They’re goofs. You kinda know they’re not going to be there for each other, at least not until things get really bad.

What a concept to have a band of men who, however hard they rag on each other, know with as much certainty as anyone can know anything that they can depend on each other.

On top of that, it’s a competent action film, helmed by personal favorite, Peter Berg. Not just competent, but the best in recent memory: The story doesn’t adhere to action movie conventions, which means, for example, that when the heroes get shot, or—and this is unseen in modern action films—fall more than a few feet, it hurts.

And it doesn’t just hurt in a Wile E. Coyote sense, where one scene has them taking damage, and then they’re fine in the next. When one of these guys takes a hit, they feel it, you feel it, and you feel the scar, the torn cartilage, the blow to the head that says you’ll never be quite right again.

It also doesn’t have a glib "10 Little Indians” approach where the characters are picked off one-by-one. Even though the title, and opening scene, tell you all you need to know about who’s going to survive, the protagonists hang on for dear life, and you are rooting for the story to come out differently than you know it must.

Mark Wahlberg is good as Marcus Luttrell, the eponymous lone survivor who went on to write the book. Taylor Kitsch (John Carter) and Emile Hirsch (Killer Joe) are also good as Michael Murphy and Danny Deitz respectively. (Michael Murphy was the subject of a 2013 documentary which unfortunately got no theater play in our neighborhood.)

Ben Foster…well…he just becomes Matt “Axe” Axelson. It’s uncanny, from the pictures shown. I saw his mother talking about the performance after the fact, and she said it was like having him back for a moment. (And if that doesn’t rip your heart out, we can’t be friends.)

The supporting players are also—well, the best way to describe it is “genuine”. The whole thing feels very genuine.

Although I’ve always suspected Berg was not entirely at home with modern Hollywood’s leftist values, I can’t really back that up. I’ve heard that he was concerned about The Kingdom being too jingoistic, for example.

This movie (much like The Kingdom) is about as apolitical as it can be, given the circumstances. I have, of course, heard some really dumb movie critic observations. One person, who I can only assume didn’t stay to the end, said the movie’s message was “brown people bad”. (And Afghan village is critical to Luttrell’s survival, and they protect him at grave personal risk.)

It’s only pro-America in the sense that, yes, we have a military, and it’s staffed with good people who make great personal sacrifices for the rest of us, and we’re not always worthy of that.

Well, if you can’t muster at least that much pro-American sentiment, you’re basically indifferent to America’s survival at all (at best).

The closest it gets to a political point is that the key plot point, that starts the terrible events in action, is whether or not the SEALs should kill three villagers who have stumbled over them. One is clearly Taliban, and the other two can be expected to inform out of sheer survival necessity.

In a brief argument, they debate whether they should kill them, whether they can kill them (legally), the repercussions of either way—they basically know they’re dead if they let them go. The fact that the Press will attack them comes up. The Rules of Engagement are discussed.

It’s a great scene. Again, very Charge of the Light Brigade.

It’s already been snubbed, getting just a couple of sound Oscar noms. War films can’t get awards unless they’re anti-war. (And this isn’t pro-war, for crying out loud. It just posits that the character of the soldiers is actually a bit nobler and higher-minded than Hollywood is comfortable with.) Being an exemplary action film doesn’t get you anything come award time either.

But to those who say “Well, it’s not a great movie. It just gets its gravitas from the real story, and from the action,” I say “OK, let’s see a dozen more like that from the past 40 years.”

And it’s a shame, because the War on Terror has produced more than its share of gripping stories that Hollywood eschewed for making anti-war, anti-America propaganda.

If The Arts owe our soldiers anything, it’s to tell their stories. I’m glad this one got told. It’s in the top 30 for the 2013’s releases, but that may not be enough to encourage similar films, since it probably won’t do big business overseas.

But if it were up to me, I’d be turning out pictures like this 3-4 times a year. You’d never run out of stories.

Holy crap. No, let me amend that: HOLY FREAKIN’ CRAP! I knew Family Court was screwed up, but I had no idea the extent of the horrors.

Fortunately, there’s this documentary, Divorce Corp, narrated by Dr. Drew Pinsky and featuring victims (and culprits) of the system.

Watch, and be horrified. By virtue of wanting a divorce, the government reaches into people’s lives (and bank accounts) to extract the most money possible. If they don’t set out to destroy people’s lives—i.e., if that’s a side-effect and not the intended purpose—they certainly show no remorse.

The fascinating thing is how the Family Court evolved: It’s essentially extra-legal. There are no Constitutional protections. No trial by jury. No freedom of speech. No ethics. Going into one of these courts, you no longer have any right to your property, nor to your future earnings, nor even to your children.

Upon entering Family Court, the judge can force you to pay large amounts of money to an unqualified friend of the judge to determine whether or not you’re a fit parent. And what they say goes.

It’s a horror.

This is why I tend to recoil around social conservatives—not people who live socially conservative lives, but people who think the government should be involved in promoting social conservatism.

It’s not that it’s that the country doesn’t have a decided interest in socially conservative values: the family unit, monogamy, even heterosexuality and birth control all have significant impact on society, and, well, you can count the number of successful societies that have been sustained on modern permissive values on the fingers of no hands.

And yet, the one thing you can count on is this: If the government has power, it will abuse it, it will pervert it, it will try to extend it. Family Court is a perfect example of this: Established to enforce traditional views of marriage—that a husband must support his wife and children even if he splits from them—it now is a complete and utter perversion, motivated to destroy families and even encourage divorce.

The movie starts with an odd thing. It says “50% of all marriages end in divorce. This is why.” First of all, the 50% number isn’t true. Second of all, as awful as family court is, I don’t think it can be blamed for divorce. If anything, the awfulness of it should act as a deterrent—though perhaps only after the first divorce.

The Boy and I were amazed. We were also sort of annoyed by the constant references to Scandinavia’s superior system but give the Scandis their due: You sign some papers, and you’re done. Very few cases are litigated, because there’s no incentive.

The first must-see documentary of the year.

As it turns out, Charles Dickens was just another middle-aged celebrity cliché who jumped a 17-year-old at the first opportunity and whose amazing story can now finally be told! Or so is framed this Ralph Fiennes directed/starring vehicle The Invisible Woman.

Meh.

I suppose it’s a fitting punishment, to have penned some of the great works of the English Language, only to be reduced to a late-life dalliance some 150 years later. I guess after nearly 70s years of Hollywood (and Borehamwood) of squeezing your literary output for material—and you have to go back to 1946 to find a year that didn’t feature a video version of some Dickens story—it was only inevitable that they would start squeezing your personal life as well.

Or perhaps I’m being too cynical.

Probably. Actors and showbiz types being fascinated by actors and showbiz types from the 19th century is only natural.

Thing is? It’s not fascinating. It’s utterly banal. Where Fiennes debut picture, Coriolanus, was a brave and challenging take on a lesser known Shakespeare play, this is, well, sort of Lifetime movie material. Well, Lifetime plus amazing actors (but more on that in a bit).

In a nutshell: 40-something Dickens (Fiennes) catches the eye of adoring teen fan Nelly (Felicity Jones, Like Crazy). It seems like she’s quite smitten, but of course, he’s married, ancient and she’s a virginal Victorian lass, despite being an actress.

Dickens is then seen oh-so-casually arranging his schedule to run into her, say, by walking to London from his house in the country. Everyone is pretty much aware of the situation, even before Dickens and Nelly are, including Mrs. Dickens (Joanna Scanlon, The Girl with the Pearl Earring) and Nelly’s mom (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Nelly’s mother demurs at first, fearing for her daughter’s reputation but, in perhaps the only really interesting twist in the movie—that you should probably stop reading about if you don’t want to be spoiled, even though it’s only a 20 second bit in a two-hour movie—in this only really novel angle, her mother begins to encourage the possible affair on the basis of Nelly being a really, truly horrible actress with no real prospects in show business, apart from what Dickens might be able to help her with.

Heh.

As for the rest of it, the part that isn’t “older dude hooks up with then falls in love with much younger woman”, deals with the stigma of being a mistress in the 19th century, and the dialogue might just as well have come out of the 1960s, or the 1930s or the 1880s or any of the other time periods when non-traditional relationships struggled against the tyranny of monogamy.

It’s woefully pedestrian.

Still, great things come from trite stories. Shakespeare did wonders with the trite. Valdemort could be considered trite and Fiennes did wonders with the dark wizard.

This, though? Nuffin’. There’s an implication that Nelly was Dickens muse for works like Great Expectations from this period, but the movie doesn’t really sell it. It’s all sort of “No, I shouldn’t. No. No. No. Well, okay. Crud. I really shouldn’t have.”

It just teases a bunch of stuff without ever coming into focus. Nelly should be the centerpiece of the film and—I mean, if you want a good drama—she should be completely infusing his work and his thoughts. And, in fairness, Dickens’ actions here fit the bill, but we never actually see much actual passion.

Which brings up another point: As you might expect from a film directed by an actor there are long moments where nothing happens but acting. Thing is, though, these are usually middle-shots with the actors in shadow. We’re left to glean how they must feel from their posture.

Not that it’s hard to figure out, but if you’re going to rest the camera so the actors can act for everyone, a Shatnerian approach beats a Fincherian one.

It’s all so low-key. Long, mysterious walks on the beach with gazing off into the distance.

It’s well made, of course. Competent, even proficient, in most regards. But some of the artistic choices make it difficult to recommend. The Boy was similarly unimpressed. We didn’t hate it; we didn’t even dislike it. It just didn’t take off.

I was reluctant to see this film, Saving Mr. Banks, about Disney’s process of courting P.L. Travers through the process of turning her Mary Poppins books into the classic movie musical it became, because, quite frankly, Walt Disney isn’t someone that modern Hollywood can even come close to comprehending.

An all-American fierce capitalist and vehement anti-communist, modern Hollywood was eager to suck up the slander in Hollywood’s Dark Prince which had it that Disney was an anti-semite (because lord knows the Sherman brother who walked with a limp because he’d paratrooped into Germany and helped liberate Dachau would’ve totally been cool with that) and also that he had his head frozen cryogenically.

So, here’s a guy who’s not only an artistic genius, a promoter of technology and arts, and a great businessman to boot, he’s also pro-America and probably never did anything in his life which could be classified as snark. And snark is where Hollywood lives, currently.

The buzz was strong, though, and we’d seen everything else. And it’s actually a very, very good movie. No, Tom Hanks doesn’t really come across like Disney. He comes across like Tom Hanks in a Disney ‘stache. And at the climax of the movie, he makes a speech to P.L. Travers that did not ring true. (Not the facts of the speech, but the idea that he would actually make that kind of speech, and say those things.)

And—and this sort of annoyed me—the premise of the movie is that Disney needs Travers to sign a release to make a movie, and she’s very uptight and insists on being called “Mrs. Travers” so what does Disney do? Call her “Pam” the whole movie.

Really? Antagonize the woman you’re going to need to sign this paper to make this venture work? And obliviously, too. Like he’s not aware of it. It also seems wildly improbable that Disney would’ve missed the point of the Poppins story, i.e., that it is Mr. Banks that she’s there to save.

I didn’t like that he actually said “Mr. Disney was my dad.” Even if he actually said it. Which brings up the main point:

It doesn’t really matter. This is a solid movie about a writer coming to grips with her past and reality, and Emma Thompson kicks all kinds of ass in it. Disney isn’t the main character—he’s not much of a character at all, really, and more a deus ex machina who comes and goes as is needed to forward the plot.

Ostensibly, he’s the one with the problem (getting Travers to sign), but he has no character arc, and he’s not really going to suffer regardless of how things turn out. No, this is all about the fictitious Travers’ journey.

As historical fiction, it’s nonsense, pretty obviously. Travers and Disney had completely different ideas about how Mary Poppins should go down, and Travers hated the animation Disney used, and Disney made one of the great movies, one of the great musicals, and is probably largely responsible for Travers’ books being read today.

And, I think, if they were alive today, Disney would love the film and Travers would hate it.

Nonsense aside, Thompson carries the film. It’s about her, and in the first few seconds, with a close-up she gives a master class in acting. And it never lets up. She’s incredibly difficult, especially to those around her, but to the audience she is warm. A great deal of the movie is done in flashbacks where young Travers grows up in increasingly hard times as her alcoholic father (whom she idolizes) drinks himself to death.

You know: Family film.

Nah, it’s done well enough, with Colin Farrell being sufficiently charming and convincingly drunk to make us see how she might idolize him.

And this brings up the movie’s other strengths: Besides Emma Thompson, there’s Farrell, Ruth Wilson (the saucy Princess Besty from Anna Karenina and The Lone Ranger, but who saw that?) as Travers’ mother, Paul Giamatti as the affable chauffeur who befriends Travers in L.A., Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak as the Sherman brothers, Rachel Griffiths, Bradley Whitford and on and on.

So, good acting. The exchanges between Giamatti and Thompson are especially nice. Hanks got the Disney mannerisms down; he didn’t phone it in. (At no time was I in danger of thinking he was playing a real person, but that’s not really his fault.)

Top notch score from ‘strom favorite Thomas Newman, who did such classics as Finding Nemo and The Green Mile. (I told the kids almost immediately: “That’s Thomas Newman!” They have no idea what I’m talking about or why I care.)

It moves along pretty well for a two-hour flick. The heart-wrenching flashbacks are actually more interesting than the contemporary timeline, I think in part because the contemporary timeline required a dramatic arc of characters who didn’t actually have them.

John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, The Alamo) directs.

The Boy and The Flower liked it more than I did. I also liked it but there are a number of *s, †s and ‡s in my mind about it.

This was the last film we saw in the theater, early New Year’s Eve of 2013, ending an amazing year of filmgoing. All told we saw over 150 films in the theater, which got a little pricey after our favorite theater closed and the new one doesn’t ever comp us.

But The Boy is eighteen now, and he’s already beginning to scope out the trouble juggling the many factors that come with adult life. I like to think he’ll remember this year; I know I will.

And it’s only fitting, I suppose that we should see David O. Russell’s American Hustle as the last film of the year, since when our favorite theater closed we saw Silver Linings Playbook a second time (a couple days after seeing this, which they did as a kind of farewell).

American Hustle features, again, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence but the stars are Christian Bale (and his comb-over, which deserves a best supporting actor Oscar) and Amy Adams (and her cleavage, which deserves better than the Golden Globes pun that is all I can think of) as a couple of hustlers who get in too deep when a zealous FBI agent (Cooper) decides to use them for Abscam.

Abscam! Remember Abscam? It was…a thing…in the late ‘70s and early ’80s. It was too hard to solve actual crime so the FBI got into the business of making crime and filming it so, you know, slam dunk at trial.

Impeccable acting from the top four (except for Amy Adams’ dodgy accent which, while it was meant to be fake, was perhaps not meant to be quite so intermittent) and great support from Jeremy Renner (as Camden mayor “Carmine Polito”), Elizabeth Rohm (whom I did not recognize from “Law & Order”) as his wife, and Louis CK as an uptight FBI agent trying to corral Cooper.

Over the course of two-and-a-quarter hours, the movie moves from vignette-to-vignette in a way that makes structural and dramatic sense, but lacks the urgency, focus and character arc of SLP. As a result, it’s a fun time but not particularly moving. (Even though SLP was a fantasy in terms of how it depicted the sorts of problems its characters had, it was dramatically tight.)

The Boy and I liked it. I tried to talk The Flower into coming with us but she demurred.

One thing I’ve noticed about Russell’s films of late is a near philanthropic feel: He seems content to draw drama not from good-vs-evil so much as many well-intentioned people who conflict in how they reach their desired goals.

Considering that our four heroes are scam artists (Bale and Adams), power drunk cops (Cooper and his pals), corrupt politicians (Renner and Rohm) and just plain dangerously nuts (Lawrence), that’s kind of a feat.

Just like SLP’s sort of breezy treatment of serious mental problems, this sort of looks a serious political and law-enforcement issues with a sort of shrug-and-smile, as if to say “People. What’re you gonna do?”

Some folks aren’t going to care for that sort of thing, but I think I prefer it to the far more common misanthropic cynicism, where everyone can be trusted to act in the worst possible way.

Winner of three Golden Globes.

Not a bad end to not a bad year.

We saw over 150 movies this year (2013), so many that I’m sure I missed reviewing quite a few, like Ender’s Game. We saw it second run and The Boy liked it. I also liked it, just not very much.

There was a dumb controversy surrounding it because sci-fi icon Orson Scott Card apparently said something (about gay marriage?) that was not approved of by the bien pensants, who apparently lack the sort of nuance that all those who disagree with them must embrace if they wish to partake in the modern culture at all.

To wit: You suck, but that’s a pretty good song/movie/book.

The movie is essentially a standard young-adult space opera, as Heinlein might’ve written in the ‘50s, about an Earth that has barely survived an attack by evil ant-aliens (or was it bees?) and has rebounded by embracing a militaristic society where children are trained from a very young age to defend against an expected future assault.

It isn’t well explained, but basically only the young have the adaptability to defeat the Alien Menace. (This gives it both that young-adult feel I was mentioning and an unfortunate Harry Potter vibe.)

Our movie shows Ender’s progress in and out of the academy (which is highly manipulative), in boot camp, and in training for the anticipated future battle, and is fairly unobjectionable in its particulars.

I would single out Harrison Ford as being particularly miscast as a long-time military dude, but then I began to realize that I didn’t think the possibly flawless Viola Davis was very good either. I’ve forgotten the kid (Asa Butterfield, Boy In the Striped Pajamas). His older brother seemed awkward and even Abigail Breslin as his older sister didn’t feel quite right.

Nothing seems to fit here. There are all these little vignettes: Zero-G combat training (which never comes up outside of training), Ender’s conflicts with his peers, his emergence as a sort-of leader, a mythical and possibly dead hero but something’s up with the whole story, the sexual tension he has with a girl (Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit), and on and on.

Nothing seems to gel.

The movie’s both too long and too short, if that makes sense: It’s too long to be a fun, fluffy popcorn flick, and too short to develop all the critical mass it needs to carry its desired dramatic weight. This probably comes from not wanting to cut key elements of the 384-page book down even more than necessary but being stuck with having two hours to cram the whole thing in.

I mean, if you’re Peter Jackson, you make it into a twelve-hour movie and add a sub-plot about ants in love. But if you’re Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) you probably don’t have that luxury. Might be worth viewing an extended/director’s cut.

The Boy, as I said, liked it more than I did. And even though I’ve been critical, I wouldn’t say it was bad. It just didn’t work very well somehow, at least not for me.

Matthew McConaughey is Losing Weight! Actually, it’s not that funny, since he’s having a hard time putting it back on, I’ve heard, and he is seriously skinny as Ron Woodruff, HIV sufferer, drug-user, and homosexual-bashing-occasional-maybe-bisexual-or-at-least-into-some-manly-looking-chicks.

Dallas Buyers Club is an essentially American story. Woodruff gets HIV and, in what should be his final days, gets a hold of experimental drugs that arrest his condition. And when I say “gets a hold”, I mean “illegally procures”. This leads to further procurement of other unapproved drugs, time south of the border in Mexican clinics, and ultimately smuggling—and kind of smuggling-in-plain-sight—these drugs across the border for fun and profit.

Where the hell does the U.S. Government get off saying what drugs anyone can use for any reason? is, of course, my question. Must be in one of them “penumbras and emanations” the Supreme Court likes to go on about.

Anyway.

Outstanding performances from McConaughey and Jared Leto as the gay man who provides Woodruff with his entreé to his client base. Both won Golden Globes for their performances last Sunday.

Woodruff, while doubtless lightened up by the charming and abdominally-excellent McConnaughey, is commendably incorrect politically, racist, sexist, antagonistic to homosexuals, antagonistic to most everyone outside of his parochial world, and yet still admirable for his boldness, his refusal to lay down and die, his refusal to accept a dubious authority telling him it must necessarily be this way.

He gets over the gay-bashing thing, more or less. He manages to woo Jennifer Garner, a doctor, which would strike me as more than implausible, if it weren’t McConaughey. The movie doesn’t make too much of his heroism, nor too much of the bizarre and corrupt drug trial system, nor even too much of the villainous FDA.

The director, Jean-Marc Valleé, is a French-Canadian. I think that’s significant. Ultimately, this is a movie about a bunch of banal, desultory yet overpowering forces against a single, reckless man.

I do hope it makes people ask why, though.

You probably could just go read my review of Insidious 2 for this horror movie also directed by James Wan, though with horror stalwarts Chad and Chris Hayes (House of Wax, The Reaping) writing and Patrick Wilson in the ghost-buster role instead of the haunted role.

All of the elements for a good old, dark house movie are here: Creaky doors, things that go bump in the night, stuff flying around, books stacked in a way no human would stack them…

In this situation, the victims are Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor as the Perrons, a family who have moved into an old house that’s just chock full of ghosts, probably. Most troubling of the ghosts is Bathsheba, a witch with a penchant for sacrificing children to…Satan!

Based On The True Story that took place in the early ‘70s, thereby freeing director Wan from the troublesome nature of cellular technology and the Internet, this is a very well paced film that banks heavily on the likability of its character.

The Perrons are a good and happy family with five (!) daughters, and Wilson and Vera Farmiga play Lorraine and Ed Warren, spook police with a history of battling with all manner of imps and lesser demons.

This was one of the best reviewed films of the summer, and even did well overall for the year, I think due to great performances and a natural feeling portrayal of family life that allows you to get attached to the potential victims. With a cast as large as the one for this movie, you simply expect that some characters are introduced for the sole purpose of being killed.

Here, that would really bug you. (And it’s not the “based on a true story” thing, either, obviously.)

Another thing done really well is to make the Warrens selfless warriors in the battle against the Forces of Evil. The movie gives the sense that a the Warrens have a rich history going back before this incident, and they invest heavily in the Perrons which gives the audience empathy for both the Perrons and the Warrens.

I mean, for reals, how often do you see a horror movie about character?

That said, there’s no other real hook, here. No gimmick, like the Insidious series’ astral plane shenanigans or anything like that. It’s really a simple tale told well, with a fair amount of suspense (unusual for horror films these days) and hardly any gore to speak of.

This is kind of interesting although, post-Saw, Wan has demonstrated he doesn’t need to do gore to get scares. There are some blood effects but they perhaps more effective than anything over-the-top would be, because they feel real.

Although it was hard to get The Boy to this, he did enjoy it, as did I. Definitely among the best horror films of the year (2013), and even one of the best films overall.

Interestingly enough, for all the foreign movies we see, almost none are Italian. I really don’t know who Paolo Sorrentino, the writer and director of La Grande Bellezza, is, nor do I recognize Toni Servillo who stars a Jep, the lead character. I couldn’t pick any of the other actors out of a lineup, though they all seemed somehow familiar, like maybe I’d seen them in movies from 20 or 30 years ago.

This movie also feels like a cultural successor to all those excessive ‘60s/’70s Italian flicks: As in, what happened to all those hedonistic people decades later?

Well, it’s not pretty. Jep is a man who, at 65 (Servillo is actually 53 but he pulls it off) realizes that his life has been a meaningless series of parties, and so sets off to find “the great beauty”. Well, sorta. It’s more a vague hope expressed at one point, that he’d hoped to see such a thing.

At this point, I should note that his apartment overlooks the Coliseum. And at one point, he takes his lover, Ramona (the gorgeous and touching Sabrini Ferilli), on a nighttime tour of all the great museums of Rome.

There’s an intro to the movie with a bunch of tourists at the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, with an Asian tourist looking out from Janiculum Hill, who takes a picture and breathes a sigh of what looks like perfect bliss, then immediately drops dead.

It’s something of a sickness of the soul, really, to be unable to see all the beauty around one, I guess we could say the movie is telling us. And if this were a French movie, it’d probably be unwatchable. All dark ennui and nihilism.

But since it’s Italian, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. You end up feeling for Jep. He’s trying. And his relationship with Ramona is a tender and humanizing thing. In the journey, he’s skewering modern art and society, religion and secularism, vanity and humility, and pretty much everyone in his circle.

There’s a Mother Teresa figure called “The Saint” (played so convincingly by Giusi Merli you’d think she actually was 100-plus years old) who sleeps on the floor and eats, I don’t know, uncooked barley and is basically the complete opposite of Jep and his hedonistic friends.

And while there’s considerable farce surrounding her, and she can seem like a character actually comical in her stoicism, the movie’s climactic moment suggests that she has gained something from her spiritual life and she can share that with Jep.

Now, here’s the thing about this movie: At 2 hours and 20 minutes, with no single compelling narrative, this could’ve been a trauma to sit through. Even with many compelling vignettes, it could’ve been merely amusing (and even then, at 2:20, it would’ve worn out its welcome long before the credits rolled).

But this really worked for both The Boy and I, and I doubt we got the same things out of it. There is such tremendous beauty here, and at the same time so many questions raised, it’s almost optimistic at the bottom of it all.

I don’t know if I can give a good sense of it. It’s just very Italian.

Sometimes, and not infrequently in 2013, it happens that we see a movie that practically no one else in the world sees. The moving documentary, The Missing Picture, for example, which has an entry at Box Office Mojo showing no box office receipts. Or like Arena of the Street Fighter or Big Ass Spider, which don’t show up at Mojo at all.

Or, say, this Persian film, Hiss Dokhtarha Faryad Nemizanand kindly translated as Hush! Girls Don’t Scream.

We wanted to see the last Persian film that came to our local, but the distributor had not bothered to fron the $100—that’s five Andrew Jacksons—it took to get it subtitled. (This is what the people at the theater told me, as well as they had turned away more than $100 in business for it. They also said non-Perisan people saw it anyway and enjoyed it.)

I was struck by the wordiness of the title, which reminded me of cheesy ‘70s movies, and maybe even especially late ’70s/early ’80s made-for-TV movies about the terrible things people do to their children behind closed doors.

The funny thing is, that’s what this is: A story of a woman who murders a random man on her wedding day, and turns out to have done so due to a dark history. Enhancing the feeling is low-budget lighting and sets, as well as a ’70s color palette (though there is some surprisingly effective camera work at times).

Not helping matters is spotty subtitles, rumored to cost around $100.

And yet. The film rises above its own limitations. Partly this is due to strong performances, partly due to the earnest handling of the subject matter, and partly due to certain oddities of Iranian culture.

For example, it’s probably no surprise to anyone that when a woman is raped in Iran, it’s considered her fault and she may be punished (even killed for it). It’s probably not much less surprising that a child who is molested brings dishonor to his or her family, so much so that the family would cover it up rather than report it.

Somewhat more interesting is that “blood money” (last seen in The Separation) means that a person convicted of a crime can be granted a reprieve if a member of the victims family allows.

Hush! moves from mystery to personal drama to courtroom drama to an action-suspense film by the end, and there’s an authenticity to the proceedings which makes it increasingly compelling. The Boy barely noted the lower production values, but we both came out liking it a lot.

Eh. Horror sequels. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t live without—well, no you actually can live pretty happily without them. If kidflick sequels are bad, horror movie sequels are often much, much worse: Not only are they often just phoned in, and the people involved were not involved with the original at all, sometimes sequels are made by people who haven’t even seen the original (I’m looking at you Friday The 13th series).

We won’t even talk about the inevitable descent into camp.

But there are exceptions. The Saw series for example, while it varied wildly in quality, the variation came largely from the limits of the—well, of trying to beat a dead horse, really. In their eagerness to set up a franchise with Jigsaw, the movies used increasingly preposterous (and occasionally confusing) devices (both literarily and physically speaking).

So, it’s fitting that it should be James Wan, at the helm of the sequel to his earlier mini-masterpiece, Insidious, making a sequel that’s just as good as the original. Obviously, opinions will vary, but as of this writing the two movies share a 6.8 rating on IMDB and a 61% popular rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (Critics liked the first one and not the sequel, but I’m not sure film critics are allowed to like horror sequels.)

Also, some object to the fact that this movie dispenses completely with the whole haunted-or-not? dilemma of the original as well as the can-we-just-move-out? plot device. I, personally was relieved by this. We saw that dance in the first film and, frankly, it would have been not just tiresome but incredible to believe that a family just having undergone the events of the first film wouldn’t pretty much jump to the conclusion that they were experiencing the same thing if a light bulb suddenly burst, much less the spooky goings on that do occur.

As a result, this is less a spooky film and more a scary film, though there are some eerie parts. Virtually the entire cast is back, although Lin Shaye is a corpse, having died at the end of the first film.

It’s instructive to view this alongside Wan’s other 2013 film, The Conjuring. That film, which is probably better, hews pretty closely to the “formula” that Wan (and co-writer Leigh Whannel who also co-wrote Saw and other films with Wan) has polished:

1. Characters you care about. (This is not a given. A philosophy of horror film making has the audience wanting to see the putative protagonists die.)

2. Atmosphere. They can do a slow build, as in the first Insidious, but it’s not mandatory. This time they hit the atmosphere hard and fast.

3. An element of mystery. There’s just enough of “what’s going on?” to engage you, and they don’t cop out by not explaining. Admittedly, the exposition can be the weakest part, though this movie suffers less than the original in that regard.

4. Suspense. This is the one that most horror movies leave out. They sort of give a half-hearted try, but they’re so caught up in imitating familiar tropes, they end up robbing their movies of any suspense.

The Boy, in particular, was pleasantly surprised, and we debated whether or not this was the better of the two films without coming to any conclusions.

Keep in mind, of course, that this is an “old, dark house” flick at its heart. It’s basically rattling chains and floating furniture, with Patrick Wilson doing a pretty damn good Jack Torrance at one point. If that ain’t your cuppa, this ain’t your cuppa.

Bonus points for concluding the story definitively while still setting up the possibility of a franchise.

Here is a movie about a girl and her lover that takes place in a dystopic future which is neither The Hunger Games nor Twilight, the star of which is neither a messianic Katniss or a magic-whatever-thingy-it-is-that-Kristen-Stewart plays. As such, it’s a smaller story in scope, disparaged and overlooked unfortunately.

The heroine of our story is Daisy, a troubled American teen who has been shipped off to England by her dad, a fate she’s none too happy about. Saoirse Ronan (Hanna, The Way Back) plays this part to a tee, being a completely unpleasant waste of space.

Seriously, I was starting to worry that this was gonna be an “I’m so unpleasant but you love me anyway because I’m sooo special” kind of thing, but the movie does a fair job of presenting the chaotic thoughts in her head which buys her enough time (with the audience) to develop into something more.

The young man of the house, Isaac (Tom Holland) has caught her eye, and (in the movie’s only fantasy element), he seems to be telepathic. They fall in love and then World War Three breaks out.

That’ll put a crimp on your summer romance.

Especially when the boy of your dreams is conscripted and you’re hauled off to pick food, the war having apparently put all automated farming equipment out of commission.

The bulk of the movie concerns her struggle to get back to her home and Isaac, and her growth into a real, live woman.

Honestly, the war stuff is pretty sketchy. That’s okay because it’s not about The War. You never see a battle. There is an odd attitude toward authority: It’s scary and bullying, but it seems also to be right, ultimately. I suppose that’s about right for a young-adult book (upon which the movie is based).

If it’s possible for a teen romance involving World War III and a maybe-psychic romance to be low-key and realistic, this is it. Kevin Macdonald (Last King of Scotland) directs, and this movie has a similar feel to his picture The Eagle.

Jon Hopkins delivers an effective, haunting score.

This movie never made it to 100 theaters.

I’ve always had a particular affinity for the Poles. Maybe becaue it seems like whenever there’s a war in Europe, the Germans go through Poland, slaughtering as they go, and then when they’re beaten back by the Russians, the Russians go back through Poland and they slaughter everyone they can.

Maybe it’s because of Lech Walesa. Amazing guy.

Or maybe it’s just all the Polock jokes from when I was a kid. They seemed like an affable bunch, if not too bright. (There isn’t really a noticable Polish community here so to me “Polock” jokes could’ve been about Martians.)

Aftermath is a completely different take on how things went down in Poland in WWII, even though it takes place in modern times (ca. 2000). This is actually a great film, in the sense that it tackles a serious subject head on, but never forgets to be a movie. So interleaved in the tidbits about Polish history is a thriller, mystery, suspense and even ghost story.

The setup is that a Frank, a Polish man living in America has returned to Poland (after decades) to talk to his brother Joe. Seems his sister-in-law and her children showed up in Chicago after leaving Joe, who has been acting erratically. Frank wants to find out why.

Frank learns that the village blames Joe for pulling up the stones that make the roads to and from the village. Joe doesn’t really want to talk about it. He’s not exactly friendly with Frank, who didn’t show up for their parents’ funerals, and has been completely out of contact in America.

When Frank does find out the mystery of the stones, the story doesn’t end there. More questions are raised. The people in the village get angrier and angrier. Only the village priest stands between Joe and Frank, and angry villagers (you don’t get a lot of angry villagers these days), and he’s frankly not looking too healthy.

Ultimately, you end up with an indictment of Poles (at least these Poles) that I have never seen portrayed anywhere, and which is apparently based on true events. Enough so to get the movie banned in parts of Poland.

Also, writer/director Wladislaw Pasikowski unflinchingly tells us that, not only did it happen, nothing’s really changed since WWII. That’s unfortunate, if true, and very chilling in the context of the film.

I’m not revealing much because it really does work as a mystery and a thriller, and possibly the best mystery/thriller we saw this year (2013). It’s a shame no one will see it outside of film festivals and limited art house runs.

Faust is the fourth movie in Alexander Sukorov’s tetralogy, following Moloch, Taurus and The Sun, which probably means as little to you as it does to me. Even more confusing, the first three movies are about Hitler, Stalin and Hirohito (respectively), so to close this tetralogy out with a fictional character seems like an odd choice.

I don’t really know that it’s a tetralogy, though. Maybe he’s got seven more movies planned which will put this film in to context. Beats me.

The story, more or less, is the story of Faust as told by Goethe, though I think it’s less rather than more. Faust is some sort of learned man, son of a doctor, living in squalid 19th century German conditions, and finding no meaning in life.

Enter the Moneylender. The Moneylender is willing to trade Faust something—whatever he wants, really—for a little something back. A trifle, a trinket, something he’s not even using. (And which, it is suggested, he may not even have.)

Faust has nothing. He wants a reason to live, really, to find meaning in existence, to know what to wish for, in essence. He’s floundering, until he sees Margarete.

That’s when things really go to Hell, metaphorically, before the go to Hell, literally.

This is a very surreal film. It’s defined by ennui, but since it’s not French it doesn’t endorse ennui. It plays an interesting narrative game by having the real-world events of the story seem remote and insignificant, secondary to Faust’s interaction with the Moneylender.

All the earthly scenes take place in an amazingly crowded town. Everyone has to squeeze by everyone else, through tiny roads and tinier buildings and narrow hallways. It evokes the silent German Expressionism of movies like Nosferatu and Caligari. Life, it seems to say, is awful.

I kind of wanted to hate it. But it’s unusual and entertaining in so many unexpected ways. By the end, you’re practically feeling sorry for the Moneylender—whom, it must be remembered, is the Devil, or a devil or perhaps some manner or lesser imp or demon.

And you come to identify with Faust, somehow. There’s something pure about him. I mean, he’s a 40-year-old dude lusting after an 18-year-old girl, and using sorcery to get her, but, I don’t know. There’s no malice there.

You gotta focus on it, though. A lot is going on. The subtitles weren’t great. The sound has to be just right or it’s gonna be just a mess. It was worth it, though, I thought: There’s a remarkable empathy in it, which sort of makes me wonder about the previous three films.

The Boy…loved it. I can’t really explain that. Or maybe shouldn’t. I think he got swept up in it.

The Book Thief is an oddity. It has a split normally reserved for Christian or pro-America movies (50/80 critics/audience) and yet it’s about how badly the Nazis treated communists, and communists are movie critics’ favorite people!

A real puzzler, that one. We’ll get back to it in a bit.

Directed by “Downton Abbey”’s Brian Percival, this is the story of young Liesel (played beautifully by Sophie Nélisse) who is given up by her mother to be adopted by Hans and Rosa, who are good (or at least politically safe) Germans.

Liesel’s brother dies on the way and when they stop to bury him, Liesel snatches the gravedigger’s manual, as a kind of memento.

This provides her with an avenue to learn to read, which ultimately leads to future thefts. Or “thefts”.

Her adoptive mother is a battle-axe (Emily Watson, looking authentic) and her new father endearing (Geoffrey Rush), who learns to read with her. I’d say he’s a down-on-his-luck painter, but that’s not exactly right: He’s a house painter, and the war has not been good to him. Rosa berates him mercilessly for his failures, and she’s not particularly generous or understanding toward Liesel either.

It’s not all brownshirts and kristallnachts, though: A boy, Rudy (Nico Liersch) takes a strong interest in her and strikes up a fast friendship, as does the local burgmeister’s (Rainer Bock, War Horse) wife (the striking Barbara Auer). Complicating things is the appearance of Max (Ben Schnetzer), a Jewish boy whose father saved Hans in WWI.

Actually, speaking of War Horse, this is a similar film, in the sense that it’s a movie about war that’s targeted at a non-adult audience. Not that it’s childish, exactly, but it’s not as gruesome as it might be, which seems to be some critics’ argument against it.

War is plenty awful even without a lot of gore, though, and there are many, many deaths in the film. Death itself is the narrator, though never a character in the story.

That’s another thing critics seemed to object to a lot: The use of Death as narrator. “How dare they!” or something. It’s not a big thing, though. (I understand the book is also told by Death.) The movie doesn’t rely on it much.

One of the other complaints is that it doesn’t show enough how badly the Jews have it. Yeah, I can’t figure that one out. The whole story is centered around Liesel’s love of Max, and her terror regarding his plight.

I don’t know. It’s not perfect, I guess. It’s somewhat sprawling, since it’s about Liesel primarily, and a lot of points where it could have ended, it didn’t. Really, there are about half-a-dozen points in the last half-hour it might have stopped. But it didn’t stop being interesting after those points, so we didn’t find ourselves squirming. I could see being disappointed if you wanted a story, rather than many stories in a slice-of-life fashion.

I guess some attacked it for a lack of originality or failing to measure up to The Diary of Anne Frank. Yeah, I don’t know what to make of that, either. We saw half-a-dozen WWII-based movies this year, and none were like this. It had its own voice.

It’s slicker than most of them. Very polished and big-budget (guessing around $30M-$40M by the looks and actors). Lushly shot. Many moments of genuine suspense. Great score by John Williams, which surprised me. (I thought he sorta petered out in the ‘90s.) Nobody’s criticizing the performances.

I choked up in a few parts, but it didn’t rip my heart out and stomp on it. (Sort of amusingly, stories aimed at younger audiences sometimes are far less sentimental.) The Boy and I both liked it.

I did wonder if some of the critical objection came from anti-war sentiments. WWII is a problem for pacifists. And this was kind of interesting because, while the village was far removed from the front, it was a bombing target, and ultimately American bombs end up killing people in the village.

But what conclusion can you draw from that? The evil American empire shouldn’t have attacked Germany? That’s the popular narrative today, but this movie shows that war isn’t a neat package where the righteous can avoid killing the innocent. I could see that upsetting some folks.

But mostly, I don’t get it: It’s a well-made film with much to commend it.

I am about done with the superhero thing, I think. This is not directly connected to the movie Thor: The Dark World, except insofar as I was thinking that as I was watching it.

We start with a big ol’ back story about dark elves who want to use the Aether(?) to uncreate the universe to restore the pre-light universe or whatever—you notice that these movies have to constantly up the stakes, and this one is now only slightly under Dogma (in which all of existence would never have been).

Natalie Portman—I think her name is Jane in this, but who really cares?—stumbles into an alternate universe (‘cause periodic alignment of the Nine Worlds or whatevs) and gets the Aether sucked up into her, which wakes the Dark Elves (led by Dr. Who and Unfinished Song’s Chris Eccleston) and causes them to lead their very sci-fi spaceship assault on Valhalla, where an aged Anthony Hopkins shows up to collect another check.

Rene Russo is back not being Michelle Pfeiffer. Sorry, I thought Frigga was played by Pfeiifer in the original, but it’s not. For some reason Russo looked a lot worse in this to me. It’s only been 2-3 years, right?

So, that time has passed and Thor’s (Chris of the Hemsworths) been stuck in Valhalla, except for that Avengers thing, and Natalie has been pursued by non-norse-godly men (like Ian Boothby, whom she strings along hilariously, I guess) but she’s been true and Thor’s been true, rather than going all Viking on the much hotter Sif (Jamie Alexander).

All those Viking cohorts (Sif, and the Asian dude, and all the other weirdly ethnic characters) are back for the movie, but they don’t have much in the way of parts.

Tom Hiddleston is back as Loki, and he’s as Loki-ish as ever. Does he care? Does he not care? Do you care?

I’ll just comment to note that the Valhallans are the worst immortals ever. They die en masse in this film. Some of them, like Loki and Thor can take all kinds of abuse, as long as it’s delivered through impact. You can drop a building on them and they’ll be okay, but if they’re pierced with a sword or butter knife or whatever, that does them in.

Or kinda sorta does them in. Sometimes. As the plot requires.

Which, of course, is the problem with all these movies. They’re failing to convince me of any actual peril. It’s like I’m not supposed to notice that the extensive damage to buildings or people never matters.

Eh. It’s not bad for what it is. It’s just become so predictable. The twists were obvious a mile off. Well, maybe not to a seven year old. (I took a seven-year-old but the elves creeped her out so she went to see Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2 again.)

The set-up for the sequel was also obvious.

I thought the direction was, while more sedate than the first movie (directed by Kenneth Branagh) but also less fun. The whole thing was less fun.

I could really go for the Batman foiling a jewel thief or something. I mean, if you wanted to do a comic book hero movie that was different.

Alexander Payne is one of those directors whose movies I view with trepidation. I enjoyed the quirky black comedy of Election and, of course, Sideways was a lot of fun, but I had a hard time sitting through About Schmidt and the Descendants and since he’s always well reviewed, it’s impossible to glean from that whether I’m going to like any given film.

What’s more, having seen it, I’m not sure I can describe whether anyone else is going to like this film, either. @Sky_Bluez, for example, hated it. Not an identifiable character in the lot, she fairly points out. But you know what?

I liked it. I ended up liking it a lot, as did The Boy.

I started out with a sense of dread, as we see ancient Bruce Dern hobbling along the highway, meet his rather bitchy wife—see my Descendants review for Payne and women commentary—and his two sons, one of whom is a news reader (this is out in Billings, pop 162,000), while the other (our hero) sells audio equipment.

Slow-paced and unpleasant, with a lot of bitterness and dysfunction.

Or so it starts.

As it turns out Woody (Dern) thinks he’s won one of those magazine sweepstakes, so he’s determined to go to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his million dollars. But he can’t drive, so he’s going to walk, I guess. He never gets very far. His wife, Kate (June Squibb, The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vincente Fernandez) and son Ross (Bob Odenkirk, “Mr. Show With Bob and David”) want to put him in a home, though it’s far from apparent that there’s anything seriously wrong with Woody. He might be hard of hearing, and he surely isn’t paying much attention, but there’s not a lot worth paying attention to.

Finally, his other son, David (Will Forte, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2) decides to take him to Lincoln in the hopes it will get the idea out of his head.

Road trip. Also, and sort of melancholy, a buddy picture, as we learn how little David knows about his dad.

They end up taking a side trip to the small town Kate and Woody came from, and get glimpses of the dramas that played out 60 years earlier. Slowly, we begin to learn about these old people as something more than stereotypes. While not exactly nice people, they demonstrate some positive traits, and even human decency.

They come together as a family. And Ross, who is kind of a loser at the beginning of the movie, seems like he might make some positive changes in his life by the end.

I don’t know. It won me over. And not just a little. I was rooting for our guys at the end. It’s low-key and some would say slow-paced, but I didn’t get bored. The scenery shots feel less like pacing than a lot of other films we’ve seen this year.

Rance Howard (Ron’s dad) is in it. Stacy Keach, too. He looks pretty good. (I was worried.) Not a lot of big names.

Gorgeous cinematography. The West in black-and-white. Tough to miss with that.

Can’t see it making its money back at the BO. Would be cautious in recommending. But really liked.

As frequently noted, a la Casa Maelstrom, we don’t ask much from our children’s movies. Just don’t phone it in, we beg. You’re spending tens of millions of dollars, don’t skimp on the script. Don’t just slap some B-list celebrity in there, if you gotta have celeb voices.

And, if you’re a sequel, for God’s sake, don’t just rehash the first movie. Yes, the original movie was a hit, that’s why there’s a sequel in the first place. But if you just repeat the gags from the first one, you not only get diminishing returns, you diminish the original, too.

Which means there was no small trepidation approaching Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2. We actually didn’t see the original in the theater, but we grew to love it from repeated home viewings. It may not be a great film, with many hoary kidflick tropes in place, but it is a very good and very watchable film, with lots of creative and entertaining bits.

Everyone is back for the new film (except Bruce Campbell’s increasingly obese mayor), which starts with Swallow Falls being cleaned up by a crew of Thinquanauts, led by billionaire genius Chester V (Will Forte). In a bit of retconning, Chester V is shown in flashback to be Flint Lockwood’s (Bill Hader) childhood hero, a sort of combination of Steve Jobs and Billy Mays, and he “temporarily” relocates the entire island’s population to San FranJose.

He’s up to no good from the start, sparing us the notion of a twist, and the inevitable character arc of his good-hearted super-intelligent orangutan companion (Kristen Schaal, who’s getting a lot of voice work these days on “Bob’s Burgers”, “Adventure Time” and Toy Story 3) could only be a surprise to a toddler.

Like the first one, it’s not great, in much the same ways—especially the character arcs. But, like the first one, it works, and works pretty darn well, and also for much the same reasons: They didn’t phone it in.

In other words, if the basic framework of the story is as by-the-numbers as can be, the details are lovingly attended to. There’s never a scene transition or a character movement that doesn’t look like it was devotedly attended to, from the cartoonish dynamism of Earl Devereaux, now subtly altered to reflect Terry Crewes as the voice (formerly Mr. T, who apparently declined to do the sequel), to the impossibly fluid movements of Chester V’s finger rolling.

The plot? Basically Star Trek III. Well, sort of a combination of II and III, with the food making machine serving as the Genesis device, both as a MacGuffin and as an excuse to make a whole lot of food-based animal puns, like “shrimp-panzees” and “taco-diles”.

It kind of goes off the rails in the end, becoming some kind of food-creature-based Braveheart, and there isn’t a lick of moral logic to be had with the villainous Chester fiendishly wanting to make the little food animals into…well, food…even as the heroes and the food animals…eat each other, or at least sardines.

That’s okay. It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s “another film by a lot of people”, as it says, and sometimes that shows in odd ways. They did rehash one thing, sadly: Andy Samberg’s Baby Brent re-appears and where his “Uh! Oh.” in the original was supposed to be ironic and lame, it’s done straight here.

But that’s a nit. Go in with modest expectations and enjoy the delicious scenery. You’ll have yourself a good time.

Oh, yeah: Some people are suggesting that this movie is better than Monsters U and should win an Academy Award. These people are wrong.

It’s been three years since the Coen Brothers gave us True Grit and their absence is hard-felt around casa ‘strom, so we headed out to see Inside Llewyn Davis on Christmas weekend. The Flower tagged along.

It won’t come as a shock that I really, really liked it, I don’t think. The Boy also liked it, though less than I, and The Flower, I think, less than either of us. (She didn’t seem bored, however.)

Of course, that tells you nothing: The only Coen movie I didn’t like right off the bat was The Man Who Wasn’t There and I’ll probably give that another look soon. If I were to describe this in terms of their oeuvre, I’d put it as Barton Fink meets The Serious Man Who Wasn’t There.

Our “hero” is the titular Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac, Drive) who has trouble connecting with the masses (much like Barton, except it doesn’t seem to be something he aspires to) and who also has trouble connecting cause-and-effect. But unlike Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik, for whom cause-and-effect is legitimately mysterious, Llewyn’s life is a series of causes he sets into motion without ever seeing or following through on the effects of.

It’s 1961 Greenwich Village, the nascent folk music scene, and Llewyn and his cohorts hang out at a coffee house singing traditional music for a share of “the hat” that gets passed around at the end of the show.

But Llewyn’s kind of a loser: His agent doesn’t care about him, his album’s been remaindered, he’s lost the other member of his duo, and he’s reduced to crashing on people’s couches for the length of stay they can tolerate him for.

His ex-girlfriend (Carey Mulligan, who was also in Drive and An Education) is married to his more likable and successful friend, Jim (Justin Timberlake, doing a great job as always), and, oh, by-the-way may be pregnant by Llewyn. She’s pissed at him in the way only a woman in that situation can be.

Llewyn is such a champ he tries to borrow money for her abortion from Jim. He’s adored by the Gorefeins, college professors on the Upper West Side (Ethan Philips of “Star Trek: Voyager” and Robin Bartlett of “American Horror Story”) even as he has a nagging feeling of being a kind of pet or novelty.

But Llewyn just doesn’t connect. It’s not just a feature of his music, it’s who he is, most notably evinced in a scene where he plays for his vacant father.

This isn’t O Brother, Where Art Thou. Davis is less likable than Gopnik, though perhaps more likable than Man Who Wasn’t There’s Ed Crane, but interesting to view in contrast with those two. Crane did nothing, never seemed to care to do anything. Gopnik wants to do the right thing but has no idea what that is.

The universe virtually begs Llewyn to take responsibility for anything. It says “Here’s your ticket to fortune” and he says “I’ll take cash up front”. It says “Here’s a chance for you to continue in music” he says “I’ll become a merchant marine”. It says “Maybe you should look up that old girlfriend” and he says “Yeah…but maybe I shouldn’t.” It says “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? You’ve gotten everything wrong up till now.” He says “Yeah, I got this.”

At one point he encounters a beat poet chauffeuring an old, fat man around (Garrett Hedlund and John Goodman respectively). When it would become inconvenient, he abandons them to their fate. We never know what happens to them.

And so this is a movie full of loose ends. Nothing but loose ends, really.

There’s a cat. I sort of reacted badly to the cat at first, thinking it was a little too on-the-nose as a metaphor for Llewyn’s ambitions. Through a bit of recklessness he ends up in charge of the cat, which he carries around, then loses, then finds, then maybe loses and finds or possibly kills or…

You get the idea. It actually works less as a metaphor than as a living example of Llewyn’s odd relationship with cause-and-effect and care-and-neglect.

As a movie, there are some bold choices which are bound to alienate some folk. For example, a great many songs are played in full, and consist of the person playing and the audience watching. Where the Coens typically have smart dialogue and great cinematography, this movie rests on performances and reactions of people to performances.

In not one but two cases, the audience is one man, and they’re completely flat—or I think they are. I thought maybe they were reacting, but I’m not sure if that was me reacting to Llewyn wanting a reaction or if they actually did change.

It’s definitely a watch-again for me. But that’s going to be off-putting to some, especially if they don’t care for the music.

How is the music? Well, again, this ain’t O, Brother. I would describe it as aggressively anodyne. Like Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind, only without parody. It’s pretty unexciting, as such music is. The musicianship is there but it’s not clear what it’s in service of.

You could really see why someone like Bob Dylan could go in and shake things up. (The Old Man always maintained that he would’ve been ignored at any other point in time, musically.)

Now, this is as much my music as anything: I love folk and harmonies and nice-sounding things. But it was pretty unengaging, except for the last performance Llewyn makes of the movie’s central song “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)”.

His other performances are nice but they pale in comparison to the version of that song he recorded with his absent partner, which is played in montage. This is also the point, maybe even deeper than it seems:

Sure as the birds flying above
Life ain’t worth livin’
Without the one you love

You could view the movie from the lens of a man who’s lost his partner and now drifts aimlessly. I don’t know if that’s right. I’d have to watch it again.

There are some other traditional songs, though the only one I recognized was “Green Green Rocky Road”. The most fun piece is a made-up novelty song called “Please Mr. Kennedy” about not wanting to be shot into space. In a lot of ways, though, it feels like the vitality has gone out of the old songs, or at least the singers.

Thematically appropriate but not necessarily gonna make you run out and buy the CD.

On the other hand, I’m not anyone’s “go to” guy for popular music interests.

The Coens used to be criticized pretty routinely for being “cold”. It’s not necessarily an unfair cop. A lot of movies rely heavily on the “designated hero” trope, encouraging the audience to feel certain ways about their characters based not on what they do, but how they’re presented, essentially.

High Noon is like this. Gary Cooper’s just the good guy, and the Bad Guys are the Bad Guys, and that’s the movie’s set up, which is never really justified. Although it’s done satirically, more than one web essay has been written on the Empire being the good guys in Star Wars because it relies heavily on those old Western tropes, and we root for the underdog, and so on.

This is a kind of sentimentalism, and I’d I would say that the Coens avoid it like an excessively abused metaphor. They present their movie as “Here’s what these people say and do, feel about it how you will.” That can seem cold, particularly as there are few angels in Coen movies. Most everyone can be a jerk.

In this film, there’s a scene shown twice. And in the first you might think the beating put on poor Llewyn was undeserved. I didn’t, actually, but the second time they show how he set this into action, and they do so with complete unsentimentality. You’ve been with a guy through one of the worst weeks of his life, and yet what he does is so awful—well, you’re challenged to sympathize with the “hero”.

I liked it, a lot, as I said. And the more I think about it. But it’s definitely not for everyone.

Steve Coogan plays a journalist/political functionary who falls on hard times and, as a result, ends up pursuing a “human interest” story about an old woman (Judi Dench) who is looking for a child she gave up for adoption 50 years earlier (‘cause she wasn’t married).

This is Philomena, the latest effort from Stephen Frears, the man in the chair for such memorable flicks as The Queen, High Fidelity and Mrs. Henderson Presents.

Coogan’s Martin Sixsmith is as cynical and awful as Dench’s Philomena is good and god-fearing, and while we needn’t spend much time wondering what side the film makers’ come down on (in the secular liberalism vs. religious traditionalist “debate”) the film works because of Coogan’s unflinching portrayal of a shallow modern man—and, of course, Dench’s typically resonant depth.

Coogan co-wrote the script with John Pope based on the book by Martin Sixsmith (a real person!).

Explicit in this movie are the sins of the Catholic church, in particular the nunnery that took in the wayward girls, forced them to work off their medical bills, and then sold their babies to rich Americans.

Not exactly kosher, you know? Make them work off their medical bills or sell the babies. Doing both is double-dipping.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In this movie, we have three story threads: The personal journey of Philomena to find her child, the mystery of what happened to said child, and the personal journey of Sixsmith, the last being the traditional movie character arc, as Coogan morphs from a major asshole to a slightly-less major asshole.

It’s a solid film. It suffers a little as one of its major twists and turns has to do with homosexual Republicans. The movie chooses to boggle at the notion rather than explore it in any depth, when the exploration could’ve led to greater understanding.

No, really.

I don’t want to give anything away but since Coogan-via-Sixsmith is essentially the author of the story, and he has no concept of anything other than his worldview, at least that he can regard without contempt, a whole lot of interesting questions are never raised.

But as drama and an acting vehicle for the two, it’s solid. The Boy also liked it quite a bit.

I just kept wanting to say:

She was only fifteen years old!

Heh.

“Mistakes were made.”

I tried to talk him out of it. The Boy wanted to see a matinee. We’re tied up most days lately so he likes to take up a weekend day to see something. Problem is, we’re in an awkward period where the arty movies we’ve been seeing all year are flooding the art houses, and the discount theater is full of stuff we’ve seen or didn’t want to see.

And so: Carrie.

I have not, in fact, seen the original Carrie, despite being a Brian De Palma fan—at least until the Iraq War when he went full moonbat with the career-killing Redacted (US box office about on a par with the under-rated Nice Girls Don’t Explode, though far less if you adjust for inflation).

Anyway, haven’t seen it. I read the book, which is essentially a “found footage” approach in novel form, and which (like all of King’s stuff) is highly derivative of some pretty hokey tropes, in this case, the school revenge picture.

The book, nonetheless, works, while this movie does not. I’m going to list a bunch of ways that it doesn’t work before getting to what I think the key reason it doesn’t work:

• It’s not the early ‘70s any more. It’s not even the late ’90s. Carrie is 18, meaning she was born in the sexually repressed days of…1995.
• Julianne Moore is 53, meaning she was a blushing bloom of…33 or 34…when she was impregnated. (OK, she’s probably supposed to be younger, and just haggard looking but…Julianne Moore was Maude Lebowski back in ’97!)
• Actually, timeline-wise Carrie just about works as Maude and The Dude’s love child. Heh.
• Chloe Grace Moretz acts the part well but she recalls a young Scarlett Johannson. The clever thing here is that she was really 15 while her classmates are all late teens, early 20s, so the “late bloomer” effect works.
• But still, she’s ridiculously good looking. Sissy Spacek was cute, but not so cute that she didn’t do a lot of “plain” girl stuff. Moretz will probably be a glamour goddess in a few years.
• The characters are so broadly drawn as to be ridiculous. I don’t remember anyone from the book except for—well, except for the mother, in fact. But nobody’s accusing King of subtle characterization.
• There’s a scene where Carrie is thrown into her prayer closet, which is punctuated by the gruesome imagery of Jesus-on-the-cross which therein lays, making this a closet of horror. Except that if you’d been thrown into such a place your whole life, the imagery would be boring to you, not shocking or horrifying. 
• The Christianity—there’s no connection to it. It’s probably less anti-religious than the original novel, but there’s a lack of depth that brings with it a lack of resonance.

The Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire illustrates one of the major truths of modern society:

Reality show producers are dicks.

The Flower and The Boy liked this movie as much as the original one, but I liked it a lot better, for a number of reasons. There’s a lot less child murder, for example.

Ha, like that’s a plus.

Seriously, though, the ephebocide is limited, since the “games” play a more peripheral role in this one and the candidates are former winners, Katniss and baker boy are the youngest involved. (But if you need more child murder, you can check out the Japanese film Battle Royale, which is really highly praised by critics an audiences. I think it so dumb as to actually cross into camp.)

So, yeah: A year of movie time has transpired since the events of the previous movie, and Katniss and Peeta have to pretend to their romance for the cameras—well, wait a tick, they were faking? What kind of ret-con bullhooey is this? Oh, right, Katniss is still in love with the guy back home, Gale, who’s one of the Thor brothers (Chris, Liam, Luke—the Hemsworths…this one is…Liam!), leaving Peeta (Josh Hutcherson, who was in Red Dawn with Chris Hemsworth, which could be really awkward if we were blending movies with meta-gossip-stories) to hold the bag. Of flour.

‘cause remember? He could toss those bags of flour around last time.

Anyway, evil Prez-for-life Donald Sutherland wants Katniss dead, having already dispatched the evil, blundering Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley) and replaced him with even eviler, more blunderinger Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Where the original movie is preposterous in its premise (something I made allowances for, given that it was a young adult story, so by convention it had to focus on young adults) and technology, this one is largely just ridiculous in its technology.

That is to say, this advanced society can craft animals from holographs (or whatevs) and manipulate the weather but somehow can’t edit a reality show in such a way as to turn Katniss into a traitor that all the people of the country hate, a feat which isn’t beyond a multitude of hacks around today.

But we’ll leave that aside.

The movie works partly because it’s based on the premise that the whole thing is starting to unravel, which gives a lot more room for intrigue and mystery. Perhaps not coincidentally, the regime is 75 years old, which is about as long as the USSR lasted (if you include the first few years of the revolution), so maybe that’s as long as a preposterous social order can last or something.

Meanwhile, the characterizations are given more depth. If Lawrence’s Katniss was bottled up most of the first movie, she cuts loose here, with the final shot of the film (really an arbitrary stopping point than the resolution of the story) being basically a close shot of her face as she struggles with a variety of emotions.

I think it goes on for 15 or 20 minutes.

A bold choice for a 5 hour movie.

I kid. It’s about two-and-a-half hours and it could’ve been longer. It doesn’t have the feeling of being padded I sometimes got from the first one. It also isn’t so darn self-conscious, which helps. It borrows shamelessly from Roman/Nazi imagery and less from campy ’70s dystopias. I think I’d credit director Francis Lawrence for this; although I like Gary Ross (director of the first film and Seasbiscut and Pleasantivlle), I think Lawrence has more conviction in the quality of the source material.

But getting back to the characterizations, everyone introduced in the first film gets another spin against a backdrop of their world falling apart. Nobody makes better use of this than the previously insufferable Effie (Elizabeth Banks), who just wants everything to be perfect in her little world, but whose sense of fair play, however strained, is not infinitely flexible.

The only one seemingly completely untouched is the incomparable Stanley Tucci, as the smarmy MC of the games.

Hey, remember The Running Man? 1987 Schwarzenegger flick, Paul Michael-Glaser directed and Richard Dawson played the MC. Stronger premise (in that criminals were made to fight for their lives, which is less of a strain on the imagination than innocent children) but overall weaker movie, with Dawson being one of the weaker links.

And it wasn’t really his fault, necessarily. It’s just that he was drawing on a paradigm (game show host) which had limited emotional range. The beauty of Tucci’s Caesar Flickerman is that he’s able to guide the audience through a wide range of emotions, not entirely unlike that you’d see from Bob Costas at the Olympics and, of course, the reality show setting.

Just like the reality show setting, of course, these are all bullshit emotions. But the audience is shallow enough not to care.

Josh Hutcherson may have the hardest role, as the boy who may get the girl of his dreams even though she doesn’t want him. That’s tough. He’s got to be appealing on some levels, but he can’t be too obviously more appealing than the guy she really loves.

But even Lawrence’s Katniss is interesting here. She’s pretty much dragooned into every heroic thing. She’d rather split. She attempts to run and hide. It’s the other characters that stop her. When she tries to sacrifice herself, it seems less heroic and more cowardice or exhaustion. She has PTSD (as do many survivors).

She’s not awful, a la any given Kristen Stewart character, she’s just kind of average in a lot of ways. Like, when she gets hit by a man, she ends up seriously hurt. How often do you see that in a movie?

Anyway, as much as I’ve tried, I don’t find the first movie very re-watchable. This one may be. In any event, I think it’s considerably better and look forward to the conclusion, even if they did split it into two more damn movies.

One of the reasons Pixar is so revered around here is that, as parents, you have to see a lot of movies you wouldn’t normally see. So, when a kid’s movie has the inevitable sequel that just phones it in, you just kind of grit your teeth and get through it. Bad enough to even have an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, worse to have a sequel with the identical plot and a “well, they’re gonna see it anyway, so don’t bother doing anything interesting” attitude.

I said to The Boy after this, if it had been a sequel to Madagascar, we would’ve had the nerdy Bill Gates guy and his squid gun back, and the mom again, with the same Gru-trying-to-impress-her plot and on and on.

In a lot of ways, the central comic relief of these movies—the minions—is just a derivative of the little green dudes from Toy Story, but they’ve made them funny and with sort-of personalities and their weird little made-up language that make the execution unique to these films. This is good.

It’s fine (even necessary) to steal ideas, the only real sin is just ripping it off and adding nothing. (As I’ve commented on “The Family Guy”, I’m pretty sure they have, by this point, redone every gag in Airplane, often with no change.) This goes even when you’re ripping off yourself.

Not to pick on Madagascar too much, but you know they’re always gonna do that “I Like To Move It” dance, and they’re always gonna have the “hilarious” old grannie punching out someone or something tough, and so on.

So, what’s great about this sequel is that it’s not any of those things. Think of a gag from the first one and you won’t see it again here. The fierce dog? Well, he’s there, but just a little. Gru’s mom? Shows up at the end.

The girls’ angst over Gru (and vice-versa) that was the central plot point of the original? Nowhere to be seen.

This is a great thing. Nothing cheapens characters like undoing the dramatic arc of the previous film so that you can reuse it in a sequel.

I doubt the Barbarian cared or noticed, even, though she did like the film a whole lot. (More than Turbo, less than Monsters U.)

The premise of the film is that Gru (Steve Carell, again doing his indeterminate Eastern European accent) is sort of down on his luck, because he’s no longer in the super-villain business, and his efforts to repurpose his lab and minions to more productive ends has resulted in some really bad tasting jellies.

So he gets his mojo back, in a fashion, by working for the good guys in trying to capture a villain who has a nefarious plan for world conquest. He does this by going undercover in the mall with a quirky-but-lovely secret agent (Kristen Wiig). There, they settle on a Mexican restaurateur (Benjamin Bratt) as the likely villain, though there are some twists and red herrings along the way.

Russell Brand is back as Dr. Nefario, in a much smaller role. Moises Arias (Rico Suave on “Hannah Montana”) plays the young latino paramour of Gru’s eldest daughter (still played by the not-yet-skanky Miranda Cosgrove).

In summary: It felt like they were trying; it felt like they weren’t so creatively bankrupt they had to lean on the gags and ideas of the original; there was enough detail to suggest a rich world with a long history, and to make some rather subtle jokes and references; and they gave it a new, dramatically satisfying story arc that’s almost subversive in its conventionality (Gru needs a wife and mother to his girls).

As I said The Barb liked it, but so did The Boy and I.

Two couples find out their six-year-old sons were switched at birth and must decide whether to switch them back or leave them where they are.

Challenge Level: Japanese

This is a difficult topic to tackle well. It’s easy to set up but lends itself to getting mired down in dramatics, and it certainly doesn’t lend itself to satisfactory resolutions.

Writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda gives us a glimpse at the two couples: One, an affluent city couple, polished, refined, intelligent with a corporate climbing dad around 40 and a stay-at-home mom who dotes on her only child; the other, a more rustic couple, a small-town shop owner, who’s closer to 50, and his wife who have two other kids, and squabble and struggle to make ends meet.

The country couple seem mostly focused on the lawsuit money they’re anticipating, with the father sort of passive-aggressively agreeing to whatever the mother says, so you start out being more sympathetic to the city couple.

Meanwhile, the movie assures us that, in 100% of the cases, when babies are switched they’re always switched back. This is the Japanese factor: a child is yours because he’s your blood, not for any other reason.

But as the movie progresses, we get deeper looks into the two families, and the buffoonish older father, besides having skills the younger one doesn’t, views his life through the prism of his role as a father. The young city father barely notices his family, devoting his energy to work.

That’s a gross oversimplification, however. One thing this movie does really well is not give you an easy out. At times you think you’re gonna end up hating city dad, but then his genuine love for the child he raised surfaces, and you realize a lot of his distastefulness is just him conforming to cultural expectations.

This movie has about the happiest possible ending for a movie about switched children without completely destroying suspension of disbelief, and The Boy and I were both moved by the story and presentation. Even at two hours, without any big, splashy scenes, it never felt too long.

This is one of those movies that feels organic, like the actors are their characters and the cameras were just lying around. But of course that takes a lot of effort and good technical skills all around.

There were clearly some aspects of this movie we couldn’t appreciate: allusions to culture that were lost on us, like A Touch Of Sin, for example. But we still really enjoyed it. I think it’s too late for the 2014 Foreign Language Oscar, but I wouldn’t be surprised it nominated in 2015.

Or, if you like, Harry Potter and the Great Expectations. OK, no Daniel Radcliffe, but Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter and Robbie Coltrane are in this Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) interpretation of the Dickens classic.

Which is not, it cannot be emphasized enough, apparently, the classic 1946 David Lean version of the same story. Nor is it the “South Park” version, but nobody seems to be holding that against it.

I don’t have much truck with Dickens. I tried reading The Pickwick Papers once; it was so dense with what were, essentially, the pop culture references of the day (specifically politics, which is just self-important pop culture) that, well, it just didn’t seem worth the effort.

Well, it was his first work, and he was paid by the word, and probably mostly concerned with keeping the gravy train going. Probably a bad choice to start. My fault, really.

In any event, I mention it because there are Dickens purists out there, and between the Lean purists and the Dickens purists, this movie doesn’t have much of a chance.

The Boy and I really liked it, however. The story is more or less the one you know and love, or not. They pretty much show it all in the trailer, which is kind of a shame because the third act twist is a good one. If there’s a serious flaw with this film it might be that it’s too aware of what has come before.

It clocks in at about two hours and moves briskly the whole time, which means scenery must be chewed at a breakneck pace. That’s not a dig, there are a whole lot of acting chops crammed into this timeframe and, in typically English fashion, alongside the big names are many lesser known actors carrying their weight.

Jeremy Irvine (whose only other major credit is the lead in War Horse) plays Pip likably, but Holliday Grainger (who, at 25, is a grizzled old acting veteran) perhaps had the tougher job playing Estella likably, as in many interpretations, she’s rather detestable.

This is a relatively optimistic interpretation—something I think that bothered some of the purists, although it’s debatable whether the Dickens meant it to be as bleak as it is often portrayed—and so Estella must suffer the scars of her twisted association with Havisham, but also reveal, however subtly, something redeemable, and something worthy of being redeemed. Grainger has a kind of porcelain beauty to her that has some warmth, and Newell, too, is fairly skilled at making her unattractive at times and not at others.

Helena Bonham-Carter threads that needle very nicely, too. At times she looks almost ghostly beautiful, like a shadow of her young self, and at other times like a hag, but even if when she looks “good”, she looks like the live-action version of herself in The Corpse Bride.

If we’re being honest, though, all the roles have challenges. Dickens isn’t really about safe, subdued strokes, I don’t think, and the characters are broad—perhaps too broad for modern audiences.

I don’t know; I’m just trying to figure out why a lot of people seem put off or outright hostile.

It’s a good story with memorable characters. It rewards your time in the chair, and isn’t self-indulgent. So, I guess I’d recommend if you’re open to Dickens but not fanatical about him.

The Flower demurred, by the way, because she figured she had already seen it.

Look, in any movie of Robert Redford vs. the Sea, I’m going to root for the sea. That’s just how it is.

We went to see Great Expectations but there was a traffic jam, so we opted instead for the latest Israeli documentary on their Prime Ministers. But we were a little late for that, too, and the only seats were down front—and there was a Q&A with the filmmakers.

Q&A can be fun, but it’s a little ostentatious to be sitting in the front row with our giant-sized sodas and popcorns slurping and chomping away while people talk about the existential crises that Israel has confronted over the years.

Gauche, eh, what?

So we ended up seeing this movie I hadn’t planned on seeing, All Is Lost, starring that anti-Tea Party bigot. He had to come out vocally against the Tea Party, too, right beforehand. So while I’m not pleased I contributed my dollars to its box office, I’m glad it didn’t go over the five million mark.

Heh. Take that Sundance Kid.

This is the second film from J.C. Chandor, writer/director of the muddled Margin Call, and this is a better film, because even if it makes no sense from a nautical standpoint, the struggle is always immediate and therefore more real feeling. (Though, like Margin Call, it really doesn’t make much sense even to amateur eyes, and every seasoned sailor I’ve talked to just sort of rolls their eyes.)

This is, essentially, Gravity, but on a boat. Only without George Clooney, and with Robert Redford in the Sandra Bullock role.

Redford’s boat hits a shipping container, and he spends the next 100-plus minutes in increasingly dire situations. This is all told in flashback, mind you, so we’re spared any uncomfortable suspense. Although at some point the movie passes the opening monologue, though it was not at all clear to me when that was.

The sum total of what we learn about Redford, beside that he’s a bad sailor, comes from that monologue. In which we learn, he has regrets. Well, yeah: He’s drowning out in the Indian Ocean alone somewhere, that’d tend to bring up the remorse.

That’s it.

So a movie like this tends to rest on how much you relate to the lead actor, and political nonsense aside, I’m ready to call it on Redford. Much like Peter O’Toole, a great deal of his acting was in his face, and his face is little-old-lady-ish at this point. He’s nowhere near as washed out as O’Toole, whose age is positively distracting, but it seems to me like he hasn’t adapted to not being gorgeous.

Your mileage may vary, of course. But Gravity would’ve been twice as much better had they kept Sandra Bullock in her undies the whole time, and this film would’ve been twice as good had they used someone a little younger.

Shallow? OK, yeah, maybe. Blame Hollywood.

James Cromwell probably could’ve done a great job, and the $5M it took in might have been a profit. (Except it might not have even made that much, given that Still Mine only took in slightly over $1M, and is a much better film.)

Well, what do I know? Redford’s got fans, still. Critics gave this a near perfect score. Audiences, besides turning away in droves, are more lukewarm. I can’t see it being a big video/cable hit either. Maybe a last-chance shot at an Oscar for Redford?

It’s competently directed, I guess. I keep thinking of all the movies we’ve seen recently where the montage—the dialogue free stuff—is the best part. I somehow think more could’ve been done here. It’s so literal that I was actually starting to crave something more metaphorical, some kind of larger picture than “What kind of schmuck doesn’t have an emergency transponder on his life raft? Don’t they all have that now?”

So, yeah, with bolder direction or better acting, it could’ve been good. That Tom Hanks fellow did good in his lost-at-sea movie, right? The Boy shared my sense of ennui over the proceedings.

Despite it all, I actually wanted to begrudgingly like it, and I sorta guess I did maybe. I didn’t hate it. Meh.

Serious You Guys slavery was bad.

I mean, in case you didn’t know. Americans wear their slavery history hair-shirt like the French wear their treatment of the Algerians.

It can be tiresome.

So, a movie like 12 Years A Slave is kind of refreshing.

Turns out racism isn’t a black American billionairess who has some difficulty window shopping a $38,000 handbag in Switzerland. It’s more about, you know, the degradation of an entire country.

This is, I think, a pretty accurate depiction of slavery, at least in a movie sense. The story, if you don’t know it, is about a free black man named Solomon Northrup who was lured to Washington DC where he was drugged, kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. As the title suggests, he spends twelve years in bondage until finally freed.

And, really, knowing that doesn’t mitigate the power of that eventual liberation.

Why this film stands out from other treatments of slavery, I think, is that it shows the richness of the degradation caused by slavery. Just from the get-go, the fact that a human being is a commodity allows them to be “stolen” and also “disposed of” as the whim suits.

As Solomon is given a new identity and sold, we see the next level of degradation: That of a good Christian who hates the system, and sees the evil in it, but is economically bound by it. However, most of the story takes place on the plantation of a not very good (though still very devout) Christian whose awfulness is given free reign by his complete power over other human beings.

The blacks themselves are given a human range of states to be in, as well. This is kind of nice, as the urge to sanctify can be overwhelming. But there’s Solomon, who feels the degradation acutely, as a free man, and there are slaves who have gotten along with their masters, and one who his her master’s favorite mistress, with much favors associated, and one who wants to be killed rather than be in the same position, and so on.

Slavery affects everyone who takes a part in it. That’s the point. It would make sense, of course, for Solomon to have penned a memoir that highlights that, but even in situations where the racial factor wasn’t the key factor (say, in ancient Rome), and Greeks were enslaved for intellect, it was still degradation.

You’ll hear that the film is brutal in its violence, and while that’s true, it’s also rather restrained. Except for one scourging, director Steve McQueen leaves a whole lot to the imagination, which is sufficient, as we’ve seen in many movies this year. The social situation is so refined (antebellum South) on the one hand that it throws the savagery of the system into sharp contrast.

Chiweetel Ejiofor (Love Actually, Children of Men) is an obvious choice for a Best Actor nomination, having to play—as Northrup must have played—many different characters in order to stay alive as a slave. He has a quality of nobility, of Everyman, even, that makes you root for him from the get-go. Newcomer Lupita Nyong’o is just heart-rending as the slave who wants Solomon to kill her.

Couple that with a moving score by Hans Zimmer and photography by Roger Deakins, and I think we’re looking at a whole lot of Oscar here.

The Boy loved it.

A French film-noir thriller about a series of seamy sex crimes? That could be good.

Or, it could be Bastards, the latest film from French director Clair Denis, best known for the ‘80s racial flick Chocolat, and in no danger of being best known for this muddled, murky, mess of a film that feels overlong at 80 minutes.

There’s some good imagery. The acting is okay in that New Age way, with desultory monologues and lots of barely interested sex.

I’d say the plot is a mess, but it’s really not. It’s actually a very simple plot told in a very convoluted matter, with the movie not being exactly in chronological sequence but not being careful about signalling deviations from the main timeline.

It’s like Girl With A Dragon Tattoo infused with French ennui.

The story? Well, as near as I can tell, a merchant marine (? sailor?) comes back from the sea when his brother-in-law commits suicide. He starts an investigation into matters and discovers that everything—everything and everyone sucks.

I could elaborate, but what’s the point? Each layer of degradation gives way to a deeper, more disgusting layer, all of which culminates in a pointless ending that gives nihilism a bad name.

Yeah, did not care for it. Neither did The Boy. We’d say we hated it, but it sort of drained all our energy out of us, so we couldn’t work up much more than a meh.

I had avoided this James Gandolfini movie for several weeks because I had the idea that it wasn’t very good. Something about the advertising turned me off, and that it was his last film made me suspicious of the beatific reviews.

I liked James Gandolfini. I’ve never been a gangster guy, so I never watched “The Sopranos”. I always figured him for one of the great character actors who got supremely lucky to find a role that really allowed him to shine and was amazingly popular. But he showed great range in The Last Castle and Killing Them Softly, even if his role was pointless in the latter.

Here, he’s less Soprano-y than ever, as he’s a kind of lovable doof, a good man with a passion but modest ambitions, a 50-year-old showing all his age but still a bit of a romantic at heart.

Yeah, we have a romantic comedy for 50-year-olds here. Which also made me a bit suspicious. Is this the tail end of the Boomer generation lamenting its agedness or a new crop of narcissists coming to the fore? I wondered.

Actually, though, it’s good. It’s really good. A little melancholy, in the way aging is melancholy. But kind of optimistic in its unflinching look at the lives of people who have entered middle-age divorced and self-absorbed.

Wait, is that even possible?

Well, you be the judge. The lead here is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a masseuse who travels around the streets of L.A. with her table, catering to a bunch of people who don’t seem to have jobs. And whom, frankly, she doesn’t seem to like much, because they’re all so freaking self-absorbed.

So, yeah, pretty accurate take on Los Angeles in 2013.

Eva (Louis-Dreyfus) is dragged to a party by married couple friends Sarah and Will (played by Toni Colette and Ben Falcone) where she meets a woman she quickly comes to idolize, Marianne (Catherine Keener), and a guy, Albert (Gandolfini) to whom she flatly states the unattractiveness of everyone at the party.

Anyway, Eva is a single (divorced) mother, as is Marianne, as Albert is a divorced dad, and their relationships to their ex-spouses is contrasted with the frayed relationship of Sarah and Will. And all their relationships with their children who are, themselves, starting to date and move away from home.

Louis-Dreyfus is perfect for the role here as she can be very, very awful and still be kind of sympathetic, like things have just gotten away from her. In fact, you could imagine this role having been written for her. Though it has a personal feel that makes me think writer/director Nicole Holofcener experienced a lot of this stuff firsthand.

It’s a good script, too. Funny, smart, and human. Also kind, where our views on characters can flip very suddenly based on something they do or say—an unexpected tenderness or expression of genuine feeling.

In the romcom genre, we have to assume the two are going to get together but this also has kind of an “indie” feel which means it can go any way, and even the way it does resolve isn’t entirely dispositive. Part of this is that while Eva’s character arc is really strong, the enormity of her crimes would pretty much kill any relationship.

That’s kind of a funny realization to have in a romcom, by the way. The Wacky Misunderstanding is the staple of RCs, and (pre-Nora Ephron, anyway) has to be shared or at least provoked by some misunderstanding of human nature or something to mitigate it. (Or it can be glibly dismissed, a la Jewtopia.)

Eva’s just awful. She has a weakness that causes her to exploit her circumstances in an absolutely devastating fashion. And her character completes her growth arc in a manner that Albert cannot possibly be aware of. That leaves him to be a saint or a sap to even consider taking her back.

Well, maybe the ending is dispositive but I had trouble viewing it that way because of that aspect of the film. Really the only weakness in the movie, perhaps necessitated by the structure of romantic comedies themselves.

OK, it’s a pretty serious flaw. It relies heavily on the audience’s sentimentality toward the two to even suggest the plausibility that they might get back together.

I didn’t care that much, though, at the time.

The Boy really, really liked it, though, which is interesting, since he isn’t at all the target audience. I chalk that up to the basic humor and pace of the script, and the fine acting all around.

You sometimes—if you’re a very, very frequent moviegoer, like The Boy and I—meander from disappointment to mediocrity and go for surprisingly long stretches without seeing anything really good.

I mean, if you’re careful, I think you could probably see 50 really fine movies in the theater in a year. But if you’re into the triple-digits, as we are, you’re going to have a lot of misses among the hits. Especially if, like The Boy, your objective is about going to the movies than seeing something in particular. (Like me, The Boy enjoys the focus and relative solitude of the movies, only in spades. I once invited a friend of his to come with us, and he uninvited him, saying “Movies aren’t really a social thing for me.”)

I’ve created a monster. Yes. But he’s a monster with good taste and a keen eye for the good and bad in cinema. This, ultimately, is the point: To view movies with an eye toward the art, rather than as just a passive experience.

So after our recent disappointments, The Boy proclaimed, “I want to see a good movie.” (He hasn’t seen Clerks yet, so he doesn’t get why that amuses me.) But, you know, post-Summer/pre-Oscar doldrums, so there aren’t a lot of options.

This movie, Prisoners, had amazing buzz, and we’d somehow missed it when it was local, so I hauled us down to Pasadena and, yeah, this is a gem. Written by unknown-to-me Aaron Guzikowski and directed by Denis Vilanueeve (who directed the contrived Incendies), this is a complex film that doesn’t sell out its basic role of telling an entertaining story.

Which is damn good, because it’s two-and-a-half hours long.

This is the story of the Dovers (Hugh Jackman, Maria Bello) and the Birches (Terence Howard, Viola Davis) who are good friends whose children are kidnapped. On the case is Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) who quickly finds a connection at the home of Holly Jones (Melissa Leo) and her simple nephew Alex (Paul Dano).

The nephew is targeted early on but released by Gyllenhaal, who is convinced that he’s as simple as he appears. But Jackman hears the boy taunting him as he’s released and decides to take the law into his own hands.

This movie is nearly as brutal and contrived as Incendies though it works a lot better because the twists and turns of the convoluted plot manage to both surprise and straighten out the story (i.e., when you get the whole picture, it’s not really that complicated), and because there are frequent suspense and even some action scenes.

This gives a framework for some really powerful acting, coming from a place that’s more easily relatable. How far would you go to save your child? Jackman is convincing in his role, and really the lead, here.

Lotta red herrings which, come to think of it, reminds me of Incendies, too.

Did I mention it’s brutal? Yeah, it’s brutal. And it dares you to both empathize with Jackman as he descends into his darkest place and dares you not to, as we learn what happens to the kidnapped children.

It veers away from two easy plot pitfalls: Painting Jackman as a cartoon because he loves guns and Jesus, and he’s a survivalist, and bringing in race (since the Birches are black). The only real weakness I saw was that Jackman’s faith in God seemed superficial, like a religious person wouldn’t look to God in times of real trouble—or deliberately turn away.

It kind of felt like the people involved didn’t get that about the religious. Not having a sense of what God is for, they didn’t bring any depth to that aspect of the role. But that’s so much better than doing it badly, I didn’t mind too much.

So, yes, we loved it. It was a good antidote to the wan sort of directionless films we’d been seeing, and this was both tight (despite the length) and deep.

Did I mention it’s brutal, though? Yeah. It is. If you’re the squeamish type, you might want to steer clear.

The first Yiddish Canadian narrative drama, The Pin! Look, you know you’re in trouble when they start trotting out the “firsts”. I mean, maybe the first Canadian movie was a big deal—although, probably not since people were just shooting stuff without any real sense of history (or at least anyone caring much). Maybe the first Yiddish movie. Maybe even the first Yiddish Canadian movie!

But I’m guessing there must’ve been a Canadian documentary done in Yiddish at some point, and very possibly a Yiddish comedy, and doubtless Canadian movies about Jews, so we’re down to the first Canadian narrative drama in Yiddish.

This is a very low budget film. As a result, it combines a recent favorite padding device (extended shots of very nice scenery) with a classic low-budget ‘50s technique (a narrator to exposit) that basically kills the film’s momentum at every turn.

Outside of that, it kind of reminded me of a dark version of The Notebook, without the horrible pandering.

The story is that a Jewish girl fleeing the destruction of her village wanders into a barn where a Jewish boy who has also fled is hiding. They hide out, they talk, they’re suspicious, but they get over it, they fall in love and then are separated.

None of this is spoilers, by the way, the movie is entirely the flashback of the boy, now grown old, who is a shomer (one who watches over the dead), who recognizes his long-lost love when he’s tasked to take care of her.

It’s actually a fine story, with good acting and even direction, but there’s only about 40 minutes of it stretched out into more than double that.

It may seem odd, but this is one of the advantages of seeing films in the theater. This is the kind of film it would be very hard to focus on anywhere else and, again, it is a good story, worthy of some attention, but so sparse as to be virtually unwatchable if there’s any distraction.

I hope the director gets a chance—and the money—to flesh out her next idea.

The Boy says “Meh”.

Why she’s so dumb, it really is a shame
She thinks “Muscle Shoals” is a boxer’s name
–Rudy Vallee, “Kitty from Kansas City”

I was just listening to this (highly dated) Rudy Vallee song (no, they’re not all highly dated) when I came across this reference to Muscle Shoals, within days of seeing this documentary, Muscle Shoals, and, perhaps most interestingly, the two have nothing to do with each other.

OK, maybe that’s the opposite of interesting. Muscle Shoals, a small town in Alabama, was a topic of interest in Vallee’s day because of a dam and munitions plant, but this is a story about the music scene which started up in the ‘60s and had a specific funky sound that defined entire subgenres of music fortwo decades. (It’s still going today but, shhhh, it’s about as dated as Vallee.)

So, what we have here is another paean to the not-waning-fast-enough era of the Baby Boomers.

So, using the method I described in the Darby documentary, we have three parts: the topic, the skillful handling of the topic, and the stance taken about the topic.

Factually, the topic is a fine subject for a documentary. The main subject is, or rather should be, Rich Hall, the founder of the Muscle Shoals sound, who came from desperately poor and tragic circumstances to rise to meteoric heights. There’s the story of his rise, and success with turning Aretha Franklin from a vanilla girl-group lead singer to the Queen of Soul, Wilson Pickett, and so on. Then his falling out with his core group of musicians, and his rise to even higher heights.

Lotta good stuff here, with Hall getting screwed by a variety of people, though, honestly, in most cases, you just have people acting in their own interests, and he was admittedly hard to work with. Undoubtedly it was his perfectionism, but hey, you wanna make quality art, even if it’s just disposable pop art, you gotta suffer through hundreds of retakes.

It’s also kind of nice that there don’t seem to be a lot of hard feelings. It was a long time ago and most of the motivations that led to trouble were not malicious, so letting bygones be bygones is worth something.

There’s a common theme of shock-and-awe when all these coastal musical types wanna come down to Muscle Shoals to get that authentic black sound, only to find that the musicians were a bunch of redneck crackers. But, yeah, the music industry, at least from all these documentaries, was pretty damned racist back in the ’60s and ’70s.

Anyway, good source material.

So, let’s talk about the handling. It’s…okay. It suffers from a two moderate problems: First, it’s seriously padded out with pictures of the Muscle Shoals area. This is lovely country, undoubtedly. But its relevance to the story is easily communicated with a few shots, not shot after shot after shot.

Perhaps more serious, if more understandable, is the kind of nostalgic shopping list that clutters up these kinds of films. It’s significant to the story that Aretha Franklin got her second wind here, and how they rebounded with Etta James after she left, and that the Rolling Stones were there, and there’s a great section on Lynyrd Skynyrd and the umpteen minute (nine minutes and forty seconds?) original version of “Free Bird”, and so on.

At points, though, we’re getting into music trivia that’s only really good for reliving the past and perhaps scholarly interest. At one point, Hall recounts the death of his dad, and how he turned that into a hit song which, from a topic standpoint made a lot of sense and was touching, but from a musical checklist standpoint had me wondering why I’d never heard this hit song (and why, frankly, it seemed so awful to me).

But, hey, I’m not a music critic. I’m not even a film critic. I just go to a lot of movies. And this was pretty good, just diluted. Not When Comedy Went To School diluted or anything crazy, but enough to rob the narrative of a lot of its power, at least for me.

At the same time, if you were really into that music and that time period, you might completely disagree.

The Boy, who is rather unaware of the time period and not particularly into music, tended to agree. And I kind of think he’s the audience of the future.

Big Ass Spider is a title that raises many questions. For example: Does Big modify Ass, signifying “extremely large”, or does it modify Spider, implying that you have a larger-than-usual ass-spider, a perhaps even more horrifying prospect. Or is, perhaps, the Ass meant as a noun, not an adjective, meaning that it’s the sort of spider that only takes up residence inside the sort of derrieres that Mr. Mixalot would approve?

Of course, it raises none of these questions. It’s merely another low-budget creature feature in the mold of such SyFy films as Sharknado and Mechahalibut vs. The Conqueror Worm, which isn’t in fact a real movie, yet, but give them time.

In fact, The Boy complained that this was basically Arachnoquake, especially in the final act, and thus rather devoid of all suspense.

And yet.

In the chair is Mike Mendez, behind one of the best of all After Dark Horror Festival films, The Gravedancers. In fact—and somewhat inexplicably—this is his first film since that 2006 flick. Mendez is good, if for no other reason than he seems to really care about the product, and also not regard the audience as idiots.

He’s also very good at the horror while also being good at the comedy, which is a tricky balancing act. His movies tend to remind of the best Corman/Griffith collaborations (like Little Shop of Horrors), with heavy Raimi overtones and even a touch of Whedonesque.

So, within the straitjacket of this low-budget giant-monster flick (the limitations of which are so obvious, you’d think the money guys would give the creative guys a little more freedom), what do we get?

Well, powering the film is a buddy picture with Greg Gumberg as an exterminator (Alex), and Lombardo Boyar (Jose) as the hospital janitor who ends up buddying with Alex, and providing most of the workable ideas, as they drive around L.A. in pursuit of a the eponymous arachnid.

It was nice to see Clare Kramer (of Gravedancers) turn up here, even though the romantic subplot couldn’t have been more perfunctory. It had some nice touches but Gravedancers had a much better triangle, and this felt like “well, there has to be a love interest, and the two have to get together at the end.”

There’s actually a kind of unevenness that this shows up: Alex is supposed to be kind of a dunderhead, with José giving him the good ideas, and Kelly (Kramer) is supposed to be a hard-bitten lieutenant (in the Giant Insect Defense Corps, presumably) who is initially turned off by Alex’s goofiness but who is ultimately won over by his astuteness and bravery.

Well, I guess his bravery isn’t really in question.

If I were to hope for a sequel, I’d like to see Kelly back and the two of them having romantic difficulties. (A sequel involving a giant cockroach is set up by the end credits.)

Anyway, the high points of the film are the effectiveness of the very early scare scenes involving very small spiders that don’t look blatantly CGI, and the switch to light humor and action once the blatantly CGI Big Ass Spider appears in the park.

The park in the middle of L.A. where bikini-clad girls play volleyball, apparently, and which I do not know where it is but wish I did.

Anyway. That was another kinda fun part: Seeing L.A. destroyed by a big spider. Not as good as Volcano, in that regard, because the effects—

Eh, I’ll stop bitching about the effects. It used to be that low-budget horror movies understood that their effects were bad, so that they used them sparingly. The last 15 seconds of Corman’s Haunted Palace utterly destroys the otherwise fine, atmospheric film with a 2D model of something like Sigmund The Sea Monster filmed with a wavy effect. But at least it was only the last 15 seconds.

Anyway, I said I’d stop bitching. And one day, maybe, I will.

Inexplicably, the movie features Ray Wise and (briefly) Lin Shaye (who were co-stars of the ultra-creepy Dead End) and Patrick Bachau and, explicably, a cameo by Troma found Lloyd Kaufman.

Again, the thing that makes it work, to the extent that it can escape the SyFy Formula Ghetto, is that at frequent intervals, there’s something little that’s somewhat unexpected, something funny—not much scary after the first few scenes, sadly—something that says, “Hey, we’re not just here to collect a check.”

I remember the Sharknado screenplay guys joking, while the movie was airing, that they’d have the script for the sequel done by the time the airing was over—but that’s only half-a-joke. They’re making crap, they know they’re making crap, and they’re just kind of riding a wave caused by a brief burst of over-the-top creativity that they then completely fail to follow-up on, producing a movie that just goes through the motions.

It’ll probably be overlooked, but you can really tell the difference. A producer with half-a-brain would give Mendez a bigger budget and even more creative freedom and see what he came up with. Also, he’d make Gumberg and Boyar into a light X-Files-Meets-Tremors TV series. But I don’t know how many producers can meet that fraction of cerebral mass.

OK, I’m done. It’s not great. It’s way better than Sharknado. There’s a lot of talent that could be unleashed here.

Oh, I didn’t know this was the Gravedancers guy going in, I should note, even though in retrospect, the movies remind me of each other.

Extra shoutout for Lombardo Boyar, who plays his character just right, as a sort of an admiring Sancho Panza to Gumberg’s Quixote.

Also, this has the most unusual product placement I’ve ever seen in the film, with Alex running around in a Western Exterminators van.

We weren’t exactly clamoring to see this wildly hyped action space pic with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. If anything, the wild praise made me suspicious, even if I rather liked Alfonso Cuaron’s turn at the Harry Potter franchise (Azkaban) and didn’t hate Children of Men. Whatever: We’re still in the post-summer doldrums, and desperate times call for any excuse for popcorn, so there we were.

And?

It’s over-hyped. Not really its fault. It’s a solid action flick, considerably better than most stranded in space movies (like Marooned and those awful Mars movies from the last decade), and it’s a nice showcase for Ms. Bullock (and even Clooney is perfectly cast here).

Some who saw it insist it’s a good vehicle for 3D. I didn’t see it in 3D because 3D annoys the crap out of me, and having seen it, I think it would’ve detracted. But note my predisposition.

The story is minimal. Seasoned astronaut Clooney and novice astronaut/comm-satellite-specialist Bullock are repairing a satellite when their ship is taken out by Russian mayhem. I forget what exactly it was. A satellite explodes and ends up taking a bunch of other satellites with it, and the whole thing creates a debris storm circling the earth at 24 hours at whatever height our heroes are currently at, and with enough density to cause trouble.

No, it’s not realistic.

Or, let me say, I wouldn’t use the word “realistic” to describe it. There are some more realistic choices made in this film than many other films of this ilk. For example, there’s no sound in most of the situations where there shouldn’t be sound. Things float around well in excess of your typical zero-G movie. A great deal of attention is paid to the no-gravity situation, e.g., when Sandra Bullock rests her head, instead of falling back on the chair headrest, it floats forward.

In fact, if anything, they probably overdid it. It seemed like the zero-G persisted into scenes taking place on re-entry.

The debris field is way more visible than it would actually be in the darkness of space, and individual particles seemed to be making noise. Real life would lack the suspense. You’d either never see it coming, then you’d be dead, or you’d see a hole appear nearby you, or (most likely) nothing. You’d just never know.

But that’d be boring.

We seem to have been on a vector for the past 50+ years where everything has to be “more realistic” (even our superhero movies!), but mostly this involves shifting the unrealism around to things that we have less knowledge of. (For example, superhero movies seem to revolve entirely around a lack of understanding of Newtonian physics that our grandparents would probably have found preposterous.)

So, despite the cries that this is “the most realistic ever!!”, it’s really just a matter of conforming to our limited notions of what reality is.

Which is fine, but a good thing to be aware of. It would help the world a great deal if we realized we aren’t really the apotheosis of culture and evolution, rising out of a sea of ancient barbarism.

I digress, but that’s probably because there isn’t much more to say about this movie. If you like Sandra Bullock and stories of struggling-for-life, this is a movie you will probably enjoy.

The movie fosters a bit of characterization involving Bullock’s character and her daughter and I couldn’t really decide whether or not I liked this. On the one hand, it was awful ham-handed. On the other, well, All Is Lost (think of it as Gravity, but on the ocean) is completely devoid of such background material, and suffers from it, I think.

But I think that Bullock is almost inherently empathetic (except to certain feminists, as noted*), and if the movie needed this underlying character development, it could’ve done with a lot less of it.

Nonetheless, The Boy and I liked it. The Flower demurred, deciding that the trailer looked like the entire movie (astute) and that it didn’t look very interesting (your mileage may vary).

*For double-super-awesomeness, you could read a review of how the movie is a betrayal of all things feminine here. It’s the sort of review that could only not be satirical in our modern world.

The next feature had such a tantalizing premise that we swallowed our disappointment over Cannon Fodder and marched in to see it.

It was called Demon’s Rook and the idea is that a young boy communes with demons until one takes him to the underworld, where he lives for a decade or more, only emerging as a confused, heavily bearded adult. And, as it turns out, leading a bunch of other demons up into our world, where they wreak havoc.

The other hook this had going for it was that all the effects were practical. The director, James Sizemore, was also the special effects chief and star of the film (with his wife Ashley Jo). The makeup is quite good, very old school ‘80s but lovingly done, and by itself sets this movie apart from other low budget flicks.

Which is why the movie itself is such a crushing disappointment, in its way far worse than Cannon Fodder, which didn’t really have much promise.

The best parts of this movie were the stretches without any dialogue, and another long stretch where the dialogue is entirely in demon-ese (no subtitles).

Another amusing thing was how it hearkened back to ’80s, ’70s and (at points) even ’60s horror flicks. It starts out squarely in the ’80s, during that Creepshow-inspired wave of monster-oriented horror features, videos and TV shows. Then at other parts it evokes ’70s cult-oriented flicks like The Devils’ Rain. At one point, there’s a virtual go-go dance with demons, a la ’60s. And the ending is kinda ’60s nihilistic and reminded me of, like, Manos or Dementia 13 or something from that ilk.

Apart from that, it’s a complete and utter mess. It’s said that it took over two years to make with all the consequent cast and crew issues that would occur when you make a movie over the course of two years, even if it’s mostly with friends and family. At the same time, Mrs. Sizemore can be seen in videos from a year ago talking about how “principal photography” is about to begin, and the movie was first aired in March.

Both things are possible, of course. It might be that many of the scenes were filmed over the course of two years with little more purpose than “this will be cool” and an idea about demons terrorizing a rural community.

Anyway, it’s a sort of depressing experience, precisely because there’s some real talent involved, not just in the makeup (obviously) but Sizemore seems to have a real facility for the visual aspect of filmmaking. But this comes off as sort of special-effects porno: the non-SFX portions are just filler.

We were so bummed at the end, we gave up on the festival.

Our backup theater in North Hollywood played host this year to the Los Angeles Screamfest. Now in it’s 13th year, I was not even aware it was a thing until seeing its movies turn up on familiar screens. And I wouldn’t have been aware any other way. The After Dark Horror Fest had a billboard/newspaper/radio budget.

But, of course, that’s not around any more, and maybe that ad budget is part of why.

The Screamfest features dozens of films shown over a ten day period, so you can’t really see them all. I talked The Boy into going to one show, which kind of interestingly turned out to be an Israeli zombie flick.

So, even here, we had subtitles.

Cannon Fodder is a low budget World War Z and unfortunately, that’s about all you can say about it. The premise is as hoary as any you’ll find: Basically, a mad scientist working for the government created a disease to turn the enemy into zombies, or maybe to turn soldiers into zombies or something.

A special forces squad is required to go into the enemy territory and retrieve the scientist, or maybe just his blood (which for some reason would hold a cure). The Boy called it “Call of Duty: The Movie”, based on the movements and capabilities of the team.

The acting is strong here, and the characters are pretty decent, with a conservative Jew, a Russian and an African alongside the squad leader, a disillusioned intelligence agent called in for that one-last-job, and Yafit Shalev (who has a producer credit) as the Scientist’s Daughter.

Shalev looked very much like another Israeli actress we’ve seen recently but is not, in fact, that actress, having no other feature credits than this.

This movie makes a lot of rookie mistakes, sadly, that keep it from ever getting very engaging. Instead of enforcing the movie’s strengths, which is the acting, it goes with a more big budget formula of knocking off the characters and having lots of cheesy action sequences and explosions, none of which it had the budget to pull off convincingly.

Like a lot of big budget movies, it’s more a series of things-that-happen rather than a logical sequence of events, carefully plotted out.

Even at 90 minutes, it seems to drag on. It was bad enough that The Boy figured that was enough movies for the day, and we would’ve headed home until I read him the description for the NEXT feature…

(By the way, this movie has some awards attached to it, and some critical praise. I believe that’s because the Israeli government is the villain of the piece.)

I ask The Boy and The Flower what lessons they had learned from Running Wild after seeing it. After they made their feeble guesses about the moral of the story, I set them straight:

1. Horse people are crazy.
2. Always get the mineral rights.

Running Wild is the story of cowboy poet Dayton O. Hyde who has gained notoriety over the past decades as an author and a protector of wild mustangs. If you look at the reviews for this, they’ll talk about a heart-warming story about a noble guy who’s saving magnificent beasts.

I presume those are horse people.

Dayton O. Hyde is a cowboy, in the classic sense of a guy who decides how things are going to be and then sets about making things that way, and really doesn’t talk much about it. I mean, that’s a kind of archetypal cowboy, along with the whole farming and ranching thing.

This outlines his early life, with his apparently equally taciturn father, his time in school, his WWII service, some of his cowboy antics, and his time working a huge ranch with his wife and five kids. There are some anecdotes about wild mustangs and the government’s rather barbaric handlings of them.

Then, one of his daughters is killed by a horse. What actually occurred is a little vague.

His reaction to this is interesting. If he blamed his wife, it’s not apparent. He certainly didn’t blame the horse, which of course is sensible, but he could be forgiven for it maybe putting him off horses for a little while.

But, you know, horse-persons aren’t like that.

Instead, the lesson he takes from this is that we all have a brief time on this earth, and if he’s going to save those mustangs, like he’s always wanted to, he better get moving. So he heads out to the Black Hills of South Dakota to start a wild horse sanctuary.

Pro tip: Googling “Mustang Ranch” will not bring this guy up.

Family? Well, they were all busy with the current, ginormous ranch in Oregon, and South Dakota is quite a trip. So, yeah. Oh, well.

It’s like that Randy Newman song:

Oh my mother’s in Saint Louis
And my wife’s in Tennessee
So I’m going to Arizona
With a banjo on my knee

One of the sons, Andrew, I think, is frequently interviewed, and seems to be even more taciturn than his father. He’s both supportive of his father and yet still fairly devastated by being abandoned by him 20-odd years ago. You can tell just in the way he answers the questions, or doesn’t, without him needing to say much.

One of his daughters is particularly distraught that he’s out in South Dakota where she, crippled with arthritis (I think it is), can’t really get to him.

The final portion of the film concerns his efforts on the conservatory, his support of the local Indian tribes (we just can’t stop messing with the Indians, can we?) and his effort to stop some uranium mining that a Canadian company wants to do under his land.

I thought this was kind of interesting: There’s a little on how the company buzzes the horses with helicopters (which apparently freak them out due to the helicopters done by the government to round up their ancestors, or something). There’s a little on the potential dangers of mining. There’s a little on the activism. And in South Dakota, owning land means you own the surface of it, not the mineral rights, which has to be one of the classic government power grabs.

But even if the horse people are being irrational regarding the mining, that really should be their right: It’s a big world, and the Canadians don’t have any right to that uranium. Let ‘em eat frack or whatever.

Overall, an interesting film that we all liked, but also padded to 90 minutes with a lot of landscape shots.

Have you noticed we’ve seen a lot of documentaries this year? Although this is the sort of thing that ebbs and flows (like foreign films), this year may represent a sea change, in that our preferred local theater is showing dozens of them in short order, apparently due to requirements laid down by the Oscar folk.

They’ve probably been doing this for years, but with our former preferred theater shutting down, and The Boy’s three-times-a-week habit, well, there’s likely to be more in the future.

This one is particularly noteworthy not because it’s about Stephen Hawking, but because it’s an autobiographical documentary about Hawking.

He points out, off the bat, that people probably know him more as the guy in the wheelchair than with any understanding of what he’s done to be a famous physicist. And, actually, after hearing him talk about what made him famous, I still don’t get it.

In a nutshell, he broke into the scene by proving the Big Bang didn’t need a God to make it happen. He did this with math, apparently. While I’m sure the math was brilliant, the Boy and I were sitting there thinking, “OK, but how did that get there, asshole?”

This is not entirely fair, of course. Scientists can’t be answering questions with “God” any more than they can answer the question of “God”, but Hawking’s an avowed materialist and atheist—and perhaps not coincidentally, ruthlessly ambitious and concerned with worldly success.

In fact, I’m convinced that a non-insignificant part of his motivation making this is that he wants an Oscar.

Let’s not be churlish: He’s an interesting guy who brought astrophysics to the masses, which is no mean achievement, and he did so while suffering a debilitating disease that nearly killed him a couple of times.

The movie is part personal life, part career ambitions, and part—probably the smallest part—physics. Apart from the Big Bang thing, he lightly covers a couple of other big theories he had. But mostly it’s about his life growing up, his wife and children, the writing of his book, the use of technology to make that talking chair thing, his divorce and post-divorce relationships, and all the various ways he’s been feted in recent years.

Which is not boasting, it must be said: I’m not exactly hip but I could name quite a few Hawking references off the top of my head that they just didn’t cover in the movie (probably due to lack of time).

However much the guy loves himself, though, the movie sticks to a manageable 90 minute length. Even so, toward the end it felt like it was wandering gratuitously into self-congratulation.

We did like it, though, the Boy and I. But it really shouldn’t be in the running for an Oscar given the competition.

You know, I don’t know if we should’ve been in Vietnam. I’ve heard it was all a power play by the CIA to create and consolidate their influence in America’s shadow government, and that isn’t really as preposterous as it should be. The Gulf of Tonkin seems to have been dubious grounds for which to go to war, assuming it actually even happened.

I’m not even sure we shouldn’t have pulled out, even if doing so emboldened the Soviets and Chinese, or that this wasn’t a victory for popular revolt—even if the popular revolt was just the tool of communist agitators.

There is no doubt, however, that the aftermath of the Fall of Saigon was a series of atrocities, and also no doubt that information about those atrocities was largely suppressed in the USA for years.

Which brings us to this interesting little documentary called The Missing Picture. This is the story of the Khmer Rouge’s democide of Cambodians in the wake of America’s evacuation. It’s the Cambodian version of The Act of Killing, basically, but where the latter film used moviemaking as an excuse to pantomime the horrors, this movie uses little wooden carvings. (There’s also some archive footage but primarily it’s wooden dolls.)

The carvings are set up in little tableaux to illustrate particular events that occurred, as the narrator (a young man at the time of the purge) describes the events he witnessed.

I’ve mentioned before that some things are too awful to directly stage, both in fictional films and in documentaries, and these sorts of slaughters tend to be among those things. The little dolls allow us to look at and contemplate the horrors without showing us something so directly horrible that we turn away.

It’s a good strategy, and the primitively carved figures are still perfectly capable of reflecting the horrors the narrator experienced.

It’s all very familiar, but no less horrible for it. The communists took over the farm (food is a human right, donchaknow) and so everyone ends up starving. Of course, while this is going on, they keep touting how popular their programs are and how much traffic they get on their websitehow much food their farms are producing.

I guess Pol Pot was a true believer, or at least managed to come across that way, wearing the same drab, awful uniforms as everyone else in that jungle mess. So there’s that. On the other hand, there’s the between two and two-and-a-half million deaths (in a country that had a population of about 7.5 million).

It’s a short movie that can seem long, though not from being boring. The Boy and I were both greatly impressed. Unlike the previous Cannes film laureate A Touch of Sin, we both were impressed and moved by this film.

In the “mixed bag” category of going to obscure movies is that you can literally have no clue what you’re about to see, or how good it is. I mean, you can’t ever really know how “good” something is until you see it because only you can know how good something is in that all-important universe of yourself.

But you can get a sense of what other people think, and if you read reviews like the ones I aspire to write, you can get a sense of whether or not you’ll like it regardless of whether the reviewer liked it. (That’s always my goal, anyway.)

But sometimes nobody’s seen it. At least nobody who’s written anything. Or at least anything in English. Or, perhaps, the only people who have written things are completely untrustworthy. Which brings us to today’s film in question A Touch of Sin.

This won “best screenplay” at Cannes. My response to that is “Huh?” Although I thought (and still think to a degree) that I missed a lot because there are many things that are doubtless significant in China that I did not get, I kinda wonder if this didn’t win its award because nobody got it.

The movie is, in fact, an anthology of four stories. The four stories never come together, they never impact on each other, and they don’t interact except maybe incidentally at one point. The fourth story may have had a callback to the first. I sorta thought so at the time, but I was also trying to find meaning in this overlong mess.

It’s only two hours and change but the problem is, just as a story is gaining momentum and building interest, it ends and you’re back to square one, not knowing what’s going on or why. Worse is that the first story is the most interesting. An interesting character in an interesting situation does interesting things, gets himself in a position of incredible peril and then, story over. None of the rest of the stories achieve that level of interest.

The four stories are:

1. A crotchety old dude is dismayed by the corruption in his village and takes violent steps to “correct” matters.

2. A roguish man visits his home village, wife and kids, then goes out to work as a murderous purse snatcher.

3. A girl works as a receptionist in a sauna, where “sauna” is a euphemism for brothel, but she really is just a receptionist. A series of unfortunate events push her out into other work for a while.

4. A young man weighing his options in life goes for the increasingly easier ones but discovers this doesn’t lead to any sort of happiness, meeting a violent end.

The theme, I guess, is violence, which may be is also why it won an award. But, I dunno, violence is just as legitimately the theme of the Transformers movies and I don’t see those getting any awards.

At first I thought maybe it would be gun violence. I can’t imagine there are too many guns in the hands of the peasantry in China so that might be interesting. But the last two stories don’t involve guns.

Actually, before that, in the first story, I thought we might be getting a Chinese Death Wish—that would’ve been interesting. But then I thought “OK, guns.” And then I thought maybe the stories would all be tied together, if only incidentally. And then, beginning to despair, I thought maybe there would be something in the final story that tied everything to the first three.

Something. Anything.

No joy. It’s a pretty joyless film. The takeaway may well be “China sucks” which comes as no surprise to anybody. Communist countries always suck. Oh, wait, they’re not considered Communist any more. Uh…totalitarian countries always suck.

I think the suckage is best exemplified by a scene in the first story where our main character injects himself with insulin. The movie takes the time to show him injecting the insulin (and his equipment is exactly the same as The Boy’s, which I found interesting). It never came up again.

But unless the director is taking the piss, presumably against pretentious art films, or is just plain awful, there has to be a reason for showing this. Was it to show that this fire-breathing example of Chinese Tea Party-ism was dependent on the State he hated so much? Was the whole story a commentary on keeping your blood sugar in line?

Who the hell knows?

Not great. Fine production values, acting, camera work, including lovely shots of China, and the same sort of atmospheric oppression you get from all movies that are based in CommunistTotalitarian countries.

We couldn’t get up the interest level to actually hate it. But The Boy and I would definitely not recommend.

The Boy said that this film, Wolf Children was the first to make him cry since Machine Gun Preacher, although he amended that later to say he hadn’t actually cried so much as misted up a bit.

Mamoru Hosoda is sometimes tapped as the spiritual successor of Hayao Miyazaki, of whom both kids are big fans, so The Flower accompanied us to see this moving and strangely serious tale of a woman who struggles with raising her children, who happen to be able to turn into wolves.

One of my big gripes these days is how ill-considered almost everything fantastic is, and probably a lot of things that aren’t fantastic, come to think of it. My love of the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic genres, for example, is soured by the slipshod way writers hand it.

To name two prominent, popular exmaples, both “The Walking Dead" and "Falling Skies" feature genuine nothing’s-ever-gonna-be-the-same scenarios where survival is predicated on being able to attack aggressively, right alongside parents who refuse to teach their children to use weapons because they "deserve a childhood”.

Both shows do that exact same thing. The whole “deserve a childhood” thing set sail along with the 99% of the population destroyed by zombies/aliens/virus/whatever, Sparky.

I’ve watched enough of those and other recent doomsday scenarios to make me believe that there will be no Hollywood writers surviving the Apocalypse.

So, why bring it up in this context? Well, this is just a very thoughtful exercise on what it would be like to raise children who could turn into wolves. Erm, in a society where that is not the norm. Which, apparently, includes Japan. (You never know with those guys.)

Toddler and adolescent disobedience takes on new dimensions, as does the bitter-sweetness of children growing into adults and finding their own ways into the world.

Much like many Miyazaki films, there’s no antagonist. In this movie, not even obliquely. The circumstance requires the mother, who isn’t a wolf-person and doesn’t know anything about them, really, to take defensive action, and ultimately learn to be very self-sufficient in a rural community.

There’s still conflict, of the sort that tends to come up in real life (or at least real life plus the sorts that would come with wolf children), and the movie is brisk, engaging and moving. It’s almost as if the introduction of this wild, fantastic element allows the filmmaker to condense human experience and focus like a laser on the sort of fleeting, temporary nature of we all endure in this veil of tears.

Huh.

Who knew you could do that?

Kind of amusingly, to me, is that at least one Japanese critic referred to the movie as being on rails, and full of stereotypes to boot. I, on the other hand, have not seen more than four or five movies about wolf children this year, so it all seemed pretty fresh to me.

I was actually somewhat surprised that the kids were so enthusiastic about this movie, because to my eyes it was more about parenting than about being a child. But there it is. Maybe they related to being wolves.

Super fast snail cartoon. Yeah, it didn’t really pump our ‘nads, either. But Turbo was one of the better reviewed movies of the summer, and The Barbarienne was looking forward to it, so off we went to see it. (Well, not The Flower. She has rather high standards.)

Cribbing heavily from A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo, not to mention the Fast and Furious franchise, this is the story of a snail who dreams of being in the Indy 500. His ambitions cause his community, and especially his conservative brother, all kinds of difficulty, resulting in him being alienated from said community. A freak accident gives him super-speed and he winds up on the snail racing circuit in a mini-mall full of stereotypes, both human and gastropodan.

Ultimately, a human discovers his powers and decides to enter him in the Indy 500 as a promotional ploy to save the mini-mall.

Voiced forgettably by a bunch of celebs, of course, with notable exceptions being Paul Giamatti as Turbo’s crusty brother, Samuel L. Jackson as the snail version of Samuel L. Jackson, and Bill Hader as a snooty French-Canadian. I also spotted Richard Jenkins, Ken Jeong and Michelle Rodriguez as their various ethnic stereotypes.

Other people who might have been replaced by anyone else include Ryan Reynolds as Turbo, Snoop Dog, Michael Pena, Luis Guzman, etc.

The Barbarienne loved it, of course, though she didn’t give it her “best movie ever” rating, which might be a reflection on her personal growth, rather than on the film itself. The Boy found it mildly amusing but also noted that he just really didn’t care about any of the characters.

The formula is strong in this one. It stakes out little original ground but gets by on energy and good will, and some successful gags. Time has cooled some of the enthusiasm for the film, and it’s higher initial ratings may have to do with the large number of high profile summer flops.

Prior to this, the only Kar Wong Wai movie I had seen was 2046, which I confess I didn’t get. I found out recently from @SueSkyBluez that it was a sequel, which may have had something to do with it. Also, it was about time travel. Fictional time travel. I mean, it was about a story that happened in the future that was being written by someone in the present which may or may not have actually been going to occur. Er. Well, you can see it still confuses me.

Fortunately, this movie is essentially easy to follow, though subtle in its own way, and reminded me very strongly of 2046.

This is the story of Yip Man (or Ip Man, depending), the legendary martial artist who fought for justice (maybe?) and trained Bruce Lee. There are about six different versions of his story that have been made in Shanghai over the past couple years and this is one of them.

One of the other renditions was a trilogy, the third movie of which showed up in theaters about a week after this one, and was focused on his post-War, post-Communist years, but this movie takes a wide, philosophical scan of his adult life and turns it, essentially, into a love story. Or, if you will, a story of love versus duty, which the Chinese are so fond of.

As such, while there are some fun and beautiful fight scenes, gorgeously choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping, famous here for The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, these scenes are not what they appear. For the most part, they remind me of Sun Tzu, who advocated a sort of bloodless, philosophical kind of war, where generals maneuvered their pieces, preferring to concede defeat when outmatched strategically, without resorting to something as grotesque as actual combat.

I have a feeling that a lot of the movies we see out of China these days are somewhat skewed by an inability to address the elephant in the room, but here we are.

Anyway, the tension in this movie comes from Ip Man’s need to unite the two martial arts scenes in sort of an East-Cost/West-Coast thing (except it’s North and South) while not consummating his love with his soul mate, the daughter of his teacher (who, by virtue of being a daughter, can’t be the grandmaster).

The pacing is poetic, not chop-socky, and there’s a real beauty to the proceedings—in other words some hardcore martial arts film fans might be disappointed. The Boy and The Flower both enjoyed it quite a bit, though.

I liked it a lot better than 2046, and it held my attention even if I felt like I didn’t quite understand what was going on. In any event, it was a lot better than the next Chinese movie we would see, the opaque A Touch Of Sin.

Martial Arts Movie legends in their own right Tony Leung and Ziyi Zhang star.

When we last left Niels Arestrup, he was being a creepy old rich dude and tormenting a poor French girl into horrible things (somehow, sort of obliquely) in Our Children. In You Will Be My Son, he flips the script around by being a creepy old rich dude who torments everyone, but especially his son who doesn’t have what it takes to take over the family biz.

Actually, this film was released before Our Children and even War Horse, but after Sarah’s Key, but you know how it is with foreign films. Sometimes it takes two years for a movie to show up here.

By the way, let’s stop for a moment to appreciate that title. The word emphasis could change everything about the story. Like, if it were You Will Be My Son, it suggests a defiance, like you’ve asked someone to be your son, and they said “no”, so you’re reasserting your dominance. If it’s You Will Be My Son, then it suggests someone wanting to be someone else’s son, and not yours, and you’re slapping them down.

But if you’re speaking to your daughter, it could be You Will Be My Son, meaning you’re insisting they have a sex change.

The emphasis here, however, is more on the You, as the premise of the film is that crusty old Paul (Arestrup) runs a winery and is losing his number one man, Francois. His son, Martin, would like to take over but Paul is pretty sure the kid isn’t up to it. Francois’ son, Philippe, on the other hand, is doing very well in California, and when he comes back to visit his ailing pére, Paul uses that opportunity to, in essence, groom Philippe as a sort of late-life changeling.

Philippe is kind of into it because, hey, free winery. Martin and his wife Alice, not so much, to say nothing of Francois, who feels like his reward for a lifetime of faithful service is to have his son stolen. (Francois’s mom is a little more pragmatic about it—because, hey, free winery.)

So, there’s your story. There’s a little give-and-take as Paul is more-and-less of a monster, but the movie is basically about how twisted he is. On the other hand, the movie’s a little cagier about whether he’s actually wrong.

Martin is a little hapless when it comes to wine. He’s smart and diligent, but lacks the sensitivity to be a great winery-dude, at least according to Paul. The movie tends to back Paul up on this, if somewhat ambiguously. It’s also a little ambiguous with regard to Martin’s general masculinity. Certainly Paul doesn’t think he measures up but Alice (Anne Marivin) is both hot and utterly devoted.

She’s also no pushover when it comes to Paul. She’s openly hostile to him, especially in defense of her husband. I looked for some sort of weakness there, like maybe an attraction to Philippe or (shudder) even Paul, but nope.

Which is a nice thing to see, even if just in a movie, but the movie actually makes a kind of weak case for Martin himself.

That brings us to the basic weakness of the film, which is that it paints a picture of its characters that don’t alway seem borne out by their actions. Things happen and characters do things, but you can’t always connect the characters with their actions.

Going back to Alice, for example, she seems to be aggressively sexual with Martin, you might think out of spite toward Paul, or to prove to herself (and maybe Paul and Philippe) that she’d chosen the right man, but the movie gives us nothing to back that up with. Martin never talks about it, and if it’s just or even primarily about spite or justification for Alice, that never comes out.

It’s not awful and this disconnect is nowhere as bad or as pander-y as Our Children, say, but great drama is driven by characters and this doesn’t feel very driven.

We were okay with it.

Well, it was time for the annual trek to Knott’s Halloween Haunt in Buena Park. Typically we head down around 1PM (to check into the hotel by 3PM), which means the morning is basically sitting around, waiting to go.

So, I looked around the park and found a bargain theater nearby showing three second run films we hadn’t seen: The Boy wanted to see The Conjuring (one of the best reviewed films of the summer), and The Flower wanted to see Despicable Me 2 (one of the other best reviewed films). The Boy talked The Flower (who’s not into horror movies) into The Conjuring to “get hype” for the night at the park.

On the way down my phone/GPS burnt out and we ended up arriving late, and so only had time to see This Is The End, which is really what I wanted to see anyway (primarily on the basis that this was going to be our only chance).

And I thoroughly enjoyed it, though the kids weren’t crazy about it, not too surprisingly.

I thought this was a movie where the various actors (Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel and Craig Robinson, primarily) believed the end of the world had come and therefore acted like asses in their attempts to save their own skins.

In fact, the premise is that The Rapture has, in fact, come, and they, being the narcissistic assholes that they are, get Left Behind in the demon-infested wasteland of Los Angeles.

That’s a pretty funny premise, really. Especially given that they’re playing themselves. They’ve noted that they started with the actors “playing themselves” and then put in some completely off-the-wall not them part.

For example, one ongoing thread is that Jonah Hill is really, really nice, especially to Jay Baruchel. Later, he prays to God to suggest that Baruchel was His biggest mistake. (Praying to God in an evil fashion is probably not something you want to do during the Apocalypse: News you can use!)

At the same time, Baruchel has commented that scenes occasionally got intense because the actors were saying things to each other that they had been holding back in real life. (N.B.: Actors are insane.)

So, yeah, I was very favorably impressed by a lot of things in this movie. The very fact that they made it about an actual apocalypse, no Scooby Doo-ing out of it, for one. That it shows when a group of actors tries to survive the apocalypse, the first thing they think of to do is…make movies. (These guys are completely incompetent at anything even remotely like a survival skill, which may be an exaggeration, but then again might not be.) That some pretty big actors do little cameos where they’re killed or debased. (Channing Tatum being my favorite, probably, but also Paul Rudd, Mindy Kaling, Michael Cera, and all the guys you’d expect to be hanging out with this crowd.)

Emma Watson shows up in a bit that was (obviously) written for Mila Kunis; Watson does a good job.

It drags a bit in the middle. The fact that they’re actors and have no clue is both essential to the story and kind of an anchor to it. There was a lot of improvisation done and it’s not bad, but it doesn’t rise to, e.g., the “know how I know you’re gay” bit from 40 Year Old Virgin, for example.

Lotta enormous demon penises (penii?). This is theologically correct, I should point out, but it’s also weird.

While a very Christian take on the Apocalypse, potential salvation comes through sacrifice, not through accepting Jesus. That would’ve been odd, to say the least.

Of course, some people are offended at the very notion of Heaven and Hell and going to one place or another based on what you do, and probably even moreso that they’re not the sort of people who’d make it to Heaven.

These people are insane, and should be shunned. Many of them post to IMDB.

Overall, though, kind of a gutsy film. Funnier if you know who the players are, which I think accounts for the kids not liking it as much as I did. Probably not funnier than Despicable Me 2 nor scarier than The Conjuring.

The premise of Jewtopia is that a WASP-y guy wants to marry a Jewish woman so that he’ll “never have to make another decision for the rest of his life”.

The ethnically sensitive need not apply.

In fact, this is probably the most racially insensitive movie since Blazing Saddles. (Excepting maybe Avatar.)

We, of course, loved it. It’s not great, admittedly: As a romantic-comedy, it stretched the tropes beyond recognition. There are a lot of missed jokes. A lot. But the movie trundles in its good-naturedly offensive way, pitching the whole way true.

Stereotyped here are Jews, of course, but also rednecks, hispanics, Mongolians—blacks not so much.

The story is preposterous: The whole premise of a Romantic Comedy is that the two principles must get together in the end, and yet we start with a significant lie—well, beyond the usual romcom lie, as virtually everything about Christian (Ivan Sergei) is completely false facilitated by childhood best friend Joel David Moore.

The Jewess of his dreams, Alison, is played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. ‘nuff said.

Actually, for what seems to be a pretty low budget flick, the cast is pretty packed. Wendy Malick and Phil Rosenthal play the future in-laws, Rita Wilson and Jon Lovitz play Moore’s parents, and there’s Tom Arnold and Cheryl David and I’ve probably stretched the point further than it will go.

In the weirdest bit of casting, Peter Stormare, a Swede best known as the main nihilist Uli (“Karl Hungus”) in The Big Lebowski, plays Christian’s redneck father, and hits the accent about ½ the time. Generously.

I felt, at that point, that writer/director Brian Fogel was positively daring the audience to take it seriously enough to be offended by that.

That said, at the Encino location where I saw this, they informed me quite a few women had dragged their husbands out of the movie about an hour in, apparently failing to appreciate the irony of doing so.

About an hour in is where the labioplasty/circumcision jokes start. And as racially insensitive as this movie is, it’s not demure about the sex stuff either.

On an unrelated note, Elaine Tan is as hot as her ultimate role in the movie was obvious.

But, once again, this isn’t really a Romantic Comedy as a shaggy dog story, a vehicle for a variety of catskill-level jokes that, like a fledgling borscht-belt comedian throwing everything at the wall in the hopes that you’ll laugh.

Well, we did.

Fun bit of trivia, the co-writer for the film, Sam Wolfson, appeared with Fogel in the flick Race To Witch Mountain. It’d be amusing to think they met on the set and crafted the idea (and possibly wrote the script) while on breaks appearing as Imperial Storm Trooper Gray and Imperial Storm Trooper Ciardi.

A mischievous arab girl decides to become an expert in the Koran in order to win a prize and get herself a bike and if you’ve seen any arab movies about women you already know this isn’t one of those stories with a happy ending.

But wait! This isn’t really like that! Unlike, say, The Stoning of Soraya M or The Patience Stone. Despite the somewhat menacing air, Wadjda keeps a fairly light-hearted, even optimistic tone.

Wadjda is the name of the lead character, a prepubescent girl who’s a little tomboy-ish, with a little crush on a neighborhood boy (though he’s got it way worse for her), and little bit of competitiveness in her nature. When the boy zooms around on his bike, she says she could go faster—but she doesn’t have a bike.

She happens to spy a bike in a local store, but it’s very expensive. 800 shekels or denari or riyals or whatever it is they use wherever they are. Wadjda lives in a modest hovel with her mother and, intermittently, with her father, who comes around to play on the Playstation, or bring a bunch of friends to eat the food his wife and daughter have prepared.

Wadjda’s mom has a long commute that she’s beholden to a local driver for since she’s not allowed to drive. Another option is to, like her friend, work in the local hospital alongside of men. Wadjda’s mom is leary of this.

Wadjda, meanwhile, goes to a very strict all-girl Muslim school. She’s not a great student, and constantly in trouble with the headmistress, who senses her mischievousness and really wants to crush it and any semblance of spirit in the girl.

When the school announces a Koran-recitation contest with a cash money prize, though, Wadjda becomes the most devout girl in the world, studying the Koran like mad in an effort to win the cash and the bike.

Meanwhile, Wadjda’s mom is struggling to hang on to her usually absentee dad—a difficult prospect since she’s been unable to give him a son. He’s under pressure from his mother to take another wife as a result, and while he claims to not be too interested in the idea, he’s also clearly not uninterested.

In other words, we have an interesting blend of characters, dramatic tensions, and a fair amount of slice-of-life humor packed into this little film.

Director Haifa Al-Mansour has crafted a mini-masterpiece here on (I imagine) a pretty low budget, believable acting, and a strong story. The strength of the movie is in the women: Young Waad Mohammed as Wadjda, Reem Abdullah as mother and the gorgeous Ahd as the stern headmistress, are standouts, each representing a method of coping with a repressive society.

The whole movie is really revolves around how various women deal with each other in a society where they have so few rights.

The Boy pronounced it “super-good”. I concur.

Expect to see this nominated for an Academy Award this winter.

The prime issue when discussing documentaries is to separate the subject matter from the presentation. The subject matter can be good, bad or indifferent, the treatment of the matter, in terms of the filmmaker’s skill, can be good, bad or indifferent—and then there’s the stance that the film takes relative to its subjects.

When Comedy Went To School, for example: the subject is a good thing of some cultural import, with uneven handling from the documentarian, and reverential treatment bordering on worship.

The Act Of Killing: About as big a subject as you can get (democide), expertly handled, with the subject being treated with a kind of respect that doesn’t include any sort of approval. (Tricky, that.)

The King of Kongs: Trivial subject, excellent handling, respectful treatment of the subject.

The Central Park Five: This is an excellent example of a well-told documentary of an important subject which is totally ruined by the pushing of a narrative.

Although I personally have never felt this way, Triumph of the Will is considered a great documentary: A big subject about an evil thing, handled expertly from the standpoint that the evil is, in fact, a very good thing.

So part of what we’re looking at is how the POV reflects on the topic. And while it’s easy to denounce Nazism now—you can tell because everyone denounces it all the time—it’s often not easy to tell in the thick of things what’s what.

Those watching in the ‘30s should’ve been suspicious just because it was clearly propaganda, but a bias doesn’t have to mean dishonesty. Werner Herzog’s great treatment of capital punishment, Into The Abyss, succeeds in part because Herzog states his bias up front. Something like Gasland, on the other hand, is rather wounded by its over-the-top outrageous bias.

Then you have the films like Supersize Me, where the filmmaker makes you think he’s being straight with you, but subsequent efforts reveal that he’s not always honest. Or, like Roger and Me, where the whole premise was bullshit from the start.

So, let’s look at the documentary Informant in those terms. (I tell ya, my intros are getting longer and longer.)

On point two, the craft used to present the story, all is well. Jamie Meltzer takes an oral history approach, relying primarily on firsthand accounts from different people, with no editorializing when they conflict (except to the extent that secondhand observers editorialize on the events). There are a few dramatic re-enactments of scenes, but Meltzer pulls back to show you the camera equipment, as if to say “I’m not endorsing this, I’m simply dramatizing one man’s story”.

But that leaves us with the tough part: What is Brandon Darby actually, and what does this movie try to convince he is? I actually tweeted Darby—his name came up in my Twitter timeline right before I went to see this—but he didn’t respond.

The facts not in dispute are that Darby went to Louisiana in the wake of Katrina to do something and in fact something was done. It’s pretty much agreed, I think, that the efforts were helpful there and he was significant to those efforts, even as there’s debate about exactly how significant a role he played.

He was running in a left-wing crowd, so while part of this was actual assistance in the form of money, goods and services to areas that needed it, another part was making this the site of Social Justice. And Darby, it is agreed, was attracted to that aspect.

But then a funny thing happens: He goes to Venezuela (heh) and sees what revolution really looks like—and he’s not, in fact, super-excited about the end results.

In what would be a shocking twist for a regular movie, Brandon Darby changes his mind.

But we are dealing with the Left, and in particular that fringe of the Left for whom Politics Is Religion and Everything Is Political. So when Darby is approached by the FBI to go undercover, he agrees, only to find himself among those who would make molotov cocktails in celebration of the Republican National Convention.

This is not in dispute. Nor is it in dispute that Darby was instrumental in bringing these folks to justice.

What is in dispute is whether or not the molotov cocktail guys are actually guilty. Well, no, that’s not actually in dispute, since they did make the molotov cocktails. But there’s the mitigating circumstances of “Well, we wouldn’t have done if not for Brandon’s encouragement and even if we did we were only going to destroy property, not hurt anyone.”

At this point, I have to make my own biases known: I know the FBI has a long history of infiltrating groups and inciting violence. (Much like the CIA’s penchant for assassinating troublesome foreigners, it’s way easier than actually investigating and bringing ne’er-do-wells to trial.) The FBI’s history of violence comes up over 100 years short of the Left’s however (with them killing and destroying in the name of social justice since the French Revolution).

But, look, there’s literally no evidence that Darby did anything to encourage these guys. They say it was all his idea—well, of course they would—yet he seemed to have literally no hand in the actual making of the incendiary devices. The best that Darby’s detractors (none of whom were there) can come up with is that, well, it sounds like something he’d do, the traitorous bastard.

Of course, completely unmentioned is that, if Darby hadn’t been there, some other old radical might just have easily been there, and maybe these firebombing weenies might have killed someone or gotten themselves killed as the FBI tried to stop them. Not that I’d expect them to be thanking him for saving their lives.

And I was wrestling this while watching it, because the movie gave a whole lotta time to Darby’s detractors, but not so much any supporters other than Darby himself—whose testimony it challenges. And even his few supporters are kind of tepid about him. Very late in the movie we see footage of Andrew Breitbart, supporting him wholeheartedly, which was very significant to me, but could just as easily be taken as a sign Darby’s celebrity-seeking.

Ultimately, though, the movie makes no case for Darby’s innocence or guilt. For me, when Scott Crow—a radical left-wing activist who seemed like he got the lion’s share of screen time, next to Darby—starts talking in defense of the molotov-gang, and how there’s a time for the destruction of private property in protesting, I began to see the insanity of the whole thing.

I mean, Darby’s detractors are people advocating the violent overthrow of society. They like to mock him as paranoid for thinking someone might kill him, but they would hail as a hero anyone who did. There is no civility in this alleged civil rights movement.

So, in the end, I come down in favor of the POV used here, because it showed pretty clearly the players and known facts (as far as I can tell) and did so without any overt editorializing.

As for Darby, well, I think he has a right to live. I ended up kind of liking him, actually. And I strongly disapprove of any political movement that thinks it’s okay to kill defectors, even if they have a stated philosophy that “means well”.

But that’s just me.

I also liked this documentary, as did The Boy.

Did you know? Women used to be treated rather dismissively! It’s true! And not that long ago, either! Why, a woman could aspire to nothing greater than to be a secretary of a Big Shot in the Big City. And by “Big City” we’re taling about Lisieux (pop. in 1958, approx 20,000).

In the charming French flick Populaire our heroine dreams of escaping her provincial life as the daughter of a general store owner, through her powers of typing.

OK, even if the premise is too self-satisfied by half—look at these silly 20th century men and how they treat women!—this is a delightful romcom, done in the style of the era in which it is meant to take place, 1958-1960. The film stock (probably all digital of course) looks the same. The music is in an appropriate style. The plot twists and conventions are the same—though more on that in a moment—and the actors are the living embodiments of their archetypes.

The basic outline seems sort of Pygmalion at first, but it’s really more like Rocky, or maybe Gypsy, with Louis hiring the world’s worst secretary, Rose, not for her beauty (as the townspeople of Liseux imagine) but for her mad typing skillz. And this, all, in some strange gambit to impress The Girl That Got Away, Marie, who married an American soldier after the war.

Well, it’s pretty obvious how this is going to play out, but like all good romcoms, it plays out in a series of scenes by turn amusing, enchanting or romantic, so that you root for the two heroes to get over their dumb selves and get together. And so old school such that the post-Ephron weak-woman template is refreshingly missing.

Now, at the end of the second act, about the time an American movie might have ended, there’s a sex scene! I mean, not a kiss-and-fade-out-wink-wink but a several seconds-long-with-boobage type scene you’d never have seen in a movie of that time.

Well, not an American movie, anyway. This was about the time of the French New Wave, of course, which had nudity and sex and violence and all that, but they weren’t making romcoms. So, is it appropriate for this film? Well, I’m gonna let you down, dear reader, ‘cause I just don’t know.

The Boy and I liked it, but felt the third act dragged on a bit and was overall heavier than the first two, and not as fun. The arrogant Louis must sacrifice, get his comeuppance, and ultimately give Rose the strength she needs to succeed, of course, but it was a lot less fun.

Deborah Francois (her name has lotsa funky diacritics on it; I won’t be typing those) is adorable as the klutzy Audrey Hepburn-esque Rose. Romain Duris looks a little odd in the period style hair and clothes, smallish with a strong Gallic nose, but he hits just the right note as the striving Louis.

Marie is played Berenice Bejo (still not doing diacritics, you frogs!) looking beautiful and a propos in her late ’50s fashions (far moreso than in the ’30s fashions of The Artist). Shaun Benson, a Canadian, plays Marie’s American husband.

Written and directed by newcomer Regis Roinsard (still not doing diacritics, yo), whom we hope to see more of soon.

People, this is how you do it. Short Term 12 is the first feature-length project by writer/director Destin Cretton done on, I’m guessing, a shoestring budget with two locations and a hand-held camera or two, using a few lesser known young actors (though I wouldn’t be surprised if those actors soaked up most of the budget) and a basic plotline revolving around a few people.

Even so, it felt like a real movie, moreso than The Internship.

The premise is that Mason has come to work at Short Term 12, a temporary holding facility for kids who might end up adopted or going back to their parents or caretakers, or might end up staying there for a while. The heart-and-soul of ST12 is Grace, who’s been around long enough to be able to control the often rowdy kids and teens.

Mason and Grace are also involved. Also, they’ve both had different experiences with the foster care system, with caretakers, and so on. This difference in experience gives them sometimes wildly different reactions to romance, sex, and the possibility of long-term relationships.

Drama!

An axiom of moviemaking is “show, don’t tell”. (Also used in writing, speechifying, and what-not.) While a generally sound principle, it’s not always true. For example, I guarantee that the new Secret Life of Walter Mitty will suck relative to the old, with CGI filling in for Danny Kaye’s “ta-pocketa"s. We’ve seen a lot of variation on "tell, don’t show” this year that have been very effective, such as in the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Missing Picture, about the Indonesian and Cambodian slaughters, respectively.

Sometimes, it’s just too much to see the horrible.

And if those films are about horrible acts on a grand scale, this one is about the little horrors, the hells created by people for their children, which in some ways are even less confrontable, as they are exclusive to children and happening to our children in our cities, every day.

So, at first, we see the kids, and there’s an almost juvie hall feel, as if these are bad kids sent to this place in lieu of prison, except that security isn’t that tight and they’re not allowed to drag escaped kids back. (This was kind of weird, but I have no doubt that it’s true: Legal requirements trump caretaking requirements.)

But then we get little bits-and-pieces of their agonizing stories. The movie threatens to veer off into some sensational events, but wisely stays largely low-key. Nothing else has to happen to these kids to increase the dramatic impact, but the omens are there. Nobody escapes unscathed.

Great performances from John Gallagher, Jr., as Mason, and the supporting cast, who are largely not people you’ve heard of, though you might recognize one or two. Grace, played by The Spectacular Now’s Brie Larson, and Jayden, played by Kaitlyn Dever (who also had a small role in Spectacular) have a real sororal chemistry.

The music, which is spare to the point of non-existence, is also quite good. There could’ve been more of it, though that might’ve detracted from the overall documentary feel.

It deeply affected me. The kids not so much, but I take that as a good thing. It’s not something that’s real to them, and there’s no reason it needs to be real to them for a few years. Still, they liked it quite a bit.

“OK, we need a new vehicle for Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. Ideas?”
“They could…put on dresses and hide out in a women’s fat farm!”
“OK, good start. Seems familiar but not too…”
“Or! We could send them to a women’s prison…or a convent!”
“OK, let’s give the drag thing a rest…anyone else got anything?”
“What if they…they’re garbage men! And they get involved with a femme fatale/murder mystery thing!”
“No good. We’ve already got Eddy Murphy and Martin Lawrence doing the Men At Work reboot. Anyone else?”
“How about we make them regular guys who get caught up in a world of technology they don’t understand. We’ll have them say things like ‘the world-wide webs’ and ‘electronic mail’?”
“And ‘The Google’! Hahahahah!”
“That’s great! Wait, let’s have them work at Google! That’s a freaky place! Total fish-out-of-water story!”
“Let’s have them work at Google as interns!”
“Ooh, I bet we could get Google to put up some bucks, too…”

This has been my impression of how the brainstorming for the Wilson/Vaughn vehicle The Internship might have gone, although the truth is probably closer to: someone read a story about Google and thought it would make a funny story to have an ordinary, non-technical guy try to fit in there.

From there, getting the Wedding Crashers crew back together had to be pretty much a slam dunk.

This is probably exactly what you think it is: V&W doing their schtick for about two hours, and if you like that schtick, you’ll like this movie. It could hardly be any more predictable or by-the-numbers. The jokes are frequent enough and amusing enough that the time flies pretty well, but this is basically the same movie as Monsters University, without any of the depth or originality.

I mean, we all liked it okay. We laughed, and that’s the first job of a comedy. But it doesn’t quite feel like a movie. It’s hollow. It’s an amusing two hour commercial for Google.

It’s possible that I am a traitor to my generation. At the time, I found a huge number of the popular teen films of my youth flat-out gross. Not just vulgar, crude and artless, but morally appalling. By the time Say Anything… closed out the ‘80s teen-flick-fest, I was just singularly unimpressed with the canon.

I still watched Ferris Beuller with my kids, but about the mid-’90s, the casual ease with which he lied to his parents started to make me really uncomfortable. (I didn’t have the kind of parents you needed to lie to to take a day off, and I am not that kind of parent, so I can’t relate to a lot of the teen angst, admittedly.)

What I’m getting at is that the modern flicks seem to be far better. Young actors, as I’ve noted, are leaps and bounds better than they were before the proliferation of cable created a crucible for them to hone their skills. Production values are phenomenal.

Also, since it’s (roughly) my generation who are the parents now, we’re more-or-less complete washouts. Less “square” and more burnt-out losers—actual drags on their children. And not in the abstract off-screen way of The Breakfast Club—although I guess all kids are Bender now—but in a more in-your-face Harry Dean Stanton way, where they’re stealing your paper route money for booze and crack and whatever.

(Have you noticed I’m digressing longer and longer before getting to the actual movie these days? I have. I assume it’s my transition into old age where I tell long, meandering stories that don’t go anywhere.)

Anyway, The Spectacular Now is the story of charming drunkard high school senior Sutter who breaks up with his fun-loving girlfriend, Cassidy, and ends up hooking up with bookish, unpopular Aimee.

Aimee is played by Shailene Woodly, who would not be out of place on a “top 100 hottest” list of a men’s magazine, but they have her without any makeup and her hair back in the early scenes so…sure, why not. (Acting plays a part here, too, snark aside.)

Miles Teller plays the likable buffoon, Sutter, who has a Live For The Now philosophy (hence, the title) and a lot of pent up anger toward his mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh, herself a starlet of ’80s teen flicks) regarding absentee dad (ultimately played by Kyle Chanlder, Zero Dark Thirty).

The movie follows Sutter and Aimee through their rather sweet relationship, which is marred only by Sutter’s alcoholism and adherence to his “live for the moment” philosophy. And if Sutter was originally using Aimee as a rebound, he becomes increasingly attached to her, as she sees in him the potential to do greater things.

There’s actually a very interesting perversion there, as Sutter has a job that he does well, but it’s actually a sign of irresponsibility, since he’s using it as a way to never have to do anything more challenging in his life. It’s not Molly Ringwald working at the record store in Pretty In Pink. It feels more like Glengarry Glen Ross.

Anyway, you have a substance-dependent and an enabler, and there’s not a lot of plausible ways to end this story happily. I understand the book ends unhappily, in fact. There are some scenes of near crushing despair toward the end of this movie, but it does at least allow for the possibility that our hero is not hopelessly screwed for the rest of his short, brutish and nasty life.

The Flower was okay with it, though hoping for something funnier and lighter-hearted, which I guess is one thing the teen movies of my youth had over these newer ones. The Boy liked it as did I.

The characters are likable and have some depth and their own arcs, and a lot happens in the space of 90 minutes. In a big picture sense, if the teen movies of the ’80s were all about people living in the now because their futures were bright (because they were bright, young and full of energy), this movie contrasts that with a picture of someone who really does live totally in the now.

And even though he’s a very decent fellow, he’s not wearing shades because his future’s so bright. It’s because he’s hungover.

The post-summer days are often among the worst for dedicated moviegoers. Anything the studios thought had any promise was dropped in the summer. Pre-holiday fall is for movies they didn’t want cluttering up the summer docket but aren’t likely award winners. And horror flicks.

When I first started taking The Boy with me to the movies pretty much whenever I went, it was October 2006. We saw Pan’s Labyrinth, Flags of our Fathers and a great French film that I can’t remember the name of. (The Boy thinks it was Indigenes but that didn’t actually get released widely in the US until the following February.)

Anyway, it was a great fall. And memorable. ‘cause you gotta go back seven years to find one that good.

Mostly you have your choice of dregs or second runs of films you avoided seeing during the summer.

Which brings us to The Heat. From director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) and “MadTV” writer Kate Dippold, we have a comedy buddy cop movie starring Sandra Bullock as the uptight one and Melissa McCarthy as the slovenly one who doesn’t play by the rules.

And, yeah, it’s exactly as clichéd as it sounds but that’s not a bad thing, necessarily, since it’s primarily as a vehicle for jokes. Of which there are many, and even some that land.

The term in the critical canon that probably best applies here is uneven. Not in terms of which jokes land and which ones don’t, but in terms of how seriously you’re supposed to take things. Sometimes it presents itself as quasi-realistic, in that movie sense, while other times it’s so absurd, you just can’t take it as more than riffing on a set of a movie.

“Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if stabbed her in the leg?”
“Yeah! Let’s do it!”

At the same time, it’s not an Airplane!-style movie, where the characters themselves are strictly gags. There are some tender moments. The girls, after hating each other, of course, finally bond, of course. They even lampshade it. Then later they bond again, for realsies. And then again at the end.

Lotta bonding.

I couldn’t drag The Flower to see it. The Boy went in with very low expectations and so was pleasantly surprised. (“I didn’t hate it.”) It was, more or less, exactly what I thought it would be.

And that’s okay.

It kind of reminds of Kevin Smith’s Cop Out. It’s not that uneven, but it still has that perfunctory paint-by-numbers feel, which in Smith’s case was meant as an homage to the ’80s buddy cop movie, while here is (as mentioned) just a device for joke delivery.

Like most of the summer’s flicks, it’s fine if you’re good with turning your brain off.

We were so looking forward to this new documentary about Catskill comedians, right up until it came out and the ratings (audience and critic) were so poor. The trailers are hilarious, which all these great old comedians doing one liners that are still funny, even when you’ve seen the trailer over and over again.

But it’s not unusual for a documentary to have stellar source material which it then handles poorly. It presents a problem for the reviewer and the careless reader when the reviewer must say “I hated that handicapped documentary” or (in the reverse) “That Nazi documentary was fabulous!”

But the ratings are pretty dead on. 2/3rds of the movie is centered around great material by classic comedians. But the remaining third, and the stuff that isn’t the comedy, is unfocused, weirdly self-important and, yes, schmaltzy.

It can’t really live up to its title. That could be because of the material, of course. Maybe Jewish comedians weren’t really very influential in post-War America. (Heh.) But it’s more likely that, beyond the low-hanging fruit of having great comedians-emeritus relate stories, the producers felt like they had to set the stage (why were Jews going to the Catskills in the first place?), then they wanted to talk about the culture surrounding the Catskills-type summer vacations, then they wanted to talk about the hotels and industry that rose, then they wanted to talk about how things changed in the ‘60s, and then they wanted to talk about how things are there today.

This mission creep, if you will, subjects the film to a few of the frailties common to the genre.

It’s instructive to consider the very first movie I reviewed on this blog six years ago: The King of Kong. This is a documentary about something supremely trivial (playing arcade games) but it’s so tightly focused that it becomes compelling, and the humanness emerges in such a way that you can’t help but become invested.

And it does so without the director (who’s gone on to work on high profile projects like directing Identity Thief and the new TV series “The Goldbergs”) trying to force you to care.

WCWTS meanders like an old man telling a story. And it suffers from the “Well, this one period of time was just the most awesome thing ever and now it’s gone” seen recently in Casting By and 20 Feet From Stardom. But, sort of weirdly, it’s doing the nostalgia thing on its own. Apart from a hotel heiress with a waning empire, you don’t really see the people interviewed (all of whom enjoyed popularity the likes of which cannot be appreciated today) talking it up.

Then there’s the ’60s which were a weird time for everyone, I guess (although my parents barely noticed them, apparently), but which really signalled the end of the Catskill era. Doing the math, that means the Golden Age was about 20 years long (the youth of, that’s right, the Baby Boomers).

Let’s turn over the camera to noted Catskill comedian Dick Gregory!

Wait, what?

So bizarre. There wasn’t enough to talk about so the civil rights movement has to make an appearance?

Another funny thing happens in the ’60s: The comedy changes, and the movie by-and-large stops being funny. It’s not entirely deliberate, I don’t think. It’s that the comedy of what’s essentially the post-Catskills era (Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, et al.) were less about straight-up joke telling and more about story telling and, of course, transgressing.

Transgressions, of course, are more dated than Groucho glasses in the world of comedy, and I thought it telling that my teenaged kids laughed at and enjoyed the old-school humor of Rodney Dangerfield, Henny Youngman, Jackie Mason and those guys than they did the later stuff. (And I did, too, even though my nostalgia factor is much higher for the later comedians.)

One of my tweeps, @Crevek, was watching Ralph Bakshi’s American Pop the other night and was hating on the post WWII parts. “It goes to hell in the ’60s,” I told him. And that’s a remarkably applicable statement to many things, including this movie, where the little focus it had scatters to the four winds, and its start talking about comedians who were never in the Catskills, TV shows (Seinfeld!) from the ’90s and, you know, whatever.

It’s not that the connections aren’t there, mind you. (You can learn about them from other great sources on the history of comedy at your local library! Or the Internet, I guess.) No, it’s just that the movie doesn’t make those connections effectively, or even at all sometimes.

As a result, this sub-90 minute film feels strangely long.

If you really want to get a sense of the thing, it’s probably epitomized by two things: The use of “Make ’em Laugh” to open the film (and punctuating stock footage rolls throughout), and to close the film—I am not kidding—"Send In The Clowns", with narrator Robert Klein lugubriously addressing “Mr. Sondheim” as to the presence and/or absence of said clowns.

I can’t believe someone wrote that. Someone said it. And someone filmed it. And then, someone edited the film, and left that stuff in.

Despite my numerous grievances aired here, we were glad to have seen it, but we probably would’ve been happier with a Catskills highlight reel.

Jason The Commenter (@BXGD) mentioned, when he saw The World’s End, that it’s best to go in not knowing anything about it, and there’s some truth to that. So if you like going in blind, you might want to stop reading after the next sentence, which is: My caveat to that is that if you’re familiar with the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright oeuvre (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and “Spaced!”), you can’t be too surprised by what happens.

Nonetheless, the movie has a bravura first act ending which hooks you into the rest of the film. Then, as @JulesLaLaLand noted, it kind of falls apart at the end of the third act. (Shaun and Fuzz suffer similarly, though not nearly as badly, from this Need For The Big Finale syndrome.)

Anyway, the premise of “The World’s End” is that loser Simon Pegg gets his old teenage gang together for one night of epic pub crawling called “The Drunk Mile”. Wait, no, “Golden Mile.” (I think “Drunk Mile” would be both more honest and less gross.)

Of course, even as he wears the same clothes, hairstyle (sorta, he’s bald-y now), and drives the same car, his friends have moved on and had real lives. So the comedy aspect is tempered with a kind of poignancy of a life wasted.

But that all changes soon enough and the movie goes off in a completely different and amusing direction that keeps the second act popping.

I can’t really say much about it without spoiling it, but if “Shaun of the Dead” recalls classic Romero zombie movies and “Hot Fuzz” is basically a fun update of “The Wicker Man”, this movie strongly recalls—well, again I can’t say, or it’d spoil it.

But you’ll see it, if you look.

We enjoyed it but I was inclined to think it was the weakest of the so-called “trilogy” (Caveat: No actual narrative connection to Shaun or Fuzz)—but it’s the sort of movie I’ll watch again to see how I feel later on. I think I felt slightly let down by Fuzz after Shaun, but on multiple viewings I think it’s the strongest of the three. (Definitely best, and lowest-key, ending of the three.)

What I particularly enjoy is how the actors change characters from movie-to-movie. Nick was a gross loser in Shaun and a childlike naif in Fuzz and a no-nonsense businessman (though still somewhat idolizing Pegg) in World. And he doesn’t even consider himself a real actor. (How English!)

Similarly, Pegg plays a low-ambition retail manager in Shaun, a super-cop in Fuzz and a burnout in World. And basically I think they didn’t use much makeup, so he looks all of his 43 years and then some.

Even Edgar Wright, whose signature cuts and camera moves powered the hilarity in “Spaced!” and Shaun hearkens to these techniques here without leaning on them. These are not one-trick-ponies. They have a style but they’re not limited by it.

Bill Nighy has a fun voice-over only role.

Thing is, if you like these guys, of course you’re going to want to see it. And if you don’t, you won’t. But if you don’t know, it’s really hard to say if you will. There’s really nothing quite like the stuff these guys put together.

Oh, ennui! Where would French films be without it! Well, this movie’d be absolutely nowheresville. What movie, you ask? Well, the original title was Thérèse Desqueyroux, being the main character’s last name, but by the time it got to us, the last name had been dropped, and only the accute and grave accents remained: Thérèse.

I will not be honoring those accents for the rest of this post, however. Honestly, hard as I tried, I could not hear anything resembling “Theresa” when the characters spoke. Not “Teresa” or “Teraysa” or “Teress” or even “Tere”. The nearest I could approximate the pronunciation was something like “T” followed by the sound of rolling your tongue out of your mouth, like “T-huwaaa”.

What’s it about? Well, remember the beautiful, charming, quirky but adorable Audrey Tatou from Amelie? Yeah, she’s dead now. In her place is a 37-year-old woman who probably smokes too many Gaulois and isn’t entirely convincing as a 19-year-old. (Not to be catty but, as well documented here, I’m generally a fan of aging French actresses.)

Well, look, she’s an actress. And this character is the anti-Amelie: A woman who, for no apparent reason, indifferently marries a man for the good of their families. (Both families are wealthy with—and no, I don’t get this—acres of pine.)

All is well and good until her younger sister-in-law discovers love. Not really love, but some pretty intense lust. Thérèse (I lied, “Thérèse” is still in my copy-paste buffer, so I’ll use it for a while longer) is affected by observing this relationship, apparently never having experienced lust before.

When I say “affected”, I mean she decides to kill her husband.

The trailers set this up kind-of Anna Karenina style, with an abusive, domineering husband who drives his poor wife to drastic deeds but, no, in fact while perhaps being a bit of a boor, a rube, an unimaginative sort who’s more physical than the modern man, he’s not really a bad guy.

As the movie wears on, he sort of begins to take on the character of a clueless saint.

Whereas Therese is probably best described as a sociopath. Even that’s not quite right, though. It’s that she has a blunt or flat affect. There’s no malice apparent, even when she’s trying to kill her husband (in a truly awful way).

So. Yeah. The movie has basically set us up for a series of events which have an arc, but which have no purpose or meaning. We can’t ever find out Therese’s motivation, because she doesn’t know it. She doesn’t even seem to have one, really.

This is the last film of French director Claude Miller, though not regarded as one of his better films, it certainly shows skill and a sure hand. It avoids feeling completely flat by letting the characters grow and change, even if it is swamped in a near nihilism. The ending is almost upbeat, sorta. It’s not as bleak as one might expect from a movie that is otherwise pretty damn bleak.

The Boy was unimpressed, though he has an appreciation for French ennui and so did not hate it.

Tatou, in the final analysis, is quite good, even if she doesn’t look at all 19. Gilles Lellouche (Point Blank) also has a nice turn as the loutish husband.

Still, it’s weird to look at such a heavy drama and think, “Did she not know anything? Was there no way of finding out about the rest of the world and life and potential experiences? Could this drama have all been avoided with an issue of Cosmo?”

That was kind of the feeling I had, though.