I was in the mood to sit in a dark room and eat popcorn Thursday evening so I scanned for a movie of interest, and failing that–I just can’t muster any interest in The Class but maybe this will be the week!–settled on a little film called Phoebe In Wonderland, which is yet another teacher drama, but of the single student variety I think, rather than the teacher goes and teaches underprivileged kids variety.

But when we got to the theater, it wasn’t playing! I’m still not sure how I made the mistake, but when we got there the Russian movie 12 was playing. Well, excellent, I actually wanted to see that.

12 is a Russian take on 12 Angry Men. It lost out at last year’s Oscars to The Counterfeiters. Yay for finally getting 2007’s best foreign films in 2009. Just for the record, the other three films nominated were Mongol (reviewed here), Beaufort (which we skipped) and Katyn (which I still don’t think has come around).

Of course the original is a dramatic masterpiece, tight as a drum and gorgeously staged and composed, so remakers must beware. (William Friedkin’s mid-‘90s is a respectable update.) And, of course, it’s a distinctly American story.

Just to top it off, the original is The Boy’s favorite movie. (It was on-demand last summer and we watched it one night, and then he asked to see it again the next night.)

So, lots could go wrong here.

However, this isn’t really a remake. The framework is the same: 12 men are locked in a room in order to decide the fate of a boy who allegedly killed his father. The evidence is overwhelmingly against him, and a lone holdout keeps the argument from being settled quickly. In the end, he sways the other jurors, and a murderer goes free.

Wait, that might not be how it goes. (Interestingly, Greg Gutfeld mentioned on “Red Eye” a few weeks back that he thought 12 Angry Men was the turning point in the culture wars. He didn’t elaborate, but given that the authorities are wrong, and a bunch of people are about to send an innocent boy off to die, it makes an interesting thought.)

But where the American version is a tale of forensics against which the personalities of the jurors emerge and reveal bias and irrationality, this sprawling Russian version mostly skips the forensics. The jurors, in turn, reveal some personal story or aspect of their lives, and this sways voters to the other side. (Some of the deductive reasoning of the original surfaces, but at one point–when the twist is revealed–a character runs through the forensic points that were overlooked, a nice homage to the original.)

The pressure to convict quickly also comes from the authorities: The baliff is a comical figure who can’t believe they’re taking as long as they do, even as he makes long distance phone calls on the cell phones he’s appropriated from them. But the implication is that most deliberations are over in a couple of hours.

Russian culture and society is on trial here, too. In this setup, the boy is a Chechen, the adopetd son of a retired Russian soldier. The sequestration is broken up by flashbacks showing how the soldier came to adopt the boy, and also by shots of the boy (now grown) in his cell. (One of the jurors is Jewish, and anti-semitism comes into play, too!)

The whole movie is both heavily laden with symbolism and bogged down in the reality of the effects of a society that’s lived under the oppressive thumbs of dictators for as long as anyone can remember.

I kept thinking, “Wow, so that’s what a jury deliberation in a dead society looks like.” Not that this should be taken as a documentary, but the Soviets’ impact is still being felt, with absurd testaments to their waste and corruption everywhere. “Everyone’s in on it” a character says at one point. The despair is palpable.

And yet, this is a hopeful movie. It’s by turns moving, absurd, tragic, funny and grim. Very Russian, as one character says.

And, it has a twist ending. Right about the time the original ends, there’s another character who starts arguing back the other way! And he makes an excellent point! Actually, there are about four points where it seems like the movie is going to end, and the last two endings seem rather gratuitous.

All-in-all, a fairly captivating 2 ½ hour flick. The Boy was pleased. And I got to practice my Russian ears. So, win-win.

I would hate to judge an author by the film adaptations of his work, but if I were to do so for Alan Moore, I would say he was a nihilistic misanthropist who was far enough left to make Chosmky blush. And also that he was an idiot. But while the latter would probably be true of assessments made of most authors based on screen adaptations, there may be some merit to the former.

This is the guy who gave us V for Vendetta after all. Also League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I have to believe that’s not as stupid as it sounds, and it couldn’t possibly be as dumb as the movie made it out to be. I just have to believe that, if I’m to have any faith in humanity at all.

Let me back up a bit and just talk about the movie: This is a decent superhero action flick, surprisingly entertaining for its length (two-and-a-half hours, not counting credits). The story takes place in an alternate 1985, and the premise is that masked heroes started appearing ca. World War II, and a second generation appeared in the ‘60s and helped the USA fight (and win!) the Vietnam War. (As if we lost that war for military or even enemy morale reasons.)

This win, and apparently the use of our five superheroes by President Nixon allows him to seek a fifth term–1968, 1972, 1976, 1980 and 1984–and somewhere around his third term, he makes masked vigilantism a crime. So our heroes are retired (a la Incredibles, which probably took a little inspiration from here) and either working clandestinely or not at all.

The story begins with one of the heroes, the Comedian, being killed. The Comedian’s kind of a psychopathic Punisher type who really enjoyed Vietnam, and in one appalling scene opens fire on a crowd of protesters while screaming about the American Dream having come true. Jeffrey Dean Morgan does a fine job playing this “nuanced” character.

The hyper-violent Rorschach, who most reminded me of The Question, suspects foul play. Or rather, suspects fouler play than just a random burglary. He warns the Nite Owl, reminiscent of the Blue Beetle, but really evocative of a clunky Batman (complete with lots of money and toys), and the Nite Owl warns Ozymandias, now a super-successful businessman who’s working on a cheap power source with the help of Dr. Manhattan.

Dr. Manhattan was exposed to some super-science thing that allows him to see into his own future and past, and apparently to give others the same power. Like his girlfriend, the Silk Spectre, who seems to be the only hero who inherited the position from her mother. Anyway, Dr. Manhattan’s superpowers don’t include giving a damn, which puts a strain on their relationship.

Anyway, there’s lots going on, and director Zach Snyder keeps the action coming so that the story never gets bogged down. I’m always amused by the sort of critical reception of movie like this gets: Apparently it confused the poor dears. It’s actually not at all confusing; it is, however, high volume, and some things are done shockingly poorly for such an A-level production.

The acting is largely top notch. I mentioned Morgan as the Comedian, but Patrick Wilson (most known to me as the guy who gets tortured by Ellen Page in the neat little horror flick Hard Candy) does a very fine job as Nite Owl, and Billy Crudup does well with a difficult role as the subtly emotional Dr. Manhattan. I found Malin Akerman, who plays the Black Canary-esque Silk Spectre, a little grating and occasionally radiating a kind of bimbotude, which was just tragically wrong for that part.

Once again, though, newly reborn Jackie Earle Haley (Bad News Freakin’ Bears!) just kicks ass as the uncompromising terror, Rorschach. And he does it, for the most part, through a completely opaque, featureless mask. (Featureless except for the shifting pattern on it.)

So, while the acting is overall quite good, there is some wicked bad makeup. The makeup for the Nixon and Pat Robertson characters, for example, is just ostentatiously bad. Carla Gugino, who plays the original Silk Specter, does a fine job, but her old age makeup reminds me of that episode of the Brady Bunch where Peter plays Benedict Arnold. (Maybe I’m just hyper-critical of old age makeup and maybe I was turned off by the Nixon caricature after Frost/Nixon, but that’s how it seemed.)

The familiar let’s-open-an-action-scene-with-a-pop-song approach takes a beating here, too. The Hendrix version of Along The Watchtower is used, for example, and it fell flat with me. Worst of all–people are talking about this one a lot–was the use of Leonard Cohen’s version of Hallelujah.

People, it was a dubious choice to have Leonard Cohen singing in the documentary about his own life, I’m Your Man. Putting his voice and the ridiculously clunky Hallelujah Chorus Singers that grace his recording of that song over a sex scene–not subtly in the background but loudly and insistently–was ridiculously tin-eared.

The other thing I’m on the fence about is the fact that, with the exception of Dr. Manhattan, they’re all just regular heroes, not super heroes. That is, they have no powers. Except that they sort of do. I mean, in the opening scene where The Comedian is fighting his assailant, walls and furniture get smashed through. Rorschach scales walls as though attached to wires. Ozymandias is faster than a speeding bullet. And so on.

I dunno. A certain amount of “super” heroism is pretty much standard in action films. It was better than bogging down the film with a bunch of origins stories. (I had a minor but similar sort of feeling about the technology used by the Nite Owl. It was so clearly of today and not of the ’80s; I would have liked to see future tech as imagined in the ’80s.)

Overall, a flawed, but engaging movie.

The Boy pronounced it “Entertaining. But it had a message, and I don’t know what it was. It would have been better without it.”

But, of course, I knew what the message was, and I’m sure it seemed so incredibly profound back in ’86 when this was written, that a lot of people are clinging to the story’s “greatness” now without observing the irony that it was terribly, self-indulgently wrong. See, the authors proceeded from the standpoint that the human race was on the brink of destroying itself in ’85, and built themselves a story around that concept.

Man’s capacity for self-destruction is, of course, a fond topic for writers, as well as how to diver that energy elsewhere. Ray Bradbury wrote an upbeat little story called “The Toynbee Convector”, for example on how a time machine saved humanity. This wouldn’t be that story.

No, this is a story where imperialist America goes unchecked and–you know, when you get down to it, the villain is none other than Richard Nixon–brings the world to the brink of destruction.

Heroes are made from sadists and neurotics and mass-murderers, and the desire to create a “nuanced” story turns–as it always does–into a soap opera’s celebration of pettiness. Dr. Manhattan gains incredible knowledge and wisdom, and as a result becomes detached from his humanity–not so detached that he can’t cheat on his wife with a younger woman, but detached enough that he can’t decide whether humanity is worth saving. The climactic scenes work–they vary from the graphic novel–but they don’t bear much thinking about.

It’s not that there aren’t a lot of conflicting messages here, because there are, and there are supposed to be. You’re supposed to make your own moral, which is what good artists allow the viewer to do. But the backdrop that that decision is supposed to made against is false, and rife with ugliness and ennui.

I haven’t read the graphic novel; The Boy and I both eschewed that, feeling that the movie should stand on its own, and I think it does. Ultimately, whether the grim world view presented–and the few upbeat notes therein–are the influence of Moore (who had his name taken off the production) or Snyder or Gibbons (who illustrated the comic) doesn’t really matter.

It’s so very ’80s, though, like Blade Runner, American Psycho and The Dark Knight Returns. The ’80s generation, in its own way, is insufferable as the ’60s generation was: Faced with unprecedented wealth and the demise of the great threat of our time, everyone was just so freaking convinced the world was coming to an end. (At least the Dark Knight embraced the notion that hard times meant heroes had to be even more heroic, on an even larger scale.)

Just in case you thought it mattered which Republican was in the White House.

So I give it a reserved recommendation–but you might find yourself a little embarrassed. There was talk of a sequel–I don’t think the movie will do as well as predicted–but that would only be slightly less stupid than a sequel to Snyder’s last film: 300.

The Boy was recovered enough to take a trip to the movies, though the pickings are slim, with the Oscar films still clogging up the screens. It’s hard to sell even the high rated films that are out now: Two Lovers, Bob Funk, Medicine for Melancholy (some asshole ripping off Bradbury’s title again), and Must Read After My Death (“Imagine if Revolutionary Road had been a documentary!”). There are a few mainstream releases out we haven’t seen, but he’s very particular about those. (I don’t know that he makes the distinction in his mind, but he’s at an age where he has an aversion to stupid, and that rules out a whole lot of movies.)

Then there’s Gomorra, a mixed-reviewed gangster flick about the Naples crime syndicate. Well, The Boy likes himself a gangster flick, though I myself run cold on them.

And, well, it’s a sprawling mess of a film, unfocused and a bit hard to follow, not because any individual scene is complicated but how they tie together is. The movie concerns: A gang war with “secessionists” trying to split from the Camorra, a boy who wants to join the gang, a couple of phenomenally stupid young men who are trying to be independent outlaws, a dress counterfeiting operation, a toxic waste dump operation, and a man who either collects the protection money or distributes retired gangster’s pensions (or both).

You could’ve made this a miniseries, with the six stories each being its own 22-minute episode–or you could have fleshed them out into 48 minutes for an hour show. This would’ve worked better, I think, because the stories didn’t really overlap, so telling them cut into pieces just made them hard to follow, without any added dramatic benefit.

The movie runs two-and-a-quarter hours, but even so, you don’t get a satisfying resolution to the young kid’s story. Here’s how it could’ve been better: The boy delivers groceries to a woman who is also chummy with the money carrier, and has some connection with the secessionists, or at least is imagined to. The boy is also trying to get chummy with the local, low-level Camorra thugs. This woman could’ve served as the focal point of the whole story, crossing paths with the tailor and the toxic waste managers–I think she was actually connected to one of the idiots doing random thuggery.

She could’ve been a good anchor for the story which, unfortunately, comes off as sort of “inside baseball”.

There is no beauty in this film; where the Godfather saga dressed up mob antics in gorgeous colors and impeccable fashion in opulent surroundings, the ruffians in this film wear cheap track suits or t-shirts celebrating sports teams of other countries, and live in housing that would embarrass trailer trash. I don’t recall any music whatsoever. There’s no dramatic lighting and the camera work is straightforward, though fortunately avoiding the dread shaky-cam.

I suppose then, this is a “realistic” film. But a little artifice could’ve gone a long way to make it a truly great film.

Easily the best part of this movie is when Humongous sends his S&M punk troops in to crash the suburban home in an attempt to steal their gasoline.

Ha! I wish!

No, no, this is Revolutionary Road, starring Kate & Leo, together again for the first time since Titanic. And director Sam Mendes is here to tell us they were better off when Leo drowned. For all the crap I’ve heaped on this movie, it’s better than the trailer makes it out to be.

But isn’t Ms. Winslet a charmer? She stars as the most horrible, narcissistic, self-absorbed characters in film, wreaking a swath of destruction wherever she goes–and not even the usual femme fatale type swath, but the inconstant lover swath–and yet we keep going back to see her do it again (and again and again)!

The story here is trite enough: Boy meets girl, boy and girl have a lot of pillow talk about grand adventures, girl gets knocked up, boy gets job and buys girl house, boy knocks up girl again, and both are really depressed.

It’s a little better than that, fortunately, because the two characters are so unlikeable at first, you sort of wish they would do one of those murder-suicide things. April (Winslet) is a wannabe actress, but she’s really horrible. She’s also moody and uncommunicative and none-too-bright Frank (Di Caprio) hasn’t figured that out.

Frank, not feeling special, has a fling with the new girl in the steno pool–gets her drunk first, too, classy!–but then comes home to find new passion in his wife who has concocted the following plan: Move to Paris; they live on savings and money from the house; April will get a government job; Frank can use the time to “find himself”.

This reinvigorates their marriage so much, they have spontaneous, unprotected sex, apparently unaware that that activity can have long-term effects. Meanwhile, Frank, in a moment of ebullience, did something noteworthy and is offered a big promotion–a once in a lifetime thing.

So while Frank is starting to feel good about things, April is getting increasingly depressed. Things go downhill from here.

This is when I began to realize what a truly horrible person April is. She’s so focused on being “special” that she can’t see the esteem in which others see her and Frank. (Or she can, but lacking any respect for those who admire her, she doesn’t care.) I thought we were seeing another side of her when she came up with the Paris plan, but then I realized it meant: 1) getting out of their neighborhood; 2) getting away from their kids; 3) attaching herself to Frank’s future achievements.

This becomes painfully apparent when Frank’s newfound satisfaction results in less happiness for her, and her subsequent actions get more and more selfish. (Though I wonder if Winslet sees any of this. She’s the one who failed to see her Nazi character as a sexual predator.)

Anyway, while I enjoyed American Beauty because I saw it as upbeat–no, really–this movie doesn’t give you any positive thoughts to close on.

For sheer moviegoing pleasure, I thought the movie dragged a lot until April comes up with the Paris plan, then it starts to drag again at the ends of both act 2 and act 3. And as much as I love Michael Shannon (who drives the little horror flick Bug), his character has to be one of the laziest and ham-handed literary devices I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Not to say he doesn’t do the part well, ‘cause he does, but the whole “Aaaand here’s the crazy guy who perceives the situation between Frank and April perfectly and explains it thoroughly to that part of the audience that hasn’t figured it out yet” is completely unnecessary.

The Boy basically liked it. He disagreed with the premise, though, finding suburbia far from hellish. Of course, now, when he’s taking out the trash, he looks pensively up-and-down the street–’cause that’s just what a smartass he is.

And on that last point, the house Frank & April have is gorgeous, and they just have to walk across the street to find themselves in the woods! They’re tramping through the woods explaining how they have to get away from it all at one point.

But, you know, okay, the point is (in part) that it’s not for everyone. However nice your situation is, if you don’t want it, it’s unpleasant. And at least the movie doesn’t force that point on you; I was sort of surprised by that. I perceived it that Frank found a way to be happy there, and that April’s exceeding selfishness stopped her from being happy.

Whether they meant it that way or not is another issue.

In the year 2027…

Women are barren. And have been for 18 years.

OK, it’s not exactly Terminator plot-wise. But while this isn’t a sexy premise, it’s a reasonable one for a movie about dystopia. Besides no new children being born, the world is trying to get into England because of a world-wide famine. (And…England is where the food is? Meh, the movie is English, so let’s just roll with it.)

At the helm is Alfonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and on-screen, primarily, is the ultra-cool Clive Owen (Sin City) being a little more “every man” here, as the guy who’s tagged by terrorists/rebels/insurgents to transport a woman to The Human Project. (Something about dystopia movies requires that they mention a refuge for the protagonist to escape to, I guess.) The woman, of course, is pregnant.

From this springs a chase movie, action punctuated only by periodic (unnecessary) exposition and peppered throughout with revolution music. Said music is a little out of place, actually, since virtually everyone in 2027 is an asshole (pardon my French), including Owen’s ex-wife, Julianne Moore, who gets him into this mess in the first place.

Moore’s smart enough, though, to know that Owen is trustworthy, and to predict many of the various betrayals that would occur on the way. Michael Caine has a small, but important role as a pot-growing hippy pal of Owen’s who provides him with the means to escape.

This is a pretty good film. Not particularly original—I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s supposed to be so all-fired cretaive about the premise, which was used most recently on film in The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s not particularly tight as far as its construction of the dystopia: What’s valuable when the youngest person on earth is 18 years old? Well, youth, of course. Yet the children of England are frequently shown as indigent. Please. Not only would the demand for food be steadily falling (most likely negating any possibility of famine), the demand for labor would be steadily increasing.

But perhaps I nitpick.

It’s just that when a movie is praised for its detail, intelligence, and ranks in the top 250 on IMDB, I have to call out the obvious. It’s a fine movie, with some excellent sequences, but it ain’t well thought out. Or, then again, maybe it is, seeing as it’s based on a novel, and the director just expects everyone to overlook the glaring questions. Since they did, maybe I should just shut up.

One employee at the theater where I saw this said people were freaking out about this movie, with one person saying they had “no right” to show this film, and another asking “When did this happen?” (If you miss the first five minutes, you could easily not see that it took place in t he future.) All in all, though, I found it a well-executed, well-acted, but otherwise pretty routine dystopic flick. Smarter than The Island (but what isn’t?) but not as smart as…oh, hell, there must be some reasonably well thought out dystopic film…maybe Minority Report? Eh, the movies aren’t really the right place to look for intelligent science-fiction.

But it’s a good film. And it’s not boring.

We were just talking about the revenge movie and whether they made ‘em like they used to. And here comes Monsieur Morel (The Transporter) and Liam Neeson to put us a bad-guy slaughter-fest where the good guy can shoot innocent people and not only do you not mind, you see his point.

In a nutshell: Neeson plays “preventor” Bryan Mills who has retired from the CIA (?) to try to build a relationship with the daughter (Maggie Grace) he estranged through years of field work. His bitchy ex-wife (Famke Janssen) guilts him into letting said daughter go to Paris with wild friend (Katie Cassidy) and before you can say “Charles Bronson Lives”, the two are kidnapped.

Now, here’s the beauty of this: They’re not kidnapped for ransom. The kidnappers are not desperate folk just trying to survive. Oh, no.

The kidnappers are white slavers who take young female tourists and drug them up and sell them to the sex trade.

I understand Fox toned the movie down for a PG-13, but it’s bad enough. When Neeson starts killing people, you have no remorse. When he tortures people, you’re thinking, “Well, good.” As I say, he even shoots an innocent woman in the arm and your response is, “Yeah, that was necessary. For the greater good.”

There’s no remorse on Neeson’s face at any point. Ever. It’s almost comical.

And yet.

It’s hard not to relate to his emotional state. The bad guys are well and truly scum. And, tragically, such people do exist as does the trade, though not with Western European tourists. (That, in a way, makes it all the scuzzier, since it implies a degree of control over things.) And if you’re a parent, some part of you is going, “Yeah, that’s about what I’d do. But I probably would’ve shot that guy a couple more times just to be sure.”

No, the villains here are Greasy Arabs (and Albanians) and the corrupt French government. Kind of like Casablanca, if Ingrid Bergman had been kidnapped by Sydney Greenstreet.

Alongside the crispness of pace, the film benefits greatly from Mr. Neeson’s performance: He moves seamlessly from concern over his daughter (even desperation) to cool professionalism. He doesn’t do a lot of the angry grimace/grunt thing but stays cool and on top of things, even when machine-guns are spraying and he’s outnumbered 12-to-1.

Not only does his paternal nature come through when he’s with his daughter, it comes through when he’s with others’ daughters. At no point does he leer or touch inappropriately, and the screenwriters were wise enough not to try to shoehorn a romantic subplot in with one of the 20-something actresses.

I was also impressed by young Maggie Grace–who isn’t that young at 24–but really was convincing as a 17-year-old, rather spoiled girl. Famke is, as always, convincing as a bitch, though she comes around a bit at the end.

As with most action pics, it gets a little silly at points. Once, early on, he tries to track down his lead and ends up with the gendarmes on his tail, yet we are not treated to how, exactly, he manages to evade them. At mid-point he kills five or six bad guys at once, though there is the element of surprise at least. Toward the end, he takes the mandatory bullet which barely slows him down.

There is a point where he does a moderate jump (by film standards) from a bridge to a boat and ends up with a limp for the rest of the movie (minus the parts where it’s necessary for him not to have a limp, heh).

The Boy approved of the relative lack of superpowers and endorses the movie whole-heartedly. I thought some of the bullet spraying at the end stretched our hero’s good fortune a bit thin.

Nonetheless, a good time. I think it’s probably better for the edits and things left unshown. At about an hour-and-a-half running time, it’s not too presumptuous either.

I advise any Albanians who see it not to take it too seriously, though.

Just finished watching Vantage Point. This film uses, sort of, the Rashomon gag of showing the same events over and over from different perspectives. (Eight, as the film boasts, though they start to get mushed at the end.) Unlike Rashomon, however, you don’t get the “unreliable narrator” effect. Instead, you get a trickling out of information from each perspective.

It’s not bad.

The start is a little slow, because the first perspective is a little slow and the new information trickles out slowly in the subsequent perspectives. As the perspectives begin to converge more and the plot is revealed, the movie picks up the pace a lot.

Unfortunately, it also gets a little silly. The problem with all caper movies (where the caper-ers are not the good guys) is that they rely on the criminal masterminds making mistakes or worse, acting out of character. In this case, the impressiveness of the stunt is glaringly undermined by the subsequent stupid mistakes and a climactic out-of-character moment. On top of that, the basically realistic vibe is broken as Dennis Quaid becomes practically superheroic at the end.

As you may know, I’m a big fan of concise moviemaking. (I’m not a short movie snob per se but if you’re going to indulge yourself at my expense, you’d better be good at it.) So I have to give this film its props for bringing in the whole eight-viewpoint thing in under 90 minutes.

A good cast, good suspence and pacing, so set your mind off and have a good time.

There must be a bunch of critics who just sit around sharpening their knives waiting for historical movies to come out so they can savage them for not being comprehensive or presenting their preferred angle on history.

Case in point, Defiance. This is the story of Belorussian Jews who flee into the forest because the Nazis have invaded with the intent of rounding them up and hauling them off to the “work” camps. Through hard-work, tough choices and persistence, they manage to survive for a time even despite the brutal winter.

That’s really the story in a nutshell, and it’s based on the real-life story of the Bielski brothers.

But check it, New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott says the message of the movie is “if only more of the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe had been as tough as the Bielskis, more would have survived”.

Well, first of all, that’s a bit of a stretch. It’s hard to imagine a more insulated story about the Jews in WWII. These aren’t German Jews or Italian Jews, but Polish/Belarus Jews, and their experience of the war is particularly idiosyncratic.

On the other hand, isn’t it true, to the extent that it can be applied? If more Jews had been as tough–and had a wilderness to escape to–wouldn’t more of them have survived? Do we have to take the stance that, as harsh as the Nazi regime was, all the Jews did everything they could?

That sort of simplistic analysis is rebutted by this film, in fact, as one of the big problems they have in freeing the Jews from the ghetto is that the Jews still believe that the Germans are sending them to “work camps”. In fact, that they won’t be killed because they’re useful as slave labor.

Anyway. Sometimes I see a review and just think, “What the hell movie was he watching?”

So. About this film, which The Boy pronounces “excellent”.

This is a manly film. Daniel Craig and Liv Schreiber are the brothers who end up taking on more and more “civilians” and trying to figure out how to feed them in the woods. (I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t hunting animals.) Craig wants to take on the civilians and concentrate on surviving while Schreiber wants to join up with the Red Army partisans.

This leads to some tension between our manly men.

Director Zwick (Blood Diamond, The Last Samuri) is remarkably non-judgmental in his direction. There are things in this movie that might be called murder, but there’s no attempt to make you feel one way or the other about them.

There’s a scene, for example, when the Jews get a hold of a nazi soldier and want to kill him. And, really, it’s hard to fault them for it. I mean, if we’re supposed to be appalled at the savagery of human nature, or something, it doesn’t come off. There’s a revenge scene and a command-struggle scene as well, and there’s even a debate about what to do with a baby being born.

But while the emotions are there, they’re not forefront. At the forefront is survival, and the question of what makes us decent human beings versus what we have to do to survive.

Note that while this is a manly-man film, the women are enlisted into the fighting and are eager to defend themselves and provide for their families. In fact, the manly-men have to adjust to them doing so. But you can see the echos of Israel in these scenes of women fighting.

So, we have strong characters, good pacing, some historical authenticity, rejection of victimhood (at least to the extent possible under the circumstances), dramatic tension…and Nazis! But no Oscar noms here. (We’ll leave that to the naked girl Nazis.)

Flaws? Well, the accents seem to come and go (particularly Daniel Craig’s). The last scene struck me as somewhat preposterous, if dramatically necessary for a satisfying ending. And I thought some of the scene juxtapositions (marriage vs. battle) were needlessly affected. But overall a solid flick, and not at all ooky.

Which may be why the Academy and critics didn’t like it.

You just knew John Lasseter taking over Disney’s animation studios would be a good thing. In the Eisner years, the “gimme” product, where some Disney property was used in some shoddy direct-to-video format because they knew it would sell X units, was reminiscent of those ‘70s live action films the studio went to after deciding animation was too expensive. Even the A-list material had begun to decline after the death of Howard Ashman (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and the good half of Aladdin).

Although I thought I detected some of his influence on the earlier film Meet The Robinsons, this seemed unlikely to be very direct, since he had just taken over the studio. But it is very obvious in Bolt. The lead character is a dog in a TV show who, for dubious reasons (earnestly explained by the TV show’s director, voiced by “Inside the Actor’s Studio” host James Lipton) requires Bolt to be convinced that he’s a superdog really rescuing his person (Penny, played by Miley Cyrus).

Bolt, then is much like Buzz Lightyear, Lasster’s Toy Story hero, or becomes much like him when a mishap has him mailed across the country and forced to find a way home to rescue Penny (who isn’t really in trouble). His companions on the journey are Mittens, the cynical New York cat, and Rhino, the couch potato hamster. The former doesn’t get Bolt’s delusion until the latter–a Bolt true believer–explains that he knows Bolt from “the magic box”.

John Travolta, Susie Essman and Mark Walton are the dog, the cat and the hamster respectively, with longtime Disney animator Walton being far and away the funniest voice. Essman (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) takes enough of the nasal twang out her voice to be palatable as the tough-but-vulnerable cat. Travolta is, if not distinguished, exceedingly pleasant as a dog learning how to be just a dog.

There’s no edge to this movie which, as you may know, I approve of. I don’t really want kid’s films to be “edgy”. There is the usual message of what you believe being an empowering factor but it’s ultimately an appreciation of his mundane abilities that allows Bolt to save the day.

The animation is quite good, as you’d expect. There’s a very nice transformation with Bolt, who both captures a lot of expressions and mannerisms of Travolta, as he becomes more “doggy”. And the common problem of the CGI character seeming lack mass is avoided.

The Flower liked it, of course, but The Boy also approved. Also, my mom loved it. So, there’s a broad range of appeal, even if this isn’t a great movie.

We didn’t do the 3D. My brain doesn’t do 3D.

I like David Fincher. Not as a person. I mean, he could be perfectly fine as a person, even if there are rumors that he’s a jerk. (It’s not like those rumors don’t fly around for just about every great director.) But I don’t even know the guy. Cut me a break. How the hell should I know?

But I digress.

I mean to say, I like his direction. As a streak, Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room and (arguably) Zodiac is up there with the best directors of all time. (I think Panic Room is under-rated.)

Maybe the best thing you could say about this movie is that it doesn’t seem like it’s two hours and forty-five minutes long. That’s a pretty good thing to say about a movie (unless it’s 90 minutes long, I guess).

It’s basically an episodic story about a man who is, sort of, growing younger, and the problems this causes in his life. It doesn’t really work, in a mechanical sense, but it’s okay dramatically.

Mechanically it doesn’t work because it’s clear from the start that he just looks old. Physically, he’s supposed to be afflicted with all these old-age conditions at birth–yet he goes through puberty after about 12 years of being born. The aging is sporadic, as well, the movie settles him in to middle-age to soon and keeps him there too long. (One plot point revolves around him getting “too young” but he looks about 40.) In his youth, he becomes afflicted with dementia, meaning that he ends up having old-age problems both coming and going.

And he’s not living backward in time, a la Merlin, either. So he’s completely inexperienced while looking 70 but has a lifetime of experience while looking 20.

Dramatically, it mostly works, except where the murky mechanics raise questions, and a sort of “well, what’s the point, then?” feel. That is, how is this story significantly different from someone aging normally? It really only provides one major plot point that comes when Benjamin and Daisy finally get together.

Well, and it does provide the gut-punch at the movie’s end. (Think about it.)

Lord knows I don’t need–or even want–a message movie, but this movie does sort of play around with it. There is a message here that Benjamin understands and Daisy only “gets” when it’s practically too late: That there is worth in loving others and being loved, and that worth transcends worldly things and–in good people–selfish interests.

Yeah, it’s not exactly rocket science, but it works for me.

Your mileage may vary. (What do you think? Good catch-phrase or no?)

Sure, Nazis are bad. But is it okay to sleep with them if they’re really hot?

That’s the challenging question the new Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours) Oscar-baiting movie asks.

The answer appears to be a qualified “yes”.

I’m being flip about the totally super-serial movie The Reader wherein a 15-year-old boy ends up involved with the stoic 37-year-old Hanna Scmitz (Kate Winslet) who teaches him ze ways of love.

This just in: Kate Winslet looks good naked.

But that’s not really important when you’re dealing with, you know, deep thoughts.

You might not even notice that the film is produced by ZOMBIES! OK, no one’s seen Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack emerge from their graves, but no one’s not seen them, either.

OK, ok. I’ll try to calm down a bit.

Wait, why isn’t this child porn? I thought it was against the law to have sex scenes involving minors or anyone pretending to be a minor or a drawing of a putative or even fictional minor.

Let me try this again: This movie is about Michael Berg, played half by Ralph Fiennes and half by David Kross. Fiennes played the top half.

And David Kross was a lot funnier on “Mr. Show”.

I guess I don’t have much to say about this movie. It’s good, and all, for some definition of “good”. Good acting, and plenty of it, of course. (Besides Winslet and Fiennes, there’s also Lena Olin and Bruno “Hitler” Ganz.) Good cinematography. It moves pretty quickly, though some seem to think the first half (with all the sex in it) is slow, it sets up the 2nd and 3rd act, wherein Berg’s life is ruined by the events in the first act.

I think this movie works as a character study of a boy who was too young to have an affair with an older woman and whose life is basically ruined by the affair for one reason or another.

I think it’s supposed to be about the difficulties of the Nazi generation and the next generation in reconciling those actions. (Turns out war sucks and genocide has repercussions. Huh. Who knew?) There isn’t a lot of empathy for the Nazis, which is good, I guess (see first sentence) but the forms this lack of empathy takes–show trials, expressions of desire to basically kill one’s parents (which oh-so-coincidentally takes place in the ‘60s, when lots of non-Nazis were talking about the same thing).

If it is, it partially misses there, because Michael is all messed up before he finds out Hanna is a Nazi, and then after he finds out she’s a Nazi, he takes ten years or so but finally decides to send her books-on-tape. Also, he’s almost completely non-functional as a human being, so he’s obviously punishing himself, too.

So, he he doesn’t forgive her, exactly, but he doesn’t break it off exactly, either.

Dunno. I guess it’s a reasonably murky topic so presenting a clear resolution would probably seem too pat. At the same time, it’s so freakin’ morose, I sort of have this counter-urge to laugh at the whole thing.

Your mileage may very. After all, it’s no laughing matter.

Update: Be sure to check this out as well.

Many have already noted that Clint Eastwood, at 78, dominates the screen in every way in his new movie Gran Torino. Some of this has gone out as criticism of the younger actors, but I think that’s misplaced. They are callow and naive, and whether it’s bad acting or not, it works perfectly in the context of the movie.

And this is legendary stuff, with Eastwood no less a mysterious, alien figure than an Ent from Lord of the Rings. This is kind of rare: Power Fantasies are common enough, but how often do we see a senior citizen power fantasy? (2-3 times a decade, max.)

It’s also really, really corny. Has anyone mentioned that yet?

Get over, for a minute, that Eastwood’s playing the “gunslinger with a past”, only instead of blowing into town, the town has blown up around him. He’s killed people (55 years ago) and he’s a lousy father and his wife–the one person in the world who understood and loved him–has just died.

Beyond all that, he’s still the archetypal “crusty but benign” oldster who takes the youngster under his wing and teaches him about the world.

Corny as hell. But it works, even down to gravel-voiced Eastwood singing the first verses of the closing song.

That’s right. You heard me: Singing.

And I think it works because, like Kwai Chang Caine and the Incredible Hulk, Walt Kowalski hates violence–but he’s not afraid of it. Well, “hate” is a strong word. Let’s just say he doesn’t like killing people. Roughing them up can be part of a healthy parenting philosophy.

It also works because there’s a disturbing truth there: Urban centers are an awful lot like Old West towns where gangs have the population in fear because nobody is willing to fight to defend themselves–well, nobody not in a gang, anyway.

Mostly it works because Eastwood glowers, growls and snarls his way through, while wearing his pants too high and having a strange little old-man paunch and wobbling when he walks–except when it’s time to hold the rifle steady.

There’s also some good story building there. It’s hard to imagine my pool-sharping, sharp-dressing, beer-selling (and swilling), WWII-fighting grandfather having much in common with me or my dad.

So we understand when Kowalski doesn’t “get” his sons and views them as disappointments. They are hugely spoiled, by his standards, and his grand-kids even worse. When he has a revelation that he shares more in common with the Hmong than his own descendents, it works.

And it works without trying to cover up Kowalski’s sins–his failure to reach his sons being his worst.

So, yeah. It works. Well. And it’s a successful vehicle for a 78-year-old 4-decade strong movie star. The Boy heartily approved.

Now, I make a point of avoiding message movies. Milk, for example, is not on my list. But Eastwood is definitely working at more than one level; does he make message movies?

I tend to say no. For example, I think it’s a real mistake to look at Million Dollar Baby as being pro-euthanasia. The situation addressed in that film was unique. It would make no sense to apply it generally.

This situation addresses something more generic, I think: That we’ve lost an important set of values, that we’re spoiled, and that immigrants represent a lot of those old values–but not all the truly great American ones.

But, you know, that’s all very cliché–and very corny–stuff. It’s something you could see John Wayne doing. Hell, it’s something Wayne probably did in one of his later movies.

What’s nice, though, is that it still works. Is anyone in Hollywood paying attention?

I am, for the most part, not inclined to look at movies through a particular political filter.

Let’s say, for example, there’s a movie about an evil Republican. Well, doubtless such a creature does (or could exist), and I’m disinclined to view a movie about said creature as an indictment of all Republicans.

Even if it’s meant that way.

My justification for such ignorance is Shakespeares Richard the III. Ol’ Bill knew what side his bread was buttered on. He wasn’t going to make a Yorkie a good guy while there was a Tudor on the throne.

Still, it’s a great play. And that’s what matters in the long run.

Bush-related stuff of the past decade is an exception for two reasons: The drumbeat was constant, and impossible to ignore; but more importantly, art was sacrificed at the altar of Making A Point.

I mention this because many people went to Doubt with–or avoided it based on–some pretty heavy prejudices. And that’s unfortunate, because this is a pretty solid little movie.

There is a lot of acting in this movie. (Not necessarily a bad thing: 12 Angry Men has more acting per foot of film than any other movie I can think of.) You have Meryl Streep doing an accent that reminds me of an old Jewish lady, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the charming priest and Amy Adams as the wide-eyed naive girl.

And, as you might imagine, they’re all quite good. I’ve not always been a big Streep fan–I like her much better now than during her more acclaimed youth. She’s convincing as the feared Mother Superior, but not monochromatic even given the narrow palette she has to work in. Hoffman has a rather challenging role, too. (I’m not sure how much doubt we’re supposed to have that he’s a pedophile; clearly he’s “good” with children, and that takes on creepy dimensions.)

The delightful Amy Adams–last seen on this blog in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day–shows that she is just as comfortable as a naive, unworldly nun as she was a vibrantly sexual flibberdigibbit. She, in a lot of ways perhaps surprising, best reflects the audience: She’s enchanted by Flynn’s (Hoffman) modern ways and disapproving of Sister Aloysius’s (Streep) draconian ways.

And yet she learns. Quite apart from Flynn, she learns that there is a reason for the stern-ness, and there are consequences for abandoning it. Viola Davis (“Law & Order: Special Victim’s Unit”) has a brief but powerful role as a woman who is willing to sacrifice her son to help him succeed. (That’s as convoluted as it sounds.)

In fact, you could easily see this movie as a struggle between conservatism and liberalism and, perhaps surpisingly, conservatism comes out way ahead. I think that’s probably an unsubtle and incomplete take-away, but the most sympathetic character in the movie is the ballpoint/transistor radio hating Streep.

And it’s impossible to not see this 1964 school, even with its slow integration of blacks, as superior to modern ones. Sister Aloysius, as school principle, knows all the types of students there are: good ones, bad ones, fidgety ones, troublemakers, etc. She knows which girls are going to get into trouble. She’s a terror, yes, but because she’s a terror, a naif like Sister James (Adams) can control her classroom while still being sweet and gentle.

Sister Aloysius’s matter-of-fact-ness–her complete lack of doubt, in fact–is what powers everything. The students get an education because she makes it her business to see that they do, to the limits of her ability, and regardless of any of the sticky, mushy, ultimately obstructive dramas the world wants her to care about.

It’s that same shark-like focus that removes any doubt as to Father Flynn’s ultimate fate, too.

Indeed, Flynn’s guilt is never spelled out, but as Sister Shark swims for him, the inability to stare her down, unflinching–his continual shifting of tactics, from denial to eliciting sympathy to what might even be considered blaspheming, is what makes him so obviously guilty.

It’s ultimately this dynamic–the implacable Streep versus the shifty Hoffman, the pollyannish Adams, the horribly oppressed Davis–that powers the movie. Indeed, like the aforementioned 12 Angry Men, Streep is juror #8, if Fonda’s character had Lee Cobb’s fierceness and E.G. Marshall’s intellect to go along with his sense of justice.

The Boy liked it. And this is ancient history, really. The world isn’t one that he has any familiarity with.

Althouse has some thoughts up about it. I confess I didn’t notice the mucous. Does that make me unobservant? She’s right about the religion being mostly absent, though there is a bit with Flynn praying and the altar boy ringing the bells behind him that was decidedly religious.

The issue of pedophilic titillation I can’t really address. Going out on a limb here, as a non-pedophile myself, I’m not sure how it works. Is a movie about a priest among boys the equivalent of Some Like It Hot? Titillating because it’s a fantasy, even though nothing suggestive is shown? If so, I’m not sure how the subject can be addressed at all without falling afoul of the implications.

There’s also talk over there of the lack of subtlety in certain places, such as using the weather (windy, wintry) to hammer home a point. But my guess would be that writer/director Shanley would’ve put that in his play if it were less trouble than it was worth.

Howard Shore (and his all nurse orchestra) does a great job on the score, too.

I can see this film being very re-watchable. I wouldn’t recommend skipping it just because you think it’s another H-wood hit job on The Church.

I’ve started and stopped this review so many times, I can’t remember if I, in fact, already did review it. It’s mostly the holiday season and what-not, but to a degree it’s that the new Paul Rudd/Sean William Scott vehicle Role Models is not all that memorable.

It’s not bad. In fact, The Boy really liked it. The story is that the rather juvenile Scott and Rudd do some rather juvenile things and end up in front of a judge. The sentence is community service, to be filled in a “bigger brother” type organization.

I’m pretty sure–I hope!–this never actually happens, sentencing people who act like idiots to be mentors to children. But, hey, it’s a vehicle, and the first part of the movie is really carried by the not-nearly used enough Jane Lynch.

Doing a classic “reformed drug addict, now responsible but compelled to share uncomfortable details at every turn” bit, she rides the boys asses (even when they’re being relatively good), much the way she did in 40-Year Old Virgin.

Rudd is paired up with a nerdy LARPer whose parents don’t understand him, and in fact demean him even when they’re trying not to. Scott is paired up with a sassy black kid, as if Gary Coleman had been raised on hip-hop and porn. Scott is a womanizing frat-party regular–what you might imagine Stiffler to grow up to being, while Rudd is on the verge of losing perennial girlfriend Elizabeth Banks.

Knox will be happy at least that this time Banks is paired up with the reasonably good-looking, clean-cut Rudd instead of the slovenly, unshaven Seth Rogan.

You know how this plays out, right? Our Peter-Pan-esque boys actually get involved and start caring about their wards, only to screw up at the end of the second act and have to fight for honor, even at great personal risk to themselves.

I mean, seriously, how else is it going to play out? They continue their reckless ways and get the kids killed? Come on. What’s the matter with you? (OK, just once….)

The movie keeps you chuckling throughout, which may be sufficiently distracting from the parts that don’t work that well. Too, there is enough avoidance of some of the obvious subplots to make it not seem fresh, exactly, but at least not completely predictable.

The relationship between Rudd and Banks is really a pointless waste of screen time. Banks is really just a backdrop on which Rudd’s growth can occur, but the whole growth thing is pretty minor, and when contrasted with the fact that in the end she, of course, loves his new self, it’s particularly unconvincing why she would. (I like Banks a lot, but this is a pretty typical male comedy writer’s idea of women, i.e., a cardboard cutout.)

It looked early on like they might go with Scott putting down roots with his little buddy’s single mother. Thank God they didn’t go there.

LARPing gets an unexpected fair shake. I mean, personally, I’ve never met a LARPer who wasn’t totally insane, but I assume that’s just random chance. (They can’t all be nuts, can they?) At first, the movie is unsympathetic but then allows that it’s really not an unreasonable pursuit.

Rather than teach the foul-mouthed little black kid to behave, Scott teaches him how to score with the ladies. OK, that’s different.

As I noted, The Boy liked this a lot more than I did, and he is closer to the target demo than I am, so I guess they did that right. There’s a KISS theme running through the movie which is, I suppose aimed at me (and I did find it amusing), but ultimately I was sort of underwhelmed.

This currently has a whopping 7.9 on IMDB. It takes an 8.0 to break in to the all-time top 250. (Score inflation: When I started looking at IMDB 10+ years ago, the #1 movie in the top 250 was The Godfather and it had a 7.9.) I found it trite and sloppy which is something that doesn’t necessarily kill a comedy, if the gags are good.

And the gags are pretty good. So, you know, have at it.

I was on the fence about seeing the new Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie. I’m kind of on the fence about Cruise, and not just because the one time I saw him, he kept shooting me dirty looks. (OK, in fairness, I kept sorta staring at him like, “Who the hell is this little guy?” But I digress.) But as an actor, I don’t find him particularly compelling. The exceptions are his under-rated performance in Rain Man–I thought he was better in that than Hoffman by a long-shot and, uh, oh, yeah, he was great in Tropical Thunder. Oh, yeah, I liked him in Risky Business, too. (He was good in Magnolia but it almost felt like a rehash of his Rain Man character.)

He seems callow to me, even after all these years.

But I don’t dislike the guy, and he has some fine moments in this film about Germans who set out to kill Hitler–and actually more significantly, overthrow the National Socialist government.

I don’t buy the rather silly argument that since we know how this turns out, it has no potential to be an interesting movie. We know that the Titanic sank, yet the movie made over a billion dollars. Whatever the Hindenburg’s movie’s problems were, knowing that it was going to blow up was not one of them.

There are several hundred miles worth of film coming out in the next few weeks all dedicated to WWII, and we know how that event turns out, too.

Silly argument. And, in fact, director Bryan Singer does a great job handling the issue. You do wonder, at more than a few points, whether they’re going to be able to pull it off, and while it’s in progress, there are times when it seems like they can’t fail.

In fact, the plotting and execution of the plot is quite good, but it felt like the movie was waiting to get started up to that point. Stauffenberg is a difficult character to write and play, and the opening character development is sort of hit-and-miss. Obviously, the guy was a bit of a bad-ass, and cool as ice, something Cruise does pretty well. The other side, the more emotional, father, husband, human, is also hit-and-miss, though particularly good during the “let’s kill Hitler” and less so during the family scenes.

I found myself, overall, less engaged than I wanted to be. I was distracted by the timeline, for example, since the plot takes place about nine months before the war ended and I kept wondering if it would really help much taking Hitler out when the horse was sorta out of the barn already. (Though a lot of the worst stuff happened at the end of the war.)

I was also distracted by wondering if, at this point, more English-speaking people had played Nazis than there had ever been actual Nazis. The accents are all over the place. Cruise stays American but most of the rest of the cast is English. Except his wife, who is Dutch. Also his secretary. (Both actresses from Black Book.) Some use German accents. All the signs and telexes are in German, though.

Usually this doesn’t bug me, but it did, as did a big round of “Hey, who is that?” Bill Nighy, for example, I half-recognized. Like, “That guy looks like Bill Nighy, only thinner. And less funny.” Nighy is a great actor, but I’m used to seeing him in silly things like Pirates of the Carribbean. Terence Stamp and Tom Wilkinson are also great, but they’re also so very English.

I try to avoid comments like “this would’ve been better in Japanese” but I have to think this might have been done better with a bunch of no-name German actors.

Or maybe not. The Boy liked it more than I did.

I told The Boy when we left the theater that he could probably claim to be the only 13-year-old American boy to see the Belgian-made Dutch-language movie Moscow, Belgium. Sage that he is, he said, “It doesn’t matter what it’s about as long as you care about the characters.”

Dayamn. When I was 13? I was all about plot. Plot and boobies. (OK, I threw that in for Troop.)

Anyway, this is the wrong title for the movie. The Dutch title is Aanrijding in Moscow, which means “Collision In Moscow”, I think. That’s a better title but stupid Americans would think it was a Russian movie, I suppose. Not a Belgian movie. In Dutch.

I don’t know why I’m fixated on that. I guess because I was listening to it and thinking, “That sounds Germanic more than Frankish,” which is the sort of thing that bugs me. The last Belgian movie I saw (the fine Memory of a Killer) was in Frisian.

I digress.

This is the story of 43-year-old Matty, whose husband Werner has wandered off to have an affair with a younger woman but who won’t divorce her and sort of hints about coming back (for six months!) and has made her miserable, raising her three kids alone except for the alternate weekend.

The story begins when frazzled Matty gets into an accident with 29-year-old truck driver Johnny and is taken aback by the fact that Johnny is strongly attracted to her. This is interesting because she’s a complete shrew to him.

In fact, she’s rather unpleasant throughout the beginning of the movie. On top of anger, sarcasm, bitterness, they also do the “no makeup and hair” thing so she looks a haggard 43 indeed.

But with his persistence, we start to see Matty change and get a glimpse in to what’s made her so angry. (We also later get a full-on view of her body in a mirror which I think most even 20-something women would kill for.) And when she gives in (sort of), she has to take a hard look at what her husband has done and how she’s let it affect her.

There’s a curious element to this movie in that none of the characters are portrayed as victims. The cheap shot–the Hollywood formula–would be to have Werner be a jerk and Johnny be a saint, but Werner digs up dirt on Johnny and we find out he’s far from a saint. And then, just to make things a little more complicated, the movie shows us Johnny being a jerk. Meanwhile, Werner brings back a lot of the old memories that made Matty attracted to him in the first place.

Werner is especially jerky, I guess, since he seems to not want to let go of either Matty or the girlfriend.

There’s no “happily ever after” but this movie is hopeful–optimistic, even. We know the characters may be happy, but it won’t necessarily be perfect or easy. And there’s the subtext, or at least one subtext: Easy isn’t always better.

There’s another interesting bit of tension: Werner is an art professor; Johnny is a truck-driver. I somehow thought the enlightened peoples of Europe were beyond class wars as snobbery, but this movie brings the bigotry to the forefront. And it shows the prejudice going both ways as Werner turns out to be an insufferable snob–as does Johnny in his own way.

Ultimately, The Boy is right: While this movie is positively prosaic in its subject matter, ultimately you care about the characters, and so it works.

If you see only one Dutch-language Belgian film this year, make it this one.

It’s hard being twelve. Being Swedish probably doesn’t help, with the long, dark winters and constant snowfall. Being a smaller kid with an absentee father who’s a target for bullies certainly doesn’t help.

What does help, though, is getting a girlfriend. Sure, she’s a little strange looking, sometimes very pale, and the windows on her apartment are papered over, and people start mysteriously vanishing from the neighborhood, but hey–a girlfriend’s a girlfriend.

And here we have the crux of this Swedish vampire tale, which plays very cleverly on the vampire legend and, in particular, the notion of a vampire not being able to enter a person’s home without permission. (Something I’ve always considered metaphorical.) Whom do you let into your life?

This movie felt really Swedish. Somewhat slow, dark (literally and metaphorically), brooding and snow-covered, the bursts of violence is especially shocking given the quiet, bourgeois surroundings.

It also works by avoiding, on the one hand, the pitfalls of glamorizing vampires, and on the other by making the vampire victims largely sympathetic. There’s really only one truly evil character, and it doesn’t seem to be the vampire.

It’s a good movie, and there’s really only one thing that doesn’t work. But if I say what that is, and you watch it, you’ll be thinking about that thing through the whole movie, and it’s really unnecessary to the film (but is a vestigial remnant of the backstory in the book).

Suffice to say, there’s one aspect of the story you may wonder about, and it has to do with a very short shot (in the USA version) where we see the vampire naked from the waist down. (This is simulated; no actual naked twelve-year-olds were shown, I’m told.) I totally misinterpreted what I was seeing.

The Boy liked it and we think it was probably way better than the teeny-bopper Twilight.

And if you don’t like subtitles, give ‘em a year and you’ll see this movie remade in English. (But it probably won’t be as good.)

Toward the end of his career, Blake Edwards made a bunch of comedies that were widely regarded as not as good as the films he had made previously. But what you could count on in those ‘80s movies was that while he was going to introduce farcical elements into the topic, he was also going to seriously address some topic that was usually glossed over.

For example, Skin Deep looks at the Casanova-type both from the “good times” aspect of having a lot of unattached sex, but then from the more serious aspect of the effect those “good times” can have. Micki + Maude looks at when a couple’s urge to have children (or not) are in conflict, and it doesn’t gloss over the ending. Switch takes a look at misogyny inside of the body-switch-style farce.

I mention this because Kevin Smith, at his best, does something similar. (And he’s also often steeped in his time heavily that, like Edwards, you wonder if some of his “better” works aren’t going to age well.) Chasing Amy takes an unflinching look at the problems of expectations and desires in the post-sexual revolution world.

Also, like Edwards, he’s not afraid to go to the custard pie (or in Smith’s case, the fecal matter) for a joke, lest you think he’s overly full of himself.

And this brings us to Zack And Miri Make A Porno, the tale of Zack (Seth Rogan) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks), long term friends who, on the eve of their 10th High School reunion, find themselves without power, water and heat in the brutal Pennsylvania winter.

Let me take a moment to say that one thing I admire about the Smith kid is that he grows. Each movie he makes is a little more like a real movie. From the early days of setting the camera down for 10 minutes while a couple of characters talk in Clerks to actual camera movement and letting the visuals tell the story in Clerks II, he’s come a long way. One of the comments on Dogma was something like “It looks like a real movie.” And we’ve had a running gag about that ever since.

This really looks like a real movie. There’s some excellent visual work, like a withdrawing shot of a distraught Miri as Zack heads down the hallway to have sex with Stacey. She gets smaller and smaller and the shot gets darker, and finally on the side, we see the bedroom door close.

Great work.

Besides Smith, there’s Rogen as (again) the lovable slacker–hey, it works well for him–and Banks as his platonic friend. Banks has real range, and she plays a character that’s fairly far removed from her sex-freak persona in 40 Year Old Virgin, her secretary-with-a-heart-of-gold in the Spiderman movies, or even her damsel-in-distress turn in Slither, just to name a few. Craig Robinson (the bouncer in Knocked Up and hotel staff in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) gets a meatier role here.

I have no idea what the Apatow connection is, except that there’s a superficial similarity between Smith and Apatow.

Meanwhile we have some Smith regulars doing some acting: Mrs. Smith as the too peppy high school reunion coordinator (she always does a good job, but she does tend to be cast as a bitch, hmmmm); Jeff Anderson as a-sarcastic-and-world-weary-but-not-really-Randall-esque cameraman; and Jason Mewes not being Jay. Also, going full frontal.

That’s right. Full frontal male nudity is here, for your viewing enjoyment.

There was also Tyler Labine, who is not Ethan Suplee, and Tom Savini, who is not Brian O’Halloran. Sorry, you tend to look for these guys when you know Smith’s movies and both of them confused me. (Savini’s gotta be 20+ years older than O’Halloran, too, but I just figured it was a good acting job.) Actual porn star Katie Morgan is in the movie, and she doesn’t look like a Smith regular, but she sounds like Joey Lauren Adams.

Rounding out the cast is former child actor Ricky Mabe and new mother Traci Lords. Traci looked a little tired in this movie but she’s got the acting-without-dialogue thing down. Justin Long and Brandon Routh play gay lovers. Long is hilarious. But what is up with Superman going on to doing gay kissing roles? That’s just what Reeves did!

It’s a good cast. One thing I like about the Smith kid is that he tends to keep his movies short. Brutally so, sometimes. Short and fast-moving. They’re not boring. This isn’t boring. But.

He’s trying to cram two things into one short movie here, and neither exactly work. First, there’s a love story between Zack and Miri–did you doubt it? (If someone could do it, it’d be him, I guess.) The dramatic tension is created through the fact that they’re going to have sex for the first time and it’s on camera, but it’s supposed to be “just sex”. But they’re also supposed to have sex with others which, well, you know, it’s not “just sex”.

Their transition from completely convincing platonic friends to being in love isn’t really built-up. Rogen and Banks sell it, though, so it does work. Their sex scene is intensely intimate; the antithesis of the porn they’re trying to make. The transition between the vulgar and the romantic reminded me strongly of Edwards better work.

The other thread, though, is the “let’s make a movie” part. This is a condensed encapsulation of Smith’s own experiences making “Clerks” but there just isn’t enough time for the camaraderie to really resonate.

Overall, it seems like one of his best movies. It’s not boring, it’s made with considerable attention to detail, and the dialogue is fun without being too much in Smith’s strangely idiosyncratic soliloquy style. It is, of course, vulgar, but not unexpectedly so. I’m a little surprised it didn’t take in a bit more money at the box office–though they really didn’t advertise it much, presumably because of the “porno” in the title.

Don’t leave before the stinger.

While Jonathan Demme is best known for Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, this Roger Corman alumnus has a broad and diverse resume. Which is another way of saying you don’t really know what you’re going to see when you see one of his movies.

In Rachel Getting Married, you’re going to see Anne Hathaway act, for example. (I’d heard she could act, but I really only know her from Get Smart and that picture that circulates around the ‘net of her in the see-through top. (In this movie, her hair is shorn, she looks strung out and she’s so thoroughly narcissistic, there’s no chance for looks or charisma to carry her performance.)

You also get a lot of shaky cam, so beware. I found this well within my tolerance and The Boy praised it for making you feel like you really were there. There is a minor character, in fact, who is filming the proceedings, and you kind of feel like that while watching this. Adding to this is the fact that all the music is ambient. There’s a band that hangs around doing nothing but playing eerily appropriate music, even if such music wouldn’t be appropriate an actual wedding. (Heh.)

OK, so the story is that Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt of “MadMen”) is getting married to Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe) and sister Kym (Hathaway) is checking out of rehab to join the festivities. Kym, being an addict and compulsive liar, immediately makes everything about herself.

Kym has done a Bad Thing. The upshot has resulted in her own downward spiral, her parents (Bill Irwin and Debra Winger) divorcing, and alienation galore.

And it was bad. And Kym feels really, really bad about it. But she expresses this by constantly drawing attention to her own suffering. Rachel understandably dislikes this idea, while her father tends to try to defend and protect her, and her strangely serene mother simply absences herself as much as possible.

In order to have a story, though, we need to have some sort of change. And there are only a few that will work. For example, Rachel could make the ultimate expression of self-pity by committing suicide, or she could have an epiphany and be miraculously cured–all in the fine melodramatic tradition, but not necessarily effective in the hyper-realistic form being used here.

Demme rather bravely pursues his climax at the wedding in a way that makes the resolution clear and eschews soap opera style dramatics. And amazingly, this works. The Boy liked it, which says something for a movie that’s nearly two hours and primarily about wedding plans.

I’ve seen some hay being made out of the multi-culti aspect of the family (the bride is white, the groom black), as if their acceptance of diversity and quirkiness doesn’t extend to the real quirkiness of Kym, but I don’t see it, myself. First of all, the families are largely musicians. Second of all, Kym’s not quirky, she’s deranged and narcissistic.

No, if I had a problem with this, it was the timeline. The Bad Thing took place when Kym was 16. We don’t know how long ago it was, but let’s say Kym is now in her early 20s. Meanwhile, Rachel is the older sister (I think, certainly the actress in her 30s), so some of the tension doesn’t make much sense to me. (I don’t think parents divorcing when you’re in your 20s is quite the same as them divorcing when you’re a child.)

So I did get a little hung up on that.

But otherwise the movie works, and well.

As mentioned previously, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was sold out Saturday evening when The Boy suddenly up and decided he wanted to go see something. But we returned for the last show, never to be daunted by the fair-weather moviegoers who sometimes inhabit our cinema.

The story takes place in Germany in WWII and concerns an eight-year-old boy whose Nazi father (literally, not the more common metaphorical “Nazi” you read about these days) gets transferred to a concentration camp. Isolated from his friends, the boy Bruno–looking for all the world to me like a mini-Bud Court circa Harold and Maude days–looks for friends in the area and happens to come across an eight-year-old Jew behind the fence of the camp his father runs.

WWII afficianados assure me this is impossible. But, hey. I’m amused by the fact that “Hogan’s Heroes” has made it impossible for anyone in a movie about Nazis to have a German accent. We all just think of that lovable Sgt. Shultz!

What we have here is a fable, an antethesis to Benigni’s La Vita E Bella. Only instead of a father trying to keep his Jewish son unaware of the horror they live in, it’s a father trying to keep his German son (and whole family) unaware of the horror they’re committing.

Heavyhanded? Oh, yeah, without any of the lightness of Benigni. But what the hell else can you do? The mother is the first to figure out what’s going on, and the knowledge breaks her. The sister, having a crush on her father’s driver, endeavors to be a good Nazi, but even she’s taken aback when she pieces it together.

We don’t actually know if Bruno ever figures it out.

It’s not bad. There’s a scene in the beginning where Bruno is playing soldier with his friends that’s more than a little trite. And there’s a scene in the middle where the sister has gotten rid of her dolls, and the pile looks like a bunch of dead bodies. Other than that, the director spares us most of the really weighty symbolism.

It is in danger of being regarded as important, mind you, like Crash or Babel or any of the other Oscar-baiting crap one sees. But I think Benigni had the harder task.

Ultimately, if there’s a flaw in the story–beyond the whether-you-can-suspend-disbelief-this-much, which is your problem, not the movie’s–it’s sort of that it’s a morality tale, a stern warning, a scolding–ultimately directed at long dead people.

I mean, seriously, the odds of me running a genocidal camp while my children are still young enough to be negatively impacted are pretty small. I’m not even in the genocide field so, you know, I’d have to start as camp janitor or cafeteria worker or whatever. It’s just too late in life for me to change careers.

Sorry, is that in poor taste? (If you have to ask….)

It’s just that the writers are in a corner. There’s very little actual death in the movie, but we can’t whitewash the Holocaust. Therefore more difficult and challenging endings that respect the complexity of the situation are forsaken for a tidy, less-than-happy ending that really drives home how bad the Holocaut was.

You know, in case you hadn’t heard. Or maybe needed driven home to you. (Last year’s The Counterfeiters does a pretty good job.)

I guess my point is, I hate Nazis as much as the next guy, but this movie feels like it’s lecturing Nazis, and I just didn’t think there were many in that theater. Even when it was sold out.

Revenge of the Nerds meets Snow White. You just know that’s how the Amanda Bynes vehicle Sydney White was pitched. What’s interesting is that the Snow White parts work a lot better than the Nerds parts.

Amanda Bynes got to be famous when I wasn’t paying attention to kid shows, particularly girl-oriented kid shows–that narrow window–and so when she starred in What A Girl Wants I was like, “Ooh! Amanda Bynes in a movie! Wow! Who’s Amanda Bynes?” And, honestly, I’ve had the same reaction every subsequent time she impinged on my consciousness.

These channels, particularly Nickelodeon and Disney, act as grooming areas for the next generation of stars–quite effectively, I think. You know, when they remade all those horror movies after Scream, while the movies weren’t very good, the one thing they had over the old movies is that the acting was a zillion times better.

Take the not very good late ‘90s horror film Disturbing Behavior. Not a great movie, but the kids include Katie Holmes (Thank You For Smoking), James Marsden (who would go on to be in Hairspray with Bynes), Nick Stahl (of the late, lamented “Carnivale” series) and Katharine Isabelle (who’s not as big a star but a fine actress nonetheless).

Of course, the adult cast (Bruce Greenwood, Steve Railsback, William Sadler) and the production also kick ass over the old ones, which suggests there was a lot more money in the new movies. But I think there were also a lot fewer young adult actors who had been through the day-to-day grind of TV shows production.

Disturbing Behavior, by the way, was written by a chief writer on one of Trooper York’s new favorites: Life on Mars. Interesting that the whole movie isn’t much better.

Anyway, Bynes is sufficiently charming. More than sufficient. She does the “adorable but accessible” thing perfectly. Her foil is Sara Paxton, who does a good “Evil Queen” even though she’s been a convincing protagonist in her own right in such tweenie fare as Aquamarine. (And she’s going to be in the remake of Last House on the Left…[shudder].)

The premise is that tomboy Bynes raised by widowed plumbing contractor John Schneider (who’s career has finally recovered from his success as a Duke boy) goes off to college and to the sorrority her mother used to belong to. The Evil Queen running the sorrority drums her out, and she ends up in the wilderness.

That’s when the seven dorks living in the run-down house at the end of Greek Row invite her in. She does some Snow White-style cleaning up, and runs a campaign against the Evil Queen to get her and the dorks into the student council.

What makes the movie watchable is really the little references to Snow White. For example, the magic mirror is a “Hot or Not” list, and Paxton is pretty hilarious with her over-the-top outrage over Bynes climbing up the rankings. The poisoned apple turns out to be a virus-infected Mac. “Hi ho!” becomes “Hi, ho.”

And of course, you find yourself going, “Oh, that one’s Sleepy. That one’s Sneezy.” Happy is, for this updated version, Horny. And Arnie Pantoja as George does the most overt imitation of Dopey from the movies.

Just as these clever interpretations liven up the proceedings, using the Revenge of the Nerds framework drags it down. Although I liked Nerds, it’s far from a great movie, and when this film does the “I’m a nerd” scene at the end as “I’m a dork,” it’s pretty weak. They sort of punted on the whole framework of the movie.

The film isn’t really raunchy, and Matt Long, who plays the Prince Charming character, manages not to come off like a douchebag. Most of the naughty bits are on the level of comments you might hear in a primetime sitcom. (The Flower basically misses them.)

Apparently Bynes lost her hair doing a short role in Hairspray and so wears a wig throughout, also, her makeup reminds me of Juilanne Moore in Boogie Nights.

Little things like this aside, the movie turns out to be a not unpleasant 1:45.

Quantum used to be used to mean a small amount. Really. I’m just positive. Somewhere in the ‘80s it started to be used to mean a large amount, as in, “a quantum leap”, playing on the idea of electrons moving from one position to the other without traversing the space in-between.

And now, with Quantum of Solace, we have Quantum being….well, I’m not exactly sure. OK, it’s a play on words: Bond, having lost love of his life, pointy-breasted Eva Green, must console himself with round-breasted Olga Kurylenko. (Actually, and fortunately, it’s not that obvious, though that’s sort of how it would’ve worked in the old Bond series.)

Quantum is also the reboot’s version of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), the super-secret bad-guy organization that was always out to blow up the moon or artificially inflate the retail price of Peeps or whatever.

Anyway, to me the real danger that this new series is has to avoid is campiness, and I give it good marks for that. The Boy noted that in the original (Casino Royale), when James Bond was confronted with an extremely agile suspect fleeing on foot, he made up for his shortcomings with brute force and determination, whereas in this one, he seems to be super-agile and just matching his opponents.

Interesting point. Casino Royale did make Bond seem less super-heroic. And that’s a dangerous route to go down. There’s a scene where he takes out three agents in an elevator that struck me as a little much.

OK, let’s get out of the way first that this is not, in any way, as good as Casino Royale. But it’s still better than the other Bond movies on a number of levels: It’s not campy. There are virtually no gadgets. (I’m not anti-gadget per se but they’re going to have to be oh-so-careful to not lapse into the nonsense the original series went through.) Quantum is both mysterious but has a villainous face that can serve as the focal point of the plot.

Some members of the organization meet at an opera and talk to teach other over something akin to bluetooth, so that they’re in the same room but not face-to-face. I’ve seen some objections to that but I think it’s something you could actually pull off with a little money.

The overarching scheme–utility rights in Bolivia–seem somewhat less grandiose than blowing up the moon, and I’m not sure where I stand on that as being a good MacGuffin.

Bond, at least in part seeking revenge for the death of Vesper, ends up tangled up in a plot involving Camille (Kurylenko) who is also seeking revenge on the Bolivian General who’s using Quantum to overthrow the government. The CIA wants to get in bed with the future ruler and agrees to “get rid of” Bond on behalf of the Quantum agent (what?).

Can’t say I’m crazy about that line. Frankly, I think intelligence agencies are prone to doing bad things–the nature of being able to act in secret with other people’s money and official protection–but I didn’t need the America-bashing. (Show us as cloddish dunderheads, but at least good-hearted!)

The main shortfall of this movie over the superb Casino Royale is it’s relatively unfocused nature. It meanders, relative to the previous film, but it’s sort of remarkable in that it manages to suffuse an action film with a certain melancholy without being boring.

Anyway, not as bad as some die-hard fans are suggesting.

Of course, the real problem with these Dreamworks movies is I sit there going “Who is that? Is that…?”

It’s Alec Baldwin this time. He’s the evil lion whose constant haranguing of the king (the late Bernie Mac) is ultimately what results in Ben Stiller’s Alex the Lion Cub being kidnapped and ultimately ending up in Central Park Zoo.

This movie takes up where the last left off, basically, with the four characters (lion, zebra, giraffe and hippopotamous played by Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer and Jada Pinkett Smith) trying to get back to New York. The Penguins get them to Africa where they find a preserve and many of their own kind, and Alex The Lion is reuinted with his parents.

Before you know it, evil Alec Baldwin is there taking advantage of Alex’s ignorance of lion ritual and gets Alex banned from the reserve. Marty finds a bunch of other zebras exactly like him (all voiced by Chris Rock, amusingly enough), Gloria finds hippo love and Melman discovers that his fellow giraffes are also all hypochondriacs.

The plot ends up being more derivative than original, reminding particularly of The Lion King, though never played at that level of seriousness, obviously. Also, no musical numbers. But the jokes are pretty steady and not all bad. Because it’s Dreamworks and Katzenberg, there are a few more jokes aimed at the parents than I’d like, including some of that referential stuff that ages poorly.

But The Flower liked it and The Boy didn’t hate it, and I had a few laughs, so that’s not bad.

The thing about these English gangster flicks is that it takes a while for the ol’ ears to adjust to the myriad accents and quaint sayings and slang and whatnot, and by the time you’ve adjusted, you don’t know who anyone is and have no idea what’s going on.

OK, it’s not that bad, but I remember getting halfway through Billy Elliot–which had been given an “R” rating for swearing–wondering where all the swearing was before I realized that “fook” and “shite” are naughty.

And so we come to Guy Ritchie’s latest production, his divorce from Madonna.

No, wait, it’s RocknRolla, the tale of a couple of British “real estate developers” whose deal has gone sour because their partner in crime has prevented the necessary zoning from being passed so that he can get the land from them and squeeze them for his “losses” which ultimately forces them to look for other sources of money which actually ends up causing trouble for the guy who swindled them because of his hot ‘n’ wild accountant all while searching out the rat who’s been turning them in for years.

Phew.

Oh, yeah, and the big guy’s son is the titular RocknRolla, a local drug-abusing musician who has a habit of being reported dead. He steals a painting which doesn’t quite act as a MacGuffin, but which provides a fun thread throughout the film.

Surprisingly, this movie is a little slow, at least at first. It picks up momentum as it goes and finishes strong, with lots of good moments.

The cast is very good, with Gerard Butler as One-Two and Idris Elba as Mumbles and a bunch of other Brits with equally colorful character names. The music is what you’d expect. And there’s a nice combination of whimsy with really, truly abhorrent gang style violence. Sassy!

We liked it. I’m not a big gangster movie guy, but this was fun.

I noticed something interesting: These guys weren’t really gangsters in the traditional sense of running drugs and booze or hookers or contraband: The big boss’s power came entirely from government. Zoning laws and building codes, in fact. The money came from the change in value of a property based on zoning changes.

[insert “small government rant” here]

But I wonder if that’s not something that’s just considered normal in the highly regulated world of London.

I love me some Clint Eastwood. Acting, sure. An archetype. But behind the camera? Awesome.

Also, the guy is 78 and has two movies in the hopper, one of which he’s directing and starring–as the tough guy! WTF, man. I’m such a freakin’ slacker.

Anyway, what I love about Eastwood is that he always hits the universal themes while telling a specific story. For example, some people got upset about Million Dollar Baby, as if it were pro-euthanasia. I say they’re taking too broad a view: Million Dollar Baby isn’t pro-euthanasia, it’s pro-euthanasia, if you have the opportunity to kill Hilary Swank.

Actually, to focus on the euthanasia is to miss the point of the movie. And Eastwood’s movies don’t really lend themselves to generalizing. They tell a specific story in a very convincing fashion, and they don’t skimp on the atmosphere or the research. (That’s why Spike Lee’s accusations about Flags of our Father struck me as such naked self-promotion.) You could see why Eastwood’s character does what he does in Baby. Even if you didn’t agree with it, it was true.

Let me throw some roses here on the much maligned Flags of our Fathers. I liked it–more than most apparently–because it was a naked look at the costs and value of propaganda. And how some soldiers give more than their lives.

And now we come to Changeling, the story of a woman whose son is kidnapped in 1928 Los Angeles, and an impostor returned to her by a corrupt Los Angeles Police Department.

You know, you see Eastwood’s name on a picture, you expect someone to be blown away with a .357. But no dice.

You see J. Michael Straczynski’s name you expect a Narn or at least a cameo by He-Man. Strangely, neither makes an appearance.

But you do get an interesting profile of the abuse of power 80 years ago. Most fascinating is the continued assertion to the mother that the impostor really is hers, and she’s just crazy, obstinate or enjoyed her freedom too much.

The icing on the cake is the “Code 12”, which allows the cops to commit anyone to the L.A. Psycho Ward. They get special treatment there, too, which involves signing waivers to exonerate the police.

Did I mention this is a true story? And not a fake-true story either.

So, whomever is elected tomorrow, and whomever was elected a few years ago, keep in mind that things are pretty much better now. (I’m not saying this doesn’t happen anymore, but at least it requires more effort.)

This is the Angelina Jolie show and I have to say, despite the emphasis of some critics, she pretty well vanishes into the role. She’s scrawny, worn out, washed out–and that’s before her son gets kidnapped. I’m not joking; very little of her beauty is in evidence, she turns the glamour and sex appeal off completely, and even when she fights back, it’s more a quiet, demure determination than a Lara Croft-esque feistiness.

So, what’s the verdict? Well, I can now say I’ve seen Angelina Jolie in a good film!

It’s not great, I don’t think. It’s worth a second view for sure. It lacks a big payoff, though it’s remarkable how much suspense there is, as far as whether or not the boy is ever going to return. In fact, the movie goes on past the climax for quite some time where you really get a sense of the alternating hope and despair of a mother missing her child.

Oddly, though, I didn’t tear up or anything like that, and I’m usually a sucker for this sort of thing.

So, what else can you expect? A stunning recreation of L.A. in 1928 (and 1935). Wonderful cinematography and expert pacing. Excellent acting rounded out with John Malkovich (as a corruption fighting preacher), relative unknown Jason Butler Harner as the child dismembering psycho, and especially Jeffrey Donovan as Captain J. J. Jones, the arrogant and corrupt officer who sacrifices a distraught mother to save himself from ridicule. Oh, and Michael Kelly as the cop whose horror over child-murdering exceeds his concern for the department’s reputation.

And, okay, in the psycho ward, there was this nurse. If they remake Cuckoo’s Nest they could put her in the Louise Fletcher role. I mean, seriously, check out her IMDB photo. She looks only half-evil there, and probably isn’t even trying. She looks pretty much 100% evil when she’s administering shock treatment. Note that the actress, Riki Lindhome, also looks like Eastwood’s “type” (Sandra Locke, Frances Fisher) and was in Million Dollar Baby.

This a propos of nothing, but it’s the sort of thing your mind picks out when you watch too many movies. Another thing your mind picks out is that they used the phrase “serial killer” once in a voice-over. But that phrase didn’t exist in 1930. A detail, but one that leapt out at me.

The 2:20 pretty well flies by and I have to admit JMS has written a solid screenplay.

The Boy also approved, though he didn’t seem wowed.

And now back to trying to accomplish in the remaining decades of my life a fraction of what Eastwood has planned for the next 24 months…..

I’m not really familiar with Mickey Spillane’s work, being more a Hammett or Chandler guy myself. I rather liked the short-lived ‘80s series with Stacey Keach, but since I’d heard good things about this particular film–and I knew about the “whatsit” from somewhere (maybe the ’80s cult classic Repo Man)–I queued it up and gave it a view.

It’s…well, it’s solid enough as a detective noir film, but Bezzerides script is subversive and Aldrich’s direction plays that aspect of it up. So, Ralph Meeker’s Hammer isn’t just tough, he’s sadistic and misogynistic. Life isn’t just hard, it’s cruel and isolating.

Bleah.

Part of the charm of the hard-boiled detective is that he’s a good man, but he knows that a white hat will get him killed. He’s not a sucker for dames but he’s got a code. He’ll think nothing of getting rough, but it has to achieve something.

So, the great photography, nuanced performances (Cloris Leachman in her first film role!) and intriguing story are marred by this misanthropic world view.

I didn’t enjoy it as much as I would have liked, therefore.

A few months ago I mocked an article lamenting the state of the horror movie, and pointing to the Spanish-language films The Orphanage and Rec as showing the way to–oh, hell, I don’t even know what the guy was going on about.

But here we are seven months later and we have the American remake of Rec called Quarantine.

It’s not bad.

Viewing it touched on a lot of themes that have been bubbling in my head since I’ve been computer-free at night.

• A thread over at the Althouse had people singing the praises of watching movies at home, which (with the brood here) I can’t relate to. And particularly not with horror movies, and even comedies. The audience was particularly chatty and laughy during this, which undermines my point a little.

• There’s a certain type of film I call “House of Usher” films: A sort of film where the ending is a foregone conclusion due to circumstances that occurred before the movie started. Ironically Corman’s House of Usher isn’t one of those films. Neither is Quarantine, even though the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

• Horror movies try to do something very, very difficult. It’s hard to be scared by a movie these days, and it’s even hard to be horrified. We’re all a little too “meta”. As a result, a successful horror scene often results in laughter. (The famous “head-spider” scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing, for example.) In Quarantine, there’s a scene where the camera is used as an actual weapon.

I’ll go a bit more into some of these ideas in a later post.

Quarantine is a good balance of terror and horror, with suspense connecting the scenes. The actors are not super-famous (there’s Dexter’s sister in lead–you see her getting killed in the commercials and on the movie poster, hence no real question of how this movie turns out, even before the movie starts, and there’s the wattle-fetish guy from “Ally McBeal”) which works in the movie’s favor.

So, some firemen go to investigate a problem at a small L.A. apartment building and find tenants suffering from a mysterious disease. But when they try to get out, they can’t.

Where most horror movies have the victims hoping to hold out until help arrives, in this move help arrives–and makes everything far, far worse. The idea is that the CDC has locked everyone in to contain the disease, and they’ve got SWAT to kill anyone who tries to escape.

How’s that for a kick in the krotch?

One of the reasons this is not an “Usher” movie is that it’s perfectly reasonable that the people could survive the situation, but they do a whole lot of stupid things. Like everyone sits together in the lobby with the infected. It might be understandable why the CDC would kill the outgoing phones, but it’s less comprehensible why they cut the incoming cable and the power.

Also, I’m not clear on why they wouldn’t try to route everyone out of the house, one at a time, since there’s still a chance of escape of the disease if nothing else. I think you’d route everyone out and then burn the place down, if you were worried. Or maybe chemical bomb it. (I wonder what the actual CDC protocols are, come to think of it.)

Anyhoo. We got the standard trapped-inside-a-house deal with a little Blair Witch thrown in: We only get to see the events that transpire because Dexter’s sister (heh, okay, her name is Jennifer Carpenter in real life) is a documentarian doing a story on firemen who tags along with her cameraman, expecting a routine call.

The camera is less shaky than usual, thankfully, but if you get the nausea or carsickness, you’re not going to like the end at all. The camera, sensibly but annoyingly, gets shakier and shakier as the movie goes on.

This partly obscures the fact that this is a pretty tired premise used for most zombie movies, and you’re really just dealing with that.

Nonetheless, it’s well done. I was a little confused as to whether I was supposed to be rooting for these guys. “Yay! Get out and…infect everyone?” Isn’t that the premise of the second and third Resident Evil movies?

Getting away from the fact that most horror movies are Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians”, right?

I was looking for the demon baby but there really isn’t one. The thing that looks like it is not a baby at all but the most recognizable guy in the movie: Doug Jones, whose miming talents (as seen in The Fantastic Four, Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy I and especially II) are making him very recognizable indeed, for a guy who seldom says anything. (Kind of like how Ray Park’s karate moves were so recognizable after The Phantom Menace and Sleepy Hollow.)

Anyway, it worked for me and The Boy also approved. But I don’t know if it will survive the transition to small screen.

There’s a scene in Unforgiven where Clint Eastwood talks about how, rather than straight gunfights in the street, assassins were more likely to shoot their target coming out of the outhouse. In Ed Harris’ new movie Appaloosa, Harris and co-star Viggo Mortensen kidnap Jeremy Irons after his morning, em, activities.

Cowboy movies in the past 30 years are sort of like Baroque music after Bach died. It’s all been done by guys who were better at it than the modern generation, so most oaters feel warmed over and weak.

Happily, Appaloosa works and feels fresh.

Harris directs and plays Virgil Cole, a hard-nosed Have Gun Will Travel type whose sidekick Everett Hitch (Mortensen) guards his back and occasionally reins him in when he’s gone too far. There’s some serious good chemistry here.

Cole is straightforward and somewhat thick who only seems to be uncomfortable when made aware of his limitations, and at the same time spends time reading Emerson and asking Hitch what various words mean. Hitch is eminently practical, and respectful of Cole’s abilities, almost acting as an apologist.

Cole and Hitch are hired to protect a town from the villainous Randall Bragg (Irons) who has just offed the previous sheriff’s department–though he was smart enough to hide the bodies and deny it, making it impossible to bring him in.

An uneasy peace exists between Cole, Hitch and the town and Bragg and his men, who live outside of town. The peace is unsettled by a witness to the murders and, even more, the arrival of Allison French (played by Renee Zelwegger).

French dresses nicely, and plays piano (laughably badly, though no one seems to notice or care), and quickly latches on to Cole. Before you know it, though, she’s making moves on Hitch. And it doesn’t stop there.

As it turns out, French is one of the more interesting female characters in Westerns history. And Cole’s response is equally interesting and pragmatic. This does not turn into a rather tired love triangle.

In fact, the whole movie is a bunch of interesting events framed by typical Western set-ups, but not in a contrived way either. In other words, it doesn’t seem so much like they were trying to tell a story that was just contrary to Western genre clichés, but rather had a story to tell that simply hadn’t been told before.

The place where a typical Western would end left about 15-20 minutes of the film; that is the action-y climax left a bunch of situations unresolved that ultimately come to a head later.

An engaging, entertaining film. I guess there’s no one in it to power a big release but keep your eyes on your local indie theaters. You’ll be glad you did.

The Boy liked it quite a bit, too.

How To Lose Friends and Alienate People is the second movie in as many weeks that seems to illustrate the rather large indifference of the American masses to British stars. Last week’s delightful Ghost Town showed we don’t care much about Ricky Gervais, while this week’s similarly delightful How To Lose Friends and Alien Poeple indicates we don’t give a rat’s ass about Simon Pegg. It reminds me a bit of the complete and utter rejection of the perfectly delightful Aardman studio movie Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, as well as the later, less delightful but still pretty good Flushed Away.

Maybe Troop is right about “perforated abalones” or whatever he calls the Brits.

I, on the other hand, think it’s a shame. While this is a pretty by-the-numbers romantic comedy (as was Ghost Town), it’s a solid one and provides plenty of laughs.

The story concerns trashy Pegg being wooed away from his trashy little celebrity-hit-rag by magazine mogul Jeff Bridges (as the anti-Dude!) to work at his trashy BIG celebrity-kiss-ass-rag. There he meets nice girl Kirsten Dunst, a pre-op transsexual, and super-hot Megan Fox, channelling a sort of Marilyn-Monroe-meets-Bette-Davis type. He lusts after Fox (I mean, of course) but falls in love with Dunst (again, of course, but for different reasons). Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy pursues other girl–the story begins with Pegg in striking rang of his goal of having sex with Ms. Fox, and I don’t need to tell you how that turns out–and loses his soul in the process, but again, I don’t need to tell you how that turns out, either.

As I said, by-the-numbers but less gross than a lot of modern comedies, with more slapstick, and with a curious message–or so it seemed to me: That it’s better to be a celebrity-mocking journalistc parasite than to be a celebrity-ass-kissing-journalistic parasite.

Isn’t that like saying it’s better to be typhus than The Plague?

The cast is absolutely pitch perfect. Bridges is entirely credible as a guy who both hates and, at some level, longs for the person he used to be. Pegg has the right combination of likability and unlikability–he’s really quite a good actor, showing range by being a completely different person than he was in Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. Kirsten Dunst is almost too believable as the girl who trades in her dreams for a steady paycheck and a creepy boyfriend. Danny Huston, by the way, is the creepy boyfriend/sleazeball/obstacle to all of Pegg’s dreams, and he’s got the smarmy thing down pat. Gillian Anderson is excellent as the soulless PR agent bending everyone to her will.

Megan Fox is eerily dead-on as the flavor-of-the-month actress. She’s completely superficial and at turns siren, vulnerable girl, airhead and cruel vixen. (Her award-winning movie role is hysterical, too. Stay through the credits, because they do a full trailer.) You really don’t end up knowing much about her–she’s completely insubstantial, really–which is in its own way perfect for the story.

All the little roles seem to have been filled with care, as well. Miriam Margoyles plays the Polish (Russian?) tenement manager, Bill Paterson shows up as Pegg’s father, Max Minghella is the over-rated wunderkind director, Diana Kent plays the washed up ‘70s actress (though is she really old enough?), and Thandie Newton does a turn as herself, being chatted up by Pegg in one of his more charming disguises.

And, hey, you got your full-frontal male nudity, sorta, in the form of nude model Charlotte Devaney, who plays a pre-op transexual stripper. I don’t really believe it myself, as she lacked any outward male characteristics whatsoever and I don’t think Playboy and Hustler feature TSes, but since about 12% of my hits are for full frontal male nudity, I thought I’d throw you guys a bone. (Heh.)

A solid flick with lots of laughs from humor both broad and subtle, but it ain’t gettin’ no love in terms of distribution and box office.

Damned abalones.

I think Ghost Town is officially a flop. It barely cracked the top 10 in a weak week last, uh, week, and has completely dropped off the charts over the weekend. And that’s a shame, because it’s a solid comedy.

It’s a bit formulaic. Think Groundhog Day meets Ghost. Ricky Gervais is a misanthropic dentist–and let me interrupt here to say that all the dentists I’ve known have been wonderful, warm people–who wakes up after a colonoscopy (in which he demanded a general anaesthetic) with the ability to see dead people.

Dead people with needs.

Who annoy him.

My I say that I came up with this premise 20 years ago, but not having writer-director David Koepp’s connections I never could get the movie made?

Primary among the annoying dead people is the ever-smarmy Greg Kinnear. (Nobody does smarm like soup boy.) Kinnear is concerned that his ex-wife (on whom he was cheating) is about to marry a gold-digging…uh…civil rights attorney. He enlistst the reluctant Gervais’ help by promising to call off other dead people–he’s good at convincing people to do stuff–and it doesn’t hurt that Gervais is instantly attracted to Kinnear’s widow, Tea Leoni.

This movie works for a couple of reasons:

Koepp keeps things moving and doesn’t skimp on the jokes. (Some of them are so characteristic of the actors, particularly Gervais and KatherineKristen Wiig, that one senses perhaps some improv was done.) Koepp’s got a track record of under-appreciated movies: He wrote the script to Panic Room, wrote and directed Kevin Bacon in Stir of Echoes, and also wrote Death Becomes Her.) Or maybe all those movies sucked, and you wouldn’t like this either.)

Fun fact: Koepp is the douche who wrote War of the Worlds and paralleled the Martians to US troops in Iraq! Yes, I maintain that he’s both talented and a douche. Fortunately, this movie is apolitical.

The acting is top notch: Besides Gervais and Kinnear, Tea Leoni is really quite marvellous. I mean, really: She plays an odd Egyptologist with a fondness for lovingly detailed descriptions of mummification. If there’s a flaw there, it’s that it’s a little hard to imagine Kinnear’s smug narcissist hooking up with her.

Besides the three leads, there’s also Katherine Wiig as the surgeon. This chick is funny. I guess she’s on SNL but I know her primarily from Knocked Up, and she does a similar bit here trying to keep Gervais from suing the hospital. (I know her from something else, too, but I haven’t seen any of her other IMDB credits and her scenes were apparently cut from Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, so I can’t recall what. UPDATE: Oh, yeah, I know her from the freakin’ Ghost Town commercials. I’m such a dingus.)

She gets a great assist in this scene from Michael-Leon Wooley as the hospital lawyer.

The ghosts play comic relief, mostly, but they also give the movie it’s final poignancy. Dana Ivey as a mother trying to reconcile her family, and Alan Ruck as the father trying to give his son some peace in a particularly poignant moment.

Fortunately, this all comes at the end, and avoids the mawkishness that occasionally bogs Groundhog Day.

Let’s see: Pacing, acting…I was going to mention a third thing here that makes this movie work, but I’ve forgotten what it is now. Damn my tangents.

Well, there’s some spectacular cinematography. New York hasn’t looked this gorgeous in years (at least in the movies). Uh. Hmmm.

OK: I laughed. I had a low chuckle going through most of the movie with some occasionally raucous outbursts. Ultimately, that’s “why” this worked for me. Little funny stuff, like Gervais’ awkward or jerky moments punctuated with knee slappers. Not quite rolling in the aisles, but still quite amusing.

The Boy laughed, too.

Altogether worthy of better box office than it’s getting. It’ll do better in England, I’d bet.

Melissa Leo is in a big budget picture out now alongisde mega-uber-super-duper-screen legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. But you could probably skip that film that can only generate lukewarm reviews and box office, and see her in Frozen River, filmed for less than 1% of the cost and is something you aren’t likely to see much in movies.

Leo plays Ray Eddy, a poor woman with two boys (T.J., 15 and Ricky, 5), who lives at the northern edge of New York state, near the Canadian border. When we meet her, her gambling-addicted husband has vanished with money they need to purchase their double-wide. She’s not a very likable character, and T.J. blames her for his father running off, though, in fairness, she’s in the difficult situation of keeping her family together while not letting the missing dad destroy it.

She crosses paths with Lila, a Mohawk Indian whose husband was killed and whose son was taken away from her when she was caught smuggling.

This leads the two to end up smuggling immigrants across the Canadian border through Mohawk reservation, which is half on the USA border and half on the Canadian border. Ray’s initial reluctance is plausibly denied by Lila’s insistance that what they’re doing isn’t illegal, because the reservation can admit whomever it wants and, uh, I guess, let whomever it wants off the reservation?

It’s a dubious justification, but one that serves well enough to convince the desperate for money Ray that she’s not really a criminal as she, you know, commits all these crimes. As it usually does, her life of crime has some negative consequences, as does her sense of right and wrong.

I won’t spoil anything here, but let’s just say her desperation leads her to venture into the dark, mean streets of Canada. So, you know.

This is a good low-budget flick that tells its story crisply, without relying too heavily on dialogue–Lila barely talks at all–and playing nicely on the cold, desolate poverty of Plattsburgh, New York. There’s a little too much shakey-cam in the opening scene (though I think I understand why) but things settle down and draw a picture which is sort of the opposite of the pristine snowscapes of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo and Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan. The snow always looks questionable, dirty and even sinister.

The acting is good. While Melissa Leo allows the camera and lighting to show all the age and poverty she’s supposed have endured, Misty Upham packs on 40 pounds to play her laconic Indian sidekick. They look and act their parts–very naturally, as if director Courteney Hunt pulled them out of the trailer parks in Plattsburgh. The boys (Charlie McDermott, James Reilly) do solid work, and Michael O’Keefe, normally seen as a white-collar type, if I’m not mistaken, makes a credible state trooper whom it’s really not clear if he’s racist or just (rightly) suspicious of Lila.

The ending of a movie like this is tricky. Very, very tricky. Our heroines are criminals, after all. But as we get to know them, the movie–almost grudgingly–gives us a chance to like them. I won’t say how it ends, but I will say it avoids the common pitfalls this sort of movie often falls prey to.

Solid flick, worth checking out.

You could divide the movies of Joel and Ethan Coen into two categories: Tragedies and comedies. You could almost adhere to the classic definition of these as well: In tragedies the hero dies; in comedies he lives.

The tragedies are usually pretty apparent up-front: Miller’s Crossing and No Country For Old Men, for example. The movie tips you off pretty quickly as to what kind of movie you’re going to see.

The comedies also come in two different flavors: dark, and extra-dark. The ones that are merely dark would include Raising Arizona (probably the lightest), Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother! Where Art Thou. The extra-dark would include movies like Barton Fink and possibly The Ladykillers. The difference between the dark and the extra-dark is that, probably nobody’s going to die in the former, whereas anyone might die in the latter.

Fargo, for example, would be one of those extra-dark comedy: Marge survives, but anyone else is up for grabs.

The potential “problem” is that you think you’re watching one kind of movie until someone ends up in the woodchipper. Still, if you’re familir with the Coen Bros’ work, you shouldn’t be surprised by any particular surprise. As it were.

Still. I was surprised.

Anyway, Burn After Reading is the story of a personal trainer (Frances McDormand, who proves that just because a director puts his wife in the film doesn’t mean she has to suck) and her dimwitted pal (Brad Pitt, in his best role since Fight Club) who stumble across a CD full of an embittered ex-intelligence agent’s memoirs and personal financial information. Said agent (John Malkovich) is having trouble with his wife (Tilda Swinton) and so she was collecting the financials in preparation for a divorce.

The agent’s wife, you see, is having an affair with a federal marshall (George Clooney) who’s a narcissitc exercise freak given to trolling the internet for women while lying to his successful children’s author wife (Elizabeth Marvel of “The District”) and having an affair with…France McDormand!

Anyway, Linda and Chad (McDormand and Pitt) figure they can get some money for the CD, which Linda desperately needs to pay for the plastic surgeries she desires. This leads them to blackmail Osborne (Malkovich) and even go to the Russian embassy when he refuses.

The various plot twists and turns remind me a lot of Lebowski and a bit of Blood Simple. Though it’s not as dark (literally) as the latter and it lacks the loveable characters of the former. It is funny–though obviously you have to be appreciative of the Coen sense of humor.

What makes it particularly funny, oddly enough, is agent David Rasche explaining what’s happening to department head J.K. Simmons. You actually feel sorry for these guys trying to figure out what’s going on, especially as they’re trying to work it out from the standpoint of whether this rises to the level of actul espionge.

“What did we learn here?” as Simmons says at the end of the movie.

Good question. Good question indeed.

One thing that cannot be denied is the quality of performance of the cast. McDormand’s shallow self-absorption, Pitt’s energetic idiocy, Clooney’s paranoid sex-addict–actully Clooney could never work for anyone but the Coens again and it’d be okay by me.

Richard Jenkins–probably the only really sympthetic character in the film–is having a good year, with this and The Visitor, and I’m sure Tilda Swinton must be the sweetest woman in the world. (She’s always portrayed as cold and mean to children, sometimes very literally as in Narnia.)

This movie speeds along–actual running time about an hour and a half–and ends almost abruptly, but exactly where it should, and keeps you paying attention and laughing. A nice change from No Country for Old Men.

Even here in La-La Land, not every movie gets a shot in the theaters, and sometimes the ones that do get a shot get just a few days. And yet, I’m surprised when a good one slips through the cracks.

I’d never even heard of Fido until we watched it last night on cable, and that’s a shame. It’s a sort of alternate-history movie (which we don’t get much of) where a Night of the Living Dead scenario occurs in the ‘20s, leading to the Zombie War. The Zombie Wars are ended when a scientist discovers their weakness (i.e., destroying the brain kills them) and also how to curb their fleshlust through a collar, allowing for their domestication.

The movie itself takes place in a recognizable version of the ’50s, where housewife Helen Robinson (Carrie-Anne Moss, in a role far scarier than The Matrix) lives on the edge of hysterical concern about appearing strange and keeping up with the Joneses. Frazzled husband Bill (Dylan Baker) is having trouble keeping up, what with the costs of funerals these days.

Seems that if you don’t want to come back as a zombie, you have to have a separate head casket from your body. With the various economic incentives, most people opt for coming back as a zombie, but Bill–having had to kill his own father who tried to eat him–is adamant on spending the family’s money on funerals. He hates zombies.

Helen, on the other hand, can barely conceal her shame, as they’re the only one on the block without a zombie! The Bottomses, who’ve just moved in, have six! And so, Helen runs out and buys a family zombie (Billy Connolly, barely recognizable without his goatee and brogue).

And this is just the set-up.

The Robinsons have a son, Timmy. (Of course, he’d have to be named Timmy.) Timmy (played by the unlikely-named K’Sun Ray) is a bit of an oddball, picked on by bullies, but friendly with the new Bottoms girl (Alexia Fast), who finds in the family zombie the father Bill isn’t. And also sort of the family dog.

Thus, the zombie is christened is “Fido”.

Ultimately, this movie works out to be both dark and cute, as it veers away from the borderline camp at the beginning of the movie, veers through a Lassie movie (if Lassie, you know, were a zombie and not a collie), and ends up in a strange Pleasantville-ish location where humans and zombies reach new levels of understanding.

There are some Cold War undertones, if you want to look for them. The father’s obsession with funerals neatly parallels the money spent on bomb shelters. And whether zombies are actually dead comes up a lot, with the Helen and Timmy deciding they’d rather be zombies than dead which reminded me of the old “Better Dead Than Red” saying.

But ultimately, this is just a fun, dark little movie–good for Halloween–and worth a watch.

A few bonus points: Henry Czerny as the ZomCon security chief; Tim Blake Nelson as a the necrophiliac neighbor; and tons of gorgeous classic cars, all polished to a shine.

Check it out!

I saw The Dark Knight again.

My original review, from six weeks ago is here. Some observations upon reflection:

• It holds up rather well.
• It’s at #3 on IMDB (under Shawshank and Godfather) which is still too high.
• My initial appraisal of Maggie Gyllenhall was off. She really isn’t convincing as the tough-as-nails DA. What’s surprising is that, in retrospect, Katie Holmes was. But Gyllenhall is far more convincing as a hippie/folksinger/drifter than an authority figure, and sort of slouches and shrinks her way through this film.
• Mostly unchanged on my view of Heath Ledger: He did good. But he’s actually not even in the film that much.
• I was contrasting with Superman 3 and noticing that Bale does a good job acting even while wearing the cowl. I know people didn’t like the “Batman growl” he does, but it still works for me.
• Aaron Eckhart has the toughest role: He’s a good guy in a way that’d perfectly comfortable in a movie from the ‘40s. For a guy who played a cigarette PR guy (Thank You For Smoking), he does sincerity really well.
• Gary Oldman is too old to be Commissioner Gordon but it works.
• Caine and Freeman and Bale should make a non-Batman movie together.
• Joker’s claim to not be a “schemer” is not credible.
• Watching Spiderman 3–with celebrations for Spidey–twigged a vague recollection of something. In the DC world, with Superman and Batman, the heroes are generally publicly praised. I think it was Stan Lee and Jack Kirby who introduced the idea of public opprobrium to comic books. I never once read an anti-superhero comic as a kid, unless it was due to a temporary misunderstanding.
• The theater was about 2/3rds full. (!)
• UPDATE: Also, Batman’s head was HUGE. That was one problem with showing him in full light. What’s up with his head being almost a perfect sphere with bat ears?

Narcissism and nostalgia, would be my bullet summary of Man on Wire, the documentary of Philippe Petit’s crossing of the World Trade Center on a tightrope.

Petit, a Frenchman whose means of support is not discussed at all, is a singular man with an incredible drive…to tightrope walk. His certainty and clarity of purpose is like a magnet to those around him, as he acquires a team to help him pull off a number of remarkable stunts: Walking between the towers at Notre Dame, and over a Sydney freeway, and finally, between the two largest towers in the world (at the time).

So, here’s a story about hope, passion, dedication, the creative impulse, and the ability to do the impossible, as well as a story about how easy it was to get people to do really stupid things in the ‘70s.

Petit narrates a lot of the story with tremendous passion, interspersed with comments from the others who were there at the various events. That’s not a spoiler, dammit: He’s there in the opening scenes of the movie. He obviously didn’t die. Actually, everyone still seems to be alive, which is not bad, given the time span.

This is an interesting story, both of the actual events and of the group dynamic, which completely disintegrates after the big event. It’s interesting to note that the whole thing was held together by one man’s passion, and it worked right up until he achieved his goal.

So, there’s the message: If you’re passionate enough–and you don’t care how you use people–you can do anything. I’m only being a little bit snarky, here. Everyone seems to have enjoyed being around this guy when he had this passion. He burned brightly. But I don’t get any sense that he ever related to anyone in any other way than how they could facilitate his ambitions.

Which, perhaps, is a lesson of its own about creative drive.

All-in-all, a pretty good movie, though I was confused by the fact that there’s actual footage of training they did. I first thought they had hired some very similar looking actors to the real people and recreated the scenes but, no, a lot of the (remarkably high quality!) footage is real, though they weren’t able to carry that through to the actual crossing.

Then they started throwing in re-enactments, which were pretty obviously fake. But at the end I found myself wondering which was which, and that’s not good for a documentary.

The ghost of the World Trade Center haunts the entire movie, though they never once mention 9/11. There’s no need to. You’re sitting there, looking at them going, and if you were sentient seven years ago, there’s going to be some resonance there.

All-in-all, not bad, though you don’t want to approach it from a dour, conventional point-of-view–or you’ll end up wondering what the hell it is that allows Europeans to waste all their time doing pointless things.

Take it as a flare of brilliance–a remarkable incident, never to be repeated–that fired up the imagination of the world for a few moments.

Maybe if you do something like that, that’s all you really ever need to do.

The Boy opted for the new Don Cheadle movie over the documentary about the guy who tightrope walked across the World Trade Center, and since he had been the King of All Brothers with a rather whiny Flower, I let him hold the popcorn for a while.

Which isn’t really relevant to anything. Except I was proud of him. The Flower’s been going through a difficult time and she tends to take it out on him, while at the same time missing him when he shutters himself in his room.

So we went to see this movie–based on a story by wild ‘n’ crazy guy, Steve Martin!–and, The Boy didn’t really get it. That’s unusual except there are some subtitles in the movie. I’ve noticed that if the movie is entirely in a foreign language, he does fine, but if they come and go, he can get lost. In this case, while most of the dialog is in English, part of it is in arabic, and the arabic’s not all subtitled.

The other thing I think is a factor is that for more than half the movie, you’re in the terrorist’s lair, and that’s hard to relate to, I think. I liken it to the mad scientist in a Bond movie who’s going to destroy the world, except writ small. The thing is, the Bond movie doesn’t have to make sense. You have to wonder about the logic that says, “If we just blow up enough random, non-military stuff, we win.”

For a moment, I got a kind of Paradise Now vibe off it. Paradise Now is a kind of brilliant movie, told entirely from the Palestinian POV. If you’ve drunk the kool-aid, anyway. An objective POV might chafe a bit at the Palestinians blaming the entirety of their plight on Israelis. I’m sure they do that, but it turns them all into victims whose only recourse seems to be further victimization.

So, in this movie, we have Don Cheadle, Islamic explosives expert, who gets deeper and deeper into the world of jihad until he’s sent on a mission to equip 50 American moles with 50 bombs to detonate on bus trips, all on the same day.

All is not as it seems, of course, and one of the big problems is that Don Cheadle is almost a latter day Henry Fonda. Even when he’s not playing an American, he radiates a kind of All-American good-heartedness. He’s the guy who turns the hotel into a refugee camp, who takes his crazy ex-roommate under his wing, who is wise in the ways of racism. Even in Boogie Nights, he seemed like an incredibly decent guy in a sleazy business.

Seeing him as a terrorist is challenging, and maybe it ultimately works because terrorists see themselves as good people. The movie does raise a whole lot of questions about what limits it’s okay to go to get a bad man.

One of the other big problems, however, is that the actions taken to get the bad man (not Cheadle but his ultimate boss) don’t entirely make sense. They do set up a bravura climax, one that’s really quite satisfying.

Which leads us to the biggest problem: The movie is more tense than suspenseful, which makes it feel a little slow. (I remember Joel Siegel saying once that the difference between tension and suspense is that two hours of suspense is fun, while two hours of tension gives you a headache.)

I’m calling out the faults, but it’s only the movie’s slowness that hurts it seriously, and it’s still quite watchable. Cheadle is fine, as always, and the supporting cast includes Jeff Daniels, Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough. Cheadle’s real co-star is Saïd Taghmaoui, who respects his love of Islam and takes him further into the terrorist network.

Ultimately, the movie works in the sense that it challenges you to think about, as I said, what’s okay in the war on terror, and it does so without being a navel-gazing exercise in America-bashing. So, that’s a plus.

It needed a little crisper direction, however. But the director’s former “big script” was the abysmally perplexing The Day After Tomorrow, so this is a step in the right direction.

I avoided Evan Almighty when it was in the theaters because it had less than stellar reviews and a bad IMDB rating. Too much about it should’ve sent it off the charts: It reunited director Tom Shadyac with screenwriter Steve Oedekirk, with a way more appealing leading man in Steven Carrel. (Jim Carrey was good in the original but Carrel actually steals the movie in the scenes he’s in.)

Now that it’s rolled around to On Demand, we’ve watched it. Actually, The Flower really likes it, so we’ve watched it more than once. We all agree that it doesn’t really work (except for The Flower, obviously).

In the original, you may recall, Jim Carrey was a self-absorbed jerk who caught a few bad breaks and took it out on God (Morgan Freeman, who predicted he would be cast as God after being cast as President in Deep Impact). God responds by giving him unlimited power, thereby giving Bruce enough rope to hang himself. There’re a lot of sight gags and slapstick, and a litle bit of power fantasy, all of which conspire to make a fun watch.

Evan boldly follows up by abandoning the premise and most of the major setups of the original: There’s no extended “you’re not really God” slapstick (some, but nothing like Bruce); Bruce was self-absorbed but Evan, in this movie, has clearly changed to be a caring person with good ideals, though still very flawed; Evan doesn’t get God’s powers and so we don’t get the sight gags associated with the abuse of those powers; Evan’s tasked with building an ark, so we get building and animal gags; Bruce’s lesson of humility has more to do with not being self-absorbed while Evan is more of a Job figure–his lessons are more about listening to God and having an appreciation for small acts of kindness rather than large scale efforts.

This should’ve been a great, great movie, just looking at it on paper. Better than the original, potentially. So why isn’t it?

First, and foremost, there aren’t enough gags, and a great many of the gags are tired. For example, the always enjoyable Wanda Sykes seems to have fallen into a number of roles lately that are less humor and more sassy stereotype, this being a prime example. The animals tend to lend more “cute” than actual “funny”. Jonah Hill (he of many Apatow films like Knocked Up and Superbad) adds a mildly weird edge that provides for a little offbeat humor.

But a great deal of the jokes that are presented are very standard. And there just aren’t enough.

The Boy feels it doesn’t work because Evan is a clearly decent human and God is just messing with him. Bruce needed a lesson in humility because he was completely self-absorbed. Evan is only quirkily self-obsessed with grooming and cleanliness. God totally messes up his life with facial hair and ancient clothing where Bruce only reaps what he himself has sown.

There’s a lesson about faith here, as well, in God and in each other, which is quite nice. But, for example, Evan’s relationship with his wife (Lauren Graham, who’s as cute as can be) is not so well illustrated that her loss of faith in Evan doesn’t seem hard enough. Compare with Jennifer Anniston in the original: Bruce had to pile on insensitivity after insensitivy after self-absorption after complete unawareness of what she wanted.

So that tension is missing the front end.

There’s some attempt to create tension with the kids which is somewhat more successful.

This is not to say there aren’t some good moments in this movie. As much as I hate to lay blame anywhere, I’m inclined to lay it at the feet of Steve Oedekirk.

I love Steve-O. Kung Pow: Enter The Fist is one of the greatest, original comedy ideas in years. I’m seriously hoping he has a chance to make the sequel. But this movie fails in much the same way his Barnyard kid’s movie fails. Which is to say, benignly but under a paucity of jokes and with Wanda Sykes doing sassy. Also, it’s sort of fascinating to look at why it doesn’t work. (In Barnyard’s case, for example, consider the concept of male cows.)

Of course, dying is easy: Comedy is hard, and nobody hits it out of the park every time. With luck Steve-O is back on the ball and turning out some new classics.

Comedians are often the hardest working guys in show business.

You may not like Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, Jack Black or Ben Stiller, but you know what? These guys never phone it in.

They’ve all been in bad movies, but the movies were never bad because the actors weren’t trying. (I remember Groucho Marx commenting with disdain on a critic’s observation that a mere comedian was capable of dramatic acting, with Marx’s rebuttal pointing out that comedians are required to do all the acting dramatic guys do all the time and often compressed within a few seconds.)

This is a rather odd way to start talking about a movie which, in essence, makes fun of actors. Brutal mockery. And has both Matthew McConaughey and Tom Cruise in my favorite role of his since Rain Man.

Hollywood satires are often dry (Altman’s The Player), ridiculously broad (Edward’s S.O.B.) or ultimately succumbing to what they are lampooning (McTiernan’s The Last Action Hero). This, by the way, would make a great weekend trilogy. Or, they’re just plain stupid, like the recent rash of [blank] Movie ridicule/Airplane!-style fiascos that, for example, make fun of comedies that are way funnier than the objects of their ridicule.

Seriously, this is a good rule: If you’re going to lampoon somebody, you’d better be better at what they’re doing than they are.

I remember a first-gen SNL where Larraine Newman parodies Barbara Streisand by singing a medley of her hits with altered words. Problem is, even if you hate Streisand, you have to concede the quality of her singing and the most prevalent thing I remember about the song (the lyrics of which attacked, perfectly legitimately, her acting and her apparent self-centeredness), is that Newman cannot hold a candle to Streisand in the singing department. (South Parkwas more successful decades later by just painting her as a crazed megalomaniac and not going anywhere near her singing ability.)

But really, movies like The Comebacks(which parodies the far superior Dodgeball–actually, in The Comebacks’ case, it’s clearly a rip-off, not a parody–and Disaster Movie (which parodies the far superior Juno) don’t do themselves any favor by drawing comparisons to other, better comedies.

Note that the original, classic Airplane!primarily parodied the melodrama Zero Hour! which nobody on Earth had seen, and a bunch of classic movies, along with referencing the plethora of airplane-based disaster movies, which had been given a decade–that’s a decade without DVDs and Internet–to season. I’m pretty sure that matters, even if I’m not sure how. (I know that when I saw it, despite having seen most of the Airportmovies, I really didn’t think “Hey, that’s from Airport ‘74!” or anything.)

Anyway.

Tropic Thunder parodies Hollywood and actors, and Vietnam war movies–though, again, primarily as they reflect on actors’ desire for legitimacy.

Stiller plays an action hero–fairly believably, for someone who’s played Mr. Furious–searching for credibility by moving out of the straight-action genre and playing a retard, and then doing a “serious” war movie.

Another digression here: It’s appallingly true that the Academy is an absolute sucker for “retard” roles. As Downey’s character points out, though, you can’t be a “full retard”, like Sean Penn in I am Sam, it has to be a half/not-really retard like Hoffman in Rain Man or Hanks in Gump.

For people who know, live with, and love brain-injured people, this fantasy view of the handicapped is appalling, on the level of The Magic Negro. It reduces these people to their injuries plus some bullshit enchantment.

A lot of brain-injured people are savants, mind you. Way more than anyone understands. But this doesn’t change the fact that, this savant-ness doesn’t really improve their quality of life, and most importantly that they are still humans with all the human frailties that we have, plus a few more we can’t comprehend.

Almost weirdly, it’s only comedy that actually respects the brain-injured, by being willing to treat them like everyone else (e.g. South Park’s Timmy or the Farrely Brothers movies, like Stuck On You.

Stiller’s character in the movie is the one I have the hardest time connecting to a real world actor. He’s sort-of Willis. Maybe Schwarzenegger or Stallone? Sort of a melange, or archetype, but a lot of what he did would’ve been physically funnier if he were 6-plus-foot and ripped.

That’s nitpicking, since there’s plenty of absurdity and good jokes to go around.

On the other hand, Downey plays, essentially, Russell Crowe. I don’t know if Crowe is a method actor, but Downey plays one of those guys who gets so into the role, he loses himself. That, of course, is a little nod to himself, since that was reportedly what happened with Chaplain. Since Downey is playing a black guy, he becomes a kind of parody of Fred Williamson and Richard Roundtree–which really pisses off the actual black guy in the cast, played by Brandon T. Jackson (whose character goes by the moniker Alpa Chino and sells “Booty Juice” and “Bust-A-Nut” bars).

Meanwhile, Jack Black plays…Robert Downey Jr.! Not exactly, of course. His character is a melange of those comedians like Eddie Murphy who play all these different roles in one movie and wear a lot of fat suits. But he’s the bad boy drug user who can’t be insured–and if that’s not Downy ca. ’95, I don’t know what is.

So we have these three mega-actors and their mega-egos on set with a green director trying to make a “serious” war movie. In desperation, the director (played by Steven Coogan of Tristram Shandy – A Cock and Bull Story) ends up listening to hard-bitten war vet Nick Nolte (author of the book on which the movie is based) and decides to go guerilla by seting the actors down deep in the jungle and letting them fend for themselves.

Hilarity ensues.

No, really, it does! This movie balances very delicately on the line between dark humor and absurdist comedy. Something that Stiller, the director, has not always succeeded in the past. (Compare to The Cable Guy–commonly regarded as too dark–and Zoolander–which is very broad, and not dark at all, except in the actual filming.)

What I’m saying is that land mines aren’t all in the movie. Kill everyone and you have a movie people aren’t going to see. Make everything goofiness, well that’s a turn-off, too.

On the other hand, paint your characters as ridiculous but still very human, don’t be completely cynical, and be as real as you can without dragging the movie down–this is a damn hard thing to do and Stiller pulls it off.

Cruise’s character is the closest to pure evil, while McConaughey is given an opportunity to do the right thing in the face of a very tempting offer.

Everyone liked it. I found myself wondering halfway through why it was R-rated, until Black, going through withdrawals, described in detail what he would do to Jackson’s penis if he’d let him go. It’s only about 30 seconds long and it’s not that graphic, but, eh, what’s a ratings board to do?

Before closing out, a shout-out to former child actor Jay Baruchel (of Are You Afraid of the Dark?) who plays straight-man to all the heavyweights and does a fine job.

A great close to a pretty damn good summer.

A stable, staid couple hooks up with a wilder one causing havoc in their otherwise ordinary lives. Sure, we’ve seen it before, but have we ever seen it on a train crossing Asia?

Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer have just finished helping some orphans in China have decided to take the train back home instead of a plane, when they meet a sexy, sleazy Spaniard played by Eduardo Noriega, and his twitchy, sexy girlfriend Kate Mara. Hard-nosed Ben Kingsley is sniffing around with his lapdog Thomas Kretschmann, ratcheting up the tension.

I actually can’t describe much more without giving away the plot twists. This movie can be commended for missing about half the usual clichés of this well-worn plot. The normal trajectory of the “good couple gone bad” has them clashing with the “bad couple” and doing desperate things to restore normalcy back to their life. The theme of this movie is more about faith and honesty.

This latest film from Brad Anderson lacks the eerie atmosphere of his earlier film The Machinist, though it has much of that movie’s predictability. It generally seems above-average by missing a lot of the typical turns, as I’ve noted.

The Boy liked it but felt it was a bit slow in parts. I didn’t find it such, but with movies with foreign languages I (sorta) know, I’m always trying to parse out the foreign language.

‘Why don’t I like you?“
"Because you think I’m an ass. And I’m not really. It’s just that I’m British…and you’re not. ”

If there’s a danger in Randall Miller’s new flick Bottle Shock, it’s that it might be just one big pro-America pander. Which, I confess, is not much of a danger, both because it’s unlikely and because it would be refreshing.

This neat little film is “based on a true story” and centered around the 1976 wine-tasting competition in France where California wines beat out French wines in a blind tasting.

It’s really two stories (and perhaps weaker than it could be as a result): The first is the story of affable Brit snob Steve Spurrier (Alan Rickman) who, with his Wisconsinite friend Maurice (Dennis Farina) contrives the contest as a way to raise his stock with the elite French wine culture.

Rickman and Farina are a delight, as might be expected, as Farina mooches off Rickman’s failing wine “Academy” business, and as Rickman travels around Napa valley, tasting a variety of wines along with Kentucky Fried Chicken, guacamole, and whatever else American cuisine has to offer.

This is a fun story and the better (and smaller) part of the movie.

The other story concerns xenophobic, perfectionist, pig-headed wine owner Jim Barrett, who’s watching his dream go down the drain with debt as he refuses to release his wines before their time. (“Gallo” is a name spoken with disdain in this movie.) Barrett is played by Bill Pullman, who seems to be channelling Martin Sheen with this uncharacteristicaclly harsh (but compelling!) character.

A burr under Barrett’s saddle is his son, a fun-loving late-hippie ne’er-do-well named Bo. (Bo is played by Chris Pine, who will probably become a lot more famous once he’s known as Captain Kirk in the new “Star Trek” movie.) As Bo comes out of his daze and starts to take action, he actually pisses his stubborn father even more. (Jim is convinced the wine-tasting is a setup to bash America on the bicentennial.)

This story is a bit sparser and somehow less compelling–perhaps due to shortage of Rickman, though Pullman gives a great performance. It may be because it’s the more traditional of the two stories. Or maybe it was because I spent the whole movie thinking, “Get a haircut, ya damn hippie!”

But it’s not a bad son-vs-father-vs-hot-chick-who-thinks-he-can-be-more story, as those go.

Rounding out the cast is Freddy Rodriguez as the son-of-a-migrant-worker who’s building his own vinery on the sly, Rachel Taylor as the hot-n-sexy intern/love interest, not nearly enough Eliza Dushku as the local bar owner, and character actor great Joe Regalbutto, whose role I won’t elaborate on, since it would be a spoiler.

Other points of interest: Mark Adler’s score recalls (not unfavorably) David Newman; the movie has a nice, authentic ’70s feel, not too camped up or bogged down in bell bottoms and disco; I wanted more from the cinemtography–Napa is beautiful and this doesn’t really showcase that, except in one or two places–but it is a low budget film so I suppose the budget wouldn’t allow for much; and the attitude is affable but not cloying.

On that last point, the moviemakers seemed not to be trying to Make A Point, much, about anything. Rickman brings real humanity to a character who could have been completely unsympathetic (as could Farina’s). Pullman is hard to get along with, but for understandable reasons. Bo is a screwup, of sorts, but he finds in the girl a reason to not be.

It’s not super-deep or nothin’. But it does demonstrate that you can make a good popcorn flick for a few bucks that doesn’t need a lot of profanity, nudity or violence to hold an audience’s attention for a 100 or so minutes.

The Boy sez, “I liked it very much.”

A documentary of the event would also be cool.

I was not particularly optimistic about seeing Mirrors, the latest Asian horror remade American-style, but the initial buzz was pretty good and, as I’ve pointed out before, horror movies are substantially better in the theater.

OK, so, Kiefer Sutherland is a down-on-his-luck cop whose life fell apart after shooting another cop the previous year. He’s estranged from his life, sleeping on the couch at his sister’s, and working as the night watchman in a burnt out department store where the former night watchman (seen gruesomely dispatched in the opening scene) kept the store mirrors meticulously clean.

Shortly after beginning his new job, weird things start happening to him, and he’s ultimately forced to go on a sort of mini-quest to save his family. Think The Ring.

This movie initially annoyed me as it seemed to not have a consistent internal logic. The opening scene suggess what happens in the mirror happens in the real world: Just as you control your reflection, generally, your reflection controls you. But in other situations merely the effect shows up in our world.

The effect seems less egregious as time goes on, and the movie builds nicely to a somewhat odd action-y climax. (This modern trend of ending horror flicks with explosions is not that appearling to me.) Then there’s a stinger.

The stinger is often the worst part of horror movies, as filmmakers try to recapture that feeling they had when they were ten and first saw “The Twilight Zone”. This one was not so bad, though I felt it was either pointless or a set up for a sequel. The Boy liked it because, as he said, it didn’t undo the entire movie.

Yeah, that’s a real problem. “It was all a dream” or “If only I had thought of that sooner” tends to feel like a rip off.

Plus, it was new to The Boy, and I have to admit, I haven’t seen that twist used in 30 years or so.

Anyway, Keifer pretty much dominates the film, though Paula Patton does a good job as his wife–who thankfully gets on board sooner than in most horror films. They shouldn’t have put her in so many low-cut outfits, though. It was distracting. (They were distracting?) The children were beautiful and did their parts well, too.

One thing that makes this work, I think, is the change-up of horror “effects”. (Not as in “special effects” but as in “effects used to create fright”). Any movie is a series of scenes, and in horror movies, there are certain clichés used to pad things out till the real action starts. Things like the frightened cat, the phone ring, the door slam, etc. This movie rather successfully keeps you uncertain as to when you’re getting a fake-out versus when you’re getting the goods. It’s not always sensible, but it’s fairly entertaining.

The Boy liked it quite a bit. And if you like Sutherland II, he does his thing here. Since only a few characters know what’s going on, it’s up to them to sell the horror–and Kiefer most of all–and they do a good job.

From the guys who brought you Superbad, as the tag line goes, comes another film which curiously blends ‘00s sensibilities with a ’70s feel. What is this movie, anyway? Comedy? Action? Love st–okay, nobody’s thinking it’s a love story. (Though it is, kinda.)

Drug comedy–at least the old style stuff, whether it’s Cheech & Chong or, hell, even Dean Martin or Foster Brooks staggering around–doesn’t really do it for me. I find the humor to be overly broad, without the cleverness of a Chaplin or something else to ameliorate it. I enjoy Kevin Smith’s stuff, I think, partly because the stoner characters are comic relief, not the main focus. Also, they’re just as dopey when they’re clean and sober (as in Clerks II).

I’ve noticed with the Judd Apatow guys that they take a lot of conventions of the genre they’re working in, and render those a lot more realistically than previous movies have, and then stylize some other aspect instead. Superbad, for example, was a lot more realistic in terms of how the kids acted, on the one hand, but on the other hand, the subplot with McLovin and the cops was surreal.

In Pineapple Express we have the story of lovable stoner/loser Dale Denton (Seth Rogan), a process server who smokes pot all day while driving between jobs, and waiting for his targets, and dressing in costumes, who has no apparent ambition and a girlfriend who’s still in high school (Amber Heard).

After receiving the titular marijuana from his dealer Saul Silver (James Franco in a wonderful change from his usual, more intense roles), he witnesses his next victim (of service) murder a person with the help of a cop (Rosie Perez). This murderer is Ted Jones (Gary Cole), who just happens to be his dealer’s dealer’s dealer.

The “love story” aspect is between Dale and Saul, by the way. They’re both losers, sure, but they both have potential, unlike the other losers they deal with, and they sort of recognize that. Dale feels superior to Saul because, hey, Saul is a drug dealing felon. Saul’s sensitivity, which shows up in many ways, is what makes him lovable, despite his dependence on the loco weed (and his subsequent lack of good judgment).

Anyway, Dale, also not functioning at peak efficiency, tosses his pineapple express out of the window after witnessing the murder, which allows Jones and his cop accomplice to track him down through Silver’s dealer, Red (Danny McBride). Hilarity, or at least a few good chuckles, ensue, and along the way we learn the dangers of smoking too much dope. (See? There’s a moral! Heh.)

So, first off, the cast: Yeah, pretty top-notch. There’s a weird, great chemistry between the always fabulous Cole and Rosie Perez, to say nothing of the relationship between Franco and Rogen (occasionally with McBride). James Remar and Bill Hader show up in an amusing opening showing how marijuana came to be banned. Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robinson (the bouncer in Knocked Up) play the heavies sent to kill Dale, Saul and Red with a mixture of humor and menace. And the whole rival Asian (Chinese? Japanese? Indian? Who knows?) gang is amusing as well. And Ed Begley and Nora Dunn turn up as the girlfriend’s parents.

So even though you have a buddy movie, essentially, it’s also a nice ensemble piece, with each new character bringing their own little twist to the proceedings, so that you keep going, “Oh, and remember when this character showed up?”, like Cleo King as the school cop who arrests Dale.

I think they call that good writing. It reminds me of Hitchcock, actually. Very seldom did a characer show up on screen who wasn’t a character, i.e., who didn’t seem to have their own life and their own problems, and just because the movie’s about you doesn’t mean they’re going to roll over.

The last set of the movie, a shootout in the drug lord’s hideout, is necessarily somewhat goofy. But the movie walks the fine line between slapstick and gory-realism very well, as the characters are only required to be just heroic enough, and not suddenly Willis, Stallone and Schwarzeneggar.

Although Rogan does that jump from the second floor on to Cole near the end–they show it in the commercial–is sort of unexpected and cool, even if you just know that he’s got the safety harness on and needed a lot of editing and multiple takes.

Those things usually do, of course, it’s just–you know–Seth Rogan. (Though, honestly, the guy just has a round, five-o-clock-shadow face; he’s not really very fat. He’s probably reasonably fit.)

So, all-in-all, a pretty entertaining couple of hours. Not your thing if drugs are offensive to you. And possibly not your thing if you’re into the whole drug scene and find anti-drug moralizing off-putting (though there’s not much of that, it is there).

Better than it had a right to be. The Boy approved, and particularly of the last action scene which he thought had just the right feel.

Margot and Alex are childhood sweethearts (ignore that there’s 15 years age difference between them) who grow up to be a happily married couple, until Margo ends up dead and Alex ends up in a coma for three days, with no explanation for what happens.

The official story is that Margot was killed by a serial killer, though the police suspected Alex.

Flash-forward eight years, as the still morose Alex, mourning his wife on the anniversary of her death, receives an e-mail linking him to a live security camera where a woman who looks a lot like his wife can be seen staring upward.

Meanwhile, two bodies have been found in the woods near where Margot and Alex were attacked, and evidence on these bodies raises questions about the official story. The police once again turn their attention to Alex.

Meanwhile, some mysterious thugs are going around killing people and Alex must consort with some unsavory characters while getting to the bottom of the mystery.

This is a heavily plotted film. There were a couple of moments where I went “Ohhhhh” as I had figured out what was going, only to find another layer of plot deeper. It’s not, however, too much plot gettin’ in the way of the story, as Joe Bob Briggs would say. It all works except, to a degree, the final, ultimate exposition.

Which isn’t to say that the final exposition is bad, since the character’s motives all work out. But the actions, as described, are fairly improbable.

The Boy had trouble following it. He got distracted by trying to read things that were in French. He liked it, but it wasn’t until the end that he figured out what was going on, and even then I had to fill in some blanks. There’s a bit of exposition at the end that I thought was overlong but that helped him catch up.

But it still works. It’s interesting, there’s some good action, and the actual motivations are pretty clear. Things not quite hanging together doesn’t kill a movie like the characters acting inappropriately. It’s good drama.

François Cluzet is the lead, turning in a tightly wound performance that reminded me of Dustin Hoffman. Marie-Josée Croze, as Margot, necessarily has a smaller role, being killed in the first scene, and thereon living in flashbacks. But there’s good chemistry there.

Kristin Scott-Thomas, last seen (by us) as the suspicious wife in The Valet plays the savvy lesbian lawyer, married to Marina Hands (from The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, which Croze was also in), who is…uh…Margot’s sister?

One thing that confused The Boy and also confused me was keeping everyone’s relationship straight and, in fact, keeping the characters straight. It might’ve been the subtitles, which occasionally were white-on-white (doesn’t someone check these things?) and so demanded attention at times long after the subtitles usually disappear. (If you watch movies with subtitles a lot, you often forget you’re reading them 10-15 minutes into the movie.)

Not a perfect film, perhaps, but quite enjoyable and with a nice emotional depth you don’t usually get from a summer thriller. Of course, this is a fall movie from 2006, but still. New direcctor Guillaume Canet–an actor from one of my favorite films of 2005, Joyeux Noël–does a commendable job with a difficult script.

Get Smart was still playing and a movie was needed. The new Mummy flick doesn’t look too good, and 3-D doesn’t work for me, ruling out the other Brendan Fraser.

He’s doing cute spots with Maria Bello on cable, though. (Cinemax?)

The movie is not as funny as the old show, but in fairness, the old show isn’t as funny as it once was. As a summer movie, it’s good fun, with wall-to-wall comedian cameos; as nostalgia, it’s not bad, there are some good references to the old series; as a sitcom remake, it’s one of the better ones (if not the best of what is a horribly weak field).

Some details:

They made a lot of good choices. Instead of Maxwell Smart being a complete boob, he was a highly competent desk jobber who wanted to be an agent, but was too good at his data crunching to be field agent. And actually, many of his failures were not in execution, but in timing or just plain luck.

This…works. If you recall the original series, Don Adams’ Smart was a constant goof. But in order to forward a plot with an incompetent protagonist, you have to rely on others (which diminishes your lead) or you have to rely on luck, which gets tiresome. Adams did both, which was fine, because the series was composed of 22 minutes shows, stuffed with sight gags and other absurdities. This movie gives Smart enough skill to make him less irritating than he might have been.

Carrel is just right. He could do a fairly good, dead-on, Don Adams imitation if he wanted. But that wouldn’t have worked for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s weird. The guy’s dead, but only for about five years. Second of all, the original character wouldn’t have fit due to the changes made in the setting.

Like an Owen Wilson or (in most cases) a Will Ferrel, Carrel has created a persona that works in a wide variety of situations, and that means he can do the goofy stuff and switch into a more serious–though never too serious in this movie–mode. In this movie, that means, completely missing a stunt on the one hand, and then moments later doing something competent, and then doing something movie-competent (like avoiding lasers with Olympic-level gymnastics).

The movie walks this line, too.

In the originl show, you had to sort of wonder what Agent 99 saw in Agent 86. And Barbara Feldon can hardly be commended enough for convincingly conveying real love in an absurd sitcom. I’ve heard people–guys–pining for her decades after and in retrospect, it’s probably because she managed to adore Agent 86 and respect him, even though her skills were far superior.

Not really my type, I do see the appeal. Now compare her to Anne Hathaway, also not my type.

I’m putting these here because I these pictures may say something about changes in taste, at least as presented by Hollywood. Beauty, in the ‘60s, had a rounder face, and smaller nose and eyes, as this picture of Feldon doesn’t actually illustrate all that well.

Hathaway is more in the Julia Roberts/Uma Thurman mold, with a longer nose and wider mouth, to say nothing of enormous eyes. Her eyes are so strikingly large that it’s easy to forget she’s not really my type. (Not that she’s been hounding me for attention anyway.) Is it just my imagination? I see more Hathaways than Feldons these days.

Anyway, I don’t really “get” the appeal of Hathaway. When I see her in a movie, I think, “Why’d they pick her?” And then at some point during the movie she wins me over, as she did here. Right about the point she donned a 99 wig and was doing the goofy laser-dodging thing that’s been all the rage since Entrapment, and actually gave us a husky voiced (momentary) Feldon imitation, I was swayed.

The supporting cast is superb: Dwayne Johnson as the uber-buff super-agent; Alan Arkin–man, this guy’s been funny since before I was born; Terence Stamp just-so in the Bernie Kopell role as head of KAOS; the versatile Terry Crews; Masi Oka and Nate Torrence as the uber-nerds; Ken Davitian as Stamp’s lower-key right-hand man; and the ginormous Dalip Singh as the sensitive crusher, whose domestic problems make him grumpy at work.

On top of that, we got cameos. Bill Murray as Agent 13. Patrick Warburton as Hymie. James Caan as the Presdient. Larry Miller and Kevin Nealon as agents of a competing bureau. Etc. What’s cool is that they’re not just gimmicks. Everybody does a good job both fitting in and being funny in their own ways.

It’s fair to criticize the movie for not being funny enough. One character appears to get killed–in a non-funny fashion–and that felt wrong. The original would’ve shown him in tattered clothes and smudge-faced, I think. (Though if memory serves, the original show did have people dying, but off-screen due to some sort of “missed it by that much” deal.)

But ultimately, this movie works pretty darn well, has a lot of the spirit of the original, and showed proper respect. Name a movie based on some other ’60s sitcom that does the same.