If you don’t like Adam Carolla, you can stop reading this now. Seriously, there’s nothing here for you.

I’ve found Mr. Carolla amusing since his Loveline days on MTV. His working class-style approach often made a lot more sense to me than Dr. Drew Pinsky’s educated opinions. Reasonably, a guy who spent a big part of his life as a boxing trainer before and a carpenter before becoming a comedian has made a funny movie about a carpenter who has a chance to box in the Olympics.

As might be expected, the hero of the film, Jerry Ferro (played by Carolla) is basically a loser. But he’s not a loser because he hit hard times or was ground down by someone. No, he’s just a loser because, well, it was easier and more fun to get high and play video games. This is probably truer to life than most similar stories, and keeps it from the typical melodramatic pitfalls.

The story begins when, on his 40th birthday, he loses his and his pal’s (crap) job and his girlfriend, but manages to channel his frustration into his boxing. This turns into a shot at the 2008 Beijing Olympics–or does it? Boxing is a young man’s game, generally speaking (and as near as I can tell, the age limit is 36) but the movie gives us certain expectations without dealing to heavily in fantasy.

Joining Carolla on his 88 minute journey are his Nicaraguan buddy Oswaldo (played by Oswaldo Castillo, Carolla’s real life construction pal) and cute-as-a-button Heather Juergensen, as a Public Defender with a love of underdogs. Old timer Tom Quinn, looking and acting like he’d been born to play the role of tough-as-nails boxing coach Eddie Bell, also coaches a deeply religious flyweight (Jonathan Hernandez) and Carolla’s much younger rival played by Harold House Moore.

Adam has chemistry with everyone, and the only time I felt he overplayed his hand a bit was on a date to the La Brea Tar Pits. Apart from that this movie is tight, funny, even suspenseful–you don’t know how far he’s going to get–and gives us enough back to where we feel rewarded for rooting for the guy, but not so much that we feel pandered to.

It’s a delicate balance.

It’s also a good reminder that you can make a good comedy/drama for under a million bucks.

It should get a wider release.

The primary problem with converting Dr. Seuss into a feature length film is that Seuss’s stories are a distillate of the very essence of drama: A stranger comes to town and changes the characters’ world views (Cat in the Hat); a curmudgeon finds spiritual redemption (The Grinch Who Stole Christmas); a bitter war is waged to the ultimate destruction of both parties (The Butter Battle Book).

A part of his greatness was his ability to play out these dramas in a short space. Even the classic Chuck Jones specials can seem stretched thin, and they run 26 minutes according to IMDB (and I think that’s an exaggeration). The prospect of stretching it out for 88 minutes is not promising, if for no other reason than everything added is not Seuss, and that’s usually painfully obvious.

Imitating Seuss is a common phenomenon, but nobody does it very well. Even Seuss can be said to not add successfully to his own material (as with the extra verses in the TV version of Grinch which he wrote). As a result, you get the abomination that was the live action Grinch, where the Whos lose their pure spiritual goodness and become horrible things that created the Grinch. (I’ve never been able to watch that movie past the first few minutes.)

The next tactic for padding out the source is to fill it with gags. But that’s not easily done, either. Seuss books are really about the essential drama. They’re fun, but they’re not really “jokey”. And they’re never scatological or sexual (another crime of the live-action Grinch). The physical comedy of the cartoon Grinch is probably one of the best approaches, and even that’s more Jones-y than Seuss-y. (For the record, Ralph Bakshi’s The Butter Battle Book is the purest interpretation of Seuss.)

As fraught with peril as the task is, wise men would refuse to take it on. Horton’s directors, Pixar alumnus Jimmy Hayward and Robots art director Steve Martino prove shockingly worthy of the task, fools though they may be.

Poor Horton (Jim Carrey) finds himself custodian to an entire world in the form of a tiny speck that only he can hear the inhabitants of. The if-not-quite-evil-then-meddlesome Kangaroo (Carol Burnett) makes it her business to squash this Horton’s fanciful imaginings, with the help of Will Arnett (as a vulture) and of course, the evil purple monkeys known as the Wickershim Brothers.

Let me say up front that the Wickershims are way scarier and freakier in the Jones cartoon than they are here, despite being pretty similar. (They get a lot more screen time in the ‘toon, and seem irremediably evil there. Plus, they sing in the Jones version. No singing in this one till the end.) Nonetheless, the Flower grabbed my arm a couple of times in fear.

Meanwhle, down in Whoville, the Mayor (Steve Carell) has to save a world that doesn’t believe it’s in any peril, with the help of Isla Fisher as the wacky Who-scientist and Jonah Hill, who plays the tiniest Who of them all.

Most of this film works quite well: Carrey is on a tight leash. In fact, the whole movie shies away from zaniness and super-broad comedy. It’s fairly straight action, for a cartoon. The required length is achieved by having Horton take a long-ish journey and the Mayor having to deal with disbelief in his world.

What doesn’t work that well is the sub-plot where the Mayor doesn’t “get” his son (which isn’t terrible, just not very Seussian) and particularly a little segment of animé, where Horton imagines himself as a ninja (which is thankfully short). In what constitutes an hour’s worth of padding, that’s fairly impressive.

Anyway, The Flower liked the movie a lot. (She was particularly excited when the dialogue actually included some real Seuss words, which didn’t happen much: “I meant what I said and I said what I meant: An elephant’s faithful one-hundred percent.”) The Boy was not displeased, which is high-praise since, in his own words, he has “a low tolerance for the kind of broad humor they usually put into” these things.

Of course, someone’s always trying to co-opt Dr. Seuss. The Wikipedia tries to draw parallels between the Wickershims and Joe McCarthy (“citation needed”), while anti-abortion groups have tried to see it as an anti-abortion tale (“a person’s a person no matter how small”).

But they miss the point: It’s the conflict that’s universal, not the particulars. Horton is like a more heroic Thomas More. He’s told up-front to either give up what he knows to be true or suffer the consequences. Similarly the mayor.

You could apply the particulars to terrorism, global warming, or whatever you wanted.

That’s why Seuss is great.

And these guys are to be commended on preserving that.

I wonder if Jason Statham gets tired of playing roguish burglars and assassins. If so, that’s too bad, since three of his next four films have him doing the same schtick over and over again. Well, he’s good at it, and I suppose not much different from other action heroes in that regard.

In The Bank Job, he’s a lower class swindler–a used car salesmen in debt with the local loan shark–who is tempted by the very tempting Saffron Burrows into pulling a heist on a Baker Street bank.

Pretty ballsy, if you ask me, to knock over a bank four blocks down from Sherlock Holmes.

The movie is based on an actual heist that occurred in 1971, news of which was suppressed via a D-Notice, which is apparently something you get when you don’t have a First Amendment.

Anyhow, the filmmakers posit that the gov’t had a “black power” radical cold for drug smuggling but couldn’t bust him because he had compromising photos of Princess Margaret so they needed to steal those photos without looking like they were stealing those photos, and hence used an outside crew. (This is all made relatively clear in the first time-bouncy-10 minutes.)

As it turns out there’s lots of other bad stuff in the vault, and our bank robbers end up under the gun of a lot of unsavory characters. Many of whom are employed by the crown.

There’s probably as much reality in this as there was in, say, Murder by Decree. But it was well acted and paced nicely. There was some confusion (at least in my mind) about Jason’s relationship with Saffron. The crew finds their way into the vault and decides to break then to sleep. (It’s a little far-fetched, but they had been up for 36 hours by this point.)

Anyway, the two end up meeting in the vault and having a romantic interlude. Are we supposed to, at that point, think that they had sex? It seems improbable, but a later scene with the wife suggests that is what happened.

A minor nit. This is a fun ‘70s-era flick–without all the ridiculous costumes that are usually omnipresent in a movie based on this time period–that keeps the suspense up till the end. More sex (mostly implied) and nudity than your average heist flick, I thought, though it all related back to the (rather involved) plot.

But eventually, we’re gonna wear out on these types of roles, Handsome Rob.

One of my favorite comedies of recent years is the German film Schulze Gets The Blues. It’s not for everyone: It’s statically filmed, slow-paced and, naturally, plays a bit on German sensibilities. But it works for me because it taps into the love of music and how it can motivate people to leave their “comfort zone”.

The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) is an Israeli film which might seem to have similar premise: An Egyptian police band (classical Arab music) ends up in a small town in Israel by accident, and all kinds of wackiness ensues. Or at least amusing, human episodes.

This film cleaned up at Israeli film award shows.

But, in the end, I have to say, I didn’t really get it. It seemed aimless to me. And the idea that people can get along–even Arabs and Jews–strikes me as not all that revolutionary (from the comfort of Hollywood, CA). Where Schulze’s slowness was usually a setup for some amusing tableau, like a silent movie, The Band’s Visit seemed to let the characters brood for extended periods of time. (Not dissimilar to the movie 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days.)

Unfortunately, I have little insight into what they’re thinking.

Ronit Elkabetz was pretty hot, though, and Sasson Gabai brings an odd “warm distance” to his role that makes his character believable.

But I suspect that 80% of this movie’s resonance is parochial.

I often ruminate on how the screwball comedies of the ‘30s and ’40s can’t be recreated in modern times. I’ve always assumed they couldn’t be redone because, well, they never have been. When they try, we get things like The Money Pit or Legal Eagles which, whatever their merits, do not manage to capture the spirit of those films. Often, even good modern movies are hurt by trying to be like these old movies and failing.

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, however, proves that it’s possible. This film is so straight out of the ’30s that it’s absolutely obvious from the trailers how the outcome has to…uh…come out. You know the poor Miss Pettigrew has to hook up with the rich guy with the shrewish girlfriend just as you know that Delysia, the ingénue, is going to end up with her true love, instead of the guys who can advance her career.

Anything else just would have–to use a non-’30s expression–sucked.

This movie, which takes place in ’39 (I think), touches on a lot of the tropes of the ’30s-’40s with just the right lightness. It starts with Frances McDormand doing a bit of down-and-out nanny that reminds one (favorably) of Charlie Chaplin’s “Tramp”. That’s saying a lot right there, though the scene never goes into full on slapstick (a good thing, I think).

When Miss Pettigrew and Delysio meet, you get the screwball, fast-paced dialogue of, say, a Howard Hawks, along with some zany antics as the two try to keep the delightful Delysio from the sort of social embarrassment that comes when one of your boyfriends walks in while you’re having sex with the other. This sort of dialogue cropped up relatively recently in Joss Whedon’s series Buffy, The Vampire Slayer and Angel, and was a staple of The Gilmore Girls, but in this case, it’s well choreographed with the action. Actually it reminds more of Leo McCarey than Hawks.

The modernization of the story shows up only a bit at this point. First, we get some Amy Adams cheesecake. Second, the girl in the ’30s movies was usually playing with the men as opposed to actually having sex with them. There was usually a “plausibly deniable” out for the audience who didn’t want to imagine the characters being less than pure.

This is one of the things that makes a ’30s-’40s style zany comedy ordinarily impossible to remake. The audience rejects too much coquettish-ness but the character of the movie changes if it rubs your nose the characters’ sexual indiscretions.

Somehow, Delysio remains charming despite her relatively libertine ways, which is in no small part due to the charms of Amy Adams.

Rounding out the pith-perfect cast is Shirley Henderson (best known as Moaning Myrtle from the Potter movies), Ciaran Hinds (late of the HBO/BBC series “Rome”, as Julius Caeasar), and Delysio’s three boyfriends (Lee Pace, Tom Payne and Mark Strong).

Is anything off about this film? Well, yeah: The characters are mostly too old to be who they’re playing. Amy Adams is 33. I’m pretty sure ingénue age stops at 28, tops. Now, she’s quite lovely, and the character can easily be on the high end of the age range (adding to her desperation), so only occasionally did I find myself thinking, “Hmmm, she’s a little old for that.”

One of those occasions was, however, when McDormand and Hinds respond to the younger people cheering at the airplanes flying overhead with “they don’t remember the first one”. The practical age cap for not remembering WWI when WWII started would be around 25, I think. (Keep in mind that Shirley “Moaning Myrtle” Henderson is 40, however young she looks!)

Still, the whole thing works well–surprisingly well.

The boy said “Tell them the boy is pleased.”

And he was.

UPDATE: Kelly H. talks about the movie and source book in her “movies from books” series here. Turns out it is derived from a ’30s book. It would be a good template to draw from if someone wanted to re-do Thorne Smith.

Oh, yeah. Way too long. It’s 35 minutes before the first car scene, which is, like, five minutes, and then there’s 50 more minutes to go. 15 minutes later…get in the car, bitches!

Sheesh. Finally!

The last 20 minutes are quite good. Quite good indeed.

I don’t really know much about Tarantino. I’ve only seen this, the little bit he did in Sin City, and Kill Bill, none of which really clicked with me. (Well, maybe the Sin City bit; Clive Owen was great!)

I’m not sure why he thinks we want a grindhouse movie that’s over an hour of talking. They had movies like that, but it was because they didn’t have any money to actually film the action they wanted. Not because they actually wanted to pad the film with blather.

Not. Grindhouse.

The Boy started out thinking it was boring but not stupid, but in the last 20 minutes switched to thinking it was all out stupid.

This is (part of) why I didn’t take him when it came out.

Update #1:Hey, is it just me, or does Mr. Tarantino actually create really shallow fantasy girl characters?

Update #2: Zoe Bell was great. But Kurt Russell makes the whole thing bearable. (And he’s not in most of the movie, unfortunately.)

Update #3: I don’t get why Stuntman Mike doesn’t attack the girls in the car at the end. The gun would be disturbing, sure, but once they’re back in cars, he should have the advantage.

Update #4: I do not believe that, at any time in the history of the universe, four hot 20-something chicks ever spent 10 minutes at breakfast talking about Vanishing Point. Period.

Update #5: I do love the QT fans on IMDB who maintain with absolute earnestness that if you find fault with this film, it is because you are a cretin devoid of intelligence. (Guilty!)

I didn’t take The Boy with me to see Grindhouse when it came out since I wasn’t sure it was appropriate (and it probably wasn’t at the time). Also, I wasn’t sure he could relate. As he’s older now and I’ve seen it (and it’s on cable), we watched it together.

His reaction was much like mine during Raiders of the Lost Ark: I was okay with it up until Harrison Ford rode the submarine across the Atlantic. And it just got stupider from there. Not too long after, I realized that it was basically a kiddie movie, like Star Wars, and you can’t really apply rules of logic or sense to it. (And as a result I enjoyed Temple of Doom a lot more.)

Anyway he was appalled by the stupidity.

I still think it was 20 minutes too long but I found the various film corruptions a lot more interesting in the re-watch. Rodriguez cleverly used the scratches, blurs and distortions to punctuate parts of the action.

Anyway, the trailers are still the best part.

In Bruges is my kind of movie. Like Drop Dead Gorgeous, Very Bad Things, Wrong Is Right, Harold and Maude, S.O.B. and the original Wicker Man, it appeals to the part of me that thinks death is very, very funny.

This is somewhere in between last year’s whimsical Death at a Funeral and, say, Shaun of the Dead which was a bit heavy-handed. In Bruges is a bit more likable than your average black comedy, as it’s actually not cynical (as many films in the genre are).

Hitmen Brendan Gleeson (prob’ly best known as Harry Potter’s Alastor Moody) and young cohort Colin Farrell (lotsa stuff, but I like his turn in Phone Booth the best) are in the picturesque Belgian city of Bruges after bungling a job. They’re on orders to sight see until things cool down, and Colin Farrell’s character is bored to tears of all historical richness. (Hence the title of this entry.)

The only thing to pique his interest is the morally dodgy Clémence Poésy who seems torn between her romantic interest and her inclination to roll easily duped marks. Adding a little bit of spice to the proceedings is Jordan Prentice (probably best known for playing Howard T. Duck). They meander through the streets of Bruges until Ralph Fiennes, their boss, tells them the real reason for their visit. (Favorite role ever for Fiennes, a low-talking, yet somehow likable, uber-violent thug.)

Ironically, despite the topic and the source of humor, this is a movie about honor and redemption. You’re kind of rooting for these guys, hit men though they are. At the same time, you know it’s not likely.

Anyway, lotsa laffs (if you can laugh at this sort of thing, which I can), and great acting all around. A refreshing change from the brooding, introspective stuff that dominated the award season.

In 2007’s The Savages, Laura Linney turns in an Oscar-nominated performance of Kenneth Longergan’s Oscar-nominated screenplay about a sister whose tragic childhood scars her and her brother well into adultho–

Wait. What? That was 2000’s You Can Count On Me?

Oh, right. Sorry.

In The Savages, Laura Linney turns in an Oscar-nominated performance of Tamara Jenkin’s Oscar-nominated screenplay about a sister whose tragic childhood scars her and her brother well into adulthood.

Snark aside, the movies aren’t that close. In the older movie, Linney has adjusted pretty well and is sort of a rock for her brother, Mark Ruffalo, who is much less stable. About all she can do for him is be there.

In Savages, Linney and Hoffman are both maladjusted, with Linney somewhat more adrift, but neither able to grow up. You know, the first thing that needs to be pointed out is that the trailers make this out to be sort of whimsical. There are some humorous moments–especially punctuating what would otherwise be overly heavy-handed scenes–but this isn’t a movie with a lot of yuks.

In fact, I thought at first the movie was going to be a real slog. Linney’s character thrives on melodrama, and she’s happy to lie to get a reaction she wants. Hoffman’s character is flat–not his acting, but his character, I know some of you hate him, but I liked him in this–and dull, not given to open expressions of emotion, which in this case means his emotions emerge in weird ways.

When the movie starts, their father, played by Philip Bosco, is being kicked from his house, apparently as his dementia worsens. Although they haven’t talked to him in a long time, as his family, the responsibility of taking care of him falls to them. The back story, not terribly fleshed out, is that he was abusive and their mother simply ran off. Somehow they survived and while they must have relied on each other–they talked with each other even though they haven’t talked to their father in 20 yers–they’re not exactly warm to each other.

Anyway, it’s a (perhaps not so) curious thing. They are likable, even with their flaws. I’m not sure, for example, in that situation, whether I would feel any particular obligation to take care of an abusive parent. But they never challenge it for a second. Linney’s character even feels guilty about the quality of the home (which is functional but not wonderful).

You realize pretty soon that this isn’t going to be a “reconcile with Dad” movie (a la Tim Burton). Dad’s a MacGuffin. He seems to have no awareness of his past sins. (It is suggested at one point that his father was abusive, but this isn’t really a cathartic thing.) He’s basically there so that his kids can figure out how to let go of the past.

It’s an indie movie, so there’s no big “happily ever after,” but there’s a nice bit of hope. As contrasted with You Can Count On Me, where you know the brother’s going to be a screw-up for the rest of his life, in this film, you have reason to believe that the two will get past a least some of their dysfunction.

This movie’s been floating around for three months now and probably isn’t going to be released widely (can it really have wide appeal?) but it’ll be on DVD within two months, I’ve heard. Hollywood’s put me into this quandary, though: They’re not really turning out the quality fluff these days. I love independent and foreign films but come on: A guy’s got to have desert, too!

Anyway, Laura Linney kicked ass as the CIA chief in Breach. Enough of the dysfunctional sisters, I say!

Die Fälscher won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language picture and happens to be the only one of the nominees to actually make it to a local theater (a few days) before the ceremonies.

You can’t ever get enough WWII stories, apparently. This shows us yet another angle we’ve never seen: Nazi counterfeiting rings. (Well, at least not in this detail.)

This is the story of a Jewish counterfeiter who’s captured by the Nazis and placed into a concentration camp where he manages to survive by doing portraits of various representatives of the Master Race long enough to be enlisted into the Nazi’s scheme to fund their war effort and bankrupt the allies by forging pounds and dollars.

The movie gets off to a bit of a slow start, but builds nicely as the counterfeiter (Karl Markovics, whose oeuvre I’m unfamiliar with, though there are familiar faces from Das leben der anderen and Downfall) goes from a near sociopathic state to something a little more human.

It’s not an easy transformation: The counterfeiter (Saloman) is constantly forced to act in self-interest to survive. The world is telling him to act as he’s always done, but he doesn’t like the world that this creates. By the time he’s confronted with the reality of funding the Nazi war effort or dying and letting his fellow concentration camp inmates, he’s clearly conflicted. Intriguingly, he has one code (don’t squeal) that he holds on to when almost everyone else is surviving at any cost.

The movie is nicely bookended with Saloman visiting Monte Carlo with a briefcase full of cash.
You have a different view of that at the beginning than you do at the end.

I don’t know if it was the best foreign movie of the year, but it was the best of the five I’ve seen.

I went to see the Romanian flick 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days before if vanished from the local cinema. I didn’t take The Boy. He already hates commies and like Das leben der anderen, this film isn’t going to enamor anyone of communist regimes.

This is not a movie for everyone, as I’m fond of saying, because it’s an ugly story and it’s paced like a Kubrick movie, without the long tracking shots. Think Schultze Gets The Blues, only devoid of humor and life. And, actually, Schulze sets up a shot and the characters move through it, but in this film, the camera sits there and the central characters barely move at all.

The premise of the movie is simple (and if you want to go in blind, you shouldn’t read this): It’s 1987 Romania and college1 student Gabita is pregnant. She uses her roommate to help her get an abortion. This results in unexpected costs. and nearly two solid hours of bleak despair.

The director is remorseless in this regard. The movie–the events of the movie–could be cut down to 40 minutes easily. There are long shots where no one talks and very little happens. This heigtens the uneasiness, the awkwardness, and the general discomfort–but also made it hard for me to stay awake during the climactic scenes.

Actually, the movie this reminds me the most of is Caché, even though that movie is a metaphor disguised as literal events, where this movie is a very literal series of events which could be seen as a metaphor. But Caché has the trappings of a mystery, which it isn’t, and if you watch it that way, you’ll be bored. This movie incorporates a lot of the elements of a thriller, but never carries through (and would be an entirely different, and less real, film if it did). You might still be bored, depending on how much you appreciate the restrained, tense acting that is center stage for most of the film.

It’s really a treatise on the banality of evil. The characters are trapped in this oppressive state, where corruption is so integral to every day life (black markets, bribery, surveillance), that the only time Otilia (the main character) seems awakened to what they’re actually doing, is when she must confront (and dispose of) the evidence.

Like Juno, Mar ardento, and other movies that handle controversial topics well, a commendable thing about this film is that it doesn’t take a side and beat you to death with it. You could argue that it’s pro-choice, for example, especially given the passing reference to the young women’s periods being monitored by the dorm mother. On the other hand, it offers no romanticization of it. It’s clearly anti-oppression and anti-corruption, but those are hardly controversial points.

But it’s a disturbing film, and slow, and contains a particularly shocking scene. This makes it hard to recommend.

1. Forgive the imprecision. She’s at a school, she’s college age. I don’t know if they called them universities, or polytechnics or what.

I don’t rush out to see (or quickly post reviews of) the big movies. You can get that lots of other places. Unlike, say, my keen insight on the latest movies about the Middle East.

But we did go out to see Cloverfield. The Boy pronounced it “the best monster movie I’ve ever seen”.

Well, okay.

Monster movies are inherently a dated thing. Alien–the horror movie of my generation–to him is like Frankenstein was to me. It’s perhaps weird to think of exploding chests in the same category as stiff-legged golems, but it’s not so much a matter of gore, I think, as a matter of what seems more real.

And Cloverfield does a good job selling itself. In a nutshell, this is a Godzilla movie with the emphasis on a group of people who are unfortunate enough to be at Ground Zero when “it” arrives. A plot contrivance forces them to go toward the monster rather than away, which gives us opportunities to see the the beast major as well as all the little beasties that drop off it like lice.

This contrivance takes about 15-20 minutes to set up which had me saying “Thank God!” when the monster finally arrives. (At another point, when the characters have spent lots of time and risked themselves horribly to save another character who appears to be dead when they find them, The Boy leaned over and said to me, “Well, that was time well spent.”)

I’d heard some bitching about the monster, but I liked it and the boy proclaimed it “perfect”. The shaky cam didn’t bother me much and of course The Boy barely noticed it. (I have a theory about that: I think kids today are well-exposed to shaky-cam stuff so their brains automatically stabilize images internally in a way that older folks have to work at, if they can do it at all.)

It’s fun without being campy. Exciting without being too preposterous. Mysterious without being obscure. It’s actually a very old school style movie, with the monster not introduced until well into the movie, and not really shown clearly until the last act. It’s surprising that it works at all, but it does.

Recommended.

But wait! This one is animated.

And, actually, that’s an important starting consideration. Low budget animation can be very hard to watch. (Check out Adult Swim some time.) This mostly black-and-white marvel manages to evoke the UP-style 2D animation, techniques of Ralph Bakshi, and the occasional florid Yellow Submarine-ish look.

I’m grateful. Really. The animation serves the movie.

I found the story interesting and engaging, which is in itself kind of intriguing, because it has features that I’ve found reprehensible in other recent films. Basically, the story follows Marji Satrapi, who grew up during the fall of the Shah, the subsequent revolution, the Islamic takeover, the subsequence Iraq-Iran War, and the increasing enforcement of Shari’a.

Where The Kite Runner featured a character who was cowardly but obsessed with his shame, Persepolis is about a character who commits no great acts and is primarily self-absorbed. When the movie starts, she’s a child, and it’s understandable that she sees things in terms of herself. (One of the movies subtle yet moving contrasts is that of young Marji’s dreams of being a prophet at the beginning of the movie with her defiance of others claiming to be prophets toward the end.)

When the Iran-Iraq War starts, her parents send her to live in Vienna, where she associates with a bunch of typical teens enamored of anarchist/nihilist type philosophies in the usual shallow way. The ironic part is that when she realizes how full of crap they are (having survived the sort of upheaval they all listlessly pine for) she doesn’t seem to really gain any insight into her own experience. (It’s kind of funny to me, though, that she’s made to feel shame about her Iranian heritage in multi-culti Europe. Iranians in USA seem to refer to themselves as Persians, but I can’t recall anyone caring.)

Even when she goes back to Iran, and the repression is bad and growing worse all the time, she doesn’t really clue in quickly. (As it turns out, she’s still pretty young, around 20, which is sort of shocking given all she’s goes through in her teens.) There’s a persistent undercurrent of anger and victimization which is somehow not off-putting, perhaps because it’s rather warranted.

The story wisely stays away from trying to figure anything out. The situation in Iran has been complicated for some time, and it’s clear even the characters don’t really get what’s going on (though it’s fairly clear they’d like it to stop, please).

We’re often told that Iranians are a lot like us and that the smart thing to do in Iran is encourage them to make the choice they want to make anyway. And it’s hard not to admire a people who are willing to party when the consequence of being caught partying is death. Like the Afghanis depicted in Kite Runner, we’re left with the trite observation that things have gone horribly wrong there and the world would be much benefited from stability and freedom in those parts.

I have to wonder, though: Can we get a story like this about Iraq?

Actually, I’m not gonna kick The Bucket List at all. As the credits rolled last night, I was shocked: I just saw a good Rob Reiner movie! A new one!

I mean, the guy made seven good movies in a row in the ‘80s: This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing (cute fun, if not great), Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery and A Few Good Men. That’s a hell of a string. The middle four are classics and each in a different genre: coming-of-age, family/fantasy, romantic comedy and horror. And, of course, Spinal Tap is the mother of all mockumentaries.

Damn. It looks even more impressive now.

Then came North, with Elijah Wood. But he rebounded, sorta, with The American President and Ghosts of Mississippi. Then some shorts, a documentary, a TV sitcom and three dogs in a row! The Story of Us, Alex & Emma and Rumor Has It.

Reiner has resisted doing a sequel to Spinal Tap, reportedly because he doesn’t like to repeat himself. Maybe he’s easily bored, and hence the genre switching. Dunno. But here we are in 2008 and he made himself a new sort-of Sure Thing. It has the most in common with that film, I would say than his earlier films.

It’s a buddy picture. It’s a road picture. It’s an old-fart picture that doesn’t use old-age humor as a crutch (as seen in Matthau and Lemmon’s last movies, as well as the President movie where James Garner fills in for the late Matthau.) It’s funny in parts, but not hilarious, and really not very wacky, which is how the commercials portray it.

It’s also touching and sentimental, occasionally maudlin, loaded with clichés and has gratuitous Morgan Freeman narration.

But damn, you have to be trying–hard–not to be moved by Freeman and Nicholson who are absolute powerhouses without stage-grabbing or scenery chewing. It’s not surprising to me that the critics panned it: Like Reiner’s other great work, it’s just classic movie-going fun. Not shallow, really, but completely unpretentious. Even when the movie goes to the top of the Himalaya’s, you get the feeling that you’ve just seen a nice story, not an “important” one.

And unlike many of today’s hot directors, Reiner doesn’t make this movie into some indulgent vanity pic, clocking in at 97 minutes. He doesn’t shout “Look at me! I’m so talented!” Maybe, at this point, he doesn’t have that luxury, but he didn’t do it in his prime either.

So, critics have bashed it and audiences aren’t turning out to see it, particularly–though if I understand the numbers on IMDB, it only dropped 20% in its second week, and has made it’s $40M budget back. It could become a sleeper hit.

It certainly works as a remedy for all the Oscar-nominated films. You can go to the movies and just have fun.

I was actually not really amped to see this tale of Afghani woe called The Kite Runner. But, in my own defense, I didn’t know that it was directed by Marc Forster, of Stranger Than Fiction and Finding Neverland fame.

This is the story of a rich boy who is best friends with his servant, a “Hazari” boy who is, in most ways, of a superior character than his master. Hassan is brave, loyal, fearless, and highly protective of Amir, even when being terrorized by the neighborhood thugs. Amir is cowardly, and upon witnessing Hassan’s victimization and doing nothing, tries to drive Hassan and his father away.

This drama is interrupted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Amir and his father flee to America, where Amir makes a life as a writer. 20 years later, he receives a call that summons him back.

(As a footnote, I’m not sure if it’s the passage of time that makes it permissible, but the Soviets take it in the shorts in this movie, as they did in Charlie Wilson’s War. Apparently, when they invaded a place, they were all about the raping and pillaging. I never saw this kind of negative PR when they were in business, nor in the ‘90s.)

Anyway, this film lands a few good punches, as when Amir’s proud, intelligent, noble father ends up working at a convenience store, or when the family is at a swap meet and runs into a Afghan general. And mostly pretty tight for a running time of over an hour. (It does drag in the middle a bit, as The Boy pointed out.)

Also post-Taliban life in Afghanistan–when Amir goes back after the Soviets have been repelled and the Taliban is in control–is genuinely horrifying on a lot of different levels. It doesn’t seem like we hear much about this, except in the context of how it’s America’s Fault™. The Afghanis obviously don’t feel that way (versus how they feel about the Russians, as is made clear several times in the movie).

Contra Atonement, the cowardly character is given a chance at redemption and takes it, even when it can mean his life, his dignity, his safety, his comfort, and for that it’s a far more watchable movie.

Ultimately, I wasn’t expecting something quite this brutal (the implicit violence is horrifying, there’s little violence shown on screen), but there’s no doubting this is one of the best movies of 2007.

As another footnote, the Hazara thing is reminiscient of the Star Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, where the two characters are half-white and half-black but hate their racial differences. Seriously, the Afghans could all tell the difference between the Hazara and the Pashtun, but I sure couldn’t. (The “Hazari” are a Star Trek race, even!)

Crazy humans and their prejudices.

I run hot and cold on comedy legend Hal Roach. Well, not on him, per se. He seems like he was a helluva guy, working hard for the better part of four decades in showbiz, making the transition from silent to talkies, and from two-reel wonders to, well, almost to feature-length pix. (If TV had come along sooner, he’d probably have been the first Aaron Spelling or Sheldon Schwartz.)

Yes, if it weren’t for his persistent Mussolini-love, why, he’d be near perfect.

But Harold Lloyd wasn’t my favorite silent guy and Our Gang grated on me when I was a kid. (I can hardly imagine now.) I do, however, love me some Thorne Smith. Smith was very much about a rejection of Victorian morals on the one hand, and an embracing of those morals on the other. Which is to say, he had no use for the scold, the pious or the pompous. It’s easy to see him joining a group like Joe Bob Briggs’ Drunks Against Mad Mothers. At the same time, his characters found unhappiness discarding traditional morals and happiness coming back to them (or something like them) on their own terms.

Which is further to say, his stories involve sex. A lot of it. Not graphic, obviously, but copious.

His stories were really unfilmable at the time for that. And today they’re unfilmable because they reflect a gentility that no longer exists, at least anywhere in the product that Hollywood churns out.

Hal Roach, though, tried and scored big hits by taking the late Smith’s stories and substituting a healthy dose of “screwball”. The result is much less sophisticated, but it keeps a guy out of trouble with the Hayes office.

The most famous of these movies are the Topper series. (Not the least of which for featuring a rising Cary Grant in the role of George Kirby.) But the lesser known Turnabout is also worth a watch or two.

In this story, bickering husband and wife John Hubbard and Carole Landis are switched by a mystical statue (played by perpetual extra Georges Renavent) , who then proceed to wreck each others’ lives (which are, of course, more complex than each gives the other credit for).

Sure you’ve seen it before. As Freaky Friday three times, or one of those ‘80s movies with one of those ’80s Coreys. I think it was a play in Ancient Greece, and they probably stole the idea from the Upanishads.

But surprising, to me, is how a lot of yuks hold up after 68 years. John Hubbard swishes around the Ad Agency he works for while the elegant Carole Landis (just 21 at the time!) squats and sits open legged like a mook. Adolphe Menjou was the headliner, and he’s fine, but not really the star. The ending is an absurd twist on Thorne Smith’s ending, which results in the husband remaining in his wife’s body until their baby is delivered (as punishment for his infidelities).

All very broad, yes. And at times overplayed. Yet it still works. I’ve seen it twice in the past couple of years (on TCM On Demand) and I laugh every time.

The Boy laughed, which says something.

And the beauty of watching a Hal Roach movie is that, even if you don’t like it, it’s not going to last long.

We decided to take a break from the award-bait movies today and went instead to see Guillermo Del Toro Presents some other spanish dude’s movie El Orfanato.

This is what you call a crap-shoot. Famous directors put their names on others’ films I think because they genuinely feel they have merit, or something worth cultivating. Very often whatever that is ain’t there yet. Horror movies may be the worst, and sometimes the directors may have less pure motives than cultivating talent.

The Orphanage was, in the end, pretty good. I mean that literally, too: The ending is solid, nicely spooky and a not disappointing payoff for the build-up. The beginning is too slow and while the shocks that there are are quite good, there aren’t really enough of them.

This is more suspense than horror. In the end, you could argue convincingly that nothing supernatural happened at all, though that’s sort of a bleak way to look at things.

If you don’t mind a slow build-up, it’s good for a watch.

I caught Juno finally the other night. The writer, Diablo Cody, had a sort-of sex blog for years, which was vulgar and funny, and one of the first blogs I read. (At least, one of the first I read that was called a “blog”; we had these things back before the Internet was a cultural hub. They were called “vanity websites”.) Anyway, nomadic blogger is she, I think she’s currently on MySpace, after having left there and trying blogspot and some other locales.

A lot of the dialogue is distinctly Cody which is good on the one hand, but which I think probably reads funnier than it sounds. And it’s not as edgy or offbeat as it once was: “The Gilmore Girls” used a similar (far less vulgar) style during its run.

But this is nitpicking.

You know, back in MY day, when we did a movie about teen-pregnancy, the girl got an abortion and everyone lived ick-ily ever after. (Seriously, movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Last American Virgin were grotesque. Increasingly so to the degree they reflected reality.)

So there’s a certain poetic irony in the plot of Juno, where the girl starts out pregnant, and it’s really only because she’s something of an iconoclast that she decides to keep the baby. And really, while the movie doesn’t labor the point, it’s hard to pull back from that story without observing that the “safe” option–the one that preserves your reputation and allows you to pretend nothing has happen–is the one heavily encouraged today.

Clearly director Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking) and Cody “get” what it means to be transgressive at a fundamental level. It’s not dressing weird, or listening to a particular kind of music: It’s going against The Way Things Are. (This is seen in Smoking as well.)

One of the ways this movie succeeds this season is by NOT eschewing traditional narrative structures, satisfying resolutions, and trying to be “artsy”. It could be a run-of-the-mill film but for its refusal to take any of the easy outs. At the same time, it doesn’t mock you for wanting some sort of happiness, some sort hope or optimism.

So, I liked it. As The Boy opined, it could’ve had a few more jokes. The first act takes a while to pick up. But this is a solid flick.

The casting is perfect by the way, from Ellen Page as the pregnant girl, Michael Cera as her best friend/impregnator, Allison Janney and J. K. Simmons as Juno’s stepmother and father, Olivia Thirby as the best friend, and Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman as the couple who wants to adopt Juno’s baby.

A special nod to the last two: Garner plays a woman on the edge, she’s controlling and desperate, but conveys a seriousness that wins us over; Bateman plays the reluctant father, cool, but chasing his youth (at 39) who forms a special bond with Juno.

This is a movie that’s easy to like and easier to like the more you reflect on it.

Anyway, nice job Diablo et al. I hope to see much more from all of you in the future.

When I first saw Joe Wright’s take on that old Austen warhorse, Pride and Prejudice, I thought it was a fun angle on something that had been done the same way for many decades. Over time, and re-watchings, I began to appreciate the tight piece of machinery it is, with every scene leading into the next logically and with tremendous urgency. Emma Thompson’s punch-ups captured much of the spirit of Austen (for a modern audience) while condensing the experience. It is the most viscerally exciting interpretation of an any Austen story ever. And, he knows how to shoot Keira Knightly.

So, I was looking forward to Atonement, though I didn’t expect it to be as good, despite the critical praise heaped on it, just because the source material was unlikely to be of the same caliber.

And as I’m watching, I’m seeing the same sort of artistry: Gorgeous cinematography, with composition that reminds of the great James Wong Howe, fine acting, music that cleverly incorporates the typewriter clacks as a sort of sinister percussion. Excellent choice of matching children with their older versions–though I guess, since Juno Temple played herself at both ages, they only had to match up the 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan with Romola Garai (of Amazing Grace).

So, I ask myself, “Why am I not enjoying this?” And my answer is the terribly unprofessional, “It’s just not very good.” The story, I mean, and as it’s portrayed in this filming. This is really the story of Briony Tallis (Ronan and Garai) who tells a lie that ruins two people’s lives, and comes to regret it later.

I mean, that’s it. Confused girl tells lie. Bad things happen. Girl grows up and regrets telling lie.

Of the bad things that happen, the movie focuses on what happens to James McAvoy at Dunkirk, where he’s forced to go (else stay in jail). This is some stunning set design and photography and 20-30 minutes of irrelevance. There’s some resonance added by the end scene, but it really doesn’t excuse the fact that, if the movie is going to be about bad things happening, we really need to see the main character’s reaction to those things.

And we do, a bit, but the bad things she experiences are only after the fact of her regret. In other words, we see her before her change, we see her after her change, but it’s only getting older (and gaining understanding of sex) that causes the change, and we don’t see that.

Clearly Briony has a crush on Robbie, so is her lie an act of jealousy? Doesn’t seem to be. Her character has a longing for Robbie and Cecelia’s relationship, without any of the hatefulness. Basically, her motives for telling the lie come down to not understanding what she sees, therefore her realization of her error comes down to a big “Whoops!”.

And we’re left with a main character (who doesn’t get much screen time, perhaps because she’s not a big box office draw) who is a coward.

Period.

The boy was pissed. He ranks it with Skydivers as the worst movie he’s ever seen.

Me: I thought “Apocalypse” was pretty good for a “Resident Evil” movie.

The Boy: Yeah. A bit silly though. Wouldn’t corporations be the best chance of survival in a zombie-ridden world?

Me: Well, them and hot chicks running around in shorty-shorts.

The Boy: True.

Me: Which, if you can accept the premise that fighting zombies is best done in skimpy clothing, it’s all downhill from there, silliness-wise.

EDIT: This should’ve been RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION. I couldn’t stay awake through Apocalypse, shorty-shorts or no.

Lost somewhere in the, uh, maelstrom that was “Bennifer”, that was the alcohol abuse treatment, that was the uneven acting performances, the record-breaking number of Razzies, was this talented and tragically good-looking guy named Ben Affleck.

Well, I guess we’ve never lost sight of his good looks. How could you really? He’s damn pretty.

But the talent part. Sometimes he’s damn good–like in Kevin Smith films and the underrated Hollywoodland—but he doesn’t seem to flourish in the big budget films. Sort of like Stallone following up the marble-mouthed Rocky with a series of mono-syllabic dim-witted action characters (Rambo, Cobra) people forget that he wrote Rocky, as well as most of his other films.

Affleck looks to be trying to stave off this kind of pigeon-holing both with his role as George Reeves and his direction of today’s movie, Gone Baby Gone. (Of course, he’s been trying to do this all along if the bit with Matt Damon in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back isn’t entirely parodic.)

So, how does he do?

Not bad. Not bad at all.

This movie is based on a Dennis Lehane novel and so invites comparison with Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (by the same author) which, on the one hand, is a pretty gutsy move, but on the other hand–well, Lehane can clearly plot. Affleck’s not padding out Mousehunt, here.

The story concerns a missing girl incident of the sort anyone who’s ever flipped past “On The Record with Greta van Susteren” is familiar with. Casey Affleck and his girlfriend Michelle Monghan are private detectives/repo-men(?) who are hired by the family to augment the police investigation. As the story progresses, we learn more about the missing child’s mother, who is increasingly revealed as a horrible person, and responsible at some level for her child’s disappearance.

As with Mystic River, at the point where a normal detective story would end–the clues pretty much unravelled and the plot explained–this story goes on for another 20 minutes. In this 20 minuets, Lehane’s story presents us with a horrible moral dilemma.

I hated this in Mystic River more than Sean Penn’s Oscar-baiting hamfoolery, as I tend to hate all stories that try to tell us, in the end, man is far more degenerate than even we thought. (It’s sort of porn for cynical intellectuals and I think about as accurate as the sexual kind.) In Gone Baby Gone, however, the challenge is a lot more credible and interesting. And Casey Affleck’s decision is both more straightforward and more complex than the protagonist in “River”.

So, what do we have, once we distill all the Affleck-hype (positive and negative)? Surprisingly great performances from Casey and Michelle, predictably great performances from Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris and Amy Madigan, and also outstanding work from the lesser known John Ashton (as Ed Harris’ police partner), Amy Ryan (as the world’s worst mother) and Titus Welliver as her brother. (I found Titus Welliver’s performance particularly moving.)

Casey knocks it out of the park despite not looking the park at all. (He has more than a few of his brother’s mannerisms, too.) He has to be tough, smart, sensitive, brutal, etc. This is no easy role.

We also get a really good score from Harry Gregson-Williams, who seemed to be channeling the Newmans for this film. (A little bit Randy, a little bit Thomas.)

It didn’t hurt to have Academy Award winning John Toll behind the camera. The cinematography was just so: Not flashy or ostentatious, not lethargic, keeping pace with the story without trying to horn in on it.

One never knows, in the final analysis, what part the director plays (without having been on set) in creating a film. Some directors fit more into the auteur theory than others. And I suspect Ben Affleck’s benaffleckiness is going to encourage a “second shooter” theory.

But really, even if all he did was get out of the way and let everyone else’s talent do the heavy lifting, this is quite an accomplishment. (Movies where the various egos struggled behind the scenes to get their way don’t usually work out.)

In short, not only do I like this movie, I like what it portends for Ben Affleck’s career.