It’s always good to remember that It’s A Wonderful Life isn’t a comedy. It’s got a lot of funny parts to it—laugh out loud funny, even—but it’s essentially a dark, existential drama by its very nature: A man so overwhelmed that he considers his existence to be a negative to the world. The brooding darkness is essential to the plot.

They do this. They find long destroyed scenes or a missing print and say, “Hey! This is the COMPLETE version of this movie.” But it’s not.

Once upon a time, in a magical land called “the ‘80s”, it was required by law for Michael Caine to be in every movie made. Or so jested Dennis Miller before he became a pundit. (Caine was in 22 feature films between 1980 and 1989, usually as the lead.) Two Oscars and countless other accolades later, he still manages to maintain his vigor, even as he gets more and more of the “checking out” roles.

The reviews of the Iron Man sequel are pretty much dead on: Good, probably not as good as the first one. Though there were things about this one that were better than the last, I think.

The dysfunctional family movie is kind of an icky genre overall. I tend to blame Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning Ordinary People (not a link to that movie but to the last dysfunctional family film I can recall seeing) but The Lion In Winter pre-dates it and is really pretty much the same formula. And, frankly, the melodramas of the ‘30s are pretty much the same beast, though due to the conventions of the day, less explicitly icky.

A newly retired Argentinian justice agent decides to write a novel and picks for his topic the one case he couldn’t solve. Or perhaps more accurately, a reluctantly retired justice agent decides to use writing a novel as a pretext for trying to resolve a lot of loose ends in his life.

Kevin Smith is famous (inasumuch as he is) for his idiosyncrasies. You always know “who the Devil made it,” to borrow Welles’ quote to Peter Bogdonavich when asked about which directors he preferred. His movies are vulgar and thoughtful and juvenile (sometimes all at once). Also, they take place in New Jersey.

It’s hard to believe that prior to Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man(2002) superhero movies (as such) were rather rare. Superheroes were kiddie stuff throughout the ‘40s and ’50s, and the campy “Batman” TV series would have seemed to be the gravestone on any non-goofy interpretation of superheroes—which may have been the reason that the Salkinds struggled so mightly with Richard Donner over the classic ’70s Superman movies, with Donner wanting to play it straight and the Salkinds going for slapstick.

A funny thing happened on the way to the movies: in order to see a movie that didn’t feature anal rape, I had to go see a movie made by an anal rapist.

Finally! A good movie! And it’s from Sweden! Betcha didn’t see that comin’, didja? Huh? Huh? Well, me neither. Last time a buncha Swedes got together to make a good movie, vampires were involved.

Sometimes I feel like saying that all of our greatest directors suck. Like, Avatar seems more like a Cameron parody than an actual Cameron movie. Spielberg? Tell me the last Indy movie didn’t seem like a parody of the previous ones.

I didn’t want to. But I had to. James Cameron’s Avatar is undoubtedly the hugest movie of the year and maybe even the decade. And, you know, I enjoyed Titanic, despite the length. So, I figured I’d enjoy this, despite the flaws.

A washed up Country Western star struggles to repair the shambles of his life. Sure, we’ve seen it before, but have we seen it with Robert Duvall? Oh, wait, yeah, we have: Tender Mercies. We’ve also seen it with Clint Eastwood (Honkeytonk Man), Joaquin Phoenix (Walk The Line) and Willie Nelson (Honeysuckle Rose). Just to name four others off the top of my head.

Generally speaking, if a foreign language film gets much play in the US, it’s going to be pretty good. We are monoglots with extreme prejudice. (I don’t find this a condemnation of the USA; we’re monoglots because we can be, and any other group with that luxury would take to it just as readily as we do.) It takes a Das Boot or a La Vita E Bella to get our butts in the chair (and even then, a lot of us insist on dubbing).

We should be flush with Oscar-bait movies and I guess we are, but they seem to lack a certain majesty. Or even modicum of interest. I suppose Avatar will sweep, since it combines the right politics with big budget and big success. (I will see it. Eventually. I guess.)

There are things you just have to do as a parent. You don’t have to enjoy them, you just have to do them.

Jason Reitman (son of iconic comedy director Ivan Reitman) is probably one of the most promising young directors around, having directed the darkly comic Thank You For Smoking as his feature debut, and following that up with the comically dark Juno.

So, while waiting for the lights to go down on his latest, Up In The Air, I had to wonder: Would it be comic? Would it be dark? What would the ratio of comic to dark be?

As it turns out, way more on the dark, not so much on the comic.

The story is about ruthlessly shallow Ryan Bingham, whose job it is to fly around the country firing people. The company he works for acts as a (very) short-term Human Resources department which has as its sole function the removal of employees in as painless and low-key manner possible. Bingham is glib, and so thoroughly disconnected from humanity that he actually prefers being in the air 320 days out of the year, and loathes the few days he has at home.

Played aptly by George Cloony and oh, my God! what did he do to his face? I wish I were kidding when I say that. I spent about 30% of the movie trying to figure out whether he’d been botoxed or lifted or what. And that’s a shame since this is the kind of role he was made for.

Anyway, Bingham is flying around the country firing people when he gets called home by his boss (Bit Maelstrom favorite Jason Bateman). Seems that the latest addition to the firm, firm young Natalie Keener (Twilight’s Anna Kendrick) has successfully promoted the idea of firing-by-webcam.

Cue existential crisis as Bingham must contemplate the notion of not flying all around the country. This plays out as Bingham flies Keener around the country to get some real hands-on experience firing people.

So. Yeah. Seeing people get fired for a good half-hour may not be exactly what the doctor called for in this economic climate. (Seriously, anyone looking for a veteran computer programmer/movie geek?) There’s a buttload of acting, though, and we actually do gain a little respect for Bingham; there is some technique to what he does.

The other tension in the story comes from love interest Alex, played by the sexy Vera Farmiga (of this year’s Orphan and last year’s Oscar bait Boy In The Striped Pajamas). Alex shares Bingham’s love of the perks of travel, including the niceties that ultra-frequent travelers enjoy. As Bingham’s work situation comes to a head, he also finds himself reconnecting with his sisters (about whom we know nothing till late in the film).

Can Bingham use this old connection to hel phim find happiness with a chick he picked up in an airport bar?

It’s a well-made movie, with strong characters and believable settings, yet I wouldn’t recommend it broadly. It’s hard to explain why without some spoilers so let me just say that beyond the firings, while the movie’s not exactly bleak, it’s not exactly a pick-me-up either. (More dark than comic, like I said.)

Great little performances from J.K. Simmons, Bateman (of course), and Sam Elliott (who I swear is reprising his role as “The Stranger” from The Big Lebowski).

The Boy thought it was okay, but he expected more humor. This is the umpteenth movie we’ve seen this year that was made out to be funny in the commercials, but turned out to have a much more dramatic edge in the theater. (Adventureland, Duplicity, Observe and Report, Sunshine Cleaning, Management, just to name a few off the top of my head, all were advertised as being wackier comedies when they all had a fairly serious dramatic edge.)

A little more truth in advertising would be nice.

Cross-posted at Ace of Spades HQ.

When you see as many movies as I do, you learn to avoid entire categories, either because you don’t like them or because you’re just flat out tired of ‘em. For example, I skipped last year’s “The Class” and “The History Boys”, just because I’m tired of the whole Blackboard Jungle thing.

Even when I like a movie, if I’m acutely aware of the formula, it can be hard to really get into it. (I liked “The Last Samurai” but I couldn’t keep from thinking “Oh, look, a white guy’s gonna show the Japanese how to be better Japanese.”)

Rarely, however, you end up missing something that approaches a well-worn storyline in a refreshing way, as I almost did with the new Great Expectations-ish The Blind Side.

In this movie, Michael Oher, a ginormous black orphan who has lucked into a place in a fancy Christian private school, ends up being adopted by Leigh Ann Tuohy (a MILFed-up Sandra Bullock). Over the next two hours, they change each others’ lives.

You can understand my dread. “Based on a true story!” even.

In what constitutes a Thanksgiving miracle—yeah, it’s been out for a while—this actually works. Why?

Well, first of all, the characters are well-defined and interesting, the story is lively with lots of barriers impeding the characters’ desires, the dialogue is funny and touching, and the resolution is satisfying. It all sounds so easy when you put it that way. But really, there are a ton of pitfalls t this kind of movie, and the movie avoids almost all of them neatly.

For example, there’s a tendency (to put it mildly) in a movie like this to wallow in racism. There is racism in this film, but it goes both ways and mostly comes across as one of many forms of xenophobia. There’s no temptation to make it the central point of the film.

This can lead to the related pitfall of viewing the world as a unrelentingly cruel place where selfishness is the sole motivator, and the righteous protagonists are the only beacon of hope, sacrificing all in the process. Now, the Tuohys are definitely good folk, but there’s no real hardship for them. It’s not about them “sacrificing”; the movie shows a convincing case that (as said in the movie’s most wince-worthy moment) Michael is changing their lives.

Their “sacrifices” are shown in contrast to what their charge has endured, but rather through their understanding of those things, instead of through graphic flashbacks. Really, the only serious discussion about whether they should be doing what they’re doing revolves around their kids. And even then, it’s not like there’s a question that they should help.

It’s kind of refreshing. And it feels true, too, in the characters’ reactions to what is, essentially, Leigh Ann’s rather powerful sense of responsibility.

The tertiary characters are a rich assortment. There’s a lot of naked self-interest. There’s some altruism. There’s a veneer of altruism masking healthy doses of self-interest. At the same time, the movie doesn’t try to portray self-interest as evil. It comes across as natural: There is an “I”; there is also an “us” (as in our team or family). In other words, it seems very realistic.

This movie avoids The biggest pitfall of all—mawkishness. This is charmingly reflected in Leigh Ann’s tendency to leave the room rather than have anyone see her get emotional. But the whole film does that: It shows us the projects, the poverty, the bureaucracy, the politics, the opulence, the desperation, the kindness, the bravery—all without the high melodrama or glib politics these sorts of movies are prey to. It allows you to feel what you’ll feel from the circumstances, not from having characters overact.

I can’t say I viewed it entirely apolitically. The Tuohys are Republican. So Republican, apparently, they don’t know any Democrats. But this is more of a cute point, only significant because I can’t recall any film ever where the main characters are both kind, generous and explicitly Republican. The real (political) thought that occurred to me, as I was watching this poor kid wander around The Projects was, “Gosh, everyone wants to go to public school and live in public housing! Why wouldn’t they be crazy about public health care?”

So, yeah, I brought my own snark. The movie doesn’t address the issue at all. (Which is fitting, I think.)

Anyway, the Boy (my 14-year-old movie companion) enjoyed it quite a bit. I attribute that to the lack of gross sentimentality and the general liveliness of the whole movie.

Anyway, if you’re like me and you’ve been waffling on seeing it, give it a shot: There’s a reason it’s still playing. And stay for the closing credits to see pictures of the real Tuohys with Michael Oher.

(Previously posted at Ace of Spades HQ.)

Ah, that great holiday tradition, the dysfunctional family film. I don’t know when it started, but the modern form seems to stem from Ordinary People, that Oscar-winning depress-fest that made us miss Mary Tyler Moore’s spunk.

This season’s dysfunction starts off with Kirk Jones’ (Nanny McPhee, Waking Ned) Everybody’s Fine and Robert De Niro, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore. And, as might be expected from a director with such a gentle pedigree, this isn’t your hard-core “you ruined my life and now I’m a drug-addicted suicidal crack whore!” type family dysfunctional movie.

Actually, the dysfunction’s pretty mild. De Niro’s character is a decent guy, a blue collar wire-insulation man who worked hard to make sure his kids have plenty of opportunities. And his kids, for the most part, aren’t screwed up—they’re just worried about disappointing him.

On top of that, the one kid who is really screwed up, well, that’s not laid at his father’s feet.

Kind of refreshing, really. It’s less about soul-crushing guilt and despair, and more about communicating to improve relationships. (Sort of an anti-About Schmidt, if you will.)

De Niro is pleasing as the recently widowed father whose kids all cancel a long-planned weekend home, and so decides to embark on a medically ill-advised cross-country journey to see them instead. (The opening scene where he prepares for their arrival is rather touching, with nice touches, such as when he pulls out, inflates and fills the old wading pool.)

The movie flirts with a lot of clichés, reminding me quite a bit of Waking Ned Devine, as it toys a bit with your expectations, but eschews melodrama for something a little less over-the-top and an ultimately less predictable and more satisfying ending.

I rather enjoyed it. We were actually standing there debating whether or not to go see this or The Road, but I’ve made my opinion on the book rather clear, and the movie is apparently quite faithful to it. So, even without having seen it, I’m pretty sure I picked the more pleasant of experiences available.

It didn’t knock The Boy’s socks off, of course, but it reminded me, many years ago of having seen Peggy Sue Got Married with my dad. For him, a very emotional movie. (His grandparents were long dead, and so he was deeply touched by Kathleen Turner’s trip to the past to see them.) For me, not so much.

One device used here is to show the kids as kids, through De Niro’s eyes, and that got to me in a way I wouldn’t expect to get to him. Overall, though, I was pleased by the relatively low-level of dysfunction; I think it’s a little more realistic than the high dramatics we usually get.

I’m sure the actors love the scene chewing stuff, but there was a lot of nice, low-key drama here. Each of the children lies to their father, trying to protect him from bad news (and also trying to avoid confrontation), but they’re not all comfortable with it—or good at it.

So, while the cool, professional Beckinsale puts De Niro off rather mechanically, expressing regrets but not exhibiting a lot of warmth in her attempt to keep news away from him, the bubbly Barrymore is much more facile in her lying, and still very affectionate to him. The more morose Rockwell is an abysmal liar and knows it.

I’m not particularly a De Niro fan (more a matter of the sorts of movies he’s in) but he was excellent here as a guy who’s trying his best to understand his kids, while his kids are busy hiding from him.

As the man says, you could do worse, and probably will.

“She was a young maiden in the full bloom of youth,” or so could have started An Education, the movie based on the memoir of Lynn Barber. The story concerns 16-year-old Jenny, whose middle-class father controls her life tightly, forcing her to concentrate on education and building the appropriate resume to get into Oxford.

But Jenny finds herself the object of David’s attention. David is a roguish 30-something of the sort of mysterious (but copious) means that seem to signal “gentleman” to the English. He’s cultured, smooth and charming, and proceeds to seduce the family with his wiles.

What? Well, obviously he has to seduce the mother and father or they’re not going to be letting their 16-year-old daughter go out with him. I mean, it’s 1961 England, after all.

You know, as uptight as things were in England in 1961, I have a hard time imagining a stolid middle-class family today being cool with—well, let’s be honest, the guy isn’t even a young 30, the actor is 37!—sending their 16-year-old daughter out with an unknown man old enough to be her father.

And then sending her away for the weekend, even if it is to Oxford, and even if he has convinced them he’s connected.

Forget about Paris.

But, like I said, this is a memoir, and if I’m going to believe that Cameron Crowe lost his virginity in foursome with three groupies while on the road with a rock band (Almost Live), I suppose I can believe this.

Actually, it’s a testament to the movie’s execution that this comes off far less creepy than it should. Indeed, the movie only works at all because the audience is also seduced by David. He keeps a respectful distance from Jenny, and she’s ultimately in control of how their physical relationship progresses.

And as the cracks in David’s veneer begin to show, the movie does a good job of rationalizing. In particular, the defenders of the traditional path—work hard, do lots of boring, irrelevant stuff so that you can go to a good school, so that you can then become a teacher and teach boring, irrelevant stuff—are particularly weak at defending it.

Her teacher, her principal, her father really can’t explain why she should dedicate herself to study rather than run around with the roguish David and hang out in nightclubs, eat fine food, and explore Europe.

Beside the excellent handling by director Lone Scherfig, and nuanced performances by Peter Saarsgard (as David), and Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour (as mom and dad), the movie is largely powered by the charming Carey Mulligan. (She’s 23, but like Ellen Page, she can play much younger convincingly.)

The actresses in this movie are especially strong, as they all seem to reflect the various choices available to the young Jenny. Mom is tired with an unextraordinary life, and we see both hints of danger and jealousy in Cara Seymour’s performance. Rosamund Pike (of Doom and Pride and Prejudice) plays Helen, who is the paramour of David’s partner in crime Danny, and in her we see—besides a shocking level of ignorance—wistfulness toward Jenny’s naiveté, jealousy of her sparkling youth, and the kinship of one who knows the man she loves is not as noble a character as she might like.

Olivia Williams (late of “Dollhouse”) plays Miss Stubbs, the teacher Jenny most highly respects (and ultimately gravely insults) as a buttoned-up disciplinarian, and Emma Thompson is the imperious and vengeful headmistress who sternly reminds Jenny that non-virgins are not allowed in her school. Heh.

Oh, and there’s also Matthew Beard, who plays Jenny’s age-appropriate suitor, Graham. He’s awkward and unsophisticated and also sweet and sincere, but wholly unable to compete against the urbane David. In his few short scenes, he has to deal with going from a likely successful suitor to being snubbed mysteriously to realizing what he’s up against.

Solid acting, solid writing, solid direction. Ultimately, though, I did find the whole exercise oddly Victorian and almost melodramatic. Will Jenny lose her virtue to the handsome rogue? Will her life be ruined? Will anyone care in five years, when the world so radically changes?

The Boy thought it could’ve been worse, but as remote as the whole thing felt to me—I could, at least, relate to the larger parental issues of making sure your kids know why they have to do things that aren’t fun—it’s ancient history to him.

Just as an addendum, Roger Ebert has put this on his top 10 list of mainstream movies of the year. I probably wouldn’t put it in the top ten or on the mainstream list. Heh. (But Ebert’s a contemporary so that might be part of the appeal for him.)

I avoided the ‘60s love-fest Pirate Radio for its first few weeks because, well, it’s a ’60s love-fest. It’s not that love-notes to bygone eras are bad. Hollywood’s love affair with the Gilded Age lasted into the ’60s and produced some of my favorite movies. (That’s 30 years of nostalgia!)

Rather than compare and contrast turn-of-the-century nostalgia in the ’40s to ’60s nostalgia today, though, I’ll just stay focused on this particular movie, the Richard Curtis (writer/director of Love Actually) pic The Boat That Rocked. Or, as it’s known here in the States, Pirate Radio, with distributors perhaps hoping for a Disney tie-in. (Pirate Radio of the Carribean, anyone?)

Pirate Radio is sort of an Almost Famous on the high seas. (If even has Philip Seymour Hoffman!) Basically, a teenage boy is sent by his mom to live on a ship that’s anchored off of England in order to supply Britain with desperately needed rock music. (Government-controlled radio won’t play any of it. To paraphrase one character, “That’s the point of being the government. If you don’t like something, you can pass a law to make it illegal.”)

So, there’s your story: coming age plus the renegade cool cats versus the squares in government. Neither of these stories is done very well. No, strike that. It’s not that they’re done poorly at all, it’s that they’re barely done.

But you know, I’ve never seen Almost Live—a generally highly regarded movie—a second time, and yet I might watch this again.

The very thing that kept me away from this movie was a fear that it might be self-important. A rock-saves-the-world motif. And of course, not really the rock ‘n’ roll that my dad’s generation dug, but that high ’60s stuff which some people earnestly maintain was the Best Music In The History Of The World. And all, like, socially relevant ‘n’ stuff. And that this would be contrasted with social repression, brought down by titans of social change who set themselves against…well, you get the idea.

To hearken back briefly to Hollywood’s love of the Gilded Age, as if the great things of that era were the result of Ragtime.

This movie does none of that. It’s really just a series of vignettes and character interactions punctuated with brief montages of people listening to the radio.

What a relief.

The guys on the boat are half-defiant, half-loser, whose defining characteristic is their love of music. This seems reasonable. Musicians aren’t really revolutionaries—and these guys wouldn’t have been crossing swords with the government had the government not created (let’s be honest) a black market for rock.

It’s kind of interesting to watch the twisting of the movie’s villain as he comes up with various ways to make pirate radio illegal. It reminds one that governments claim all sort of “reasonable” power which they then used to stamp out things they just plain don’t like.

But it’s not exactly historical. Even the sampling of music is probably a bit ahistorical. (The opening of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is part of the soundtrack—but not as a record, only to punctuate a dramatic scene. What would we do without Pete Townsend?) This may have been to avoid a lot of the seriously overused tracks. Also, no Beatles. (Beatles songs almost never seem to be in movies that aren’t Beatle-centric.)

Again, though, this is really at the level of your average low-budget coming-of-age tale with good music. It’s better than most because it’s consistently funny. Also, acting. We have Kenneth Branagh as the evil minister of musical correctness, or whatever the hell his position is, with his ex-wife Emma Thompson as the mom of Carl (played by Tom Sturridge). I didn’t recognize either of them.

Fans of the BBC show “Spaced” will recognize Nick Frost, in a (once again) completely different character. This time he’s a rock ‘n’ roll Lothario. Really! I marvel over Frost because he doesn’t consider himself a real actor. Which tells you something about the English versus Americans. Here, a guy who gets to be famous repeating a catchphrase in a sitcom thinks he’s ready for Hamlet next. There, the guy probably has done Hamlet, and still considers himself not quite legit.

Finally, there’s Bill Nighy. Ever see the second two Pirates of the Caribbean movies? Nighy played Davy Jones. Those movies would’ve been ten times better with more Nighy. In the Underworld movies? He was King of the Vampires or somesuch. Those movies aren’t very good, but they’d have been a millions times better with more Nighy. Love, Actually features him in the washed-up rock ‘n’ roll star role, singing his old song naked.

Good movie. Needed more Nighy.

You know that movie Precious, about the black girl with the poor self-esteem and crappy home life? Bill Nighy isn’t in that, I don’t think. I haven’t seen it. But it’d have been better with more Bill Nighy.

The Boy was pleased. The movie kept him laughing, and that was quite welcome.

Go in understanding what it is, and what it isn’t, and you can have yourself a good time.

At this point, we must concede that the Jigsaw Killer, Jonathan Kramer, must certainly have spent more of his life setting up his murderous little games than any other activity. And that the amounts of money involved to play them are staggering.

Which makes one wonder if he might have done something more productive with his time and money.

Anyway, we have here the sixth entry in the notorious movie franchise.

And while I defend these movies as not being torture porn, I have to admit, when this one started I thought, “Well, that’s a bit much.”

Heh.

Now, Saw suffers from the the same problem every successful horror movie does: The demand for sequels far exceeds the planning of the people who wrote the original. Sort of queerly in the case of the Saw series—which uniquely (I think) has had one release every year for six years—each entry has to do some retconning. I say “queer” because I think movies 2-5 were a done deal after the first one, and #7 seems to be guaranteed. In other words, you could do some planning.

And, in fairness, the Saws’ retconning has been rather mild up till this movie.

In case you’re not familiar with the premise, John Kramer is an engineer who entraps people he feels are wasting their lives by constructing elaborate and horrific traps they must escape, in an attempt to give them a new appreciation for life. (Oh, and he’s been dead for half the series, and lives only through the elaborate plans he set up in advance.)

Well, that’s the original premise. Jigsaw’s mission has drifted away from that pure idea to where he’s been trying to teach forgiveness, cooperation, anger management, and so on.

The other drift that has occurred is that the original motivation for Jigsaw was anger over his own life. He had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and so felt it unfair that others didn’t appreciate what they had—what had been taken from him.

Now, to me, the thing that sets the series apart from the typical slashers (besides the generally above par suspense and plotting), is empathy. The characterizations in most slashers are weak: They’re just fodder. Their personalities are largely irrelevant.

In this series, the victims’ personalities are the killer’s prime motivation. (And not stupid things like having premarital sex and smoking pot.) Infidelity, violence, depression, selfishness and so on, are the flaws that Jigsaw tries to correct with his unique brand of therapy.

In the third installment, for example, the morose father gets the option of killing or saving the people he holds responsible for the death of his child and the subsequent injustices. To add injury to insult, he can only save them by enduring considerable duress. It’s a sort of high drama, compressed into a very determinate, short time period.

This is a huge part (in my mind) as to why the movies work, when they do work.

Saw VI has the unfortunate added burden of a political message. And this message completely struggles against the established precedent of the previous movies.

You see, in Saw VI, John Kramer targets insurance company employees!

Even if you accept the premise (which cheerfully skips around the general success of the insurance industry by noting offhand the millions of people insurance works for) that these guys (and everyone who works for them) are pure evil, the movie undermines itself and the entire series in two big ways.

First of all, there’s a scene where John goes to Insurance Guy because he’s found an exotic treatment for his cancer. Naturally, he’s refused, and on top of that threatened with having his coverage dropped if he goes and does it himself.

Well, on the one hand, how would they know? But more importantly, we know John has tons of money. In fact, they even point that out, by saying the treatment he’s getting now could wipe him out financially, to which he says “Money is not the issue.”

Y’see, it’s a matter of principle. So the guy who’s gone around for five movies putting people in horrendous situations to gauge their love of life doesn’t bother to take a mild risk to save his own life? Really?

Second of all, there is a “test” in this movie completely different from every other in the series’ history: An innocent character is given the chance to kill someone.

In every previous case where someone playing a game has had the opportunity to kill, doing so meant their own death. (Y’see, Jigsaw teaches tolerance and forgiveness with all his hacksaws and barbed wires.) But in this movie, it’s fairly clear that killing is just peachy! One presumes that not-killing would be okay, too, but it’s not entirely clear.

Worst of all, this otherwise well plotted movie struggles because you’re obviously meant to hate the insurance exec, but the formula requires us to empathize with the victims at some level. As a result, the exec comes off very human and really, very decent. (His employees, to a man, are completely one dimensional monsters, which is rather weak, too.) Actor Peter Outerbridge, while capable of seeming like an unctuous sleaze, is a little too deep and human to make us feel like he deserves his torture.

So, the whole thing ends up ass-over-tea cart.

There was much swearing from The Boy who liked the movie except for the weird imposition of politics onto it.

And it’s a shame, because it’s otherwise the strongest entry since #3. Good pacing, good characterization (with the noted exceptions), clever and interesting “games"—notably bad lighting, however, and maybe a slightly cheaper feel over all.

Costas Mandylor (of the perpetual trout pout) is back in this movie, doing Jigsaw’s dirty work, with an especially brutal flair, and providing one of the movie’s two big twists (setting up the sequel).

Shawnee Smith (who died several movies back) re-appears in flashbacks, as of course does the Jigsaw himself, Tobin Bell. Weirdly, Athena Karkaris, who took a face full of death a movie or two ago ends up having gotten better, though not for any reason I can figure out. (The series’ tendency to kill everyone makes it hard to establish much continuity, so they keep resurrecting minor characters.)

Happily, the wonderful Betsy Russell is back. Though it seems to me her character has drifted over the movies, again I think due to the fact that not many characters survive from one film to the next. She seemed to be pretty appalled by her ex-husband’s behavior when we first met her, but gradually seems to have warmed to the whole serial murder thing.

I’m not sure if this soured us to the next one. This one we waited till it was only $3/ticket. I’m guessing the next one won’t have any political agenda, however.

I never feel so quintessentially American as when the topic of “help” comes up. The whole concept of hired live-in help feels wrong to me, at least as a separate class. I’m not even all that comfortable with hiring someone to come in to clean the house.

At least, I think that’s American. Maybe it’s Western. In any event, it’s very me.

And this newish Chilean import La Nana (The Maid) brings up all the uncomfortable-ness and throws it into sharp relief.

Catalina Saavedra plays Raquel, who’s been in service to a family for over 20 years, cleaning the house and raising the children. Also, she seems to be increasingly recalcitrant, though we’re not entirely positive of this since we don’t see any past stuff. Maybe she was always way?

When the story opens, we see the family throwing a birthday party for Raquel, which she doesn’t want to attend. But the oldest boy (Lucas) drags her in and she shares in the cake. But the awkwardness is palpable. The father (Mundo) excuses himself to go work (build a model ship), and Raquel barely tastes the cake before deciding she should do the dishes. The mother (Pilar) tries to insist that she not do them now but she points out that she’d only have to do them later.

The catalyst that moves the story along is a condition that causes Raquel to have bad headaches, and to occasionally swoon. Pilar has been toying with the idea of getting help for Raquel, because the house is so big anyway—an idea that Raquel hates—and soon there’s a new maid helping out.

Along the way, we discover all the strange family dynamics that Raquel is in the middle of. Though interestingly, most of the strangeness seems to emanate from Raquel herself.

I never really knew how this movie was going to play out. It’s supposed to be a “black comedy” but I don’t get why, really. It’s not a comedy at all, from what I experienced, but a quirky drama. It’s got funny parts, most of which stem from this awkward intimacy—the covert ways that Raquel makes her displeasure known and gets her way against the wishes of the rest of the family.

I liked it. It’s a bit slow, but it’s also curiously upbeat, and you do come to have a strange affection for the character. I’m not sure if there’s something uniquely Chilean that makes it resonate particularly for them; I’d just call it an interesting little movie.

The Boy liked it as well, but he didn’t think it was very funny and a little slow.

I never miss a Coen brothers movie. Which isn’t to say that my reaction to them all is the same. Besides not provoking the same reactions at the time, often the reactions change over time and repeated viewings.

Befuddled bemusement, for example, followed The Big Lebowski. But over repeated viewings it has become one of my favorite movies of all time. No Country For Old Men also took multiple viewings to fully figure out, though for entirely different reasons. O Brother! Where Art Thou? was enchanting and remains so. Even Blood Simple was sort of amazing, resurrecting these long-out-of-fashion zooms and giving us a plot that the lead character ultimately didn’t understand.

I’ve maintained that the Coen’s have different styles of films, which sort of forces my hand with this one: Where does it fit? Comedy? Tragedy? Comedy of the darker sort?

I’ll be damned if I know.

I laughed. A lot. At the same time, the entire film is remarkably poignant and—well, it’s a sort of modern retelling of the Book of Job—or maybe a preface to Job?—set in the Midwest in the ‘60s. (1965-1967, given the appearance of “F-Troop”.)

Our hero is Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor who’s up for tenure. He’s got a series of minor nuisances—a disgruntled student, snotty kids, and a loser uncle who makes home life difficult. And as we watch, Larry’s life goes slowly to hell.

Larry’s a decent sort. He’s passionate about the physics he teaches, and about the math behind the physics, although as a wise man once said, there are no answers there. (Something Larry himself must face as he tries to find reasons for his worsening predicament.)

The Coens are always lauded for cleverness, but often also labeled as “cold”. I don’t agree, necessarily, but I see the point. This movie probably remind me most, at least superficially, of The Man Who Wasn’t There. Except that where Billy Bob Thornton’s barber character was metaphorically non-existent and challenging to care about, Larry seems to be strongly guided by a desire to do the right thing.

Where Thornton barber’s misfortunes might evoke a sort of wry smile that tweaks your sense of injustice, you just really wish Larry could catch a break. And it’s quite a roller-coaster ride. You don’t get any easy answers. In fact, the final scenes suggest you may have had the wrong questions all along.

In the telling, of course, you have amazing camerawork by the amazing Roger Deakins. The palette for the movie is the gawdawful, drab ’60s avocado greens and mustard yellows, and the whole thing strongly evokes the faded, crappy Kodachrome you’d see on all those late-night movies-till-dawn programs ca. 1980.

But wow. Amazing stuff. Every shot communicates. It’d be worth seeing again just to see what the various angles and compositions were saying. And then again to try to figure out how all those ugly colors and styles make such an aesthetically pleasing movie.

The Gopnik family itself seems both vaguely familiar and not immediately identifiable, actor Michel Stuhlbarg (Larry) has been a few things, but for the actors playing his wife, daughter and son, this their first roles.

Meanwhile, the supporting cast is a sort of “Who’s Jew”: Richard Kind as poor uncle Arthur, George Wyner, Adam Arkin, Michael Lerner, even Fyvush Finkel as a dybbuk (maybe).

Yes, about that dybbuk. The movie opens with a story about a man who’s helped during a snowstorm by a beloved rabbi. Which would be a blessing, if the rabbi hadn’t died years ago. Because the rabbi did, in fact the man has invited a dybbuk into his home. Which is quite a curse.

But did the rabbi die? Is it really a dybbuk? The ambiguity there may, in fact, be the key to the whole movie. What are blessings and what are curses? Is it always known?

I liked the movie more and more as it went on, I think for its peculiar empathy. Even when Larry does something wrong, you feel for him. There’s no judgment there. He’s human. And it has stayed with me all week.

I started thinking as I left that this may be the best movie of the year, better than my previous champ The Brothers Bloom. I can’t see it getting the attention No Country did: There’s a strong spiritual undercurrent, about Man’s relationship to God, and as dark as it is, there’s something life-affirming about it, where Hollywood seems to prefer nihilism.

The Boy liked it very much, though he missed a lot of the Biblical imagery. He was puzzling out the meaning of the dybbuk though, after I had sort of forgotten it.

I wouldn’t call it a dark comedy, though. As a lover of dark comedies, this felt entirely different to me—perhaps way too much reality. I don’t know. But I’d recommend it on a lot of different levels.

If there’s one thing that movies have taught me, one secret mystery that has been revealed to me, over and over through celluloid magic, it’s this:

Genocide is bad.

Time-and-again, Hollywood’s superior moral compass steers away from life’s most treacherous pitfalls. Just the other day, I was thinking of wiping out the Ainu but I remembered some important (if sometimes confusing) lessons recent movies had taught me.

“But Blake!” you cry, “What about Reds and Che and all those movies celebrating revolution that resulted in, or even immediately involved mass murder!”

“Well, that’s democide,” I reply smugly. “The jury’s still out on democide. No consensus there.”

“But genocide was also a big part of the Soviet regime, too!”

“Shut up,” I explain.

I digress. And exaggerate. Because today’s movie, Tickling Leo, is really a low-budget effort without much of Hollywood about it. It’s the story of Zak Pikler, who goes with his girlfriend Delphina to visit his estranged father upon hearing that he’s not quite right. Upon arriving, he finds out that his father is not well. In fact, he’s losing his mind.

Sure, we’ve seen it before. A lot. But have we seen it with WWII-surviving Jews? (Actually, I sort of think we have.)

Anyway, while Zak is estranged from his father Warren, Warren is, in turn estranged from his father Emil (Eli Wallach at 94, folks). As it turns out, Emil had to make a hard choice during WWII that Warren never understood, and Warren carried this anger through by renouncing his faith and not raising his son in the church—and further excoriating his non-Jewish wife when she tries to expose him to a little of it.

Delphina obviously has a passing interest in resolving this conflict, though there’s not a whole lot she can do, other than insisting Zak act like a civil human being.

I asked the boy afterward what he thought and he said:

“It was a very good example of its genre.”
“What did you think its genre was?”
“Depressing.”

But, in fact, it’s not a depressing movie, which is quite a feat, given the subject matter. Movies like this—I mean both Alzheimer’s movies and Holocaust movies—can tend to wallow. (Helloooo, The Notebook!)

It’s traditional film-making for the most part. Not a lot of shaky-cam. A few scenes are too darkly lit for what appears to budgetary reasons rather than artistic ones. But overall, the solid acting and writing makes for something that doesn’t feel uncomfortably low budget.

And it manages to weave a thread of optimism in it, which I tend to favor.

Still, it’s a niche.

Intriguingly enough, our next movie would also be steeped in Jewish-themed.

Imagine a world where no one lied. That there was no concept of lying, even. That all manners of fictions, deceits, imaginations and cons simply did not exist, and so neither did protections against them. Then imagine one man suddenly developed the ability to lie.

Or, don’t imagine it and go see the new Ricky Gervais movie The Invention of Lying instead.

Or, maybe don’t go see it.

The Boy said it was good though he thought it could’ve been funnier. Then the next day he said it was kind of depressing.

It’s interesting. The premise posits a drab world—modern day but rather colorless—and presumes the most cynical values of “truth”. After all, one can say any number of true things at any time. One doesn’t have to pick the most hurtful truth. But that wouldn’t be nearly as funny.

It’s a fragile premise: As if we could get to this point without imagination. But even allowing for that, as if we could get to this point without the concept of differing in opinion or just simply being wrong. Survival would be unpossible.

OK, we’re playing for laughs here. And it’s sort of funny seeing the world without euphemism, though actually not as funny as it should have been. (I felt like I could think of a dozen funny opportunities missed.) Part of this premise seems to be that there’s an agreed upon truth, and no one can deviate from it.

So, our hero (Gervais) is a homely loser who will never amount to anything—because he’s a homely loser who won’t amount to anything. We see him on a date with Jennifer Garner, who states flatly that she’s out of his league and, even though she likes him, they’re not “genetic matches"—as if that were a term with some sense to it.

In his darkest hour, something in his brain goes off, and he is able to lie to get himself out of a jam. And for a moment, it looks as though he’s going to pull a Groundhog Day, using his power for self-indulgence until he hits rock bottom and comes out the other side. I was grateful they avoided this plot—though Gervais could certainly pull it off—because that was sort of the plot of Ghost Town.

Gervais is most emphatically not a jerk here. He’s a nice guy who’s been labeled a loser and believes that label (because he has no choice but to do so). He quickly turns his ability to lie to try to help others. (Not that he isn’t plenty self-serving.) He brings his loser pals CK Louis and the suicidal Jonah Hill along for the ride, just for example.

The movie’s turning point is very possibly its downfall. In one of the most touching scenes I’ve seen all year, Gervais sits with his mother as she dies.

I’m going to do a little SPOILER here, so beware if you want to be surprised. I wasn’t surprised in the least, because the "twist” here had occurred to me about five times before it happened.

You’ve been warned. You probably should check out of this review now if you want to view this movie in a pristine state.

OK, so Gervais’ mother (the lovely Fionnula Flanagan, whose name I spelled right without looking it up!) is dying and sobbing hysterically because that’s the end and she’ll cease to exist for all eternity, so to make her feel better, he invents Heaven. This makes her happy but increases the complications for him, since the staff overhears him and wants to know more.

Cue Life of Brian style intrigue.

Hugely touching scene. But now the movie’s stepped in it. Truth is now materialism. And Gervais is then required to invent religion. But he does a piss-poor job at it, taking a micromanagement view of God that confuses everyone and gets them worked up.

Now, it’s perfectly plausible that Gervais’ character would do a poor job. But there was no reason for him to invent The Man In the Sky in the first place. No reason, in fact, that he would think of such a thing. All he had to do was invent the soul. Which makes the whole thing comes off rather anti-religion, atheist and working on the assumption that materialism is truth.

Then all of the “helpful lies” start falling apart, too. At first, we’re given a world where no one is happy because there are no lies. Then we’re given a world where no one is happy because of lies.

Well, a world where no one is happy isn’t very funny. And all the guest-stars in the world (Jason Bateman as a smiling doctor who is completely unmoved by death, Rob Lowe as Gervais’ genetically superior rival, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a bartender, Ed Norton as a cop, etc.) can only buoy it a little.

I’ve never had any opinions of Jennifer Garner in her early years but her work here and in Juno has really impressed me. (Though I do think she’s kind of goofy looking. Is that just me?) At the same time, a scene with her and Lowe just lies there (as it were).

It all comes off a little clunky, and the sharp veer into what are rather heavy matters of truth and reality, ends up bringing the whole movie down to a limping pace. Kind of depressing, as The Boy says, and ultimately saying what about Man and humanity?

We can’t be happy if we only believe the truth, and we can’t be happy if we believe in lies, but we can be happy if we can fool everyone else with our lies?

I mean, it’s a comedy, right? It probably didn’t mean to be profound at all. But if not, it should have trod a lighter path.

We’re coming out of lean times as far as moviegoing goes. As August winds down and well into September, typically the dregs of the season are released: Summer films that everyone thinks will flop, Award-season films that won’t win any awards, horror movies that can’t compete at Halloween, and so on.

That means that an occasional breakout success cleans up—it has no serious competition—though we haven’t seen that this year. But it’s a challenge for the regular moviegoer.

From this bleak desert we wandered into Pandorum, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi old-dark-house road-trip monster movie, starring Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid.

The story is simple, but perhaps I shouldn’t describe too much. Basically Payton and Bower (Quaid and Foster, respectively) wake up on their way to a distant world, but with no memory of who they are or what their mission is. OK, no need to panic since memory loss is a side-effect of hypersleep—but a little more disturbing when they realized they weren’t woken up by the previous shift. And the power is down. And they can’t get out of their sleep area.

That’s the sci-fi and old-dark-house part.

Shortly thereafter, they find the ship overrun by monsters. That’s the monster movie part.

Foster realizes he has to get to the reactor and restart it before it shuts down for good, and he finds some other awoken folks to accompany him: Road Trip!

And, oh, the movie starts with a series of rather grim statements about earth in the upcoming years, then goes to a picture of a crew on the bridge of the ship receiving a message from earth that says “You’re the last of us.” So, yeah, you can figure out the post-Apocalyptic part.

In fact, there are a couple of “reveals” like that later on in the movie where you’re thinking, “OK, not shocking since you showed that in the first fifteen minutes,” but this is well-directed and acted to the point where you sort of empathize for the characters: They didn’t know it. (Came in late to the movie, as it were.)

This sort of evokes Moon though without the shoestring budget. It still feels kind of cheap but—I don’t know, is $40M cheap these days? Kind of seems like a lot to spend on a movie with no hot stars and no promotion/marketing budget. I hadn’t even heard of this film.

It also saves its minimal corporate bashing for the beginning of the movie. There are intimations that corporations are behind all the world’s problems, but nothing to get hung up on.

As I mentioned, a lot of the reveals aren’t very revealing. And a lot of the tension I felt came from worrying they were going to screw the whole thing up. The titular Pandorum is, like, the “space willies”. So there’s a lot of question about who is crazy and who isn’t, and it has a big impact on how you perceive the story.

You might even, at the end, wonder if the whole thing’s a hallucination. But that’s reaching.

The boy proclaimed it very, very good, and particularly because the ending didn’t suck.

Sci-Old Dark House movies (Alien, Event Horizon, Sunshine) very often end badly. This looked like it was going to take one of those bad endings. About six times, actually. And one of the resolutions was sort of disappointing.

But overall, the spooky stuff works pretty well, the action works pretty well, the adventure works pretty well—though it’s all a bit familiar by now—and the plot (also well-worn) plays the right balance of tension and gratuitously-twisty-ending to come out in a satisfying fashion, which is rare.

Foster is good, Quaid is…Quaid, the other supporting actors are quite good, though most of the notice is going to go to Antje Traue, who’s like a German Kate Beckinsale with curves.

In short, this was a pleasant little surprise of a movie, I mean, if you don’t rule out cannibalism, monsters, murder, insanity and treachery from your “pleasant surprise” entertainment.

Mike Judge is someone whose work I always enjoy, even though (or maybe especially because) it’s usually low key and driven by average guys. But it can sneak up on you with its addictiveness.

Office Space, for example, went from a limited release, low-key, low-budget film to a cult classic adored by millions. Idiocracy? Well, maybe not so big, but still a cult classic. Even “King of the Hill”, which just ended its run last week, succeeded quietly, spending its run in the shadow of the iconic Simpsons and the far splashier “Family Guy”. And I suspect we’ll see “The Goode Family” build up the same kind of hard-core following, even if they don’t bring it back.

We won’t even talk about Beavis and Butthead, primarily because I’m not sure where that fits into the whole pantheon.

So, I wasn’t too surprised to see his latest movie Extract, spend one week at a few regular theaters—just surprised it jumped immediately to the second run theater. So The Boy and I rushed out to see it.

We laughed. A lot. As to be expected. But does this movie have the kind of grows-on-you cult-watchability of his other movies? Not a freakin’ clue. I’d have to rewatch it.

It is a bit ickier than his other films, I think. Though it’s ultimately handled with a typically kind and light touch, it feels kind of weird when it’s happening.

The premise is that Joel, a middle-aged man who built a successful extract factory, has become discontented on a couple of levels: First, he’s not getting any lovin’ from the wife (in a funny bit you can see parts of in the trailer); second, he’s somewhat disenchanted with his life’s calling of making extracts.

This second point is very secondary. We see and can understand why Joel’s unhappy with aspects of his factory and the life-changes his wealth has brought him; but he’s actually pretty passionate about extracts so his desire to retire ultimately seems to come down to the first point, and to a degree the encouragement of his colleague.

Anyway, into this mix is dropped a gorgeous con-girl, Cindy, a grifter who sees an opportunity when Step, one of the workers at the plant, suffers a freak accident. The accident, amusingly, occurs when one of the other workers, who’s obsessed with how much work everyone else is or isn’t doing, decides to let the machines roll even though doing so is bound to cause some sort of foul-up.

I’ve never worked in a plant like this, but from the people I’ve know who have, there are a lot of people who shoot themselves (and the plant) in the foot out of some perceived injustice. There are just a lot more of ‘em at Joel’s plant. He seems to have a soft spot for screw-ups.

Cindy’s pursuit of Step takes her across Joel’s path. And as we see in every single scene she’s in, Cindy uses her sexuality to deal with everything.

That might be enough to get the ball rolling, but for good measure, Joel has a bartender buddy (former co-worker) who gives him all kinds of sage advice, like how, as the owner of the company, he could have any woman he wanted who worked for them. (Though they’re mostly men and not very attractive.) And also, how, if his wife had an affair, he could also have an affair guilt-free.

It’s sounds almost French, doesn’t it?

The casting, typical for a Judge movie, is near perfect. Jason Bateman plays the milquetoast-y Joel with Kristen Wiig as his wife. Wiig does a great job, playing a very sympathetic woman in contrast to her usual quirky, sort-of cold comic character (seen in Ghost Town and Knocked Up). Mila Kunis is perfectly believable as Cindy, the sexpot without a heart of gold, though it’s a little hard to dislike her as much as we should.

David Koechner plays the neighbor from Hell, a latter-day Lumberg, J.K. Simmons is the colleague who refers to all of the employees as “Dinkus”. Dustin Milligan is the world’s dumbest gigolo. Beth Grant, last seen as the mother-in-law in No Country For Old Men is the woman who will wreck the plant to prove a point. Repeatedly. Gene Simmons plays a rapacious bus-stop-bench-advertising lawyer also out to shut the plant down out of sheer greed.

And, finally, in my favorite role of his since he played himself in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Ben Affleck is the drug-dealing bartender who basically guides Joel down the path of losing his marbles. He’s really good at these kinds of roles; he should do more of them. (I shouldn’t knock the guy; he was really good as George Reeve in Hollywoodland.)

But really, this is Bateman’s movie to carry, just as Ron Livingston had to make Office Space work and Luke Wilson had to make Idiocracy worth watching. Judge makes movies about Everyman and the Everyman has to be sympathetic and empathetic. Bateman’s one of my favorite actors, since the short-lived ’80s series “It’s Your Move”, and I love how he can turn up as a stoner jock in one movie (Dodgeball), an uptight white-collar worker in the next (The Break Up) and a smarmy won’t-grow-up musician in the next (Juno).

But did he have enough warmth to pull this off? I’m not really sure. And I mean that exactly: I’m not sure. It might be that the movie didn’t quite work for me at some levels and I’m looking around for reasons why.

The situation does get dire in this movie—Judge is excellent at making you wonder how the hell his characters are going to get out the messes they’ve made—and I felt like the resolution was a little pat. But it sort of had to be. It is a comedy, after all.

And it had what I consider to be Judge’s trademark kindness. The movie isn’t mean-spirited or misanthropic, so that goes a long way in my book. And while there was quite a bit about sex, it wasn’t graphic. It was way less than TV level, frankly. (I didn’t notice the language, though, so I guess that, and the drug use put it into the “R” category.)

I’m glad I saw it, and The Boy liked it a lot, if for no other reason then he was worried it was going to just turn into a downer and it didn’t. But I’d recommend it selectively, and heavily to the people I know who work in plants. It’s not Office Space level of classic, since there’s much less about the actual workings, but I suspect it’s eerily accurate.

There was another unusual thing about this movie: It’s basically business-positive, which is rare, and the first time I can remember such a thing in a decade. Ultimately Joel is heroic in his own way and lauded simply because he likes to work, and built a business where other people (who might not be highly employable) can work, too.

Even when there’s talk of a takeover, the company making the bid isn’t shown as a villain. The workers are shown as rather short-sighted, interestingly. And, of course, the lawyer is just as wicked as the criminal who hires him.

The Boy liked it.

Along with Pixar, Hayao Miyazaki is one of those filmmakers whose kid’s films I look forward to (and have for 15 years). And with Pixar’s John Lasseter running Disney’s creative stuff, it’ll be nice to see his films getting a bit of a wider release.

But when Jason (the commenter) tweeted that Miyazaki’s latest movie Ponyo boring, I could relate. In my case, I’ve noticed that there’s often something slightly relaxed about the narrative structures. There’s a different pace and purpose to scenes. Oddly, I always get to the point where I can rewatch them without being bored at all. Much like Pixar, his films are so packed with artistry that there’s always something new to notice.

I was pleasantly surprised by Ponyo, however. It skews young—more like My Neighbor Totoro and less Princess Mononoke—but the presentation was constantly entertaining. The Flower liked it. The Boy was chuckling throughout the whole movie, but I wasn’t sure he would cop to having enjoyed the movie as a whole, but he had no reservations about it. (He was actually more enthusiastic than The Flower.)

The story is one of these Japanese things where there’s a whole mythology that you’re not quite privy to. Fujimoto is the guy in charge of keeping the seas in balance. We’re not sure how he got the job, but he’s made time with some sort of sea goddess, and had 500 or so pollywoggish mermaid daughters.

But he’s a single dad, basically, raising a few hundred preschooler demigods, and so it’s not surprising that one of them, Brunhilda, manages to escape the protective bubble he keeps them in. From there, she gets into trouble and then rescued by a 5-year-old, Sosuke, who keeps her in a fishbowl and calls her Ponyo.

Her father then rescues her back, and I sort of thought the movie was gonna flash-forward Splash-style to a grown-up Sosuke, but it didn’t. Ponyo escapes her confines again, this time getting into her father’s store of magic elixirs and throwing the seas into chaos.

Ponyo reminded me a lot of The Barb, really, and I was pleased to see a movie that really respected the awesome, earnest destructiveness of the kindergarten set. There was another scene where Pony is sprouting arms and legs—growing into a human through sheer force of will—and poor Fujimoto (Ponyo’s father) is trying to stuff her back into her pollywog form, to no avail.

There’s a metaphor for ya.

Anyway, the only part that got me kind of sleepy was the climax of the movie. It’s a sort of weird thing for a movie about two five-year-olds, but they’re in love, and Sosuke has to pass a test to be with Ponyo. And if he doesn’t pass the test, Ponyo gets turned into sea foam.

Harsh.

But the whole aspect of what the test is and how to pass it is sort of vague. It might be something I get on rewatching the film, or it might not even be all that important. Other than that, the movie just seemed delightful: clever and cute, with some wonderful imagery.

Miyazaki fans will note a lot of trademarks: Food plays a prominent role; there’s a magical world and a real world; the real world has its ugly side but isn’t demonized; Ponyo’s sisters are reminiscent of the tree spirits in Mononoke; and so on.

Disney has thrown a bunch of celebs in here, as is their wont. There’s a Cyrus (not Miley) and a Jonas (but I don’t know if it’s one of the brothers). Cate Blanchett is the Sea Goddess, Tina Fey is Sosuke’s Mom—didn’t really recognize them or anyone else except Liam Neeson as Ponyo’s father and Betty White as one of the old folks. They just have those kinds of voices.

It’s been four years since Miyazaki’s last feature, and I know he keeps threatening to retire. I wouldn’t be happy about it, but Ponyo wouldn’t be a bad one to go out on.

This movie—indeed, the entire premise of revolutionary totalitarian movements—is probably best summed up by The Boy, who about 45 minutes (or approximately 5% of the total length) into the movie leaned over and asked, “What is it they’re fighting for?”

In fact, this movie feels so accurate, that one wonders whether it might not be used later on in the century by historians marveling that any group of people so stupid manage to survive. (Assuming, of course, we do manage to survive.)

The Baader-Meinhof Komplex is a German movie (the most expensive ever made at $20M euros?) about the Red Army Faction that operated primarily in the ‘70s in Germany. It covers about ten years of their activities, which include such socially advancing things as setting fire to a department store, robbing banks and blowing up newsrooms. And, at two-and-a-half hours long (in its pared down US version), it, uh…

What was I saying?

Oh, right. One-hundred-and-fifty-freaking-minutes of near uninterrupted idiocy. I read one review that said the movie doesn’t take a judgmental stance—which I’d agree with—and so gives you some room to sympathize with the characters—which I don’t agree with at all.

At one point, these spoiled Westerners who have been randomly destroying, killing and stealing go to a Palestinian Terrorist training camp and I actually felt sorry for the Palestinian terrorists. I mean, really sorry. I kept hoping they’d shoot the SOBs.

For example, the titular Meinhof at one point agrees to let her (pre-teen) daughters be thrown into a refugee camp. This, I guess, shows the completion of her transformation from bourgeois to radical.

The authorities are similarly clueless, with the one expert on urban terrorism constantly trying to figure out “the root causes”. These guys get away with stuff for years, and once behind bars, spontaneously formed cells of idiocy continue to do stupid stuff in their name.

And, if I may borrow from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, “What the f*ck is wrong with German people?” In particular, these—I’m sorry, I’m having trouble writing this without swearing.

What I’m getting at is that a significant percentage of the German population apparently supported these people. Worse, their capture was followed by years of navel-gazing by the courts, and a jail setup with all of them together that reminds one of nothing so much as “Hogan’s Heroes”, with all of them passing messages to the outside and stuff.

Look, people, we had morons who robbed banks and shot up cops here in America, too! We even made folk heroes out of ’em—though we had the excuse at least of being in dire economic straits. But when the state caught ’em, the state killed ’em. (In fact, sometimes the state killed ’em rather than catching them, because they knew they weren’t really all that good at catching, keeping and convicting.)

OK, sometimes we elected their friends President. But that’s complicated.

The only reason this is of interest—and maybe why I started to lose interest around the 100-minute-mark—is that these thugs masked their wanton brutality in political trappings. So determined were they not to allow the sort of fascist horrors that occurred under the Nazis, they blew stuff up and killed people to allow the sort of horrors that occur under communism.

The movie spends all its time on their activities (pre- and post-jail) and never looks at the question of how can something so obviously stupid be supported enough to cause such incredible destructiveness.

At one point, the Germans shut down the borders to do a countrywide dragnet to catch them! Our heroes are solemnly watching this, allowing how this confirms Baader’s idea that the country would turn into a police state. O, Irony!

I mean, honestly. I’m sure the people who lived it thought it was very exciting. An exciting time of change. But the only reason they could possibly think that is decades of a successful information war by communists, and a no-enemies-to-the-left attitude carefully fostered.

So, for me the movie ran out of steam. Well acted, well directed, well produced, and ultimately feeling like a waste of celluloid. (I have that reaction to Raging Bull, though, so your mileage may vary.)

Or as The Boy put it, “Hovercat is not amused.” These kids today with their internets and roflcats.

Phrases you don’t get to say much: “I’m here to see the new Andy Griffith movie!” I like Griffith, though I never could stand to watch any of his shows. I should say, I liked him in Waitress. I thought his Obama commercial with Ron Howard was kind of cloyingly appalling.

Still, the old guy’s back in the feature debut of Marc Feinberg, Play The Game. And once again his name is Joe. But unlike Waitress’s Old Joe, Grandpa Joe is a nice old guy with a grandson, David, who loves him.

David (played by Paul Campbell, who normally plays a character named “Billy”) is a sleazy used car salesman who is an expert at overcharging people he’s oversold, and who is expert and getting ladies into bed. He’s likable enough, and gave up his (weirdly low-key) dreams to buy a condo for Grandpa Joe in his time of need.

The premise of the movie is that David is teaching Joe how to “Play The Game”, i.e., get the ladies. Grandpa Joe quickly lands Edna (former James Dean fianceé Liz Sheridan), but really has the hots for Rose (perennial sombody’s mother Doris Roberts, who looks very good for 78). David coaches him through various strategies to land her.

Now, David is the main character in the movie, and it’s really primarily about him becoming smitten with Julie (Marla Sokoloff, who’s one of those actresses you’ll probably say, “Oh! Her!”) who always seems to be one step ahead of him, until he’s become the victim of his own games.

Well, you can see where this is going. You don’t make a RomCom about a guy who’s a player and have him stay a player. Kinda cramps the Rom part, if not the Com.

What sets this movie—or this part of the movie, anyway—above most is that is there’s an underlying mystery about what’s going on with Julie and David. He’s playing games with her, we know, because he goes over them in detail with his buddy, played by Geoffrey Owens (Elvin from “The Cosby Show”) and sometimes with Grandpa Joe.

A lot of little things, though, don’t quite add up. I wrongly attributed some of them to sloppy film-making (which attitude is the only one that makes it possible to be surprised by The Sixth Sense), but they’re all tied together at the end Fight Club style. Stay until the credits roll, people.

We enjoyed it.

I actually liked the old folks part better than the young folks. I don’t know if they’re better actors, necessarily, but they seem to have a lot more character then the pretty, sort-of-generic-looking leads. There is a fair amount of old folks sex and talk about sex. We do see the 83-year-old Griffith’s “Oh” face as the 80-year-old Liz Sheridan, uh… Let’s just say she’s out of frame for this part? We hear about it in detail later as well.

I also don’t really like “the player” as a lead character, or a member of society for that matter. David is a consummate liar, positively mercenary in his approach to women, and also almost completely unperturbed about his car selling tactics. I wasn’t sold on the back story for him; i.e., I didn’t feel enough empathy toward him to care too much about whether he got the girl.

Then there’s the question of the girl herself, and whether she’s playing him. And also why and to what end. Certain things that are intellectually satisfying are not necessarily emotionally honest.

But then, I dislike game-playing.

So, you know: fun movie, don’t think too hard about what it says about the main characters, or the view it takes of men-women relationships in general, and you can have a good time.

Zombies have been a scourge for untold eons, but as an untamed force—or a force only tamed in small quantities for the ends of the occasional witch doctor or mad scientists—they weren’t a serious threat. Not until George Romero popularized zombie-ism-as-a-contagious-disease in Night of the Living Dead did they become a global threat, and even then it was a non-directed threat. Zombies on that scale “just happen”.

After all, what possible force could be—what force would be—to try to harness the walking dead for their evil ends? Well, if you need to think about it, you might be on the wrong side. The answer, of course, is Nazis.

Nazis and zombies go together like peanut butter and sauerkraut. Maybe they’re not a good idea, but once you mix them, you’ll have the Devil’s own time separating them again. (This year we have the Norwegian movie Død snø, for example.)

Recently I had an opportunity to view the earliest example I know of the Nazi/Zombie blend, the 1943 film Revenge of the Zombies. This genre—mad scientist raising the dead—was already getting stale in ‘43, being the subject of Abbot and Costello and ultimately Bowery Boys films. And this is not a noteworthy representative, generally speaking.

John Carradine plays the mad scientist in question. (He also has a role in the ’70s Nazi/Zombie flick Shock Waves, surprisingly not as one of the zombies. And those are just the two N/Z John Carradine flicks I can think of off the top of my head.)

Gale Storm plays the secretary he’s got his eyes on before his wife isn’t even cold and walking above ground.

And that’s about it for big names.

What sets this movie apart from others of the genre is that it takes place in the bayou. Back then, of course, zombies and voodoo were still married. (If not for the presence of the German voice over the wireless, the Nazis would hardly be players in this show. But they’re needed for the extra menace factor.) But this movie is chock full of black people acting in ways black people aren’t supposed to act.

Which is pretty much the highlight of the movie. The white people walk around all serious and stodgy, while the blacks get to be interesting, ominous—wacky, sure, but really the only part of the movie that grabs you. Mantan Moreland, probably best known as Birmingham Brown in the ’40s Charlie Chan movies—also not a particularly PC series—is genuinely funny, no matter how minstrel-ly he may seem in modern times.

Anyway, this movie probably didn’t get aired much in recent decades as a result. I’m not sure why it suddenly became okay, but I’m sure it didn’t get play when I was a kid. (I would’ve seen it, guaranteed.) The director was a Hungarian who had made some good movies back home, but never quite got his mojo back in English, though he did ultimately direct the sci-fi icon Day of the Triffids.

This isn’t a movie you really recommend. You know from this description whether or not you want to see it, I’m sure. Semi-comically, I pulled this off the MGM “high definition” channel. The HD channels are kind of a joke. They charge you “merely” $5 for them, and then they’re full of non-HD programming, commercials (Universal HD, grumble) and the like. But MGMHD also has a lot of good movies, darnit. And interesting ones like this and It! The Terror From Beyond Space!

That movie, by the way, being the inspiration for Alien according to movie guru Ed Naha. I’ll report back once I’ve seen it.

I was sort of dreading going to see District 9 due to the summer factor mentioned previously with Orphan. But sci-fi isn’t the modern teen male proving ground that horror is, and it’s also generally more consistently loud, so I figured we’d brave it.

Not a stretch to say that it’s one of the best of the year. Interesting without that sort of self-important/self-conscious thought-provoking weightiness. It manages to walk the fine line between cynicism and nihilism, horror and dark comedy, and action-film with social commentary.

The premise (a la Alien Nation) is that a giant spaceship is hovering over Johannesburg. The ship is cracked open to discover a chaotic situation of aliens running around. The Prawns, as they’re nicknamed, end up being set up in a Joburg ghetto, where much degeneracy ensues.

Into this mess goes a South African by the name of Wikus, whose boss, the MultiNational United corporation, is under tremendous pressure to relocate the aliens to a happy fun-time camp 200 miles away. (Although I’d say this was neither a “left” nor “right” movie, there really is no reason for the MNU. It could just as well have been a government agency. And, let’s be honest: In any real situation, it would have been a government agency.)

Anyway, Wikus (pronounced like the plant, “Ficus”) gets into some trouble while trying to evict people, and ends up slowly mutating into a Prawn.

I know people are saying this is really original, but it’s almost hackery, isn’t it? Haven’t there been a dozen Star Trek episodes over various series that have done this? Isn’t it essentially Logan’s Run? Dances with Wolves? The premise of being forced to walk in your enemy’s mocassins, as it were. The one original story in The Twilight Zone Movie, and the one that seemed the tritest, perhaps not coincidentally.

No matter: This works because it is done expertly. The acting is excellent, and the transformation that Wikus goes through is really nuanced and interesting. He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s cheerful and people seem to like him. So it’s jarring to see him do some of the things he does early on in the Prawn camp. We alternate between liking him and not liking him, throughout the movie.

Said movie being almost non-stop suspense. You never know who, if anyone, is going to survive. You don’t know when they’re gonna get it. The movie does come down to two central characters, but death is imminent for both throughout most of the movie—and they manage to get you to care, which is the chief bugaboo of action films.

There were half-a-dozen places the movie might’ve ended before it did. And things did get a little dodgy in the end, just from a practicality standpoint. However—and this is a credit to the story—I found myself engaging in apologetics to a degree. I could see how certain things that seemed far-fetched could happen, given other things that had been set up. (I don’t want to be specific, lest I spoil things.)

The camerawork is largely shakycam, though not as bad as, say, Rachel Getting Married or Cloverfield. Since it’s actually part documentary (in the film), I think it would’ve been more effective to go to a steadycam during the non-documentary scenes, but I didn’t really notice that much.

I’ve pointed out that the acting is good, and the effects are just right. The only time I felt like yelling out “CGI!” was with a young Prawn—and of course that would be difficult to do well. The ending is just right, too. You’re on the edge of the seat and you actually feel like you won’t mind the (inevitable) sequel.

The Boy gives his thumbs up.

I’m seriously inclined to begin this review with a political screed. This movie carefully avoids any direct connection to actual events, however, so I suppose I should, too.

The story concerns a young new aide to the British Minister of State. The minister has just put his foot in it by saying that “war is unforeseeable”. And then, trying to fix things, follows up with something like “to walk the road of peace you must sometimes climb the mountain of conflict.”

This is a dry, wry and cutting movie, with quite a few laughs as the government of two nations (the UK and the USA) are shown to run by cowardly, self-involved incompetents who play petty games with each other and who generally put their goals ahead of what those goals might result in.

There’s a great cast, including Torchwood’s Peter Capaldi as a vicious agent of—well, I’m never actually sure who he worked for, Tom Hollander (who antagonized Keira Knightly in both Pride and Prejudice and The Pirates of the Caribbean) as the self-involved but ultimately well-meaning minister, MirrorMask’s Gina McKee as his assistant, and writer/actor Chris Addison as the young, new assistant. (He’s 37, but he doesn’t look it.) The great Steve Coogan (recently in the Night at the Museum sequel) has a part, too.

The first 20 minutes of this movie may be hard for you to understand. If, like me, it takes you about that long to be able to adapt to a mishmash of English and Scottish accents—the latter being both thick, and fast with some of the cutest swearing you’ll ever hear. It’s nasty, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help but smile when I hear “fook” and “shite” and “koont”. I would’ve gotten a lot more out of it they’d chosen a clearer sound: It’s all very organic, having people talking over each other; talking over each other with thick accents and a kind of muddiness makes things hard to parse.

The Americans are easier to understand. (For me, that is. You native English and Scots may have a hard time with them. But fook you.) They include Tony Soprano himself, James Gandolfini as the ultra-violent anti-war general and Mimi Kennedy, who’s probably best known as Dharma’s mom. (I kept thinking it was Alison LaPlaca and that she looked really old, but for Mimi Kennedy she was looking pretty young.) David Rasche, whose breakthrough was the short-lived “Sledge Hammer!” TV series, has happily managed to break that “type”, playing a hard-nosed (right-wing?) clean-mouthed politico.

The jokes, the sarcasm, the verbal irony and scathing wit fly fast and furious. And when you can catch it, it’s pretty dang funny. The cinéma vérité isn’t overdone, and it’s not boring.

And yet, it falls short of being great satire. It starts as appropriately harsh condemnation of political figures, but by the third act, dramatic irony is sacrificed on the altar of an earnest condemnation of that classic demon, rushing to war with bad intelligence. The bad guys—as they are clearly defined by this time—are just all-fired hot to have themselves a war, and completely willing to subvert an intelligence report to get one.

Why? Who knows? Who cares? Just run with it. Just fill in Evil W and Dick Cheney and their lapdog Blair and an entertaining satire gets bogged down in its own attempt to be significant. This pissed me off because it’s one of the stupider shibboleths of the left about Iraq: Yet that had to be the longest rush to war in modern times, with the topic under debate for over a decade.

That might bug you a lot less than it does me, but there’s really nothing else to hang on to. You could say they weren’t being specific so as to not make a political point, and then you’re left with a bad drama where the bad guys are so bad they’ll blatantly commit serious crimes—right out in the open!—for the sole purpose of starting a war. We don’t even get a nod to Stupid-Evil Economic Theory (see Gary Oldman’s “broken windows” speech in The Fifth Element).

Just random evil for the sake of random evil. Aided by a whole lot of feckless sorta-good. Satire becomes cynicism. Just to put this in perspective, imagine Network if the network killed Howard Beale for no reason. Or Very Bad Things if the “heroes” had just gone on a killing spree. Harold and Maude if Harold killed Maude, or The Ladykillers without the heist.

Epic black comedy fail. Assuming that was the intention of course. A really good black comedy—and one with the ring of truth—would have had the two sides switching by the end of the movie on the basis of some sort of election or polling result.

The Boy liked it, though he had an even harder time making out the dialogue than I did. Plus, there were references to “old stuff” I know he missed.

Recommend it? Depends on how much you agree with or are annoyed by implicit reinforcements of anti-war dogma—I mean, it’s not like we’ll ever see a movie about The Rush To Healthcare or The Rush To Cap-and-Trade—and whether you’re good at parsing out thick accents all talking at once.

Some of the synopses of this movie about a psychiatrist who kind of deteriorates into depression and drug abuse make it sound like a sort of wacky, black-ish comedy.

Don’t be fooled. Shrink is a movie about surviving the suicide of someone you love, and in a larger sense, surviving life with is failures and even successes. There are some darkly funny moments, but a whole lot of depression.

Kevin Spacey plays a psychiatrist to the stars: A successful man with successful clients who wallow in neuroses and look to him for excuses for their bad behavior. But he’s increasingly depressed over the loss of his wife, and unable to use the information in his bestselling novels to help himself out of his funk.

I should put in a ROBIN WILLIAMS ALERT for Trooper York: Williams plays–well, I’m guessing a character maybe based on Jack Nicholson?–and he’s actually not very convincing. But he’s not in it much, and he’s not obnoxious.

The main characters are an agent played by Dallas Roberts, who is as powerful as he is neurotic, a screenwriter/tenuous relative to Spacey played by Mark Webber, a troubled urban school kid played by Keke Palmer, and an overly successful strung-out actor played by Jack Huston (yes, of those Hustons).

That’s a lot of main characters. Which gives us the primary failing of this movie.

There’s a writer by the name of Robert Newton Peck who wrote a cute little book on how to write, in which gave various rules about what to do and what not to do. One of the things that stuck with me was “Stay in the phone booth with the gorilla.” In other words, you don’t mention that your main character is in a phone booth (okay, outdated now) with a gorilla, and then go off on 12 tangents while leaving everyone wondering about the character, the gorilla, and the antiquated phone booth.

This doesn’t create suspense, typically. It does create annoyance. And so, while have our main-ist of main characters, played by Spacey, we’re constantly being yanked away from the interesting stories and pulled into another story which isn’t nearly as interesting. Then it gets interesting and we’re pulled away from that into another one.

Paul Thomas Anderson has gotten away with this, arguably, with Boogie Nights and Magnolia, except that he lets the scene finish before switching to a new scene. Not completely resolve, but finish as a reasonably self-contained unit. The exception being when the stories overlap in a suspenseful way and are about meet up.

This movie just sprawls, sort of fecklessly unsure of where it’s going, but reasonably sure about the quality of the material it has in its characters. Who, when you break them down sound pretty cliché: the psych who can’t help himself, the troubled urban kid, the desperate screenwriter, the self-absorbed agent, the star who self-destructs because he’s not producing quality “art”, the starlet trying to sleep her way to the top, the aging actress who can’t get good roles….

Geez, I may have talked myself into thinking this is a worse movie than I thought before I started this review. The characters don’t come off horribly hacky, though. The movie is really buoyed by the relationships of the main characters with the supporting characters, like the titular character with his drug dealer Jesus (Jesse Plemmons). Although this is sort of hacky, too, since, fercryinoutloud, his name is Jesus. Not hay-soos–he’s a ginger named “Jesus”.

Well, at least they don’t put any words of wisdom in his mouth, exactly.

Another bright spot is Pell James as Daisy, pregnant assistant to the high-powered agent, who gives us a reason to like both the agent and the screenwriter. Robert Loggia brings some nice gravitas to his short role. And Saffron Burrows as the aging actress (she’s 36 or 37!) is delightful.

Ultimately, though, the movie founders: It’s too unfocused, even remote from its own characters. We don’t get enough time with them to appreciate their changes, and the movie doesn’t sell their flawed selves well enough to allows us appreciate their transformations. They’re actually not really in conflict with each other most of the time.

The whole thing comes off a little boring, a little listless. Marijuana plays a big part; maybe there’s a connection there. Heh.

The Boy was not thrilled. He thought it could’ve been funnier and overall less drab. I tend to agree.

Second movie in a row we saw that took place in L.A., though. (Previous one: Funny People).

Like the rest of you, I was outraged by this movie! I needed to know: Who hurt this locker, and why?

Heh.

The Hurt Locker is the latest from the beautiful and talented Kathryn Bigelow, the story of a EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) squad in its final days in Iraq 2004.

Bigelow’s catalogue is a mixed bag, delivering an unexpected gem in the early vampire movie Near Dark, and an unexpected stink bomb in the Jamie Lee Curtis/Ron Silver starrer Blue Steel. (Really, that film has a killer cast, great atmosphere, a reasonably promising premise, and yet it’s astonishingly bad. It’s worth seeing just to try to figure out why.) However, those were quite some time ago and Bigelow hasn’t directed much since the high profile bomb K-19: The Widowmaker. (I rather liked that one and thought a number of the critiques were sort of superficial.)

If The Hurt Locker shows anything, it’s that Bigelow is supremely confident and competent handling scenes of high suspense. This movie is 80% powered by suspenseful set pieces, as the crew defuses bombs and otherwise engages with hostiles in Iraq. A persistent tension holds these scenes together like glue (without being annoying, as tension can be over a 2-hour-plus period).

Bomb defusing is of course inherently suspenseful, but if it seems like low-hanging fruit, consider all the times it’s been done badly, even when it’s done once or twice in a film. This film has at least five bomb defusings, each one different from the last, and each one putting you on the edge of your seat.

I almost didn’t see this film, since I read a review (from a right-winger) saying that the movie got political at the end, ruining an otherwise good film. In trying to find that review again, I came across a slew of leftist reviews that were alternately pissed at the absence of politics, pissed at the notion that it wasn’t political and/or just pissed at the whole war.

I’m happy to report that if you don’t bring your political baggage to this movie, you probably won’t find it to be especially political. Leave your English degree at home, too, lest you start seeing metaphors for…stuff.

So, beyond the excellent suspense scenes, and the atmosphere of tensions, what else do we have? Well, our three leads are either clichés or archetypes, take your pick. And the last 20 or so minutes, which is meant to give us insight into the main character’s psyche–well, really doesn’t particularly. I suspect there’s an element in here of trying to make a political statement, but it’s pretty weak tea. (There’s really not much of a political statement you can make when you’re dealing with the guys on the ground; war looks the same from there, regardless of politics.)

What else? Well, the whole thing struck me as a little far-fetched. OK, not just a little, a lot. I didn’t delve into details on how the EOD squads worked, but–well, these guys didn’t seem to be with anyone, to answer to anyone, or even particularly be affected by anything else going on. They just went out to answer bomb threats and then–again weirdly–left the defused ordinance lying around. (I presume for others to clean out, but this was part of the isolation the movie shows.)

In writing this, I stumbled across this interview pointing out some the same issues I had.

OK, so, don’t take it like it’s supposed to be Michael Yon’s blog–though they came awfully close to recreating his classic photo–and don’t bring your political baggage and you can have a good time. If you do bring your political baggage, you can probably find support for whatever point-of-view you have if you look hard enough.

The Boy also liked it, though he thinks it won’t hold up well. That is, he thinks the immediacy of the Iraq War gives the movie an extra cachet it won’t have a few years down the line.

Either way, I hope see more films from Bigelow.

One of the first movies I blogged about was the Spanish horror film The Orphanage. So it’s only fitting to make my last movie blog about the new horror movie The Orphan. Except, of course that this has no connection with that Spanish film, and I’m not going to stop blogging as far as I know.

Other than that, there’s a real poetry here.

Let me just say up front that this is a really, really solid horror flick. I mean, great. Up there with Drag Me To Hell but completely the opposite in tone: Deadly serious.

There was one problem, however: It’s mid-summer, it’s a horror film, which means it’s hard to see it without there being a large percentage of assholes in the audience. And our showing had more than the usual amount. It’s always male teens, of course, whose concept of masculinity is so poor, they feel compelled to prove it by “acting tough” during a horror movie. Half the audience was texting, too.

Really, I should have known better. And I do, but I forget because I’m not all that tied into “summer” and I usually go to the local art house where the big peril is the old folks.

Anyway, back to the movie. This is part of the “Bad Seed” genre, where a young couple (the annoyingly familiar-but-not-quite-identifiable-to-me Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiger) go to adopt a child to compensate for a recent stillborn.

There they meet the delightful Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) who makes rather good oil paintings and sings old show tunes, while not really blending in with the other kids. John and Kate (yes, that is the parents’ names) decide to adopt this quirky kid and bring her home.

Where she immediately sets about killing all who stand in her way. OK, not really. In fact, the initial treatment she receives from her peers (and older brother) is pretty awful. Still, you’re not quite sympathetic because she really does come across as malevolent.

The movie escalates bit-by-bit as Esther reveals more of her true nature and is required to take more and more drastic means to cover up her crimes. She’s also clearly driving a wedge between John and Kate.

You know, I dislike this genre almost as much as I dislike “House of Usher”-type movies (i.e., movies where it’s apparent from the start that the characters are doomed); I think it’s kind of a cheap shot to jeopardize children and put them in the position of evildoers. (Roger Ebert, who gave this movie 3.5 stars said something similar about the late Gene Siskel. I think it’s kind of sweet of him to bring his old partner up.)

Yet, this is a genuinely great horror flick; It manages to present many of the common genre tropes (murderous children, weird sexual overtones, etc) but without falling into the merely unpleasant or icky–the usual fate of such films.

Yes, there is a twist to this film. It occurred to me almost immediately but the movie rather adroitly made me forget about it until about the third act, by which time there were only a few ways the story could go and still make sense. Often after the big reveal, horror movies kind of peter out and coast along, but this one kept going right up to the very last moment.

A huge amount of credit has to go to the young actress playing Esther. (Sure, her Russian accent comes and goes, but it would in real-life, too.) Alternately beautiful and charming, and cold and psychopathic, she bears the brunt of conveying the horror. Kate must be believably menaced by Esther, and this comes off nicely, though the script gets a lot of credit there for not relying too heavily on any particular trope.

That is, when you have a menacing child, there are only a few ways to go to string the movie out, and this one hits them all, but none of them ridiculously hard. Farmiga is not entirely credible due to past history, but the movie doesn’t rest solely on that. And she realizes Esther is off in a serious way, but not one that would justify drastic measures until the end. And then there’s the whole social issue of “troubled children”.

Again, that very delicate balancing act of “well, that’s creepy” versus “well, that’s just downright unpleasant”.

Also true of Sarsgaard, who must be the bland, committed father who is unaware that he’s being manipulated by his new daughter. (All fathers are manipulated, of course, it’s just the unaware part that’s bad. Heh.) Margo Martindale (“Dexter”’s woman in search of the perfect key-lime pie) plays the dull, easily manipulated psychiatrist–sort of a mandatory part for this kind of movie–infuriatingly convcingly.

The siblings (Jimmy Bennet, Aryana Engineer) do an excellent job as well. Interactions with other children are another way that these movies can go off the rails, but the dynamics are handled excellently and rather lightly, in the sense that the movies stays especially focused on Kate and Esther, rather than Esther and her siblings.

A lot of care and thought went into lighting, shooting, music, editing–nothing looks “phoned in”. All-in-all, a very watchable horror flick. Not super-violent, but nonetheless very “adult themed”–not for kids. Two hours long, too, without feeling as long as some 90 minute horrors I’ve seen.

The Boy commented that he wasn’t into it–I think he was especially distracted by the jackasses in the audience–but that it kept drawing him back in. That’s about right. The movie really did overcome the bad audience.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra and writers David Johnson and Alex Mace don’t have much in the way of credits, and at this point in my life I’m inclined to regard this film as kind of a fluke where everything comes together just so. Nonetheless, I’ll be watching to see what they do next to see if they can duplicate their success here.

This joins the ranks of our “Best of 2009”: The Brothers Bloom, Up and Drag Me To Hell–and it lacks the last’s lame horror ending. So, you know: Check it out.

I was sort of leaning toward seeing the dark S&M Nazi dissection movie Death In Love, but it seemed really inappropriate for The Boy and the more I looked at it, the more I suspected the few IMDB ratings that put its score in the 8s were from the cast, crew and family members of the cast and crew.

So, instead I took The Boy to see Away We Go, which opens with Burt performing oral sex on Verona.

Oh, well.

In fairness, it’s a plot-crucial moment, and more funny than anything else. We learn a lot about the two characters both individually and their relationship with each other. So, it’s one of your rare, non-gratuitous oral sex scenes.

It’s also cute, as is the whole movie.

I was somewhat reluctant to see this movie, because it was directed by Sam “Taking Out The Trash Is An Existential Crisis” Mendes. And it does scrutinize the whole family thing, as Mendes is wont to do.

But let’s scroll back a tick: This is the story of Burt and Verona, a 30-something couple that has just discovered that they’re gong to have a baby. Verona’s parents are deceased, and Burt’s parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara) have chosen this moment to take a two year trip to Antwerp.

Lacking any local support, Burt and Verona are now free to travel about the country in search of some kind of family role model.

That’s right people: It’s a road picture.

And it works! What’s nice is that it doesn’t work just because Mendes is a fine director and the actors (Maya Rudolph of Idiocracy and John Kasinski of “The Office”) are very believable, but because the characters they’re playing are very likable. Flawed, certainly, but very likable.

They doubtless represent a big chunk of the post-Boomer generations, too. With no real imperative to do much of anything, no real parental guidance to speak of, and an unprecedented amount of freedom, Burt and Verona are not the first to realize that they’ve got a kid coming and they’d better get their act together before it shows up.

Part of what makes them likable, though, is that they begin this long journey in an effort to figure out the best life for their child. And not in a everything-has-to-be-perfect way, but in a what-is-a-family way.

Their journey takes them to a family that just sort of hangs together because, well, that’s what families do. They’re sort of an unlikable group, but you do feel a kind of empathy for them.

Then we meet Verona’s younger sister, who’s a bit more adrift than she is. After that, it’s Burt’s cousin, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal (who reminds us that she’s a lot more believable as an insufferable New Age-y shrew than a Assistant D.A.) who nurses her kids well past the usual age, and shares a family bed (and more!) with the kids.

And so it goes. There isn’t really a “normal” family here, but that’s to be expected. And as awkward and uncomfortable as many of the scenes are, we always have Burt and Verona’s ambition to do right by their kid.

This really was a pleasant surprise: lightly humorous, sweet and hopeful. I found myself slightly annoyed by the acoustic guitar folk music that’s mandatory in these films, but that was probably more due to the previews leading up to this movie that looked and sounded just like the preview for this movie.

The Boy really liked it, too, way better than Revolutionary Road, and he brings a new understanding to his viewing since he had his movie class. We both agreed that the comedic and other light-hearted aspects made this a more watchable movie. And I thought it actually made the serious parts more profound than the relentless despair of the DiCaprio/Winslet vehicle.

It won’t get the plaudits, though, so you’ll have to be a little more aggressive if you want to actually catch this one.

Well, we’re in the homestretch as far as Harry Potter movies go, though the bastards have decided to milk the franchise by splitting the last book into two movies. As if you couldn’t possibly do the story justice in 2 ½ hours, you need a full five to tell it.

But that’s a problem for next year. Or the year after that, depending on whether they decide to drag it out even further.

Now, about this latest movie, The Half-Blood Prince. Well, wait, before we get to the latest, I have to assume that you’re aware of the whole “Harry Potter” world and its inconsistencies. ‘cause the world ain’t getting any more consistent. (Like, how, in the fourth movie, all three forbidden curses were performed in a classroom; in this movie, a non-forbidden spell nearly as fatal as the death curse in the fourth one turns up. And an incredibly fatal potion is brewed as a casual class exercise.)

But, really, you should be expecting stuff like that by now.

You should also be expecting this movie to follow the increasingly dark trend the previous four sequels have followed, and it does, big time. The Flower and I have a running gag that started with the biting candy from the fourth movie: “Harry just can’t get a break!”

And Harry doesn’t get much of a break in this one. It’s literally darker, too, with very few bright days, so that even the lighter moments–and there are actually quite a few light-hearted moments, probably more so than in the previous film–still feel like darkness is weighting them down. John Williams’ Teddy-Bears-Picnic-esque theme is completely gone, except for some echoes in Nicholas Hoopers’ gripping score.

I was somewhat reluctant to take The Flower to see it, in fact, but she brushed off my concerns and really seemed completely unphased throughout the movie. (There’s even a bird that dies–or appears to–and she was disappointed by that, but not upset. Maybe she’s growing up?)

You should know that there is a major character death in this film. The Flower, apparently wise to the ways of the sci-fi/fantasy/horror story, was fairly confident the character would come back in the next movie. But even when I assured her that the character wasn’t coming back–I think that’s true–she was okay with it.

Your eight-year-old’s mileage may vary. (Of course, if your eight-year-old is frightened, that might offer a respite

Anyway, this darkness is kind of interesting in contrast with the rampant sexuality in the movie. Don’t get me wrong: There’s nothing graphic about it. The movie is just rife with teenagers and love potions (as if those were necessary), and some light snogging ensues. This also did not trouble the eight-year-old, though she found much of it silly.

Meanwhile, there’s a whole lot about this film that is truly excellent. The camerawork is the best of the series. The establishing shots are breathtaking, a few scenes look like they’re from Romantic era paintings, and director Yates (on his third Potter film) is increasingly confident. (Or perhaps he’s just being given more freedom with his successes in the previous films.)

There’s also a lot of richness in this movie. Most of the tedious exposition has been gotten out of the way in the previous five films, and the characters are well-established. The kids are better actors, too, and while the story needs to focus more on the main ones, it’s a shame that so many of the peripheral kids are barely in the film. (Never mind the adults, who can now add the great Jim Broadbent to their rolls.)

I’d give a special shout out to Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) and Bonny Wright (Ginny Weasley) who get some meaty, if not huge, parts they acquit themselves well with. I missed Katie Leung (Cho, from the previous two films) both as an actress and as a character. Did their relationship really end because she was forced to tell about the secret room in the previous movie? Seems unfair.

The action is brisk, too. The movie really flies by, despite the nearly two-and-a-half hour running time (not counting credits). The plot is…well, the plot. It works because the director stays focused on the simplicities as much as possible: Threats large and small abound, and survival is a tenuous thing.

The big reveal is very nearly stupid, however. If you’re super-sensitive to spoilers, you may want to skip this paragraph, but what I’m going to “spoil” is the entire basis for all the movies prior to this, at least as I have understood them. Ready?

The big secret Harry uncovers is that Voldemort used some magic to preserve his life even after shuffling off his mortal coil in the battle with Harry’s parents. Stunning, eh? Didn’t see that coming. If you were Dumbledore. OK, it’s a little more detailed than this, but really, given that Voldemort spent the first four movies re-incarnating, you’d think a trivial stroll through the library’s Restricted Spell section–a stroll that apparently any kid can take, would’ve revealed this mystery sometime during the previous 15 years of Harry’s life. Or at least the last five years.

As I said, you kind of have to be used to this stuff by now. None of the movies make a lick of sense (and I understand the books aren’t much better in that regard). But this movie does leave things in a very precarious spot indeed. Along with a path for resolving those things.

The Flower did not rate it with her favorite, The Prisoner of Azkaban. (She likes it when Harry makes the Aunt blow up like a balloon.) But she wasn’t displeased. The Boy liked it, too, though it doesn’t comport with his economic sensibilities.

And I liked it, too. I sure wish they weren’t splitting the last book in two movies, though.

Ah, women. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t beat ’em to death with rocks.

Oh. Wait a tick.

It’s Iran! And the movie is The Stoning of Soraya M., based on the 1986 true story of an Iranian man who uses Sharia law to handle his marital issues in a creative manner. That is to say, he conspires to have her convicted of committing adultery.

I sort of have to be a little flip here because this is a grim story of an unfortunately common experience in Iran and other Muslim strongholds, and you know from the get-go pretty much how it’s going to come out.

The build-up felt slow to The Boy but this is a story I think is done well, and reflects one of my favorite narrative flourishes: Even with the outcome being known in advance, a good storyteller creates suspense and a desire to see a different outcome in the audience. (I’m not a Stephen King fan, but he does a good job of this in Carrie. And, of course, that Shakespeare guy.)

There isn’t really a lot to talk about, movie-wise. The acting is quite good. You’ll probably recognize Shoreh Aghdashloo who is (in essence) the narrator, and Soraya’s Aunt. You might recognize Mozhan Marnò from her work in Traitor or from the refugee camp scenes in Charlie Wilson’s War. And so on. (American movies about foreign cultures tend to have the same A-List actors from that culture, so it’s practically shocking that I didn’t recognize anything from Kite Runner.)

There are a few directorial flourishes, and a little music, but mostly this is a spare tale, plainly told.

And, frankly, it pissed me off. I mean, when the opening scene has Aghdashloo running to the river in a black burka, it reminded me so much of The Life of Brian, I had to smile. The Life of Brian also has the greatest stoning scene ever.

And it made me think of what I was saying in my last MMA post. There is a fate worse than death, and the Irianians opted for it 30 years ago. I mean, come on! The stunning similarity between life in Iran in 1986 to (an admittedly faked) portrayal of life in the year 1 reminds one that, in the year 1, the Persians were probably ahead of where they were in 1986.

I was actually sort of jarred by the presence of an automobile. Occasionally there are shots of men in modern-ish clothes. And a radio. Otherwise, this story could’ve taken place centuries ago.

I mentioned it pissed me off? It did. Big time. The men in this movie are evil, weak, cowardly and stupid. There are bookends with Jim Caviezel (of Jesus fame) who is the only male in the movie approaching heroic. It would make me ashamed to be Persian.

The women are more varied. Some are happy enough to be tools of a genuine patriarchy (not like the one we allegedly have here), and most are convinced of their own helplessness. Zahra (Agdashloo), though more acclimated than the other women to freedom, also seems to know Sharia better than they do, and how and when to push against the order.

The visceral reaction I felt at times was rather unusual for me. Soraya’s husband was a good example of a guy who “just needed killin’”, as they say in Texas. And I kept thinking that women should be champions of the second amendment. Also, I kept hoping someone would stick a knife into that guy.

When a bus rolls in at the climactic scene, I wanted it to plow through these worthless men.

It’s not that kind of movie, obviously, but it would make a great primer for a Persian Death Wish or Rambo. A more transparent and gross miscarriage of justice would scarcely be possible.

In my more phlegmatic moments I reminded myself that there are similar stories in the Western world. I don’t know of any wholesale “get out of marriage free”-type situations like those set-up by Sharia but Ancient Greek culture had some interesting oddities in that regard. Still, that’s a long time and a lot of apocalypses ago.

But this goes on today! Needless to say, there’s an awful stoning in this picture. A true, horrible depiction. Where Kite Runner gave us a scene of wide-scale social insanity, an impersonal lynching by a huge mob in a massive modern arena, Stoning gives us an intimate, awful, close-up look at an innocent woman being killed by her family and friends.

The framing story actually pissed me off more for reasons I can’t say without a spoiler. Nonetheless, a good movie about an awful story.

I asked for tickets to Moon, Inc. at the theater the other night, which was a conflation of the new low budget sci-fi movie Moon and the documentary (exposé) on food corporatism Food, Inc. but in fairness that may have been because it was pretty obvious from the summary that an evil corporation was central to the Moon plot.

More on that in a second.

First, because you probably haven’t heard of it, Moon is a new movie by director Duncan Jones which stars Sam Rockwell as astronaut Sam Bell, approaching the end of his three year contract for Lunar Industries when things start to go awry. His computer companion, Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) seems to be helpful, but is he?

OK, yeah, clichéd as all get out. What works, though, is Sam Rockwell, a fine actor who has incredible range: There are times in this movie where he doesn’t quite look like himself. And this movie gives him a chance to show range, which he manages to do without really recalling other characters, like Crewman Guy from Galaxy Quest or Wild Bill from Green Mile.

Kevin Spacey, whose voice is the sort of pleasantly bland, banally modulated sound we’ve come to expect in movie computers, and whose character’s emotions are otherwise represented by a series of emoticons, very AIM-like smileys, still manages to convey some kind of subdued humanity, thanks to one of the least clichéd aspects of the story.

This part, Spacey and Rockwell–who are basically it, as far as presences in the movie–really does work, and makes the movie more engaging to me than, say, the more opulent Public Enemies.

Now, from an economic standpoint? The movie makes not a lick of sense. I’m sure I’m it will come as no surprise to you (or anyone else who’s ever been to a movie) that, in this movie about a corporation, greed is the primary lens through which the corporation is viewed.

But we have, as with the execrable The Constant Gardener, a poor sense of scale. Lunar Industries is supposed to be providing the earth–the entire freaking planet–with 70% of its “clean energy needs”. The problem that the corporation is presented as solving in a creative money-saving way is nowhere in the order of magnitude of the amount of money they’d have at their disposal.

And the solution is positively absurd. It really raises more questions than it solves. An undertaking of the magnitude implied would be far more expensive and challenging than the supposed solution.

Also, a significant percentage of the earth’s energy being dependent on one man?

Yeah. No. No chance.

But that’s okay, it’s not really the various “reveals” or “plot twists” that make this movie. The story lays things out pretty quickly, and where the movie excels is with Sam struggling with being away from earth for so long, missing his young daughter, working through his personal anger issues, and so on.

So, a good little movie. Entertaining, dramatic, nicely done cheap effects–looked like models instead of CGI, which I like. Spare without being austere. Nice use of a limited budget.

Check it out.

People do seem to love them some Michael Mann. I’m not one of those people, so you should keep that in mind as I review his latest opus, Public Enemies.

I don’t hate the guy or nothin’. Well, okay, I used to. During the late days of 1980 and early 1981, it seemed like every movie thata was released wallowed in mediocrity. To some degree that may have been pure happenstance, as there were many, many fewer movie options back then and if you were dedicated, it was hard to avoid seeing bad ones.

One of those movies was the very disappointing James Caan vehicle Thief, Mann’s first big-league feature. He followed that up with the even more disappointing The Keep, a nazi-monster horror flick with a great cast. Then he got famous for “Miami Vice,” which was fun and quintessentially ‘80s, and with that fame, he was the first to put Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter onscreen with the remarkably noisy-yet-forgettable Manhunter. That same year he put his name on the downright icky Band of the Hand.

But he got better in the ’90s. (That’s consensus, not just my opinion.)

I personally find myself not engaged by his movies, generally. They don’t resonate with me. Even if I enjoy one of his movies, like Collateral and to a lesser extent the (overrated) Last of the Mohicans, I almost immediately forget them after seeing them. (If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that I like Michael Mann the director more than Michael Mann the screenwriter.)

And now, forearmed with an inkling of my tastes, to Mann’s Public Enemies, the story (primarily) of special agent Melvin Purvis’ pursuit of notorious Public Enemy #1 John Dillinger in 1933 Chicago. Summary: I found it more or less like Mann’s other works; I wasn’t engaged, mostly, and I’ll forget most of it pretty soon.

But there are some really fine moments in this film. And while it’s an ensemble piece, a lot of what works has to do with Johnny Depp’s performance as Dillinger. I wonder if it gets tiring hearing how awesome you are, but Depp is ridiculously empathetic as the man whose early incarceration turned him into an effective (yet gentle!) bank robber. Violent, but principled, dangerous but with high standards.

Yeah, it’s romanticized, big time. It’s kind of weird, even. There are good guys and bad guys among both the FBI, the police and the gangsters, in no particular distribution.

The story arc basically follows Dillinger’s breaking into a jail, then returning to Chicago where he embarrasses the G-men, who then resort to increasingly brutal tactics to cover up their general incompetence. Christian Bale is the hard-edged but largely moral special agent who has to carry out J. Edgar Hoover’s demands.

Complicating matters for Dillinger is his fledgling yet instantly permanent romance with Billie Flechette (Marion Cotillard of La Vie an Rose and 9/11 and moon landing conspiracy theories), for whom he tries to take responsibility, and who (of course) becomes his weakness. (Actually, upon reflection, this aspect of the story is almost Harlequin-esque, which may make it popular with the ladies.)

She’s not as big a weakness as The Syndicate, which is becoming mighty unfriendly to these bank robbing celebrities who attract unwanted attention to illegal activities.

You get the idea.

I was distracted. There were about 20 interesting stories here, and I felt like we got the most banal one. Which could’ve made for a great movie, mind you, but it was also unfocused. Give us the love affair and the noble bank robber, if that’s the story you want to tell.

The Boy liked it, I should point out, so I may just be making excuses for why this film didn’t ignite my toes like it is for Mann fans. He did express disappointment that it wasn’t about the economic underpinnings of organized crime; I don’t have the heart to tell him that they don’t really make movies about the economic underpinnings of organized crime. (Though last year’s Rock ‘n’ Rolla came pretty close!)

But, damn, there was an interesting story right there: How The Mob was in bed, then out of bed, with the bank robbers.

There’s another scene with J. Edgar Hoover trying (and failing) to get money from Congress for the FBI, and being thwarted by a principled man who saw the danger in a national police force and the threat particularly posed by Hoover. Interesting.

There’s Dillinger himself: Rough upbringing, stupid life choice early on, forged into a criminal by the system, but still drawn to this low class girl with integrity, and fiercely protective of her. But why? What really happened? Where did he get his principles from? Interesting.

And, wow, what about a society (America during the Great Depression) that venerates bank robbers? That has so little faith in the system that it roots for criminals, but at the same time elects the same man President over and over again. (The former is a big part of the story, the latter not so much. )

Anyway, I just kept thinking of all these interesting things that would never be developed.

Really fine acting, of course. Though I have trouble with these period pieces, ’cause they all kind of dress alike and have similar hair cuts, but I did manage to distinguish, generally. The lighting doesn’t help, however: A lot of the interior shots look “naturally” lit, i.e., details of faces hard to make out. (Fincher does that, too, but you always know who you’re looking at even if you can’t make out their face.)

The use of the shaky-cam–well, it wasn’t gratuitous. It indicated a certain kind of shift in the action. But it distracted me. As did Mann’s trademark use of music. The score was good, but it irritated me the way it was worked into the action. The songs were hit-and-miss.

So, there you have it. If you like Mann’s work, you’ll probably love this. If you like Depp, you won’t hate it.

One of my favorite movies is Apocalypse Now. I love it, right down to its murky ending. So much so that I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch Apocalypse Now Redux, the mega-expanded hour-longer version for fear it will make me reject the whole project.

My old martial arts instructor, with whom I used to have hours long bull sessions after class, rejected it as a “film student project”. And the thing is, I can’t really argue with that perception of it. It’s a bold movie, and if it fails in your eyes, “film student project” is a fair description.

Last Sunday, I dragged The Boy out to see Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film, Tetro, and if you had that idea that Coppola inclined toward that sort of “film student project”, this is not going to be the movie to disabuse you of that notion.

There are two things I can say for sure about this movie:

1. It is positively gorgeous, a sheer masterwork of cinematography, light and shadows, blocking, and composition with nary a throwaway shot.

2. At about two hours, it is overlong by about 20 minutes.

The story is simple: Young Bennie (played by Alden Ehrenreich in a role Leo DiCaprio would’ve done ten years ago) goes to Buenos Aires to track down his older brother, Tetro, who fled the family many years earlier with a promise to come back for him, but who never did.

Tetro has become a famous writer who doesn’t ever write or publish anything, but seems to be very well liked and respected in his own modest way in this little corner of the city known as La Boca. He has a faithful girlfriend-not-quite-wife, and in his not-quite-functional way, he’s living a good life.

The imbalancing effect of Bennie is two-fold: First he knows nothing about his own history, so he digs through Tetro’s autobiographical play; second, Tetro’s friends know nothing about Tetro’s past, so Bennie reveals truths to them Tetro wanted to keep hidden.

This all unfolds in glorious black-and-white, except for the flashbacks, which are in color (and a 4:3 format instead of 16:9?), and we slowly get a picture of the dysfunctional family the two are from. A little too slowly, really, since I figured it out at the start of Act III.

So, besides the length, this movie is both very meta- and very “inside baseball”. First of all, it’s littered with shots that, if they aren’t famous from other movies, feel like they ought to be. Coppola can (and does) do that. It always feels more like he’s painting from the same palette as the masters versus ripping them off. But unlike, say, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where it was almost necessary to know all the films he was riffing off of, this stuff just works.

But this is about the struggles of a very creatively talented family. Their dysfunction manifests in the expression of their art: The play Tetro can’t finish; the life Bennie can’t begin; and the patriarch who is not satisfied with his own greatness unless he can grind everyone else down. It’s not necessarily something everyone can relate to.

Even more problematic is that Tetro and Bennie bonded through Tetro exposing the younger boy to arty films, and segments of the third act play out as dance numbers that hearken back to one of those films. I’m talking ballet-esque bits with real dancers (not the actors). One was interesting; three was probably excessive.

One thing that Coppola has over most of the “film student” types is an inherent upbeat nature. His movies, no matter how dark the subject matter, tend to be an affirmation of life. And so, while this movie looks very noir, it doesn’t wallow in darkness.

That’s probably why I like it. I really wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. And we picked a bad time to go see it, too: The show started after 10PM, and we were both wiped out. The Boy couldn’t decide if he was having trouble getting into it, or if it was just bad. (Keep in mind that he couldn’t sit through Vertigo the night before with the same issue. He had a restless weekend for various reasons.)

Other things to appreciate in this movie include the acting, with young Ehrenreich doing fine work, Vincent Gallo doing what he does, Maribel Verdu just perfect as the devoted not-wife, Klaus Maria Brandauer as the patriarch, and so on. The music is perfect.

But even so, I know a lot of people would consider it boring, pretentious, overly arty, and so on. I was won over by its basic good nature, and skill in execution that you just don’t see any more. You might not be.

There’s a 1995 movie directed by a guy by the name of Mike Sedan (who I want to blog about some time) called Lap Dancing that I think of a lot. As the title suggests, Lap Dancing involves strippers, and the movie is about half angst-ridden sleazefest, and about half stripping routines which are largely not related to the other half of the movie. And the thing that struck me when watching this movie (on “Joe Bob Brigg’s Drive In Theater”, I think) was, “Wow, Sedan must really think strippers are boring!”

You see, any real stripping routine–any stage routine–is designed to be seen from a relatively static viewpoint: That of the crowd. (I’ve never been in a strip club, but I’ve seen the pseudo-documentary Stripper, so I’m an expert, okay?) Instead, the camera was jumping all over the place. If there was anything exciting about the routine, it was completely lost in the camerawork.

That thought has recurred over the years: “Wow, this guy must really think what he’s filming is boring.”

I think it a lot during Tony Scott movies like The Taking of Pellham 1 2 3. Scott using so many frenetic camera tricks in one of his films, I wonder if he has no faith in his stories. The buzz on this movie has been pretty mixed, too.

It was Father’s Day, though. What was going to take him to see? The Proposal?

On top of that, my dad held little fond memories of the original, but free popcorn is free popcorn.

And it was actually pretty darn good.

The premise is preposterous, of course: A group of ne’er-do-wells (led by John Travolta) capture a subway train, with the intention of ransoming off the passengers.

Kinda kooky, innit? A subway’s not exactly like a plane. You can’t take it anywhere. The exit strategy, as it were, is problematic, to say the least. But Scott is no stranger to dubious plots, and he handles this pretty well.

Managing the crisis is everyman Denzel Washington–who’s maybe too good looking to be an Everyman but surely gives Tom Hanks a run of his money in that area–as the guy who “takes the call” and rises to the occasion.

For all his flashy camera work, Scott knows where the drama is–between Travolta and Washington, and lets them do their thing. And they do their thing very well indeed, reminding me of another movie where two top-notch actors played off each other in what was generally considered a flawed movie: The Negotiator.

But I can watch that one over and over again–the little nuances of Samuel L. Jackson as he interacts with Kevin Spacey being very compelling. I can’t say for sure this is in that category but it did keep me entertained.

Of course, this is an action flick, which is kind of tough when the two principal characters are: 1) holed up in a subway car, and; 2) sitting at a desk at the transit authority’s office. Scott remedies this by having a cross-city car chase which is over-the-top and gratuitous but, hey, keeps you awake, right?

Supporting actors include John Turturro and James Gandolfini, who are also always compelling.

The only real problem I had with it is I could see three or four logical things the bad guys could’ve done to make their lives easier. Just painfully obvious stuff. A little trickier was the fact that Travolta tends to be very likable, but he’s a cold-blooded murderer. (This isn’t a light caper movie.) He was believable, but that particular aspect didn’t quite sit right with me.

But, overall, a good, fun movie. All three of us liked it, including The Boy, who isn’t really inclined to like these sorts of things, and my dad, who was carrying around baggage from not liking the original.

So, not really sure what the bitching is about.

“I have an idea. Let’s have coffee.” So suggests Shabtai to his cousin Herzel, but falls asleep before the coffee is ready. He has a dream of a beautiful woman speaking intimately to him and, on waking, discovers that the woman is real–in fact a national celebrity, model, singer, businesswoman named Lili Dekel. He then constructs a fantasy story of his relationship with Lili while Herzel listens, entranced.

So begins Yigal Bursztyn’s delightful little movie Etsba Elohim, featured in the 24th Israeli Film Festival in America as Out of the Blue.

Shabtai and Herzel are junkmen, buying and selling old furniture on the streets of Tel Aviv. Shabtai is married and lives in a small apartment with his wife, Rachel, and his daughter Batya, while Herzel, an orphan, lives alone in Shabtai’s warehouse.

Shabtai is lazy, surly and unfulfilled, while Herzel is his simple, cheerful sidekick who does most of the work, and becomes increasingly enamored of Shabtai’s fabrication. He hatches a plan for them to meet Lili Dekel which ends up taking some very funny turns.

Herzel is spurred on by his infatuation with Shabtai’s daughter, a young (high school?) girl who likes getting gifts from him, but seems a little dense as far as understanding his intentions. (Which are honorable, but pretty inappropriate.)

The twist of this movie is that Lily finds herself attracted to Herzel, while he’s doing everything he can to direct her to an increasingly hostile Shabtai. In fact, Shabtai seems to have a penchant for freezing up in a clinch. And we begin to wonder why Herzel is so loyal–and he is, even when Shabtai treats him very badly indeed.

Anyway, good fun. You probably won’t have a chance to see it, without going out of your way. Israel seems to turn out a bunch of good little movies that don’t get much airing over here. (See the 2004 charmer Ha Ushpizin for example.)

We actually saw it “by accident”. There’s another movie called Out of the Blue, a 2006 crime drama with Karl Urban which IMDB linked to instead of this one. I kind of figured it wasn’t the one showing–I knew the Israeli film festival was at the theater. I like to know a little bit more about things going in, but at 90 minutes, it wasn’t a huge risk.

Though it was $12 a ticket. Yow! Painful. But always easier to swallow when the money’s going to some struggling film auteur.

Anyway, no regrets. Lots of fun. Actually enjoyed it more than The Hangover.

I always warn people when they ask for movie advice: “Keep in mind, I loved the movie Very Bad Things.” The fact that I love that movie, a dark comedy written and directed by actor Peter Berg as his debut feature, symbolizes all that is wrong with my sense of humor.

You should keep this in mind as we review another movie in the “Bachelor Party” genre. And, yeah, that hoary Tom Hanks flick is probably the progenitor of the modern form (there seems little connection with Paddy Chayefsky’s ‘57 movie). Except that, in the ’90s, the form went rogue and started involving dead strippers.

This brings us to The Hangover which, depending on whom you ask, is either the funniest movie ever or the most offensive movie ever. Truthfully, it’s neither. Not even close. But it is funny.

And, no, there isn’t a dead stripper in it. Or, at least I don’t think there is. The twist in this stag film is that the main characters have no idea what happened the night before. (Attentive film students may remember this same device used relatively recently in Dude, Where’s My Car?)

Is it offensive? You know, life on this planet has basically broken the needle off my offensensitvity gauge. I didn’t regard is as such, particularly, except for a photo shown at the end of the film of one of the characters receiving fellatio from a transvestite. And this, primarily, because they needlessly used a prosthetic to make it look real.

There’s a masturbation joke involving a baby that apparently offended some people. I can only assume they don’t have, have never been around, and don’t remember being young children, since the discovery of the genitals well proceeds any kind of respect for social standards about not playing with them all the time. Actually, I appreciated that there weren’t a lot of fart/vomit/urine/feces/sodomy jokes. (I guess I’m more offended by banal repetition than actual content.)

This is really a silly movie, with the characters doing–and having done things while completely out of their gourds–that strain credulity. It never goes into fantasy (like Dude, Where’s My Car?), never gets heavy (like Stag), avoids any sort of social commentary (like Very Bad Things), and veers away from the heavily slapstick. It really is more like Bachelor Party: Sort of sweet and good-natured, with a lot of jokes and amusing scene set-ups that are coarser without being mean, and which give the film a kind of shallow feel–sort of like someone exaggerating their “true life” Vegas story.

I was at a low chuckle throughout most, with a few LOL moments. I never fully engaged with the hilarity somehow. It felt like the story was actually written backwards, with writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) starting with a zany set of circumstances (“a tiger…a baby…one friend missing…”) and trying to make sense out of how it all happened.

And perhaps it’s just me, but this didn’t have the ensemble chemistry of a really great comedy. I can’t say I didn’t like any individual actor–in fact I did like them all–but I’m being a crusty old dude by saying I felt like the timing and chemistry of Bill Murray’s old comedies (with John Candy, Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, et al) was a lot better.

That said, I give the movie props for avoiding the most clichéd outcomes. Much like Wedding Crashers (apparently script-doctored by Lucas and Moore), this movie ends up being relatively optimistic about marriage, about what makes a good relationship and a bad one, and relatively sweet about friendship–and in the long run, very positive about human nature.

In that sense, the reverse of both Stag and Very Bad Things.

Heather Graham–once white-hot, remember?–plays the escort with the heart of gold, to Ed Helms whipped dentist, Bradley Cooper is the glib high school English teacher, and Zach Galliafianikis is the weird brother-in-law, cause of and solution to most of the plot’s problems. Justin Bartha, the groom, ends up being the missing one, and it was great to see Jeffrey Tambor as the future, overly-understanding-about-Vegas father-in-law.

Mike Tyson’s in the movie. I thought the whole sequence with him was rather weak. It felt more like “Bwhahahahaha! We got Mike Tyson in our movie!” than actual cleverness.

I probably got the biggest kick out of Ken Jeong, who was also very funny in the previews of an upcoming movie called The Goods. He played the world’s second worst obstetrician in Knocked Up and an ubergeek in Role Models. He’s perfect here because you never know what he is. He seems both menacing and goofy.

And hey, he gives the movie it’s full-frontal male nudity. (Something the ‘strom predicted would be a trend back with Forgetting Sarah Marshall.)

Go in with your offense meters off and not too high expectations and you can have a fun time.

Seeing Pixar release a new movie is like watching a great figure skater do a triple axel. First, you realize that when all those other figure skaters are up, you were kind of nervous. They might land it, they might not, and you’re really on the edge of your seat. But then the gold medalist comes, and you just relax and watch the beauty unfold.

Remember last year, when the money men on Wall Street predicted that movie about the robot–the one with almost no dialogue–couldn’t possibly be a hit? And then the one about the rat? And the cars? And on and on.

I wasn’t worried in the least.

The two things that you can count on hearing when a Pixar movie come out are: “That was the best (Pixar) movie ever!” and “That wasn’t as good as [some other Pixar movie].” In the former case, they sometimes leave out the “Pixar” part. In the latter case, the person is typically referring to a Pixar movie that uniquely resonated in some idiosyncratic way.

But, really, the key thing about Pixar movies is that they’re all different. Even Toy Story 2 was thematically different from Toy Story. It’s not hard to make meaningful comparisons between them, but it is hard to state outright that of any two elements, one is necessarily better than the other. (I think this is true of all the movies, even A Bug’s Life and Cars, which are often unfairly maligned.)

Which brings us to this, the tenth Pixar film, and the tenth triple axel to be landed perfectly.

But differently.

In this case, we have the story of Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner), a 78-year-old widower who’s about to get put into an old folks home. Now, a lot of kid movies feature old people, but this one is about Carl. This is his story.

Showing, once again, that they know how to tell a story without a lot of expository dialog, director Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.) and co-director/writer Bob Peterson (Finding Nemo co-writer) use the first few minutes of the film to give us a love story between Carl and Ellie. They meet as kids, and through a love of adventure, share their lives for the next 65 years.

No child is going to experience this the way an adult does, particularly older adults. But this opening provides the hook that powers the movie. The older kids will get the connections, but if you’re an adult there will probably be parts that make you tear up.

It’s no surprise that Carl–a balloon salseman–rigs up a bunch of balloons to make his house float away, but when it happens, it’s nonetheless magical. And Carl’s expression as he floats through the air is sublime. But of course it only lasts a few seconds.

The fly in Carl’s ointment is young Wilderness Scout Russell (Jordan Nagai), and the subsequent adventure includes a giant toucan-ish type bird, talking dogs, and aerial combat. These are the sorts of things you expect from a kid’s movie. But as a grownup, you’re never far away from these little moments that ground the story in a peculiarly real way.

In a way, Carl’s actions are those of a man who’s life is almost over. This final grand gesture is his tribute to his wife, and yet Russell keeps interrupting that by embroiling him in things that are going on now. And because we’ve seen Carl at Russell’s age, we feel the wealth of emotions he feels at certain things Russell says and does, even while Russell himself doesn’t realize the impact he has on the old man.

So, plenty for the kids–and The Flower liked it a lot–plenty for the adults–as did I. If I were going to pick a demographic this wouldn’t appeal to, it’d be the teenagers, yet The Boy also liked it a lot.

Darcy pointed me to this blogcritics review, which is perhaps, an interesting. idiosyncratic counterpoint to mine: The reviewer loved Carl’s story but was dismayed by the actual adventure parts (while noting that the kids in the audience loved those parts, while seeming restless during the parts he liked). He even asks whether he is Carl, curmudgeonly hanging on to his old dreams.

At least he sees what’s going on: Many of the early Cannes reviews derided the picture’s “de-evolution” into an action film. They missed the point. Or maybe just made their choice.

“I think you have a big hunk of petrified crap up your soul’s ass.” So says Rachel Weisz to Adrien Brody in Rian Johnson’s new caper movie, The Brothers Bloom. Johnson previously directed the interesting low-budget high school-based “film noir” Brick.

I say this is a caper movie, but it’s definitely a different kind of caper movie. The typical representative of the genre–The Italian Job or the “Ocean’s” series–deals with the pursuit of a MacGuffin, and the plot usually undergoes a number of twists and turns, sometimes in an attempt to fool the viewer (e.g. Ocean’s Twelve). There’s usually stuff about the people and how their interpersonal relationships as thieves and conmen are affected, but this is generally baggage that slows the shenanigans down.

The Brothers Bloom turns this on convention on its ear by centering all the action around Adrien Brody’s development. The capers are essentially incidental to the story. This is way better than it sounds. In fact, the Boy and I think it’s the best 2009 movie we’ve seen so far.

The story is about Stephen and Bloom, who are shuttled from foster home to foster home, town to town, until they finally find their calling running elaborate cons. Stephen (Ruffalo) is the planning genius, putting little themes and symbols into their games, while Bloom (Brody) is the sensitive one–the people person who makes the confidence part of the con game work.

The problem is that Bloom is sensitive, and a romantic, and he can’t ever have the one thing the true romantic really craves: genuine human contact. Since he makes contact through false premises (with less than pure motivations), he can’t have a true loving connection. This makes him despondent.

Of course, Brody broods well, and not in a monotone way. (That is, his brooding here seems different from, say, his brooding in The Darjeeling Limited.) As his older brother, Ruffalo gives a really sublime performance. Stephen is clearly a smooth operator, intellectual and calculating, yet he’s not motivated by money. He loves the game; he also sees himself as providing entertainment, moral lessons, artistic resonance, even.

The perfect con, he says, is the one where everyone gets what they want.

This is his ethical code, really, and his failure is that he can’t give Bloom what he wants. If the caper movie is usually cold, this one is the very antithesis. By trying to help him survive, Stephen has turned Bloom into a pathetic, self-loathing character who seems unclear who or what he is. Stephen, for all his apparent glibness and devil-may-care attitude, actually seems to deeply care about Bloom.

Or…does he? This is what Bloom wrestles with. He provides sincerity and depth for the con game, so is Stephen just using him? We quickly see that he’s completely the wrong type to be a grifter. To quote Teddy from Memento, that’s why he’s so good at it.

The brothers work with a mysterious Japanese woman known as Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi, last seen largely naked in 2006’s Babel). Kikuchi is excellent in this film, as a kind of animé-ish Harpo Marx. I have no idea if she can actually speak English, but the device of not having her speak means both that she can remain mysterious and we’re spared a lot of (what would have been) tedious dialogue.

The mark for the movie is a millionaire shut-in played by Rachel Weisz. She’s a woman who, through various circumstances, lives in isolation but is also hyper-competent in most regards. All her time has been devoted to acquiring various skills, except conversational skills. Almost like her character from “The Mummy”, though very well realized and not cartoonish at all.

I sort of run hot and cold on Ms. Weisz, or maybe just some of her movies rub me the wrong way (I’m looking at you Constant Gardener!), but she’s also positively exquisite (in an entirely different way from Kikuchi). Her character is that of an essentially young woman coning out of her shell, and she buoys the movie tremendously. The “crap” line quoted above comes off charmingly sweet and even endearing when she says it.

She embraces adventure (sometimes in a surprisingly sensual way) and brings to the forefront the film’s primary thesis. To wit, in the world of human feelings and relationships, how fake is an illusion that everyone believes?

How much, in fact, is life itself a con game?

This is an honest-to-goodness feel good comedy! As mopey as Bloom is, there are enough laughs and light-heartedness to make you feel good about the proceedings. Suspense and concern are not sacrificed. Instead, the characters care about Bloom–and we do, too–and try to get him out of his funk.

Doesn’t sound like a caper movie at all, does it?

Just for good measure, the cast is rounded out with Maximilian Schell and Robbie Coltrane. Johnson’s cousin Nathan Johnson is back with the score–which I didn’t notice. (That’s often a good sign.) And the whole thing feels just right at 1:45 (minus credits). It could’ve been shorter, but only by cheating us out of the excellent ending and giving us a more Ocean-y/Sting-y one.

Funny without being silly or campy, profound without being heavy, well plotted without being fake, adult without being crude–the line quoted at the top is the crudest thing in the movie–and easily the best drawn new characters this year.

So, this is my first likely top 10 movie of the year. It’s unlikely that this film won’t make it–nothing else from 2009 has my unreserved approval. Of course, today Up comes out, so this may not be in my #1 slot for long.

Random Update #1: There was one kind of weird thing about this movie. Weisz, who does an excellent American accent, has a nasal resonance that reminds me very strongly of Kathryn Erbe. Ruffalo, meanwhile, wears a long black coat, has the slightly unshaven look, and somewhat similar cadence and look of Vincent D’Onofrio. So, every now and again, I got this weird “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” vibe.

Random Update #2: I didn’t praise the costumes and sets, and I really should have. This is clearly a movie taking place in modern times, yet the Brothers Bloom wear hats and long coats that evoke the early 20th century. Some of the sets seem very ‘20s and others seem sort of ’40s. Part of the con involves traveling by steamer, for crying out load. This was a very nice touch and gave the movie a timeless feel.

The first Night at the Museum movie was a rather pleasant surprise for me and The Boy, who were there at the behest of The Flower. It struck a nice balance between silly comedy and (slightly) less silly stuff aided greatly by Alan Silvestri’s score, which also helps this movie not degenerate into random-feeling chaos.

What? You didn’t expect me to start with the score? In this case, it’s absolutely necessary. The score sets the tone as more light adventure than wacky randomity, even though this movie is a lot more random and chaotic than the first.

And, it must be admitted, quite a bit more leaden. Somewhat ironically, The Boy and I enjoyed it more than The Flower did, who had higher expectations and found it predictable. I suspect this spells trouble for the movie, if the eight-year-old girl demo is finding it predictable.

And it’s not that they didn’t try. There are a few twists and wrinkles, and a few new bits, but a lot of these flat flat. Meanwhile, a lot of the best stuff is recycled stuff from the previous movie that still works. (A lot of humor based on the diminutive cowboy Jedediah, played by Owen Wilson, and Roman Centurion Octavius, played by Steve Coogan, e.g.) Also, this movie suffers from 70% less Robin Williams, so it’s got that going for it.

Actually, the level of talent oozing from this film makes you really want it to be better. Hank Azaria plays Ahkmenrah’s (from the first movie) evil brother with a lispy Boris Karloff accent. Bill Hader shows up as General Custer. Christopher Guest is Ivan the Terrible. And they’re all good, as they always are. Ben Stiller gives his all, like he always does. He has a bit with Jonah Hill that’s very Apatow-ish (clean, but goofy).

Basically, though, the funny’s just not there. Things that should’ve been funny weren’t. The lightness from the original movie is mostly gone. Not content-wise. This pretty much could be “G”-rated; Im’ hard pressed to remember what might have pushed it over the line to “PG”. But delivery-wise. There’s too much self-awareness, too much “look at this, isn’t this hilarious!” going on.

The original walked that line mostly successfully. This one not so much.

Buoying the movie impossibly is perennial Maelstrom crush, Amy Adams. She plays a delightfully heterosexual Amelia Earhart, as a sort of mix of Katharine Hepburn and Betty Hutton. Carla Gugino and her tight sweaters are gone without notice from this movie, to be replaced by Amy Adams in her tight pants (and remarkably fitted aviator jacket).

But more than eye-candy, Adams brings a much-needed unselfconscious lightness to the proceedings. At the same time, I did find myself thinking “They must have spent a freakin’ fortune on this movie.” In other words, where the first movie seemed like a shallow “high concept” ultra-slick Stiller vehicle, but managed to hide the gears pretty well, this movie ends up feeling a lot more transparent and cynical.

I didn’t actually dislike it. It’s not overlong. It doesn’t try to be important or relevant. It’s not vulgar or crass. It just doesn’t have the finesse of the first one, which underscores the fundamentally unclever nature of both movies.

Again, The Flower was disappointed, finding it not at all surprising. Part of that, of course, may be that she was five-and-a-half when the last movie came out and is eight now. I would say that if you’re interested in seeing it, and don’t have high expectations, see it in the theater. Because I suspect that the movies’ problems are going to be magnified on the small screen.

The tried-and-true love story formula (boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl) has actually held up even in this post-modern, deconstructive age, when you think about it. Really, the main variation is in the final part (boy fails to regain girl), and that was old when Shakespeare wrote “Romeo and Juilet”.

It’s a broad outline.

Storytellers, then, are forced to be creative within those parameters. A lot of fun can be had with the “boy meets girl” and “boy gets girl” parts, and a lot of dramatic tension can be had with the losing and regaining (or not) part.

Jennifer Aniston’s new romantic-comedy (she exec. produces as well as stars) has a lot of fun with the meeting, getting and regaining process, and a nice bit of drama with the losing. It’s really a very solid, good romcom in a world where that’s actually pretty rare. Yet the buzz is already highly negative.

I sort-of think that a lot of negativity surrounding Aniston–and there always seems to be a ton of it–must either come from her success on “Friends” or her relationship with Brad Pitt. Because I don’t see how it could come from her performances. Not that you might not dislike them, but there seems to be positive glee everytime she’s in a low-budget movie.

I’m not intimate with her work and admittedly–like most actresses–she’s often a prop. I think she’s found a way to remedy that by producing her own movies and giving herself meatier roles. Smart and, at least in this case, a very good showcase for her talents.

The premise of Management is a strange one: Steve Zahn–also often under-rated–plays Mike, who works in his parents’ motel in Kingman, Arizona. They’re kind of dull, and he’s kind of dull, too. One day, in walks Sue (Jennifer Aniston)–and her great ass. It’s love at first sight, from behind.

Mike is immediately taken with her, and likes what he sees from the front, too, and contrives an excuse to visit her in her room. As an actor, Zahn’s really to be commended here, because–for all Mike’s listlessness in life–he comes across as genuinely taken by Aniston’s character, and sweet rather than stalker-like. He’s a guy who’s never felt inspired enough to do anything, and as we quickly see, Sue becomes that inspiration.

Sue is a tougher nut to crack. She’s cold, a little prickly, even bad with people, but seeing through Mike’s ruse, she asks what would make him feel like his gambit was successful. She agrees at that point to let him lay a hand on her butt.

Strange, right? Yet, by the end of the movie, we see that it’s perfectly in character for Sue, who manages her dysfunction at one level with a kind of over-the-top altruism. We also see that Mike’s somewhat over-the-top, Quixotic pursuit of her is in line with his previously dormant passionate nature.

So, wow. Here we have a romantic-comedy with carefully drawn characters conflicting over expectations of each other and life, without anyone seeming like a victim. That’s pretty rare these days and I’d like to see a lot more of this.

Occasionally, the move delves deeply into quirkiness. Woody Harrelson plays Jango, a former punk/yogurt mogul/vicious dog trainer, who offers Sue a security–and an opportunity–Mike can’t. “Prison Break”’s James Hiroyuki Liao plays Al, the fast-talking son of Chinese Restaurant owners who immediately befriends Mike in his time of need.

These two offer more quirkiness than, say, Mike’s parents. His father Jerry (Fred Ward) is a semi-shell-shocked war vet, while his mother Trish (Margo Martindale) is terminally ill. This movie alternates between almost wacky stunts, like skydiving into a swimming pool, and dramatic scenes, like deathbed conversations.

Screenplay author and first time director Steven Belber makes it all work by never letting the quirkiness get cartoonish.

It won’t get much of a run, and Aniston won’t get much praise for her restrained, subtle performance as a cold woman who slowly begins to melt, to say nothing of Steve Zahn, who didn’t even get much praise for his excellent work in the under-rated Rescue Dawn. But if they were smart about it, this was a no more than $15-20M work that will easily clear that and more when international box office and video/cable rights are figured.

The Boy declared it “good” and was quite pleased with the story. I declare it “good”, too. Since both Aniston and Zahn have three movies coming out this year, I imagine this will get swept under the rug–but it shouldn’t be.

I’ve never been a Trekkie or a Trekker. In fact, my mom was a big fan of “Star Trek” and because I hated certain episodes (“Miri”, “And The Children Shall Lead”) but had to watch them anyway, it took me a couple of decades to where I could like the show.

I got into “The Next Generation” for a while but it got more and more ponderous as the series wore on. It seemed that every alien just needed a sympathetic ear and all technology was environmentally destructive. (I’ve heard that Roddenberry had to remind the writers that technophobia was not an appropriate attitude for the show.)

I loved “Deep Space Nine”. Which, it must be confessed, is barely Star Trek at all. Dark, with religion and spirituality woven in, reveling in the dark parts of society that Roddenberry would have us believe didn’t exist (yet which all turned up in the third season of the original series).

The less said about “Voyager” and “Enterprise” the better. (Well, okay, “Voyager” was “Star Trek meets The Lifetime Channel”. “Enterprise” should have worked. And yet, didn’t. Well, I heard it got better after I–and practically everyone else–stopped watching.)

So, was I excited about the new “reboot”? Nah, not really. “Curious” is a better word. The only JJ Abrams stuff I’m familiar with is Cloverfield, which is a good movie made of a pretty thin gruel. All good directors can do that. See The Birds or, hell, look at what Gore Verbinski did with the Pirates of the Caribbean or even Mouse Hunt.

This is kind of the reverse scenario. There’s too much in the “Star Trek” universe–much of it contradictory–to capture in a movie. And if “Enterprise” proved anything, it was that retconning is incredibly dull, except perhaps to die-hard fans.

Now that I’ve seen it, my reaction is a kind of generally positive “Meh”. Read on.

Dropping the canon was an excellent choice: They actually manage to do some pretty surprising things by untethering themselves from the bloated beast that is the Trek universe, while still making plenty of references. And you can savor the irony of fans being upset by this by noting that the device used to justify the changes is a Trek cliché that formed the basis for half the movies and TV series.

It was also smart of Chris Pine, who plays Kirk, not to study Shatner. While I’ve long maintained that Shatner’s performance–his utter conviction in selling some truly awful storylines in front of papier mache backdrops–is a big part of the reason the original show is watchable at all, his performance style is too iconic to be imitated without creating an entirely surreal atmosphere. Pine–apparently drawing on Indiana Jones and Han Solo–still manages to evoke a famliar feeling Kirk.

Using relatively little known actors was also a good choice. The first person I recognized was Bruce Greenwood, playing Captain Christopher Pike, the captain that young Kirk is supposed to serve under. (OK, I “recognized” Eric Bana as the villain, but only because I knew it was him. Bana for some reason never makes enough of an impression on me where I could actually identify him.) I didn’t really recognize Winona Ryder (in Jane Wyatt’s old role as Spock’s mother), though, so maybe I should just give up that battle right there.

The acting is, overall, very solid. Casa Maelstrom favorite Simon Pegg does a nice job as Scotty and Karl Urban steals the show as “Bones” McCoy, channeling the late DeForest Kelley without seeming like a parody. Zoe Saldana plays the Uhura role Nichelle Nichols wishes Uhura had been wrttten for her. John Cho (Harold, of “Harold and Kumar”) plays a tough guy Sulu, while Anton Yelchin (Bird from “!huff”) does a super-young Chekov (with heavier accent than Walter Koneig) to round out the core crew.

The action is pretty good. Kirk is drawn as a rash, arrogant, cocky SOB, and this often results in him getting the crap beaten out of him. (He gets beaten up by redshirts! Who are actually portrayed as pretty tough in this, in contrast to the original series.) They resist the urge to make him a superhero, good at everything, which gives the rest of the crew a chance to do their things.

So, if I consider it a decent homage to the past and a good, fresh summer action flick, why am I sort of “meh”? I think because it’s not really great at either. One thing that Star Trek is known for is absurd plot resolutions, the sci-fi equivalent of deus ex machina. “The Next Generation” was so awful in this regard, that it probably put “reversing the polarity” into the cultural lexicon.

There are plenty of absurd situations which might be suspenseful if one didn’t know how things sort of had to turn out. And even if you don’t watch the show, there are certain things you know. So when Kirk is stranded on a remote planet with no way (in the story’s own terms) to catch up to the plot, you know that some sort of technological magic is going to have to arise.

This ultimately diminishes the movie. I would’ve liked to see a reboot like the Bond reboot that eschewed the dumber aspects of the franchise.

The other thing that really diminishes it is Leonard Nimoy. Not that I don’t love the guy, or that he does a bad job. It’s nice to see him don the ears again after 15 years. But he’s a crutch, the deus ex the machina. He acts as both fan service and plot device, and I thank God they didn’t resurrect Shatner for Kirk, despite the pressure. (Kirk pretty definitively died in the first TNG movie.)

The whole thing feels a little stale to me, even with the new angle and approach. Now I’m not sure a (much) better outcome was actually possible here–certainly much worse outcomes were–so I’m disinclined to cast any stones. The kids should like it, the fans (who are a shrinking base, I think) maybe less so, depending on how invested they are in the original history.

The Boy liked it quite a bit, saying it was a lot more than he expected. The two Trek fans I know (including the one I saw it with) also liked it. My mom’s convinced, well-trained as she is, that they’ll move the new franchise in to merge with the old history. I’m trying to explain that the whole point of the movie was to reimagine a lot of this stuff. We have a bet that a certain minor character that died is (or isn’t, I say) going to come back in a later movie as a result.

There’s a lot about this movie that is really well done, too. The production values are quite good. They eschewed the trend of making things darker, both with the physical setting and attitude, and kept it light, even when things were, plot-wise, dire.

Strangely, the music is sort of disappointing. Michael Giacchino, who did the marvelous scores for The Incredibles and Ratatouille, never really delivers the goods with a iconic, hummable tune a la Alexander Courage (who wrote the theme to the original) or Jerry Goldsmith (who wrote the movie theme which became the theme for “The Next Generation”).

Maybe I’m just a grouch, here, or still burnt out from past disappointments, not feeling energized (no pun intended) by the new stuff, and not excited enough by the old stuff to really have that carry me through.

It’s not that I thought it was bad, it’s just that it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.

Return with me now to the glorious year 1979, when the air was dirty, the only thing uglier than fashion was interior design, and the children were expected to be more mature than the adults.

Lymelife is a new movie from Derick and Steve Martini, who are (amusingly) too young to remember the time they’re writing and directing about! But they do a good job, mostly, of capturing the time. If I were to quibble, I’d point out that the fashions are maybe a little too restrained, that there was never a disco song playing on the jukebox, and oddly, I swear that when they showed angry Iranians, they showed them with an effigy of Reagan, which doesn’t make any sense.

Also, there was a discussion of the Falklands and how it would result in the older boy being mobilized sooner. That didn’t make sense to me. It might be true, but since Falklands was several years later and a British conflict that they resolved easily on their own, I think, I’m not sure how it was likely to be an issue. Also, prior to the conflict, nobody had ever heard of the Falklands.

As long as I haven’t actually talked about what it’s about, I’d like to say that this movie has an awful tagline. To wit: The American Dream Sucks. This movie isn’t really about the American dream. It’s really just a coming-of-age story where the flow is interrupted by parents who think they can treat their relationships casually without affecting their children.

The story is focused on 15-year-old Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin) who adores his father, Micky (Alec Baldwin, who’s so good at playing an asshole, you start to wonder how much an act it is) and can’t figure out why his worried, unhappy mother, Brenda (Jill Hennessy) is such a drag. He’s being tortured by his long-time female friend, Adrianna (Emma Roberts) who clearly likes him but is hanging around older bad boys.

When the story begins, Scott’s mother is duct-taping his clothes shut so that the ticks don’t get him–there’s apparently an outbreak of lyme disease on Long Island–and he gets to listen to his parents fighting about whether he can go hunting, and the girl he longs for is not returning the affection, and he gets beaten up by a bully.

The other family in this drama are the Braggs, Adrianna’s parents. Charlie and Melissa (Timothy Hutton and Cynthia Nixon) have their own problems. Charlie has lyme disease, maybe, though it’s obviously pretty advanced, and Melissa–who dresses in a ‘70s porn style (which was not uncommon back then)–sells real estate in Mickey Bartlett’s office.

At this point, the story practically writes itself, but the catalyst for the events that unfold over the next 90-odd minutes is Scott’s older brother Jimmy (Kieran Culkin), on leave from the Army. Jimmy knows a lot more about what’s going on between mom and dad, and the relatively naive Scott ends up having his worldview radically altered.

The Boy said it was good, but he asked me later if there were any “feel-good” movies out that we could go see.

We do seem to be steeped in movies about dysfunction. And none of the wacky comedies we’ve seen lately have turned out to be wacky comedies.

Sad thing is, I couldn’t point to any! Maybe we’ll go see Monsters vs. Aliens.

So, yeah, it’s a good movie, but enough of the dysfunction, you know? I know it means you get taken seriously, and the actors like it because they get to act up a storm, but it’s low hanging fruit. Especially in this case, where there’s not much else going on.

With Is Anybody There? you have the old-folks angle, and with Sunshine Cleaning you have the crime scene cleanup, but here–like The Squid and the Whale–you just have a family coming undone.

Again, good, but it can be a tiring diet.

Have you ever noticed that the English seem to have an unending supply of wide-eyed pre- or just-pubescent boys who can act well and who all look vaguely similar? Just off the top of my head, there was (in recent years): Paul Terry (James and the Giant Peach), Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot), Freddy Highmore (Finding Neverland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and now we have Bill Milner in the new coming-of-age/dying-of-age story Is Anybody There?

There seems to be an endless supply of parts for this age (say, like, 9 to 13 or 14) but, of course, it’s not something an actor can build a long career on. It’s got an even shorter lifespan that “starlet” as far as career paths go. And much like our starlets, the English never seem to run out of them. But finding beautiful young women is a numbers game made easy by the fact that they sort of just happen, and they tend to congregate in highly visible areas.

It’s a lot more impressive to see someone like Milner or Highmore, who somehow have managed to acquire some serious talent in their short times. Why, back in the day, (particularly American) child actors were both hard to work with and not very good. You had lower standards, and you weren’t surprised when they didn’t have adult careers. A Jodie Foster or Jackie Earle Haley was a rare thing.

I’m starting to wonder if they have some sort of cloning device/Treadstone program for actors o’er there.

But, I digress. Milner, who was in the previously reviewed Son of Rambow, plays a pubescent boy whose parents have turned their house into a rest home to save themselves from bankruptcy. Young Edward (Milner) responds to this by becoming sullen and obsessed with life after death.

Into this picture comes The Amazing Clarence in his painted mini-camper, a travelling magician whose wife is convincing him to stay “for just a while”, something which doesn’t appeal to him, especially given the sorry cast of despondent old folks populating the house. Clarence’s wife, one can’t help but notice, is at least young enough to be his daughter. Hell, biologically, he’s probably old enough to be her grandfather (which is to say, he’s probably 30 years older).

And one thinks, if one is me, that the old fella is doing pretty damn good if he can live in that tiny camper van with his pretty young wife and still be agile enough to put on magic shows. But then, Clarence is played Michael Caine, so it seems completely plausible.

Edward and Clarence have a rough start, to say the least. Clarence is harboring huge regrets while Edward is filled with hostility. And throughout the course of an hour-and-a-half, we get to see all kinds of takes on mortality. Edward’s father, about to hit 40, is acutely aware of his own mortality, we learn, as he sees his service to the older people as leeching his life away.

The other old people themselves are all handling their twilights with different degrees of aplomb. And because it’s an English movie, they’ve all got their chops, and you recognize them at least a little (and in the case of Rosemary Harris, a lot), and never a moment is wasted.

The Boy commented that (once again) this wasn’t the wacky comedy the trailers made it out to be, but neither should you get the idea that it’s grim. It’s funny, sometimes very darkly funny and poignant at the same time, entertaining and restrained. It doesn’t wallow. The big emotional scenes are Caine’s, and they have not to do with getting older, but with unforgiven sin.

Which, when you get down to it, is what really makes a tragedy. Everybody dies. It’s the thought of sinning and being unforgiven that tortures us.

Since we’ve been talking about dramatic structure lately, I have to say that the 2nd act climax is huge, and probably Oscar-worthy for Caine. I saw the resolution coming well in advance, but it was still very satisfying.

Ultimately, then, this is an optimistic movie about life. Keep in mind, though, that Caine reported crying on reading the script and his (pretty, younger) wife was shaken up by seeing his (pretend) deterioration.

Actually, it kind of disturbed me, since Caine was one of the first actors I could identify, and he (as Dennis Miller put it) was contractually obligated to appear in every single movie made in the ‘80s. He’s always seemed to age without getting old. It’s a little hard to see him and a lot of other actors that seemed sort-of fatherly (Albert Finny, Alan Arkin, Peter O’Toole, Christopher Plummer) play these roles where you’re about 80% sure their death is a critical plot point.

The title Is Anybody There? comes from a seance scene that Caine performs to give Edward some hope. But, of course, it also works as a question for those whose minds are going, or who have just given up with age. And it works as the great spiritual question, as well: Is anybody there? Or are we just bodies ultimately consigned to nothingness.

Expect to see this mentioned in the Oscars race for next year.

Remember Almost Famous? The semi-autobiographical tale of Cameron Crowe’s experiences following around The Allman Brothers? OK, imagine if, instead of following around a rock band, the lead had followed around The Amazing Kreskin.

If you can imagine that, you’re probably better at imaginin’ stuff than I am. If you can’t, you can always go see The Great Buck Howard.

TGBH is the dramatized story of writer/director Sean McGinley–and big props to this guy, who came up through the ranks writing for Fred Olen Ray and other B-movie luminaries, to finally get this big break–as a young man, who has freshly dropped out of law school in order to find something he actually likes doing. (An amusing note, he says through his character that he never found anyone in law school who loved it.)

Having no direction and no money, he signs up for this interesting job of “Road Manager for Big Celebrity”. The celebrity is The Great Buck Howard, a talented mentalist whose best days were 20-30 years ago. A regular on The Tonight Show–the one with Johnny Carson–he travels from town to town, proclaiming that He Loves This Town and giving handshakes like a man trying to start a model T.

His act is cheesy and corny, with his none-too-shabby “mentalist effects” alternating with some less than stellar standup and positively Shatneresque singing. Howard himself is by turns charming, irascible, wise, rude and ill-tempered.

The plot sort of hangs off a trick that is Howard’s signature: He leaves the stage, the audience hides his pay for the performance among them, and he has to find that money or not get paid. I’d say it was a heavy-handed metaphor, except that the Amazing Kreskin actually performed a similar trick repeatedly–not always succeeding. So the fact that it works as a metaphor is coincidental, apparently.

The whole movie breezes along in under 90 minutes, and with John Malkovich in the title role, you almost couldn’t get bored. This is a movie in the vein of My Favorite Year or any of the other “young man follows his heart while observing a wacky elder” flicks, from which you can probably figure out if it’s your cup of tea.

The lead role is played by Colin Hanks, whose father is played by his father, Mr. Tom Hanks. Emily Blunt, late of Sunshine Cleaning, gets to play a non-neurotic love interest/PR person, and the cast is filled with celebrities playing themselves (Tom Arnold, George Takei, Regis and Kelly), and a lot of people who look familiar but might take a moment to place, if you can place them at all (e.g. “Happy Days” Don Most).

The Boy enjoyed it, and was curious about the mentalist tricks. He didn’t know there wasn’t a Buck Howard. Understandable. Even I really couldn’t be sure. I didn’t know, and there were so many celebrities running around in the ‘70s, most of which I still don’t know what they were famous for. (I pity the future trying to keep track of today’s celebrities.) Anyway, it might be more interesting–or a different kind of interesting, anyway–to know where this movie hews to truth and where it wanders.

It probably won’t get a big release, but you could do a lot worse this weekend.

Back in 1978, producer Robert Stigwood unleashed upon the world the horror that is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Not the album, obviously, but the movie. If you’ve heard of the historical (and perhaps hysterical) hatred of disco, this is probably exhibit A in understanding why.

Stigwood was hot off of Saturday Night Fever and Grease–both of which are sleazefests in their own way, really–and with the massive success of both the movie and soundtrack to Fever, the USA was subjected to a kind of musical homogeneity that we can scarcely imagine today.

The problem with disco wasn’t that it was bad, in other words, but that it was mandated. Everything had to be disco. Every producer was trying for that mega-blockbuster-Bee Gee deal. I didn’t listen to much radio, but I still heard a lot of disco, where before I’d been hearing Led Zeppelin and heavy metal, and more importantly a lot of different styles.

For a while, though, total disco immersion. It was inescapable. Hence the massive backlash that would end up with a lot of vinyl deposited in landfills.

So, here we had the callow flavor-of-the-day, in the form of Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, discofying the music of the grand pop masters. And it’s kind of funny: Frampton’s voice is not unlike McCartneys, and the Bee Gees were certainly capable of carrying the Beatles’ trademark harmonies, even if with a little added nasality.

There are some genuinely high points, as well: Aerosmith’s cover of “Come Together”; Earth, Wind and Fire doing “Got To Get You Into My Life”; and Billy Preston–a guy with Beatles bona fides–saving the day with his version of “Get Back”. Oh, and the lovely and fresh-faced Sandy Farina who gave uncluttered renditions of a few tunes that work really well with a woman’s voice.

The lows are horribly low. It wasn’t felt necessary to actually sing a number of the songs. Frankie Howerd (who?) talks his way through “Mean Mr. Mustard” and the incredibly white-hot super-mega-talent Steve Martin does a version of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” that rivals anything William Shatner ever did. (There’s a universe between his performance here and his later one in Little Shop of Horrors.) George Burns–enjoying one of five or six career revivals–talks and smokes his way through “For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite”.

“She’s Leaving Home” is performed largely by robots. Voice synthesizers were sooo cool in ‘78.

The little town of Heartland is the Warner Bros. lot. You’ve seen it a zillion times. (I used to drive through it sometimes on my way to work.) Gazebo in the middle of a small grass park. Lots of storefronts but no parking. It’s been Gotham, Central City, Chicago (for “ER”), but usually they only show parts of it. Even at the time, I recognized it.

Anyway.

The discofication of most of the songs that are actually performed–I mean, someone thought it’d be good to put in a refrain of “Talkin’ ’bout Lucy!” at the end of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”–robs most of the music of its listenability.

The over-produced sound would ultimately give way to a much cleaner, simpler sound in the ’80s, and a kind of Damnatio Memoria where instead of building on the previous big sound, bands would go back to the ’50s for inspiration. It would be just two years later that Airplane! would knock a tower off a station that promised “disco would live forever”, to huge audience applause and laughter.

The other aspect of this movie is, well, while Stigwood may not himself be sleazy, he’s made some really, really sleazy films. Beside the aforementioned Grease and SNF, there was Tommy and–hell, I thought Bugsy Malone had a kind of sleazy feel. So the camp and corniness in this film is overwhelmed by the sleaze.

It achieves a pornographic sensibility while being positively PG. There is, for example, a drug-fueled orgy, even though no clothing is removed. In the Potterization (Mustardization, actually, in this case) of Heartland, a clean storefront is turned into a (scandal!) video game arcade with lots of dancers writhing around the games.

Right. Because video games are like magnets for sexual activity.

No opportunity for sleaze goes unexplored, giving this film the only “fresh” thing it brings to a pretty shopworn plot. (Smalltown boys make it big and forget their values.) Sex, drugs, and no rock-and-roll.

At this point, I should probably offer a comparison to the recent Across The Universe, but I find that movie so offensive I can’t sit through it.

Observe and Report is the third movie in about as many weeks where the trailer is somewhat misleading about the kind of film being advertised. (The two previous were Adventureland and Duplicity.) I’ll take the position that this is due to the entirely laudable reason that these were different movies and hard for the marketing folks to pigeonhole. (None of these flicks have been blockbusters, either.)

In fact, while the trailer up until about last week had made the movie seem like a Will Ferrell-esque clown movie, the last trailer played a whole bunch more, making the movie seem more awkward and painful. I was on the fence before and leaning against it, but The Boy was rather enthused, so off we went.

It probably says too much about me that I really enjoyed this. It ping-pongs between a somewhat exaggerated broad comedy, and a black humor that borders on the tragic, much like the main character’s manic depression. It also surprised me on three or four occasions, which is not something I’m accustomed to.

The story is that Seth Rogan plays Ronnie Barnhardt, a mall cop with a bloated sense of self-importance. Hilarious, right? We had one of those movies this year already! This is really no coincidence, by the way: Studios get wind that one of their competitiors is coming out with a movie about meteors, volcanos, mall cops or whatever, and they’ll try to get their own product in there.

Anyway, the mall is being terrorized by a flasher. Which, I confess, struck me as quaint. (Can women today be terrorized by a flasher? I’d rather hope not.) Ronnie, of course, has only the sort of police skills one picks up from watching David Caruso dramatically take off his sunglasses. And when the beautiful cosmetics counter girl (Anna Farris) is traumatized, the cops are called in.

I love Anna Farris: She has the looks to go full bimbo, but somewhere about Scary Movie 3 she seems to have given her all to comedy. She actually plays a bimbo here, and a simply horrible person besides.

Meanwhile, the cop is played by the cruelly handsome Ray Liotta, who must endure Ronnie’s endless boasting and posturing, even as the mall cop ends up eating up his day with stupid dead-ends.

So, typical wacky comedy right?

But then we see Ronnie’s home life, and alcoholic mom (played by Celia Weston, who strongly recalls a younger Louis Lasser), and the laughs are of a completely different character. We see that he cares about something other than himself and also that his clownishness has a lot to do with his dreams and ambitions.

There are a lot of alternating scenes like this. Ronnie is an insufferable jerk, but then it turns out that his megalomania is the result of actual manic-depression. He invites the world to treat him badly, but sometimes when it does, he becomes surprisingly effective. We see him neglect the sweet and charming Toast-A-Bun girl most of the times, but also come surprisingly to her aid, even if in a terribly inappropriate way.

I can’t believe that this sort of movie has a broad appeal. It sets itself up in a very generic fashion–I knew instantly that Nell would be the true love interest instead of Brandi, for example–but then it refuses to overplay or oversell the comedy, and instead sells a strange violent twist.

Funny, if you can laugh at that sort of thing. Which I can. And The Boy can as well.

But if you find that sort of thing disturbing, this isn’t your movie.

It took me a while to watch this one. It’s taken me longer to review it.

Taking Chance is the story of Lt. Col. Mike Strobl, who escorts the body of Chance Phelps to his final resting place in Dubois, Wyoming.

It’s about 1:15 long. It’s devoid of big emotions, high drama, or even a plot, really. And yet, I can barely imagine the soul that would be unmoved by it.

If you’re ignorant of these sort of things, you have no idea how much care goes into this detail. The rules are specific and the protocol meticulous. And it’s impossible not to feel a measure of pride in the respect given, even if you never knew about it before.

It seems right. It seems the only proper recognition, really. And what’s beautiful about this movie is that Strobl encounters a stream of Americans who are overwhelmed by Chance’s sacrifice.

And you get, in one small moment, a sense of why the whole mission means so much to Strobl (Kevin Bacon), and a look into the soul of the brothers-in-arms who serve us, often at the ultimate price.

You should see it.

Another case of terribly deceiving trailers, like Duplicity, Adventureland comes across as a wacky summer teen-sex comedy, in the mold of the ‘80s (when the story takes place). In the trailers, they show lots of Bill Hader (Superbad) and Kristen Wiig (misidentified in an earlier review as Katharine Wiig), who have a great and funny chemistry as the couple that manages the amusement part. They reference Superbad which was not entirely froth, but which had a very light feel overall.

The trailers even set it up to look like a mishap with the corn dogs causes hallucinations. Zany!

OK, so, Hader and Wiig are great. And very funny. But they’re really just a sideshow in what is essentially a romance. Not even a romantic-comedy, but a fairly heavy clash of two people trying to love each other.

In the lead is Jesse Eisenberg (Squid and the Whale) as James, looking a lot like the wispy Michael Cera, but with a fierce undercurrent of strong passion, and the waifish Kristen Stewart (hot off Twilight).

As our story open, Jesse’s dad has been “reassigned”, meaning they now don’t have the money to send him to Europe. They don’t even have the money to help him out at Columbia, where he’s been accepted into the Masters program for Journalism. So he gets a job at Adventureland, being not qualified for anything else. (That strikes me as a stretch; were there no temp office jobs for college grads in Pittsburgh in the ’80s? But, rolling with it….)

There at the park, he meets Joel (Martin Starr of Superbad), a morose but highly intelligent college graduate who majored in Russian and Eastern European Literature, and ultra-cool musician/maintenance older guy Connell (Ryan Reynolds in the role Paul Rudd would have done ten years ago). He also meets the sharp, broody Em (Stewart) and the shallow, curvy Lisa P (Margaraita Levieva, looking more ’80s than any of them).

I’d like to give a shout out to all the smart, curvy women who are tired of this stereotype, by the way. It’s necessary for the plot, here, though.

Basically, James is the romantic type. He’s at least 22, and still a virgin. It’s not that the opportunity hasn’t arisen, it’s that he wants for it to be worthy of a Shakespeare sonnet:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?

He decides to break up with his steady girlfriend on the night she was going to bed him because he didn’t want to be a slave to the hours and times of her desire.

This is not your ’80s-guy-tries-to-get-laid-with-wacky-consequences movie. James’ virginity is not played for laughs, awkward and embarrassing as it is, when he sits down with Em face-to-face to compare sexual histories. And they are both embarrassed for different reasons.

James falls for Em very quickly, but Em, who has suffered her own family traumas, is currently having an affair with the married Connell. Connell uses his cachet as a musician (though we never, ever hear him play, and the band we do hear is awful) to attract the young girls into his mother’s basement (no joke!).

So while James is falling harder and harder for Em, she’s feeling worse and worse about herself and trying to slow him down. His quirky charm attracts Lisa P who, against his better instincts and with Connell’s encouragement, takes her on a date. He’s wracked with guilt, unaware of Em’s relationship.

You can see how rough this is going to get, can’t you?

And it does.

There are many things that amused this old moviegoing warhorse, too: This movie is way less creepy and raunchy than the ’80s teen sex farces it reminds of. There’s no nudity. No glamorization of drunken makeout sessions. Apart from the kissing, everything else is off screen. Marijuana figures big with no particular judgment made about it, and there’s a lot of drunk driving–none of it funny. There’s a big going to New York City scene, which ends in the rain on a graffiti-and-trash covered street.

There’s anti-semitism! And the parents and adults, always fodder for humor in the teen sex farce, are portrayed fairly sensitively (if not in any great detail). For example, Em’s stepmother hates her, but when Em pulls at her wig during a cocktail party, you feel bad for the stepmother, too.

It’s not, not, not the wacky Superbad. That movie, upon reflection, suffered from the fact that Jonah Hill doesn’t really have Seth Rogan’s charisma, which is kind of critical for understanding why the girl is interested in him. The whole cast here does a great job even when there’s little screen time. I particularly thought that the two actors who played the fathers (Josh Pais and Jack Gilpin) did a good job looking like men who had somehow lost control of their lives.

We liked it–The Boy included–but I think they’ve played the PR wrong. A lot of people are going to think the movie is boring and slow because they were promised a comedy. So, as with Duplicity, beware. Unlike Duplicity, however, Em and James are hugely sympathetic characters–just kids trying to figure out how to reconcile their feelings with the fear that comes from not knowing how the other feels.

“And give me two tickets to Sunshine Cleaning.”

Lame joke, but you know I ran with it at the box office when we went to see I Love You, Man. They put up with me.

Male friendship is a popular topic here on the ‘strom, and here we have an interesting cinematic example. This movie is a romantic comedy, except the leads are two heterosexual platonic friends.

And, hey, ladies! The women in this movie are not jerks!

The story concerns Peter Klaven (the omnipresent Paul Rudd) who is a milquetoast-y real estate agent who has just proposed to girlfriend Zooey (“The Office”’s Rashida Jones) and realized that he has no candidate for Best Man. Seems Peter is more comfortable with women than with men.

His initial attempts at finding male companionship are unsuccessful, if not exactly hilarious. The humor here is really not broad; the movie stays realistic and tackles the issues in a fairly straight manner. Rudd does a good job being awkward at male-male relations.

Things get funnier when he meets Sydney Fife (the formerly fully frontally nude Jason Segel of Forgetting Sarah Marshall), who takes a shine to him and invites him on some “man-dates”. Sydney leads the life of the consummate bachelor and, if possible, Rudd is even more awkward than ever.

I liked this part. Peter doesn’t really know how to appropriate greet his new male friend, and in trying to be cool says things that are not real words. At one point, trying to come up with a nickname for Sydney, he calls him “Jopen”. There’s a lot of stuff like that, but Sydney rolls with all of it as Peter gets up to speed.

So, if you wanted to be hack about this, how do you create the tension? Well, you’d start making Peter’s fiancee jealous. The very cool thing about this movie is that fiancee Zooey never really gets jealous. What happens instead is that Peter finds himself just as ill-equipped to manage the needs of both people as they arise.

This happens at a Rush concert. So, if you like Rush, it’s got that going for it, too.

This culminates in a second act where the issue of trust becomes paramount. The hero loses his best friend, his girl and his job. (Not literally, but it looks like he’s going to have his dream property sold out from under him.) Having just seen Sunshine Cleaning, where the script never really recovers from the second act crisis, this movie works out very well and believably.

The trap of these movies often fall into is that they make you wonder why the hell the hero is interested in the girl in the first place, but not here. Besides Zooey, Jamie Pressley plays Zooey’s friend Denise, whose boorish husband Barry (John Favreau) refuses to do anything for her unless it results in some kink later on from her. (But even there, we learn that this isn’t quite as it seems.)

Zooey’s biological-clock-is-ticking sister Haley (Sarah Burns) has eyes for Sydney, but he’s not interested in settling down, but the movie avoids making her pathetic, and calls the eternal bachelor in his issues, without insisting he end up married at the end.

The movie’s about the two of them. And, rather sweetly, features callbacks to all the guys whom Peter didn’t bond quite as well with.

Although it has much of the feel of an Apatow movie, it’s mostly not as raunchy (the raunch is verbal and a lot less outrageous)–and, as I said, a lot more female friendly.

The Boy liked it. I had thought about not taking him, since there’s a fair amount of sex talk in it, but I didn’t find myself cringing. (He, of course, was not bothered at all.) He made the comparison between the more loosy-goosy Sunshine and this.

And I liked the message: It’s okay to be best friends with your girlfriend, and it’s okay to have guy friends, too. But most importantly, you have to communicate with both.

Oh, yeah, and Lou Ferigno looks great and not at all like he’s pushing 60.

We have a lot of slacker comedies these days, but they’re not usually centered around women. This may be because slacker women aren’t funny. For instance, in the new dramedy (can I still use that word?) from the makers of Little Miss Sunshine, Sunshine Cleaning we have slacker sisters Rose and Norah, working as cleaner and waitress respectively, our girls aren’t really slackers because they just never grew up (as is the usual case with boys), but because of a tragedy in their early lives.

This swaps out some comedic potential for drama, which is ookkaaaay, I guess, but maybe a little, I dunno, cheap? (Drama is way easier to pull off than comedy, especially when you’ve got Amy Adams and Emily Blunt in a tragic situation.)

Anyway, in this case, we have the lovely and versatile Amy Adams in the title role, playing a normal person (as opposed to a nun, a wild ‘30s actress or a fairy princess) and there’s just no doubt that this girl can act. She’s a single mom having an affair with a married man (instead of getting her real estate license) and hard up for money because her son, Oscar, decided to lick things at school, and they don’t want him there any more unless they can drug him. (I didn’t know that the state could force you to “medicate” your child but, hey, way to go Big Pharm, if that’s the case. Nothing like hooking ’em young. I guess the tobacco guys knew what they were doing, eh?)

Her cop boyfriend hooks her up with a crime scene cleanup job, not entirely on the up-and-up, and Rose takes to it, dragging her recently fired sister along with her. The money is good and they begin to feel good about it, making some investments and getting the necessary training and certification.

There are about half-a-dozen subplots: Grampa (Alan Arkin) car-schools Oscar while buying things off the back of a truck and trying to sell them for profit; a romantic thread with the one-armed proprietor of the store (acting chameleon Clifton Collins, Jr.) where they buy their supplies; the affair with the cop; Rose’s high school quasi-reunion; Norah’s pursuit of a person connected to one of their cases; I think that’s all of them.

This keeps things moving, and everything builds nicely to a second act catastrophe. In a traditional three-act screen play, the second act ends with a disaster–the big disaster that knocks the hero down and gives him something to overcome in the climax in act three.

And that’s where this movie kind of peters out: The second act catastrophe is awesome. Just when it looks like Rose has finally got her act act together, Norah ruins everything. You just can’t see a good way out of this mess.

And then there’s some resolving of personal conflicts and–I won’t call it a deus ex machina, because it’s not, exactly, but for a movie that doesn’t bother to tie up half its loose ends (which is fine, things can be too neat), this main one is not tied up way too neatly and unconvincingly. (I can’t go into it without spoiling things.)

Overall, it’s an entertaining movie with good acting (including the aforementioned Emily Blunt of Charlie Wilson’s War, Steve Zahn as the cop boyfriend and Jason Spevak as Oscar) a few laughs from a broad spectrum of humor (that is some standard comedy fare, some darker), and quite a bit of drama.

We actually felt it could’ve been a little bit longer. It runs only 90 minutes, with about ten minutes cut from the European release. (That might’ve been another subplot, who knows?)

This movie isn’t all that much, in nature, like the contrived, sit-com-y Little Miss Sunshine, either. (I liked Little Miss Sunshine but it was terribly clichéd.) It shares a couple of producers with this movie, and you can feel their influence–like I suspect the filming location is part of that–and Alan Arkin is in both movies, but the earlier movie is a lot shallower and, yes, funnier.

And it was almost like the director and writer wanted to avoid the tidy wrapping up of loose ends enjoyed by the LMS crew and so left us with a lot more questions, and a little unsatisfied.

See, I’m having trouble ending this. The short form is: We liked it but wouldn’t recommend it unreservedly.

The trailers for Duplicity initially positioned it as a super-serious spy movie. Then they had a run suggesting it was a romantic comedy. This dichotomy may have something to do with its tepid reception, because even while there’s an overlap in the audiences, there’s not much overlap in the urge.

That is, people don’t think “Oh, I want to see Sleepless In Seattle–but I guess The Osterman Weekend is just as good.” I mean, you might be in the mood for either, or both, but a strong urge to view one genre just isn’t going to be satisfied by a movie in the other genre.

This is, however, a romantic-comedy/spy movie. Though a little light on the comedy and more a caper flick.

The premise is that Clive “And Just When Everything Was Going So Well” Owen and Julia “They’re Called Boobs, Ed” Roberts are corporate spies who are managing a convoluted caper while trying to build a relationship.

Well, look, I’ve been bitching about how Romantic Comedies have gone from the struggle of two independent, strong-willed people to find a way to cohabitate, to being about neurotic women pursued by persistent and apparently not very bright men. So, I guess we have a compromise: Duplicity is about two, independent, strong-willed and neurotic people trying to find a way to cohabitate.

It works, sort of. The plot centers around a mysterious product that one company has and another company wants, and the revelation of that MacGuffin was pretty funny. The corporate spy angle makes it possible for the movie to be lighter than a traditional spy-game movie would be.

The narrative ping-pongs between current day and progressive flashbacks, and somehow I missed the first flashback cue, so I got a bit confused at first. But the plot’s actually pretty straightforward despite the other plot (the one the two are hatching) being ridiculously complex.

Naturally, The Boy and I were more intrigued by the business aspect of corporate spying, and with the two CEOs being played by Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson, the Owen-Roberts relationship seemed a little…less so. (Giamatti is at his scene-chewing best while Wilkinson’s role is unfortunately tiny; you could see a really fun movie being made out of their relationship.)

I don’t think this is entirely a testosterone issue. These two characters are not very sympathetic. They constantly test and mess with each other, which they simultaneously seem to enjoy and revile. It’s a difficult task and writer/director Tony Gilroy (screenwriter for the Bourne series) doesn’t quite pull it off.

Normally, in a caper movie, you want the guys pulling the caper to succeed. (It’s a bit perverse, but we don’t expect movies to teach a moral lesson, do we?) And normally, in a RomCom, you want the two protagnoists to get together. This was not especially the case here. (And I give Gilroy credit for not making the ending too pat.) The whole thing ends up feeling a bit overly intellectual (Bourne has this in parts, too, I think) and unfocused.

I’m not a Julia Roberts fan, particularly–I find her looks distracting rather than engaging–but I thought she brought some warmth to the role, even though there wasn’t much room for it. I am sort of a Clive Own fan, but there was no room at all to gauge whether his charm had any genuine affection to it.

You can see why this undermines the romantic-comedy part; it also really undermines the caper part. And the whole thing ends up feeling overlong.

A shame, really.

One important rule of making it in Hollywood is to always be working on your next picture by the time your last one opens, and to have the one after that all nailed down. That way, if the one at the box office flops, you have two more chances before your career is finished.

This is probably impossible if you’re doing stop-motion animation. And so it came to pass that the director of Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach went eight years between movie releases: the disastrous Monkeybone and the reasonably successful Coraline.

I had held off going to see this movie, as it The Boy wasn’t really in the target audience–too old–and neither was The Flower–if not too young, exactly, then not particularly inclined to the creepy. But it has hung on and made an unexpected appearance at our local art house this week, when all the Oscar dross finally got pushed out. (Yay!)

The Flower seemed pretty confident that, as this was a fairy tale (my description), that they would all live happily ever after, and therefore it would be okay for her to see. But why o why, she lamented, didn’t they just tell you the ending beforehand? Then you’d know if you wanted to go see it!

This led to a less surreal discussion than the one I posted here (which occurred after the movie) between her and the boy about whether the ending was more important than how you get there.

So, about the movie: This is, indeed, a fairy tale about a young girl who moves from the big city into a sub-divided house out in the boondocks with her preoccupied parents. In the house, she discovers a tiny door with only a brick wall behind it. But if her parents aren’t around (asleep, away), the wall becomes a passage. And on the other side of the passage is a mirror image of her world, only this world fulfills her dreams of the perfect life.

Her other parents are doting and entertaining, her neighbors aren’t crazy old coots but magically talented, the garden is a living world of lights, and even her room is fantastically enchanted.

The only apparent thing that’s “off” is that all the people in this mirror world have buttons for eyes. (This, of course, is just a warning sign of how off the whole thing is.)

Creepy, eh? Now, fairy tales are creepy and horrific, in general. This isn’t much different, thematically, than Hansel and Gretel and the gingerbread house, or Celtic stories of “little people”, who were always doing horrible things. But if you’re going to take a kid to see this, make sure they’re not freaked out by eye stuff. (The other really disturbing part of the movie, that of the fat old women running around in skimpy clothing, was in the “well, there’s something you don’t see every day” category. The Flower recognized the reference to Boticelli immediately.)

The Flower is primarily disturbed by unhappy endings, so no issue with the eyes for her, though when the illusion of the other world started to come apart, my arm was grabbed and stayed grabbed for quite some time.

And come apart it does as the mystery of the “other mother” unfolds.

Wonderful voice work by Teri Hatcher (who shall forever be Lois Lane to me) and Keith David (as a savvy cat nemesis to the “other mother”), as well as Dakota Fanning as Coraline, John Hodgman as Father, and the comedy team of French and Saunders as the crazy old ladies next door. Ian McShane, late of Kung Fu Panda, plays an old Russian guy training mice in his apartment.

Ultimately, this is a satisfying movie, with solid Fairy Tale logic. Everything hangs together. I would swear I’ve read the tale before in another form; certainly the concept of a fairy world where illusions make very mundane or even nasty things seem marvelous is not new. But I can’t remember any particular fairy tale that goes that way. (Fritz Leiber wrote a Fafhrd/Grey Mouser story called Bazaar of the Bizarre in that vein, and the theme of great-illusion-masking-horrible-truth was used in the 2000 version of Bedazzled.)

And Selick’s work is good here. He demonstrates (again) that much of the visual artistry of Nightmare Before Christmas was his, if you didn’t pick that up from James and the Giant Peach and Monkeybone. (His pallette is less ruthlessly grey/white/red than Burton’s.) Since it was meant to exploit 3D–my brain doesn’t do 3D so we saw it regular-flat-style–it has more than a few moments that are conspiculously sticky-out-of-the-screen-y, but it’s not horrible in that regard.

And the stop-motion is very fine, indeed. It’s even more impressive to think that, in this day-and-age when computers can simulate this style of animation (or even more, that computers fulfill the needs stop-motion animation was originally meant to address), that there are teams of people out there moving little dolls around a millimeter at a time. And you get to marvel at the broken mirrors, the running water, and all the other little things that seem impossible with just stop-motion. (There are some parts that were surely computer animated, but not that many!)

The only caveat I have is that the movie is probably over-rated. It’s very good, but not a mind-blowing revelation. I think a lot of the hype comes from the fact that Neil Gaiman–a comic book luminary along the lines of Alan Moore or Frank Miller–wrote the story on which this was based.

It’s a fine story. And a fine movie. Part of the reason for both, though, is that it doesn’t have grand pretensions. It’s a nice, moral fairy tale. Enjoy it for being that.