The Movie Couch

Drive (2011) ***½

2012-02-28T04:58:00.000-08:00

Watching this modern-day noir/heist movie is like eating popcorn. It’s delicious, but you are hungry again in an hour. Still, for a popcorn movie it has a lot going for it.

Ryan Gosling plays the nameless main character, whom we’ll call The Driver. This quiet, perhaps semi-autistic loner spends his time working as a mechanic, stunt-driving for Hollywood movies, and driving get-away cars for heists. He is very good at all three jobs, but he doesn’t seem to have anyone in his life except his employer Shannon (Bryan Cranston), who sets up all his legal and illegal driving gigs. The Driver moves through the world quietly, observing, taking few risks, and operating like a precision machine when he is behind the wheel.

One day The Driver makes the acquaintance of Irene (Carey Mulligan), the cute girl down the hall. Irene is almost as into long, intense silences as The Driver, so they get along great. Spending time with Irene and her son starts to bring The Driver out of his shell, but the interlude ends when Irene’s husband Standard returns home from prison. It turns out Standard is a fairly decent human being who wants to turn his life around, but criminals from his past pressure him to commit another robbery for them, threatening his family. Concerned for Irene, The Driver signs on to help Standard pull off the job. Everything goes to hell, and suddenly The Driver finds himself on the wrong side of the wrong side of the law.

Know right now that “Drive” is extremely violent and bloody. The sheer level of brutality is clearly gratuitous, but in a sense the gore is a metaphor for the changes in The Driver’s life. When he is isolated within himself, his life is clean and neat. Then he gets involved with people, and things suddenly get very messy. We also suddenly get to see what a badass The Driver really is, making me wonder, “Who the hell is this guy?” Unfortunately, that question is never answered. Instead, we get treated to heart-pounding ass-kicking and car chases as The Driver tries to protect his adopted family from rogue gangsters (Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman).

Everything about this film is done with style. The camera-work should set a new standard for noir films. Albert Brooks is affably chilling, and I wish there had been more of him. Likewise, the car chases are superb, as befits the film’s title, but there aren’t enough of them.

In a movie full of restrained performances, Ryan Gosling is so restrained he is practically in a straight-jacket. His part is well-played, but the best scenes are the ones where his self-contained intensity is balanced by someone with a lot of personality. I get that The Driver and Irene are kindred spirits, but the scenes between them tend to drag. I think the solution to that would have been more scenes with Albert Brooks, who absolutely owns the screen every time he appears.

Ultimately, “Drive” is a bit heavier on style than substance, and I was ever so slightly disappointed by it. The action is intense (too intense for some), but I wanted a little more explication of the character of The Driver. Another car chase or two wouldn’t have hurt, either. Still, “Drive” is a nice addition to the modern-day heist genre, fitting in well with movies like “Heat” and “The Town.”

3.5 stars

Moneyball (2011) ***

2012-02-14T04:43:00.000-08:00

“Moneyball” is a different kind of sports movie. The theme is familiar: Someone takes a ragtag bunch of misfits that no one else wants and turns them into a successful team. The execution, however, is something new. Most sports movies introduce the inept players, then feature a montage of inspired coaching and practice that turns those losers into champions. “Moneyball” focuses on Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and his geeky assistant Peter Brand (A fictional name given to actual A’s assistant GM Paul DePodesta, played by Jonah Hill), and the montages are of these two going over statistics and mapping probabilities. It can be dry stuff, but it’s a fascinating movie nonetheless, and it‘s based on real life.

The setup begins with the A’s losing their division to the New York Yankees in 2001. It was actually an accomplishment for a small club like the A’s to get as far as they did, considering that they were outspent 4 to 1 by the Yankees. That didn’t really ease the pain, though, when, after the season, the A’s three star players were lured away by richer teams. Left to rebuild with a limited budget, Beane becomes disgusted by the subjective criteria employed by his recruiting scouts. These guys base their recommendations on things like the quality of the sound of the ball hitting a player’s bat, the shape of a player’s jaw, or even how his girlfriend looks. (“An ugly girlfriend means no confidence.”) Beane knows there is something basically wrong with their system, and he has an inkling of how to fix it, but it all gels when he meets Brand, a Yale-educated economics major. Brand has a mathematical model that he believes can identify under-valued players, winning players who can be recruited cheaply, which is just what Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s need.

The two put together an unlikely team, butting heads with everyone else in baseball. They even recruit a washed-up catcher to play first base. Things are rocky at first, and they lose a lot of games, but they stick to their guns, and gradually things turn around. Brand applies his computer models to everything about each player’s game, helping them figure out when to let pitches go, how to get walked more, and ultimately how to get more runs.

Beane and Brand take the A’s farther than they should have gotten, for the poorest team in the league, but they don’t turn the A’s into champions. They do, however, turn baseball on its head, revolutionizing the way teams evaluate talent. I’m no baseball expert, but I’m told that today everybody does it Beane’s way.

Meanwhile, director Bennett Miller has made a rather quiet, interestingly different sports movie. Brad Pitt deserves a lot of the credit for his naturalistic portrayal of Beane. My only complaint is that the film is perhaps a little too subtle. The connection between the statistical analyses and what happens on the field isn’t drawn compellingly enough, leaving the movie feeling a little dry. It’s a good movie, and I think baseball fans will be smitten, but in the end I don’t think “Moneyball” will be a classic sports movie.

3 stars

Beginners (2011) ***1/2

2012-02-05T06:04:00.000-08:00

Imagine that after your mother’s death, your elderly father came out of the closet as a gay man. Imagine that he gets a boyfriend, becomes involved with gay activism, then dies of cancer three years later. Imagine that you yourself are an introverted artist with intimacy issues, desperately trying to learn how to finally make a long-term relationship work. This is the situation inhabited by Ewan McGregor’s character Oliver in this wonderful film. We find Oliver looking back on a series of broken relationships and trying to prevent history from repeating itself with his new love interest, Anna (Melanie Laurent).

Jumping back and forth in time, the film reveals Oliver’s and his dad’s stories at a thoughtful, intimate pace. The film is chock full of food for thought. I was struck by how Oliver’s poor tolerance for intimacy was probably influenced by growing up with his parents’ passionless marriage. It’s interesting how Oliver and his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer) only really get to know each other after Hal comes out. Then too, it’s sad that Hal is so accustomed to keeping secrets in his life that he hides the seriousness of his illness from his lover.

Anna fits right into this little collections of misfits. Like Oliver, she craves intimacy, but has a poor tolerance for day to day closeness with another person. It will be a miracle if these two can make it work, but they are both mature enough to recognize the importance of trying to overcome their own personal failings.

Between all of this adult psychological stuff, the cancer, and the reflections on the struggles of a gay man in our society, “Beginners” could easily feel dark and depressing, yet somehow the movie maintains a lightness. Powered by an Oscar-nominated performance from Christopher Plummer, Hal’s charming sense of humor about himself overflows into the rest of the story. Plus, there is a really cute dog in the movie, and Ewan McGregor‘s interactions with the little terrier are the best I have seen since Jack Nicholson in “As Good As It Gets.”

3.5 stars out of 5

The Help (2011) ***½

2012-02-04T05:19:00.000-08:00

It’s movie awards season, which is nice, because instead of hearing about the latest “Transformers” movie, everyone is talking about movies that are actually good. The movies that are designed to compete for these awards tend to be edgy, intellectual, or independent, in various combinations. There’s always at least one for each year, though, that is very traditional, straightforward, and made for the masses. Films like “Forrest Gump,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The Blind Side” represent simplicity and earnestness in a genre known for complexity and irony. This season that movie is “The Help,” the funny, heartwarming story of black maids and white socialites in segregated, 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi.

Emma Stone plays Skeeter, a headstrong debutante who returns to Jackson from college to find that Constantine, the black woman who basically raised her, is gone, with no explanation. Of course, it’s obvious to the heartbroken Skeeter that her parents have, for some reason, fired Constantine. Meanwhile, Skeeter gets back into her lifelong social circle, dominated by sorority types who dropped out of college once they found a husband. While Skeeter, who wants to be a writer, gets a job at the local paper, her friends raise babies and keep house, except they don’t really do those things; their maids do. Skeeter gets a good look at how rudely her friends treat their maids, some of whom actually raised these girls, and she gets the idea of writing a book about what life and work is like for these maids.

This is no easy task in the early ‘60’s. The maids fear for their jobs and their freedom. In addition to the usual Jim Crow laws against interracial marriage and such, Mississippi apparently also had a law making it a crime to write anything advocating racial equality. It was also illegal for an unescorted white woman to enter the black part of town. Skeeter overcomes these obstacles, convincing several maids to share their stories for a book that will shake Jackson society to its core.

I resisted seeing “The Help” for a while, figuring that I knew exactly what I was going to see, and for the most part I was right. There was one character I did not see coming, however, the lonely misfit Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain). From a poor family, she marries a successful man from Jackson high society, but the rich bitches won’t accept her as one of their own. She is a poignant, but often hilarious character, and her relationship with her maid Minny (Octavia Spencer) is very sweet. Otherwise, there are no huge surprises. The rich women are terrible, while the maids are noble. The movie’s tears are well-balanced by laughter. All the acting is superb. Viola Davis (who plays the main maid character), Octavia Spencer, and Jessica Chastain all have well-earned Oscar nominations, but the whole cast deserves kudos.

It’s possible, I suppose, that some people’s attitudes about race might change as a result of seeing “The Help,” but I don’t know how likely that is at this point in the game. For most folks, the movie will simply serve as funny, heartwarming entertainment. This is an un-nuanced story about a certain aspect of the civil rights struggle, with plenty of happy endings to go around. Nothing life-changing here, but if you get a chance to see it, it’s a good time.

3.5 stars out of 5

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) ****

2012-01-16T05:01:00.000-08:00

What are the things that we value in a good movie? The list includes good cinematography, good acting, a riveting, believable story, and special effects good enough to seem real and allow us to forget that we are watching a movie. How then to explain the phenomenon of Cult Classics, movies that are beloved by a vocal minority despite lacking most of those qualities?

“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension“ (usually shortened to “Buckaroo Banzai“) is a Cult Classic in every sense of the term, sporting laughable special effects, a disjointed narrative, and over-the-top performances by unknown actors and stars alike. While loved by its adherents (myself included), the film is totally unfit for a mass audience. Show this to a normal girl on a first date, and there will not be a second date! The sad thing is that this isn’t even necessarily a “low-budget” film. To put this in perspective, the first Star Wars movie was made in 1977 for $11 million, and “Return of the Jedi” in 1982 cost roughly $33 million. Modern-day sci-fi classic “District 9” cost $30 million in 2009. These are all slick-looking, well-produced sci-fi films. “Buckaroo Banzai,” with a budget of 12 million 1983 dollars, is a complete mess. And yet, like an abused lover, I can’t help loving it.

The titular hero, Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller), is a mild-mannered polymath, a leading neurosurgeon, physicist, racecar driver, and rock star. World-famous due to a series of comic books based on his exploits, Banzai has a loose, worldwide network of friends and short-wave radio operators who help him in his battles with evil. He surrounds himself, Doc Savage-style, with a small team of gun-toting Renaissance-men who also make up his rock band.

What can I say about the plot? There is one, but it is so bizarre, and the film is edited so poorly, that it takes a long time to figure out what is going on. Basically, the Earth gets caught in the middle of a fight between two alien species. The more warlike species, the Red Lectroids, are secretly exiled on earth. When Buckaroo Banzai makes news by crossing into the 8th dimension and back, the Red Lectroids decide to steal his invention and use it to get back to their home planet, where they plan to destroy the Black Lectroids. When the Black Lectroids get wind of all this, they give Buckaroo Banzai an ultimatum: Stop the Red Lectroids, or the earth will be destroyed in order to prevent their escape.

As I said, it takes a long time for that plot to come together, and meanwhile the audience is treated to a series of slapped-together scenes that don’t make much sense. They are, however, hilarious if you just relax and enjoy the ride. Peter Weller plays a great straight-man as Buckaroo Banzai, while a bunch of bizarre characters and events revolve around him. John Lithgow is delightfully manic as a scientist whose brain has been possessed by one of the Red Lectroids. Jeff Goldblum struts around in a ridiculous cowboy outfit. Christopher Lloyd plays a Red Lectroid named John Bigboote (emphasis on the last letter). Ellen Barkin sports a dreadful haircut but still manages to be sexy as hell.

Eventually, the whole thing turns into a slap-happy space-Western. Everyone in the film appears to be having a fabulous time. If you can put aside your usual expectations of a comprehensible narrative, then you’ll have a good time, too!

1 or 4 stars out of 5, depending on how you look at it.

Roman Holiday (1953) ****

2012-01-08T05:57:00.000-08:00

Anyone who wants to understand the allure of Audrey Hepburn need only watch “Roman Holiday,” the movie that made her a star. With her refined, elfin features and devastating smile, there isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t want her for his girlfriend. Hepburn is so charming in this film that as a Hollywood newcomer she won the Best Actress Oscar for the role.

Hepburn plays Princess Ann, a bored royal who accidentally escapes from her handlers while on a diplomatic mission in Rome. She is befriended by a handsome American, Joe (Gregory Peck), who recognizes her, but pretends to believe her story of being a student who slipped out of school. Joe convinces her to enjoy her freedom by spending the day in Rome with him and his friend Irving (Eddie Albert). Little does Ann know that Joe and Irving are actually a reporter/photographer team, secretly documenting Ann’s adventures around Rome for what they hope will be a scandalous, exclusive story.

Gregory Peck, Eddie Albert, and Albert’s smooth-looking beard are all excellent, although Peck has to stretch a bit to play a money-hungry reporter. (Somehow I doubt that Peck ever played a real villain.) It is Audrey Hepburn who makes the film, however. She just lights up the screen. This is not the deepest character, but Hepburn lends real humanity and dignity to Ann while displaying some decent physical comedy chops.

Ultimately, “Roman Holiday” is a fun little comedy about Duty, about people paying the price to do what they know is right. It’s an odd mixture, but it works.

4 stars

Withnail and I (1987) ****

2012-01-04T05:18:00.000-08:00

“Withnail and I” is sort of a British “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” It’s the story of a couple of absolute reprobates drinking and drugging away their youths in a filthy London flat. Having dirtied every single dish in the house, and faced with the possible and unsurprising presence of vermin in the kitchen, the two decide that a vacation is in order. They secure the use of a country house from Withnail’s uncle Monty and embark on a hilarious weekend in which they display their complete unsuitability to exist anywhere outside of the city. Dealing with a wood stove, cooking for themselves, and negotiating muddy trails is entirely outside of their skill set, and the pair are saved only by the appearance of Withnail’s uncle.

It is never clear whether Withnail and Marwood are gay, but Monty certainly is, and the dirty old man takes an aggressive shine to Marwood. His advances border on the criminal, and the boys are ultimately forced to retreat back to the city.

I’ve been seeing a lot of British stuff lately, and “Withnail and I” may be the Britishest. It definitely isn’t for everyone, but I found it hilarious. Withnail (Richard E. Grant) is the most incorrigible character, completely oblivious to consequences, and always full of good/bad ideas. Owing to the English accents, the dialogue can be hard to follow, but even if you only catch half of what is said, it’s still twice as funny as most of what is out there. I highly recommend checking it out.

4 stars out of 5

Hellboy (2004) ***

2011-12-31T05:54:00.000-08:00

The thing about comic-book movies is that most of them suck. They are assembled by committee to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the PG-13 universe. Still, the nerd inside me wants these movies to be good, so if there is any chance of a comic-book movie being worthwhile, I will usually check it out. Sometimes it’s a complete disaster, like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” Sometimes the product is brilliant, as with the X-Men movies. “Hellboy” fell somewhere in between for me, although probably more on the positive side overall.

I think the key to enjoying this movie is to just go with it. The bizarre premise is that the Russian sorcerer and advisor to the Czar, Rasputin, is not dead, but lives on through the power of some multi-dimensional, Cthulhu-like, destruction god. During one failed attempt to bring his god into our world during WWII, Rasputin instead brings over a baby demon with a stone hand. When Rasputin and the Nazis are foiled by Allied troops, the demon falls into the hands of an American paranormal expert. Instead of being raised to help bring about the end of the world, he is raised by a loving father and trained to save the world from various paranormal threats. Hellboy (Ron Perlman), along with a centuries-old, bibliophile fish-man, lives in a secret government facility, brought out Ghostbuster-style to fight the occasional demon, and sneaking out from time to time to visit his pyrokinetic girlfriend, Liz(Selma Blair). Meanwhile, Rasputin hasn’t given up his plans for Hellboy and his tentacled god.

“Hellboy” would be an absolute disaster if it weren’t for some excellent performances, particularly on the part of Ron Perlman as the cigar-smoking, gruff, stone-fisted Hellboy. He lends a world-weary humor and humanity to the character that allows the ridiculous plot to be fun rather than stupid. Rupert Evans is not particularly interesting as the government agent trying to learn to manage Hellboy, but the rest of the cast provides more than adequate support. Jeffrey Tamboor is his usual crackling self, and Selma Blair actually exudes enough sarcasm to hold her own with Perlman. Actually, one of the best performances comes from a guy named Ladislav Beran, playing a clockwork, Nazi assassin who doesn’t say a word, but moves in the creepiest way possible.

“Hellboy” doesn’t elevate the comic-book movie as a genre, but it does show how the genre looks when it is done right.

3 stars

Limitless (2011) *** ½

2011-11-22T05:12:00.000-08:00

Within 60 seconds of the start of “Limitless” I was asking, “Did David Fincher direct this?” Turns out it was a guy named Neil Burger, but he is clearly influenced by Fincher movies like “Fight Club” and “Phone Booth.” I mean that as a compliment. “Limitless” is not quite up to the level of “Fight Club,” but it has that kinetic, intelligent action feel.

Bradley Cooper plays Eddie Morra, a failing writer who stumbles into a stash of experimental, intelligence-enhancing pills. The results are astounding. Not only can he recall everything he has ever seen or heard and synthesize all that data into useful conclusions; his writer’s block is completely cured, and the drug improves his ambition and confidence. Eddie cleans up his apartment, writes a bestseller, then moves on to the stock market. The future is wide open, but other people want the drug, too, and then of course there are the side effects…

The thing about watching “Limitless” is that it makes you feel smart, kind of like watching a porno makes a guy feel well-hung. It’s the opposite of what you would expect, but it happens, and it just adds to the fun. Otherwise, the movie is edge-of-your-seat thrilling, with excellent performances all around. I have to admit that I have been a bit slow to get on the Bradley Cooper train. I guess I just think the guy looks like he would be a dick. I’m ready to declare myself a fan, though, because he is excellent in “Limitless.”

As enjoyable as “Limitless” is, the plot is not quite as tight as it should be. The “big twist” is something you see coming from miles away. Also there are a couple of scenes that strain credulity to the breaking point, such as when Eddie gets a much-needed dose of the medication by drinking the blood of a crook who is on the drug. The final scene also felt a bit off; not bad enough to ruin the movie, but it wasn’t up to the level of the rest of the film. Still, it’s a fun ride, and a vicarious look at what it might be like if you could unlock the full potential of your brain.

3.5 stars out of 5

Never Let Me Go (2010) ****

2011-11-20T05:36:00.000-08:00

“Never Let Me Go” is a science fiction story of sorts set in an alternate present that is different from ours only in that the science of organ and tissue transplantation has been perfected so that it is widely used to greatly extend and improve most people’s lives. To meet the demand for organs, cloned human beings are created and raised in special schools so that their organs can be harvested when they reach adulthood. This heartbreaking film is their story.

The tale starts with Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and Ruth (Keira Knightley) as children. They have no idea that their life in a boarding school is any different from anyone else’s reality. They just know that they are never allowed off the school grounds, and that a couple of times a year a truckload of used toys, books, and clothes is brought around…a very exciting time for them. Kathy and Tommy develop a natural bond and seem destined for young love, but Kathy’s jealous friend, Ruth, steps in and makes Tommy her boyfriend first. Locked in this unyielding love triangle, the three grow into young adults, and the time approaches for them to start making the organ “donations” that will weaken and then kill them.

Interestingly, the young clones never openly question their status as cattle. They are allowed to wander freely, but none seem to attempt to escape their surgical fate. Still, their yearning for a human identity comes out in various ways, such as their widespread desire to find their “original,” the person from whose genes they were cloned. There is also a widespread myth among the clones that if a young couple can prove that they are truly in love with each other, they will be given a deferral of a few years to live together before beginning their donations.

As a young woman, Kathy is given the job of a “carer,” a clone whose donation time is delayed while they help other clones recover from their operations. This system presumably helps maximize the number of healthy organs that can be used from each clone before they die. In this job, Kathy is reunited with her old friends Tommy and Ruth, both weakened from organ removals, and the three get a chance to resolve some of the issues of their youthful friendship against the bitter backdrop of their foreshortened adult lives.

The question that immediately comes to mind is, “How can people allow a system like this to exist?” The answer, of course, is to look at slavery or segregation. Seemingly good people will do incredible ethical acrobatics to justify to themselves an arrangement that benefits them. In “Never Let Me Go” we eventually learn that there was initially some public outcry against the cloning, but that the public was so pleased with the health benefits of the transplants that such resistance eventually subsided. Meanwhile, one would think that the clones would try to escape their fate, but it seems that a lifetime of being told what their place is keeps them quiescent enough.

“Never Let Me Go” is an atypical sci-fi movie, set as it is in a gray, quaint, recent-past England, but parallels can be drawn to “Bladerunner.” Like the replicants in “Bladerunner,” the clones are created for the uses of others, and they face an untimely death surrounded by an uncaring world. Their desperate efforts to love and live as much as they can in the little time they have, and to make some sense of their cruelly short lives is, of course, a mirror of our own struggles. In the joy, regrets, bitterness, and even acceptance of Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth we see our own lives.

“Never Let Me Go” is a wonderfully made, well-acted film. It isn’t something to watch if you are looking for a barrel of laughs, but when you are ready for a thought-provoking drama, this is one to check out.

4 stars out of 5

The Trip (2011) ****

2011-11-13T05:02:00.000-08:00

The thing you need to know about Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon is that they are beloved comic actors in the U.K., and have frequently worked together. As such, they often play off of their own public personas in their work, presumably exaggerating and playing off the public perception of Coogan as a bit of a self-important jerk, and of Brydon as the humbler, long-suffering friend. I have no idea what these two would be like in real life, but in “The Trip” they play these stylized versions of themselves as they travel around the English countryside, trying out country restaurants for an article Coogan is supposedly writing.

No need to worry too much about the plot of “The Trip,” because the important part here is all the little things that happen on the journey itself. The conversations, jokes, and songs that pass between these two had me rolling, and you can tell that much of it is improvised. In one particularly brilliant scene, the two bicker over their competing Michael Caine impressions (with Rob Brydon clearly the winner to my ear.) There are also some very poignant insights, as in this exchange:

Brydon: “Don’t you find it exhausting chasing and bedding all these young women?”
Coogan: “Don’t you find it exhausting taking care of a baby?”
Brydon: “We’re forty; everything is exhausting.”
Long silence.

As much as I loved “The Trip,” it is clearly not for everyone. It is very talky, very British, very dry. It’s the sort of thing you will like, if you like this sort of thing.

4 stars

Starter for 10 (2006) ***

2011-11-10T14:53:00.000-08:00

“Starter for 10” is weighed down by the worst title since “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.” Outside of that, it’s a charming, if formulaic, romantic comedy.

James McAvoy plays Brian, a lad from a working class, Essex family who gets an opportunity to attend a prestigious London university. Essex is sort of the New Jersey of England, so he’s a bit lost in the big city at first, but he quickly adapts. He joins the school’s University Challenge team, which is a quiz competition where the best teams compete on TV. Brian also finds himself vacillating between two gorgeous girls. The first is a lanky hippy named Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and the other is a posh, blond bombshell with a thing for dangerous men named Alice (Alice Eve). While these beauties distract Brian from his academic goals, his thuggish Essex buddy Spencer (Dominic Cooper) shows up at college to explain that he may have to go to jail for theft and fraud.

If you can’t guess what happens next, then I’m not gonna tell you, but the main weakness of “Starter for 10” is that every plot twist is completely predictable for anyone who has seen a couple of movies before. For such a well-acted movie, it couldn’t be more formulaic. There are the meet-cute scenes. There are a couple of classic, running headlong through the university campus scenes. There’s even some older-people-naked humor, a staple of British comedy.

Other than having a plot that is exactly the same as every other romantic comedy/coming-of-age movie, “Starter for 10” is quite enjoyable. The jokes are good, the acting is excellent all around, and the lead actresses are very easy on the eyes. It’s a British movie, but the accents are mostly understandable, and really the only thing standing between this movie and an American audience is the title, which I think refers to something the quiz show announcer might say.

3 stars

Paul (2011) ***

2011-10-16T06:05:00.000-07:00

In “Paul,” nerdy, British comic/sci-fi fans Graeme (Simon Pegg) and Clive (Nick Frost) take their dream vacation to the U.S. to visit Comic-Con, then RV around to different fabled UFO sites. Near a place called the Black Mailbox, they encounter an actual alien, escaped from a government base. The alien, Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen), hitches a ride, and the trio find themselves running from government agents (Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, Joe Lo Truglio), rednecks, and the crazy father of a girl (Kristen Wiig) whom they accidentally abduct.

I think the key to watching “Paul” is having reasonable expectations. I saw some negative reviews of the movie, and I think those folks may have suffered from looking at the awesome cast list (see above) and thinking, “Whoa! Best. Comedy. Ever!” “Paul” is clearly not the best comedy ever, although with that cast, you couldn’t be blamed for expecting a bit more than you get with this movie. Nick Frost and Simon Pegg wrote it, and it must be said that their script is a rather straightforward, sophomoric, ’80’s-style alien comedy. The all-star comedic cast is so good, however, that the movie is still highly entertaining. The film relies a bit too heavily on bathroom and stoner humor as well as non-stop homages to sci-fi films past, but at the end of the evening it’s a pretty good time. The one caveat is that the portrayal of Kristen Wiig’s character and her father as creepy, fundamentalist Christians is typically over-the-top and will probably offend a lot of people of faith.

There isn’t much more to say about “Paul.” No new ground is broken here. This is a formulaic, but fun comedy with a great cast. Don’t expect the moon, and you won’t be disappointed.

3 stars

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) **

2011-10-15T18:39:00.000-07:00

Netflix’s “watch it now” feature is almost as bad as cable for inducing a person to re-watch movies of questionable worth. You know what I’m talking about. You flop down on the couch, pull up the menu, and you’re like, “Hey, ‘Meet the Fockers’ is about to start.” Next thing you know you’ve lost 2 precious hours of your life. “Watch it Now” does the same thing to me. Just this year I have suckered myself into re-watching “Ghostbusters” and “The Running Man,” and now I can add “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” to the list.

Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) are the stoner characters who loitered outside the convenience store in “Clerks,” then showed up in the next few Kevin Smith movies, including “Mallrats” and “Chasing Amy.” They are really hilarious in small doses, but the fact that these guys are essentially the comic relief in movies that are already comedies should tell you something about how broadly drawn they are. I found that an entire movie about these characters is a bit too silly for me.

The story is that Jay and Silent Bob learn that their old friend Banky (Jason Lee’s character from “Chasing Amy”) is making a movie based on them and their pot-dealing exploits. The pair initially want to get some money out of the deal, but when they get a look at the negative internet comments circulating about them (“These guys are too stupid to live.” “F--- Jay and Silent Bob. F--- them in their stupid a-----s!”) they decide to try to stop the movie, hoping to silence the internet name-calling. What follows is a wacky road trip as the guys hitchhike from New Jersey to Hollywood, hooking up along the way with Shannon Elizabeth and her gang of hot babe heist artists, including Eliza Dushku wearing all the blue eye shadow in the world. The movie features cameos from a ton of characters from the previous Kevin Smith movies, which is fairly fun, but there are too many instances of winking at the camera to let us know they are in on the joke.

“Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” has some laughs, but never reaches the level of Kevin Smith’s better films. What fun there is here is strictly for Kevin Smith fans who have seen his other films, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend sitting down for a second viewing.

2 stars out of 5

Love and Other Drugs (2010) ***½

2011-09-18T05:32:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you heard some of the buzz about this movie having a lot of nudity? Well, believe the hype. “Love and Other Drugs” delivers on the soft-porn front. Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway look great without their clothes, and the movie is not stingy with the sex scenes. What is pleasantly surprising is that it is actually a good movie when everyone has their clothes on, too.

Gyllenhaal plays Jamie, a handsome guy with a talent for selling things and for getting ladies to like him. He stumbles from retail sales into the murky world of pharmaceutical promotion, “The only entry-level job where you can make over $100K a year.” That’s no joke. Drug reps can make a ton of money if they can manage to do one thing: Get doctors to prescribe their medication. By any means necessary.

In a doctor’s office, Jamie meets Maggie (Hathaway), a young woman with early-onset Parkinson’s disease, and they crash into each other sexually like a couple of freight trains. They both commit to keeping things purely physical, but of course they aren’t able to keep that promise, and we get treated to a very sweet, well-played love story.

Meanwhile, Jamie learns how to navigate the shark-infested waters of drug promotion, but his career really explodes when he goes from selling antidepressants to marketing Viagra. Suddenly, doctors who used to avoid or ignore him start seeking him out. Everyone wants free Viagra samples, and Jamie leverages that new power to get doctors to prescribe his other meds as well.

I wish I could say that all the sleazy drug-rep shenanigans are exaggerated, but it is really spot-on. The scene where Jamie steals another rep's samples off a doctor’s shelf? That has happened. The scene where Jamie interjects, right there in a doctor’s office, to tell a patient that his drug might work better than the one the doctor is prescribing? It’s happened. The lunches and snacks, the free trips, the “preceptorship” where a doctor is paid to allow a rep to hang out with him all day? All true. The film does a good job presenting the variety of physician responses to all the marketing. Some of them completely shun the reps; some are partly open, especially if the rep has something he wants (like Viagra samples); and some, like Dr. Knight (Hank Azaria), allow themselves to get really chummy with the reps. Even Dr. Knight is presented with complexity. He discusses the frustration of having to see so many patients each day that he can’t take the time to do good medicine. Much of his time gets sucked up fighting insurance companies, both for his own pay and for coverage of his patients’ meds and testing. He seems like a decent doctor who has burned out fighting a broken system.

It’s a shame, really, that this movie became known mainly for the nakedness, because there is some good philosophical material here. There are plenty of movies about dealing with your lover developing a fatal disease, but in “Love and Other Drugs” the girl already has the disease. The question is, “Can a selfish guy like Jamie love and commit to someone whose ten to twenty year outlook is so bleak, and even if he can, should he? Is a young man being fair to himself by selecting a mate whom he will probably be lifting on and off the toilet in the not-so-distant future?” The second big question of the film regards Jamie’s pharmaceutical job. Can he continue to do this job in good conscience? Here the film stumbles a bit by failing to present the entire picture. They show the dark side of drug-repping, but they fail to depict the fact that most drug reps do not consider themselves sleazy salesmen. They believe that they are serving an educational function. The film shows companies hiring former cheerleaders and beauty queens, and that is real, but most of the reps I have known have some sort of science background. That doesn’t mean that the information they share with doctors is balanced or objective, but I think that on some level the reps believe that it is. Jamie doesn’t seem to have any such delusions.

With excellent acting, an engrossing love story, and two great-looking people getting naked, “Love and Other Drugs” is well worth seeing. Watch it with a date, not with your parents.

3.5 stars

Cyrus (2010) **1/2

2011-09-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

Several years ago I saw a movie at the Sundance Film Festival called “The Puffy Chair,” by rookie filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass. The movie was a rough-around-the-edges romantic dramedy, and not a bad little independent film. The Duplass brothers showed promise. “Cyrus” is the first thing I’ve seen from them since, and it looks like now that they have access to a bigger budget and top-notch actors, they still want to make rough-around-the-edges, independent, romantic dramedies.

The best thing about “Cyrus” is the cast, which is just bursting with talent. John C. Reilly plays John, a heartbroken guy who still isn’t over his ex-wife (Catherine Keener) after seven years. His life starts looking up when a hottie named Molly (Marissa Tomei) takes a liking to him, but things get complicated when he meets her clinging, passive-aggressive, grown son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill). From then on it’s just one annoying act after another on Cyrus’s part as he tries to split John and Molly up so he can have his mom for himself.

Yep this is one of those comedies of frustration, where we are supposed to laugh uproariously at the cringe-inducing acts of some inappropriate character. “Cyrus” is not nearly as broad as, say, “What About Bob?”, which is to it’s credit. The problem is that by making the characters and situations more real, they make it that much more difficult to find humor in the situation. The film does make the point that Molly is just as much a part of this co-dependent, dysfunctional mother-son relationship as Cyrus. That makes it harder to sympathize with Molly. I was rooting for John to just cut his losses and go find himself a saner woman.

I seriously considered ending “Cyrus” early, but the strength of the acting kept me watching, and I suppose I’m glad I did. Molly and Cyrus do sort of redeem themselves by the end, and I find that I like the movie better looking back on it than while watching it. I think the movie was mis-marketed, with the trailer seeming to suggest a raucous, “Meet the Parents”-style comedy, which this definitely is not. The Duplass brothers have a knack for working with genuine, complex human emotion, but I won’t become a real fan until they figure out how to have more fun with it.

2.5 stars out of 5

Crazy, Stupid Love (2011) **

2011-09-11T06:43:00.000-07:00

There’s something about Steve Carell that inspires confidence. Even though he plays the same schlubby nice-guy in almost every movie, he does it with such decency and adultness that it’s hard for me to think he would ever be in a bad movie. Combined with some good reviews I read, Carell’s presence led me into “Crazy, Stupid Love” with unrealistically high expectations. I think I was expecting something along the lines of “Punch Drunk Love” or maybe “Magnolia,” but what I got was a very typical Hollywood love story that starts out somewhat promisingly, but devolves into trite clichés. Carell plays Cal, a schlubby nice-guy whose wife Emily (Julianne Moore) announces over dinner that instead of dessert, she wants a divorce. Heartbroken Cal takes to hanging out at one of those bars with expensive drinks, where guys in nice suits pick up hot women, but he doesn’t fit in at all in his khakis and sneakers. Night after night he wallows in self-pity and girly cocktails, telling the bartenders and anyone else who will listen his sad story. Finally, Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a sharp-dressed ladies’ man, takes pity on Cal and offers to help him clean up his act. What follows is your typical makeover segment, where Cal gets new clothes, new hair, and a new attitude, followed by chicks. Meanwhile, the film sets up a goofy love hexagon, where Cal’s son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) is in love with his babysitter, who is in love with Cal. Cal, despite his newfound success with multiple women, really wants his wife back. While she has some similar feelings, the guy she cheated on Cal with (Kevin Bacon) is pushing to become the new man in her life. While Cal sorts through all the madcap misunderstandings inherent in this type of movie, superstud Jacob meets his own form of romantic Kryptonite in the green-eyed form of Emma Stone. With such a great cast, I think I was justified in expecting more from “Crazy, Stupid Love,” and in fairness the first third of the film is fairly entertaining. Unfortunately, the excellent performances become strained as the increasingly contrived plot leads us from one cliché to the next. The best line in the film comes when Cal’s hopes of a reconciliation with Emily have just been derailed by one of those Hollywood Misunderstandings. As he watches her drive away, heartbroken, it starts to rain on him, and Cal cries out “What a cliché!” Unfortunately, the movie never manages to transcend those clichés.2 stars out of 5

Orgazmo (1997) ****

2011-08-13T04:57:00.000-07:00

There was a time when being a fan of the work of Trey Parker and Matt Stone made you part of a cool cult. I was part of that cult. I loved “South Park,” and I had seen the little, animated Christmas short that started it all. I also watched Parker and Stone’s first movie, a bizarrely hilarious musical called “Cannibal! The Musical.”

Nowadays, there is nothing cultish about loving Parker and Stone. After achieving Hollywood success with their animated movies “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut” and “Team America: World Police” the guys have become the toast of Broadway with their critically acclaimed musical “The Book of Mormon.” It’s nice to see them getting the recognition they deserve, but I can’t help missing, just a little, being part of that cool, nerdy cult.

“Orgazmo” hearkens back to those earlier Parker/Stone days, before they had access to big budgets and big studio backing. This is reflected in the film’s NC-17 rating, which is an absolute joke, and reflects the sheer hypocrisy of the MPAA ratings system. I really can’t even say what specifically would have gotten it that rating. The violence is cartoonish, and the sex is WAY less graphic than what you can see in any number of R-rated films. I would bet that if this film had been made under a big studio, it would have been rated “R”, rather than the kiss-of-death NC-17. “Orgazmo” is a movie about porn; it is not itself anything close to a porno. What it is is dead hilarious.

Trey Parker plays Joseph Young (a combination of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the two most important LDS prophets). Joe and his fellow LDS missionary are walking the streets of L.A., holding their copies of the Book of Mormon and cheerfully getting doors slammed in their faces. When they intrude on a porno shoot, security guards attack them, and Joe regretfully uses his martial arts to defend himself. The porno director takes a look at the strapping, fresh-faced Joe and his fighting skills, and realizes that Joe would be perfect for a superhero porno film. Now of course, no good Mormon boy would normally make a porno, but Joe is desperate to make some money so he can marry his Utah girl in the LDS Temple. With the offer of $20,000 and a promise that he can keep his clothes on (A “stunt cock” will be brought in for all the sex scenes.), a Mormon porn star is born.

Trey Parker is perfection in this role. Joe maintains a sense of shocked revulsion at the pornography, but he can’t help getting into the acting, as evidenced by the superhero voice he uses in his scenes. Matt Stone kills in his goofy role as a photographer. (“I don’t want to sound like a queer or nothin’, but that’s some hot porn action!”) Michael Dean Jacobs is hilarious as Maxxx Orbison, the director. His frustration with Joe’s prudishness is quite convincing. My favorite “Orgazmo” character, however, is Choda-boy (Dian Bachar), the porn-hero sidekick who is a wealthy inventor when he isn‘t making porn.

“Orgazmo” is not porn, but it is definitely not for everyone. While there isn’t any graphic sex, the discussions about various sex acts are quite graphic. Don’t say you weren’t warned. There are also many for whom the goofy, over-the-top humor just won’t click. For me the movie works, because you have to get in touch with your inner teenager to watch it, but you don’t have to turn off your brain. “Orgazmo” never tries to take itself seriously, so it never stops having fun.

4 stars

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) ****

2011-07-20T04:58:00.000-07:00

I never got around to seeing this a few years ago when it was a big sensation and won an Oscar. Lately, though, I’ve been working on my Spanish, so I have put some Spanish language films on the list. “Pan’s Labyrinth” turned out to be a great choice, because the actors speak Spanish more clearly than in some of the other films I have watched. This won’t be an important point for most viewers, but after re-watching “Nine Queens” recently and having a hard time telling for sure that the Argentinean actors were even speaking Spanish, it meant something to me. More important, of course, is that it is a crackin’ good movie.

Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed this dark adult fairy tale in which a young girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) attempts to escape from her miserable circumstances during the Spanish civil war. Ofelia’s widowed mother (Maribel Verdu) has married a captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), of Franco’s fascist army. Vidal turns out to be a ruthless, viscious leader, intent on rooting out the local resistance fighters by any means necessary. He is dutifully attentive to the needs of Ofelia and her mother, but his only real interest seems to be to have Ofelia’s mother bear him a son, which seems to be necessary for his macho self-image.

Thrust into this physically comfortable but emotionally hostile situation, Ofelia is distracted by a fairy, who leads her into a wooded labyrinth and ultimately to the bottom of a well, where she meets a faun. The faun explains that Ofelia is not the helpless, fatherless girl that she thinks she is. She is actually the re-incarnated daughter of the King of the underworld. If she can complete three dangerous, magical tasks, she can claim her birthright and join her real father. Meanwhile, Ofelia is surrounded by the violence and intrigue of the Spanish Civil War, as her stepfather tightens the clamps on the resistance. Her mother is distracted by a difficult pregnancy, so Ofelia is left to her fairies and her quests.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is, quite simply, an example of what good filmmaking looks like. Ofelia’s magical world is as visually spectacular as it is creepy. The story is good, and the acting is excellent. Sergi Lopez is particularly chilling as the brutal Captain Vidal. I did find the darker elements of the movie disturbing, and no one should mistake this for a movie for kids. For adults, though, it’s an excellent film, and it will even help you brush up on your Spanish.

4 stars

Cedar Rapids (2011) ***½

2011-07-17T06:24:00.000-07:00

When I hear the name Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I tend to think of some backwater, middling, mid-western city. (In fairness, I know nothing about the place.) For Tim Lippe though, Cedar Rapids is very much the big city. A grown man, probably in his forties, Tim has never left the small, farming town where he grew up and has worked his whole adult life as an insurance agent. Beloved by his clients for his honesty and earnestness, he is mostly ignored by his co-workers, and we get the impression that the only sexual experience he has is a current fling with his old junior high school teacher.

When the star salesman at Tim’s agency dies, Tim (Ed Helms) is handed the job of going to Cedar Rapids for a small insurance convention where he will pitch has agency for a prestigious award. Every aspect of this trip, including flying and staying in a hotel for the first time, terrifies Tim. Rube that he is, though, he is generally likeable, so he winds up getting befriended by a wacky trio played by John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. Over a couple of days, these new friends help Tim come out of his shell, even as he learns some ugly truths about the insurance industry.

I didn’t hear a thing about this film during its theatrical release. It was a review of the DVD in “Entertainment Weekly,” suggesting that it was an overlooked gem, that caught my eye. They were right; the movie is charming. It’s pretty silly and over-the-top, but not in an obnoxious, Will Ferrell way. Ed Helms (Andy, from “The Office”) is a comedic genius, and John C. Reilly just knocks it out of the park. Even Anne Heche is funny and surprisingly sexy in this. Fans of the movie “Office Space” may recognize Stephen Root, who played Milton in that film, in a small role. It was also a treat to see Alia Shawkat, who played Maeby on “Arrested Development”. Here she plays a hooker with a heart of gold.

“Cedar Rapids” isn’t going to set a new standard for comedies or engender world peace or anything, but it’s a fun little movie and well worth checking out.

3.5 stars out of 5

24 Hour Party People (2002) ***

2011-07-13T05:23:00.000-07:00

I’ve recently become a fan of a couple of geniuses of British comedy, Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan. If the names aren’t familiar, the faces might be. The two have done a ton of work in England, and have both done small roles in a number of U. S. productions. I know Brydon best from his role as Uncle Bryn, in “Gavin and Stacey.” I was less familiar with Coogan until recently, but I recognize his face from movies like “The Other Guys” and “Tropic Thunder.” He actually looks a bit like Eric Idle (Monty Python), but Coogan’s humor is more along the awkward lines of Ricky Gervais.

Now that I’ve talked about these actors’ comedy skills, I have to point out that while they are both in “24 Hour Party People,” it is not, strictly speaking, a comedy. The movie has plenty of humor, but what it is is a rather dizzy portrayal of the 1980’s Manchester music scene, which gave us brilliant bands like Joy Division, New Order, James, and The Happy Mondays. Steve Coogan stars as Tony Wilson, the TV personality who started Factory Records and introduced these bands to a grateful world. He discovered and promoted Joy Division, mourned the suicide of their lead singer, and nurtured the rest of the band as they re-emerged as New Order. He discovered the Happy Mondays, and struggled to get them to stay sober long enough to make some records. While promoting all this great music, he also started the first rave club, The Hacienda, kicking off a worldwide movement. As good as his ear for music was, Wilson was a terrible businessman (according to the film), and he managed not to really make any money out of the whole affair. Still, he made possible a tremendous amount of good music, and he put his hometown of Manchester on the music map.

Watching “24 Hour Party People” is a bit like being at one of Wilson’s raves. The handheld camera work and documentary style are disorienting even if you are familiar with the music. Coogan occasionally breaks character to speak directly to the camera, which takes some getting used to, and they sort of assume that you know these bands and their music. It’s a really fun ride, though. You just have to hold on and let it sweep you along. The one caveat is that this movie is really only for fans of the music. If you have never heard of the bands I mentioned here, then I don’t know that this story will hold any interest.

3 stars

The Other Guys (2010) **

2011-07-02T06:18:00.000-07:00

The thing is, you either like Will Ferrell or you don’t. I find him tedious. I can’t say that he has never made me laugh, but his specialty seems to be to do something that is funny for one second, and stretch it out to one minute. His humor shifts tone in ways that I find ugly. If he finds himself doing something that is actually funny, he moves it into some dark place, just to see if the audience will keep laughing. That problem with tone pervades “The Other Guys,” a movie that has a hard time figuring out what kind of comedy it is going to be.

Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg play a couple of cops. They aren’t cool, swaggering cops who catch and kill bad guys in big chase sequences. They are “the other guys,” the desk-jockeys who fill out the paperwork. Wahlberg’s character is chained to a desk because of a mistaken shooting. Ferrell’s character just likes to do paperwork. They finally get out on the street and chase some bad guys when the paperwork puts them on the trail of a Ponzi scheme. In between there’s a lot of ineptly done character development, including a running joke about how Ferrell’s character thinks his gorgeous wife (Eva Mendes) is plain-looking.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I even thought this movie would be worth watching, and the answer is Mark Wahlberg. There’s just something about the guy. I used to think he just played the same character in every movie, but over the years he has won me over. Unfortunately, Wahlberg’s charm is not enough to save this movie.

“The Other Guys” is not completely without laughs. There’s a funny bit where a couple of cops convince Ferrell’s character that in order to fit in he needs to “accidentally” fire his gun inside the station, which they call a “desk pop.” Ferrell screaming, “I need an MRI. I need an MRI.” after an explosion is pretty hilarious as well. Mostly, though, the movie features Ferrell on an entirely too-long leash, going all over the place with his shtick while the film lurches from one nonsensical scene to another. If you find it while flipping through channels in a hotel, it might be worth sitting through, but otherwise, give it a skip.

2 stars out of 5

The Hurt Locker (2008) ****½

2011-06-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe I waited so long to see this. I really need to get better about watching these Oscar-nominated movies. “The Hurt Locker” is an Iraq War movie directed by a woman, so I figured it was a real talky, heavy-handed, message movie about how horrible war is, and this war in particular. It’s none of that. This is a fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat action movie that does not suck in any way.

Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner), Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) form a 3-man Ordinance team, specializing in diffusing the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that dot the Iraqi landscape. The work is incredibly risky, and on every job the stress level is intensified by the fact that they are watched by loads of Iraqis, most of whom are just curious, but any of whom could be an insurgent with a detonating device.

No “Best Director” Oscar has been more deserving than the one Kathryn Bigelow won for “The Hurt Locker.” In every scene she brings the viewer right into the situation. You really feel the intensity of being in this dusty, claustrophobic place, surrounded by hostile foreigners. Every scene crackles with the possibility of death.

“The Hurt Locker” is not an anti-war movie, but it doesn’t shy away from the contradictions inherent in these modern conflicts. Iraq was easy to invade, but it’s hard to hold. Tasked with rebuilding the country and keeping peace between murderous factions, our soldiers are vulnerable every minute to attack from the people they are trying to help. If they are overly friendly, they may get killed, but if they are too zealous in defending themselves, they wind up hurting some civilians, which is not only bad in itself, but fuels the insurgents‘ cause. This is more mentally exhausting for some men than for others. Specialist Eldridge is in counseling to deal with his guilt over failing to shoot a shopkeeper before the man could detonate a bomb that killed the team’s former leader. If he had hastily killed an innocent shopkeeper, however, he probably would have needed counseling for that, too.

Sergeant James, on the other hand, seems to thrive on the work. It’s like he was born to defuse bombs. In a fascinating conversation with Sgt. Sanborn, he reveals that his coolness under pressure isn’t born of any Zen philosophy or great courage; he simply has less fear than most people. Growing up, he was probably the goofy redneck always pulling crazy stunts. Back home, he’s just another guy with a dangerous penchant for risk-taking, but in war, he is in his element. Towards the close of the film there is a telling scene in which Sgt. James is back home in the grocery store, trying to pick out cereal for his kid, confounded in a way that he never was in Iraq.

“The Hurt Locker” is no message movie; it is not anti-war or pro-war. I can’t say how true-to-life it is. My friends who have served in Iraq tend not to watch movies about it. All I can say is that this is a gripping action movie that deserves a place alongside such films as “Saving Private Ryan” and “Full Metal Jacket” in the cannon of great war movies.

4.5 stars out of 5

Hot Dog (1984) ***

2011-06-26T06:01:00.000-07:00

Sports movies are a hit-or-miss proposition. Between the acting and the action, a lot can go wrong. However heavily the film focuses on the sport itself as opposed to the human drama, my opinion is that they have to get the sport right. “Hot Dog” doesn’t get much else right, but this movie really nails the skiing action.

The plot is standard ‘80’s sports drama. Fresh-faced skier Harkin Banks (Patrick Houser) picks up a sexy hitchhiker named Sunny (Tracy Smith) on his way to the big, international, freestyle skiing competition in Squaw Valley, CA. Once there Harkin is befriended by some happy-go-lucky, underdog skiers, and he makes an enemy of the reigning champion, asshole Austrian Rudi Garmisch (John Patrick Reger). The insipid plot continues from there, following the standard formula for these movies. What really makes the movie bad is not the formulaic plot, though, but the acting. It’s like Patrick Houser and Tracy Smith are competing to see who can act worse. Every actor in the movie sucks, with the possible exception of David Naughton, who plays an alcoholic former ski-champ who takes Harkin under his wing. Oh yeah, Shannon Tweed is in this, and while she can’t act either, she does look really good naked.

That brings up one other positive aspect of the movie, the nakedness. I didn’t keep a running count of the bare breasts, Joe Bob Briggs-style, but there’s a fair amount of soft-porn action to distract you from the bad acting.

Ultimately, though, the saving grace of “Hot Dog” is the skiing. They got a talented group of stunt skiers to lay down some seriously sweet extreme skiing. They blast down the backcountry chutes, go off cliffs, and rip up moguls, and it’s all genuine skiing. During the competition scenes, they even have an event called “ballet,” which is pretty much dancing down the slope. I had never seen this before, and it’s way cooler than you would think. I suppose some might ask, “Why not just watch a Warren Miller ski film?”, to which I would respond, “Have you ever seen Shannon Tweed getting her breasts soaped up in a giant tub in a Warren Miller movie?”

1 star for the acting, 5 stars for the skiing, so we’ll settle at 3 stars out of 5.

Play Misty For Me (1971) *

2011-06-14T05:48:00.000-07:00

As Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut, this film does not reflect particularly well on him, but I suppose that after this movie he had nowhere to go but up. Eastwood’s work has always been hit or miss for me. “Unforgiven,” and “The Outlaw Josie Wales” are awesome, but in movies like “Million Dollar Baby“ he indulges an entirely unacceptable level of melodrama and sentimentality. “Play Misty For Me” shows these faults at their worst.

Eastwood plays David, a smooth-voiced, late-night radio DJ with a weakness for the ladies and a soft spot in his heart for a blue-eyed artist named Tobie (Donna Mills, sporting a bizarre girl-mullet instead of the gigantic eighties hair for which she is remembered). David lets himself get picked up by a fan named Evelyn (Jessica Walter) for a one night stand that Evelyn forces into a multi-day fling. When Tobie shows back up, David has no interest in seeing Evelyn anymore, but she turns out to be the kind of girl who won’t take “No” for an answer. He tries to be assertive, but he is impotent against Evelyn’s increasingly crazy, clingy, and ultimately violent behavior, which winds up putting his career, his life, and everyone he cares about in danger.

It’s all very reminiscent of “Fatal Attraction.” To be fair, “Play Misty for Me” came first, but that’s the only advantage this movie has. The sad thing is, none of the actors deserved this movie. Everybody does a pretty decent job with their character, even Clint Eastwood, who basically plays the same squinty-eyed stoic he always plays. Jessica Walters even does pretty well as the Borderline Personality Disordered Evelyn. The problem here isn’t the acting, it’s the movie itself. The plot is painfully obvious, lumbering along as it does toward the terrible acts of violence that you can see coming miles away, but before you get to them you have to suffer through endless, schmaltzy, soft-focus love scenes between David and Tobie.

Even for a Clint Eastwood fan, this would be a good one to skip. Re-watch “Fatal Attraction” instead.

1 star

Being John Malkovich (1999) ****1/2

2011-05-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

I had forgotten what a brilliant, hilarious piece of work this is. I remembered the weirdness, the puppeteering, Catherine Keener’s bitchiness, but what grabbed me this second time around is that this movie is hilarious. Hilarious and cool as shit.

John Cusack plays Craig Schwarz, an incredibly talented puppeteer in a world where there just isn’t much demand for that sort of thing. He takes a job as a file clerk for a company located on the 8 & 1/2 floor of a building, a half-sized floor that boasts cheap rent, but forces everyone to walk hunched over. Craig meets and falls pathetically for Maxine (Catherine Keener). He would gladly leave his mousy wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) and her menagerie of pets for Maxine, but she is completely disinterested. That all changes when Craig discovers, behind a file cabinet, a hidden tunnel that leads into the actor John Malkovich’s mind. Anyone who crawls into the tunnel gets to see the world through Malkovich’s eyes for 15 minutes, before being dumped into the grass next to the New Jersey turnpike.

Maxine isn’t any more interested in the scientific or philosophical implications of this tunnel than she is in dating a puppeteer, but she immediately sees the monetary potential in being able to charge people for the opportunity to “be” John Malkovich. While she and Craig rake in the cash, Maxine falls in love with Lotte, but only when Lotte is in Malkovich’s body. Would you believe me if I said it gets even weirder from there?

“Being John Malkovich” is simply a wonderfully funny movie, and a wild ride. It manages to warp the viewer’s sense of reality without resorting to any of the cheap tricks that plague “head trip” movies. It isn’t all a dream, or a hallucination, or somebody’s fantasy. In the best science fiction tradition, the filmmaker creates a bizarre, new, technological possibility, then has interesting, fully realized characters negotiate that possibility. The result is engrossing and hilarious.

4.5 stars out of 5

A Quantum of Solace (2008) ***

2011-04-24T09:24:00.000-07:00

It’s nice to know there are some things in this world you can count on. The James Bond formula is one of them. Start with the opening credits over some lame, mildly titillating graphics, then kick the movie off immediately with an action sequence. Then Bond reports to M for some gentle scolding about “crossing the line,” and we’re off on another disposable adventure with Agent 007 and some nifty gadgets. It took me a while to get around to this latest (and so far last) installment, but there’s really no urgency to this sort of thing. It isn’t like people I know are going to be talking about the movie and ruin the plot for me!

Truth is, it’s a waste of time to summarize the plot of a Bond film. Suffice to say that Daniel Craig is once again ruggedly handsome and sufficiently deadly as 007. I really do like his hard-edged take on Bond, and I hope he will get to do a couple more of the films. The action in “Quantum of Solace” is pretty much standard-issue Bond. There’s a car chase, boat chase, plane chase, you get the picture. They don’t waste a lot of time on fancy gadgets in this one, which is refreshing. Bond just relies on his wits, his gun, his fists, and his cellphone. For Bond girls this go-round we get Gemma Arterton, who is rather uninspiring as Strawberry Fields, although she does meet her end in a very nice homage to an earlier Bond film. Fortunately, the main Bond-babe is the amazing-looking Olga Kurylenko, who tints her skin to play a part-Latina assassin.

One disappointment about the modern-day Bond movies is the lack of memorable villains. From the Timothy Dalton movies on, I can’t name or describe a single bad guy. I generally just recall a bunch of vaguely greasy characters involved in things like terrorism, environmental degradation, or global corporate conspiracies. Yawn. Give me a one-eyed guy with a cat any day. Even better, give me Goldfinger, the best Bond villain ever.

For a while it looked like financial problems at MGM might make this the last Bond movie, at least for a while. Fortunately, a deal with Sony has resurrected the series, with the next movie release planned for 2012. Will they finally create a villain half as interesting as Daniel Craig’s Bond? We should be so lucky.

3 stars.

The Switch (2010) ***

2011-03-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it pays to listen to the critics, and sometimes it pays to listen to a second opinion. I completely wrote this movie off back when I saw the trailer for it. It looked like just another lame, romantic comedy, and critics didn‘t seem to care much for it when it was in theatres. Also, the premise: a guy hijacks his female friend’s artificial insemination, seemed too similar to some Jennifer Lopez movie that was also getting advertised back then. Fast forward to the present, when this movie, and all other movies dealing with artificial insemination, have been relegated to history. The DVD section of Entertainment Weekly had a good review of the DVD, suggesting that it is an overlooked gem, so my wife convinced me to give it a try. It turns out this really is a fun, little comedy.

Jason Bateman plays Wally, basically the same likeable, slightly awkward character that Bateman always plays, maybe a little more misanthropic and neurotic this time around. He is secretly in love with his best friend, Kassie (Jennifer Aniston), but lacks the walnuts to make a move. Instead he hangs out in the “friend zone” while they both suffer through one failed relationship after another, until Kassie decides to have a baby via artificial insemination. Rather than just having the procedure done in a doctor’s office, Kassie throws a party, where everyone gets to meet the handsome, Viking-like donor, Roland (Patric Wilson). A mixture of alcohol and Xanax puts Wally in a position to “accidentally” pour out Roland’s sperm sample, then replace it with his own. Thanks to the roofie-like effect of the Xanax, Wally remembers nothing the next day.

Thinking that New York might be a tough place to raise her son, Kassie moves back to the mid-west, leaving Wally to continue his string of doomed romances. When she moves back to NYC a few years later, Wally is delighted to meet her son, whose odd quirks seem hauntingly familiar. Meanwhile, Kassie strikes up a relationship with Roland, whom she believes to be the father of her son. Hilarity ensues, along a surprisingly tasteful helping of real emotion.

While there are some good laughs in “The Switch,“ it’s the emotional side that elevates the film beyond it’s hackneyed premise. Jason Bateman may not have the greatest dramatic range, but he has a genuineness that plays really well here. His interactions with his son, Sebastian (Thomas Robinson) hinge on the fact that Sebastian is rather precocious and doesn’t like being talked down to, while Wally probably wouldn’t know how to patronize a little kid even if he needed to. Here’s one classic piece of father-son dialogue:

Wally: So, how do you like your new school?
Sebastian: How come everybody asks me that?
Wally: Because you’re a kid. There’s nothing else to talk about.

Jennifer Aniston is also surprisingly good in this role. I’ve always found her quite charming, but pretty bland as an actress, but she really brings some personality to the role of Kassie.

“The Switch” is as formulaic as you might expect, and certainly not the best romantic comedy ever, but good acting saves the day. Your life won’t be missing anything if you don’t manage to rent it, but it is worth a watch if you get the chance.

3 stars out of 5

Kick-Ass (2010) ****

2011-03-17T19:35:00.000-07:00

It’s a good question, really. With all the fans of superhero comics out there, why doesn’t anyone ever put on a costume and go out to fight crime? This is the question posed by Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), the quiet high-school student who is the protagonist of “Kick-Ass.” Sick of being preyed on by local thugs, Dave buys a colorful diving suit, a mask, and a nightstick, then proceeds to get his ass handed to him by a couple of hoodlums and a hit-and-run driver. This would discourage most people, but Dave is motivated by something that I think many of us have felt: He is sick of seeing assholes prey on the weak while everyone else turns away. He heals his wounds, puts the costume back on, and manages to bumble into a situation where he actually helps someone.

The instant celebrity of the “superhero” known as Kick-Ass inspires the populace, even though Dave has no “powers” and doesn’t even have any athletic talent or fighting skills. His only edge is that his original injuries leave him with some nerve damage that supposedly makes him impervious to most pain. Other than that, he’s just a fed-up citizen with a nightstick. His activities do, however, bring him to the attention of a pair of more capable, if less likely, masked vigilantes. The mentally unbalanced Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) wears a Batman costume and takes his 11-year-old daughter Mindy, also known as Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) along on his crime-fighting missions. Both are ridiculously bad ass experts in gung-fu, gun-fu, and everything in between, and they have no qualms about killing criminals. The pair have a grudge against a mafia boss, and Kick-Ass/Dave winds up in the middle of it.

Most action movies, and definitely most comic book movies, try to get a PG-13 rating to maximize their access to the teen audience. Not “Kick-Ass.” Between her foul mouth and her penchant for bloodshed, Hit Girl earns this film an R all by herself. Chloe Moritz is actually pretty awesome, and it will be interesting to see how she turns out as an actress. Nic Cage chews the scenery admirably in a movie that is actually suited to his bizarre talent. Aaron Johnson didn’t blow me away or anything, but he does alright in the title role.

Through a combination of sincerity and audacity, “Kick-Ass” manages to overcome its formulaic plot and genuinely entertain. I like that the movie doesn’t apologize for glorifying vigilante justice. A lot of good people would like to do exactly what Dave, Big Daddy, and Hit Girl do. I dig that this movie doesn’t do the standard, hypocritical, Hollywood thing of profiting from displays of violence, then throwing in a public service announcement about how violence is never the answer. (Batman, anyone?) You know what? Sometimes violence IS the answer. Yeah, I understand the dangers of vigilantism, but sometimes I want to watch a movie where a decent citizen who isn’t a cop or a soldier kicks the bad guys’ asses. “Kick-Ass” is that movie.

4 stars

Pierrot, le Fou (1965) and Breathless (A Bout de Souffle, 1960)*

2011-03-08T18:55:00.000-08:00

This week we watched this pair of films by French New Wave mastermind Jean-Luc Godard, and I‘m not yet sure what I think of them. Godard was clearly a highly influential filmmaker. As part of the ‘60’s New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), he made an effort to break with the conventions of traditional Hollywood-style filmmaking. He used hand-held cameras, long tracking shots, curious cuts between shooting angles, and long talking scenes. The effect of his experiments is to sacrifice photographic perfection in favor of intimacy with the actors. This works, which is why so many of his methods have been adopted by modern directors like Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater and others. Unfortunately, once we get intimate with his characters, we find that there isn’t much to them. In these two films, at least, Godard seems to have focused on style at the expense of character and story.

“Breathless” is the better of the two, in my opinion. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel, a small-time crook who hits the big time by killing a cop. He flees to Paris to collect some money he is owed and hook up with Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American girl with whom he is in love, to the extent that he is able to love. The film explores what it means to love someone, especially for an emotional midget like Michel. The film never manages to convince me that Michel is capable of viewing another person as more than an object to be used, but he does seem to love Patricia in that he is unable to drag himself away from her, even when staying puts him in danger of getting caught by the police. As for Patricia, I can’t really figure out what she is feeling for Michel. She allows him to make her an accessory after the fact to murder, so I suppose there is some devotion there, but in the whole affair I get the feeling that she is just watching herself from outside to see how self-destructive she might allow herself to be over a man whom she doesn’t even necessarily like. I suppose we have all been guilty of emotional confusion and delusion, and this was Godard’s way of exploring that. At the end of the day, I don’t know that Godard said anything extraordinary, but he does manage to make Jean Seberg and Paris look absolutely charming.

Godard worked with Jean-Paul Belmondo again in “Pierrot le Fou” (Peter the madman). Belmondo plays Ferdinand, a bored husband who casually leaves his family one night to run off with a crazy ex-girlfriend. Marianne (Anna Karina) is all mixed up with various criminal types, and she and Ferdinand wind up fleeing across France with a rifle and a suitcase full of money. This is a classic setup for a fun, action-packed, Bonnie-and-Clyde-style movie, but somehow the actors never manage to make life on the lam seem all that compelling. Any normal person would be wildly turned on to be on the run in the company of someone as sexy as Anna Karina or Jean-Paul Belmondo, but Michel and Marianne seem to be bored before the journey is even begun. I don’t think this is completely the fault of Godard’s script. Some interesting things happen to the two fugitives, but Belmondo in particular seems to be sleep-walking through most of the movie. It’s a shame, because “Pierrot, Le Fou” could be a classic example of New Wave film. There are some interesting uses of voice-over to create commentary and inner dialogue, unique cuts between camera shots, and the actors even break into song at times. The beginning of the movie has a particularly scathing scene at a high-society party, where all the conversation is in the form of commercials. (It is this party that drives Michel to run off with Marianne.)

“Pierrot, Le Fou” also showcases a general amorality that seems to be popular in French movies. In American movies, outlaws have a code of their own, and if they break that code or harm an innocent person, they are usually punished for it. In French movies, on the other hand, the stars will do truly rotten things to innocent bystanders and never be made to pay for their deeds. Some people think of the French as socialists, but judging by their movies, I think the French are naturally anarchists. Socialism may just be what it takes to keep those crazy bastards in line.

I feel bad that I wasn’t more into these movies, since Godard is considered such a master. My take on Godard so far is that he was an innovator of filmmaking style, who helped others make some truly great films. As for these two films, they are just okay.

Breathless - 3 stars
Pierrot, le Fou - 2 stars

Iron Man (2008) ***

2011-03-06T18:58:00.000-08:00

I’m probably the last person in the free world to see “Iron Man.” It was pretty much what I expected: a slightly better-than-average comic book movie that, despite competent acting, is still mostly aimed at 14-year-old boys. I’m sure you know the basic idea behind the movie and the comic it‘s based on: Billionaire inventor Tony Stark builds himself a high-tech suit of armor that allows him to fly and shoot various weapons from his limbs.

Robert Downey, Jr. plays Stark with humor and confidence, but I was actually disappointed that the film didn’t offer up more depth to this character. In the comics, Stark has a history of alcoholism. With Robert Downey, Jr’s addiction history, it would have been interesting to see him explore this territory, but the film doesn’t go there. Likewise, the all-star supporting cast (Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s assistant, Jeff Bridges as Stark’s business mentor, and Terrence Howard as his military liaison) lend a level of class to this action flick, but they don’t really get to develop their characters. This is par for the course for an action movie, but it isn’t just explosions that take up the time. “Iron Man” spends a LOT of time with Stark in the lab, developing his suits, and while I liked seeing this side of the story, it actually got to be a bit tedious. The movie could have easily been twenty minutes shorter if they had trimmed some of these scenes. Then there’s the ridiculous plot-line involving Stark having pieces of metal shrapnel lodged in his heart, so he has to wear an electro-magnet on his chest to hold the metal in place so he doesn’t die. It’s ludicrous.

My problem with “Iron Man” is that I went into it believing the hype about how Downey’s amazing performance made this a different kind of comic-book movie. It doesn’t. This is the same old song, just played by better musicians. There’s a lot of good material available in this story, but the filmmakers don’t bother to take advantage of it. There’s that alcoholism issue, for one. The film could have also delved more into Stark’s motivations for getting out of the weapons-design business. The movie does touch on this a little, and I like where they were going. Stark believes that there is nothing wrong with designing better weapons and selling them to the “good guys,” but when he learns that his weapons are getting into the hands of our enemies, he starts to view the enterprise as futile. If everyone is getting his weapons, then he isn’t really tilting conflicts in favor of the good guys, he is just profiting off making those conflicts deadlier. He comes to believe that if he applies his genius to peaceful pursuits, clean energy production for example, then he can make more of a positive impact on the world, and possibly make some of those conflicts unnecessary. “Iron Man” suggests all of this, but I think they should have run with it. They could also have done more to explain what drives Jeff Bridges’s character. Instead the movie sticks with pretty typical hero and villain archetypes.

Why am I quibbling about the narrative in a comic-book movie? I don’t believe we should have to settle for mediocrity in a story just because of its genre. We have always had stories about heroes and gods, beings with special powers who carry on the age-old battle between good and evil. Comics are just the modern incarnation of that tradition. Comic books and the movies made from them are targeted mostly at kids, which explains much of their shallowness, but there is nothing that says kids don’t deserve better. I think these stories deserve to be told well. “Iron Man” is better than most of the genre, but somehow it keeps the audience at a distance, and I wound up not liking it as much as, for example, the X-men movies. Like so many other action movies, and like Tony Stark himself, “Iron Man” has a problem with its heart.

3 stars

Paths of Glory (1957) ****

2011-02-21T20:03:00.000-08:00

Kirk Douglas has played some amazing roles. It seems to me that more than most actors, he has taken on roles of men who fought heroically against tyranny and lost. My favorite of these is the character Jack Burns, in “Lonely are the Brave,” based on Edward Abbey’s novel “The Brave Cowboy”. Burns is the classic, American, rugged individualist. He is pitted against the faceless machine of progress and industrialization. Inevitably, he is beaten, but he never surrenders. In “Man Without a Star,” Douglas plays a cowboy fighting a losing fight against the fencing off of the American West. Then, of course, there is Spartacus, who attempts to lead a slave revolt against the Romans.

To this list of dissidents portrayed by Kirk Douglas can be added Colonel Dax. In Stanley Kubrick‘s “Paths of Glory,” Dax is a commander in the French army. An ambitious general orders him and his men on a hopeless attack on the Germans. When the assault inevitably fails, the embarrassed general puts some of the soldiers on trial for cowardice in the face of the enemy. Colonel Dax steps up to defend them and finds himself opposing an uncaring military machine that considers the lives of good men to be worth less than the pride of an incompetent general.

Kirk Douglas plays Dax with brilliant outrage, and the rest of the cast is excellent. I can find nothing, really, to criticize in this film. It’s a little hard, watching Douglas and several British actors speaking English, to remember that all the characters are supposed to be French, but in the end it really doesn’t matter what the nationality is. I suspect all armies are similar in how they deal with these situations.

War movies tend to be either gung-ho, like the movie “Gung-Ho,” or anti-war, like “Apocalypse Now.” As good as it is, “Paths of Glory” suffered at the box office, probably because it doesn’t have a definite place in the war-movie framework. The film doesn’t make any statements about war itself, rather it is a tale about the evil workings of large, machine-like organizations, an evil which can outstrip that of any individual person within the machine. Colonel Dax, like so many of Kirk Douglas’s other characters, represents the moral superiority of the individual over the machine. This is an excellent movie, with superior performances on all fronts. It does not really have any iconic scenes or stunning cinematography, and I cannot say that it belongs in the ranks of truly classic movies, but it is well worth watching.

4 stars

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) ***½

2011-02-07T05:25:00.000-08:00

Some books and movies gain immortality by morphing into a cultural concept that eclipses the original work. “Catch-22” is way better known as a figure of speech than as a book or movie. “Deliverance” is a terrific film, but all most people know about it is dueling banjos and “squeal like a pig.” It’s the same way with “The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit.” The book and movie have been superseded by this cultural concept of a 1950’s company man in a non-descript suit, desperately trying to climb the corporate ladder. It’s a shame that what has been lost is actually a fairly riveting story of a man finding himself and figuring out what is important in life.

Gregory Peck stars as Tom Rath, a WWII vet with a small house in Connecticut, a desk job in Manhattan, and a lot to think about. As he rides the train to work each day in his titular, gray suit, he has plenty of time to ruminate on the war, and all he did and saw there. We gradually come to realize that Tom’s life since the war has been something of a shadow life, always under the specter of the amoral, life-and-death reality he knew in Europe and the Pacific. His wife, Betsy, regrets the change in him, and she transfers her dissatisfaction to their house. She says the place is depressing and represents giving up, but of course she is really talking about Tom. He finally takes a higher-paying job at a large, media company in an effort to appease her. There, he meets Ralph Hopkins, the president of the company, and he sees that Hopkins’s success has come at the price of a loveless marriage and a spoiled, ungrateful child. Meanwhile, Tom becomes involved in a legal dispute over his grandmother’s estate, and a ghost from the war comes back to haunt him. His and Betsy’s quiet, little life becomes anything but boring.

This sounds like it could be some claustrophobic melodrama along the lines of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe,” but it isn’t like that at all. Tom and Betsy are so decent that it is easy to root for them, and while the plot makes you worry, it never gets too dark. The film is long for its era, 2 ½ hours, but this gives us time to really think about these characters and what they are struggling with, which is the existential question of what kind of person to be, what kind of life to live. Gregory Peck is not the most expressive actor, but in a movie this long there is time for him to develop his character slowly, and the performance actually ends up being quite satisfying. The film is helped along by some other intriguing characters, including Ralph Hopkins (Fredric March) and Judge Bernstein (Lee J. Cobb).

For me, the point of the movie is not that all those men in gray suits are mindless drones. It is that while they may look alike, they are all human beings, with stories of their own, and their own struggles over what is important in life. Tom ultimately decides that being with his family is more important than advancing his corporate career. He decides to be a “9 to 5 man,” partly because he sees how Mr. Hopkins’s devotion to his work ruined his family life. Hopkins expresses admiration for Tom’s choice, but he also makes a valid argument that without men like himself, who are driven to build great enterprises, there would be nowhere for the “9 to 5 men” to work. It is this kind of embrace of complexity that saves “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” from being a melodramatic morality play. It’s a shame that this complexity has been lost in the popular memory of the movie.

“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” is not quite a must-see classic. The film can be melodramatic at times, and Gregory Peck’s stoic acting takes a while to get used to. The movie’s slow pace and 2.5 hour length mean that it isn’t a movie to see when you are distracted. It does have moments of brilliance, however, and it’s well worth checking out. It's also worth noting, for fans of the show "Mad Men," that stoic, complicated Tom Rath is the prototype for the Don Draper character.

3.5 stars out of 5

Crazy Heart (2009) ***½

2011-02-01T05:45:00.000-08:00

Even though Jeff Bridges won the Best Actor Oscar for “Crazy Heart” last year, it took me until just recently to see the movie. Even after the Netflix disc arrived, it sat for a while. It’s a testament to how a raunchy comedy or a big-budget action movie is easy to throw in the DVD player, but a serious drama is too easy to keep putting off. These critically acclaimed dramas just always seem like they might be a real downer, and ruin an otherwise fine evening. Of course, once we finally settled in to watch it, “Crazy Heart” was completely engrossing and not a downer at all.

The only bad thing about the film is the name of the main character, Bad Blake. It says a lot for how convincingly Jeff Bridges inhabits the role that I was able to get past what a dumb-ass name his character had chosen. Blake is a fading country music legend who is desperate to rekindle his career, or at least make enough money to keep himself in decent whiskey. What is cool about Blake is that despite how his alcoholism is ravaging his body, he never misses a show. He may show up drunk, but even when he is playing in a small-town bowling alley, he manages to give something to the fifty to a hundred people who show up to see him play. When he meets and falls for a reporter (Maggie Gyllenhaal), however, Blake has to face up to how pathetic he and his life have become. It takes a little while, but he is finally inspired to clean up his act and start writing songs and caring about life again.

Maggie Gyllenhaal really redeemed herself for me in this movie. I had most recently seen her in “The Dark Knight,” which is an excellent movie, but Gyllenhaal has a real do-nothing, damsel-in-distress role that left me feeling very unimpressed with her. In “Crazy Heart” she is considerably better as a single mom trying to figure out whether to take a chance on a bad bet like Bad Blake.

No film is so good that it doesn’t get a little better when Robert Duvall pops in. Duvall adds some class to the role of Blake’s bartender, recovering-alcoholic, best friend. His presence in this movie is especially cool for those who recall Duvall’s 1983 movie “Tender Mercies,” in which HE plays a down-and-out country singer trying to put his life together.

Another supporting character that deserves mention is the music. In addition to a background of classic country by the likes of Waylon Jennings, George Jones, and Townes Van Zandt, the film features Jeff Bridges singing some beautiful original songs by Stephen Bruton and T Bone Burnett. The creative duo deservedly brought home the Best Song Oscar for this film.

At the end of the day, though, “Crazy Heart” belongs to Jeff Bridges, and he knocks it out of the park. I’ve worked with a lot of alcoholics, and he really gets that part of the performance right. Bridges doesn’t just play Blake as a drunk, though. He plays him as a poet with a big heart and the soul of a true entertainer.

3.5 stars

Vampire Killers (2009) ***

2011-01-22T06:29:00.000-08:00

The original title of this movie was “Lesbian Vampire Killers,” which tells you half of what you need to know about it. The other half is that it stars the brilliant James Corden and Mathew Horne, who played Smithy and Gavin in the hilarious BBC series “Gavin and Stacey.” What’s that? You haven’t seen “Gavin and Stacey?” My friend, it is urgent that you immediately go to Amazon.com and either download this series or order it on DVD. Watch it twice, because half the jokes pass you by the first time due to the characters’ heavy Essex and Welsh accents. Even if you do miss half the jokes, the show is still twice as funny as most everything else on TV.

I had just finished watching the “Gavin and Stacey” series, and was itching to see more of those characters. The creators of “Vampire Killers” basically read my mind and created a movie specifically for me by taking a couple of the “Gavin and Stacey” guys and putting them in a movie with a bunch of sexy girls who make out with each other and show their boobs. Genius! Corden and Horne play Fletch and Jimmy, a couple of characters pretty much identical to their “Gavin and Stacey” roles. On a hiking trip they wind up in a little town that, due to an ancient vampire curse, is ruled by hot, lesbian vampires. These gals feed on anyone passing through town, turning the women into fellow vampires, and feeding on the men. The boys battle this curse with the help of a Dutch babe (MyAnna Buring), an intense local priest, and a few pints of beer.

“Vampire Killers” is every bit as silly and exploitative as it sounds. It spoofs vampire movies, much like “Shaun of the Dead” spoofed zombie flicks, although perhaps not with the same level of cleverness. James Corden is an absolute comic genius, reminding me in some ways of Ricky Gervais. Paul McGann is quite good as the local vicar, who is hilariously oblivious to the fact that all of his supposedly arcane knowledge about how to kill vampires has been widely disseminated through pop culture. This won’t be on anyone’s list of “Best Satires,” but if you liked the “Gavin and Stacey” characters, and/or if you like to see girls kiss and get their tits out, then “Vampire Killers” is a guaranteed good time.

3 stars out of 5

Ghost Busters (1984) **

2011-01-16T05:39:00.000-08:00

The thing about “Ghostbusters” is that it was an absolute meg-hit. There’s nothing you can say about this movie that will change the fact that it is a defining piece of 1980’s pop-culture. Every English-speaking person of a certain age knows what you mean if you say “Cross the streams,” or “I am the Gatekeeper; are you the Keymaster?” I am honestly curious, however, if the movie holds any relevance at all for people outside my generation. The question is, should people who are now in their teens and twenties be renting and watching this film? Having recently re-watched it, I can’t really think of a reason that they should.

The basic plot is that a few guys start a ghost-catching business right when paranormal activity in New York city is going through the roof due to the impending resurrection of some Sumerian god of destruction named Gozer. They wind up doing battle with Gozer to save the earth, or at least New York (That part is never made perfectly clear.) What the film is really about, however, is Bill Murray’s dry humor, which is an unfortunate fit for an action comedy. The actor who was so brilliant in “Quick Change” and “Groundhog Day” is actually just kind of annoying in “Ghost Busters.” He is meant to be full of rakish, anti-authoritarian charm, but there is no depth to his character. He starts out as a complete fraud, milking the field of the paranormal for money and chicks, and he winds up saving humanity. There is never any moment of transformation, though, no personal crisis. His actions as the hero and the romantic lead feel contrived and inevitable, as does the whole film, barreling along as it does from action sequence to comic interlude and back again. There is no time, of course, to develop the characters played by Dan Akroyd, Harold Ramis, or Ernie Hudson, the other ghostbusters. They serve merely to bolster Murray’s character as he woos Sigourney Weaver and, you know, does that saving the earth thing.

Sigourney Weaver, thank God, provides one of the few bright lights in the film, supplying a character with a modicum of real humanity, and serving as the emotional center of the movie. As the comic center of “Ghost Busters” I would nominate not Bill Murray or Dan Akroyd, but Rick Moranis. Moranis takes his biggest role up to that time and runs with it as Sigourney Weaver’s nerdy across-the-hall neighbor.

Those two good performances aside, my experience of re-watching “Ghost Busters” did not live up to my memories of the film. That should be no surprise. I first saw it in theatres, as a teenager. Of course, there are movies that I loved then that I still love, like the first Indiana Jones movie, “Die Hard,” and “The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonsai.” It isn’t that I couldn’t appreciate something good back then, I just had more tolerance for lazy, formulaic crap at that age. These days I know that with almost 100 years of film to choose from, there is no reason to settle for crap.

2 stars

Yentl (1983) ***

2011-01-09T05:50:00.000-08:00

I basically watched this on a dare from my wife. I can’t say that I ever had a desire to watch a musical movie starring Barbra Streisand, in which the most famous song is called “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” How shocked was I then to find myself actually liking the movie?

Yentl (Streisand) is raised by her single-parent father in a Jewish community somewhere in eastern Europe. Her dad is a rabbi and a bit of a rebel. He secretly teaches her to read the sacred texts, the Torah and the Talmud, something that is traditionally forbidden to women. When her dad dies, Yentl cuts her hair, dresses as a boy, and goes to the city to study at a rabbinic school. There she proves such a quick study that she is paired with star pupil Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin). Yentl falls in love with the handsome, brilliant young man, but Avigdor is in love with a hottie named Hadass (Amy Irving), and, of course, he thinks Yentl is a man. Things get really strange when Yentl winds up married to Hadass and has to ward off the advances of the increasingly in-love, young bride. This bizarre love triangle is hilarious most of the time, sometimes touching, and actually pretty sexy.

I generally found myself more interested in the story than the music in “Yentl”. The songs serve well to explicate Yentl’s inner life, but I don’t see myself listening to the album in my car. The acting is excellent all around. Streisand and Patinkin have great chemistry, and they do a great job portraying the kinkiness of their situation. Amy Irving doesn’t have as much to do as they do, but she is very easy on the eyes. All the times that Yentl refuses to bed Hadass I found myself wanting to scream, “Just take her!”

This film has been the butt of a lot of jokes, and it’s easy to see why. The title is terrible, the music is overwrought, and the whole look and feel of “Yentl” is not really for mass consumption. I’m glad I gave it a chance, though. It’s really a fun, thoughtful movie.

3 stars

The Kids are All Right (2010) ****

2011-01-08T06:22:00.000-08:00

I’ve heard that there are only two basic stories: 1) Someone goes on a journey, and 2) Someone comes to town. “The Kids are All Right” is of the “someone comes to town” variety. Lesbian couple Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) have a nice, suburban family life with their teenage kids Joni and Laser. Everything, as they say, is going smoothly until the kids look up their sperm-donor biological father. Paul (Mark Ruffalo) is a laid-back man-child who immediately charms the kids and hippy-dippy Jules. Uptight Nic, however, takes a dislike to him, and she becomes more incensed the more her family gets tangled up with him.

“The Kids are All Right” is a genuine dramedy, a story about real people and real conflicts that manages to be hilarious. The reviews I read didn’t really get across how funny and how sexy the film is. It was promoted as a movie that I SHOULD watch; you know, to show how open-minded I am. It’s not a hard movie to watch in any sense, though. All the performances are really excellent. Ruffalo and Moore are great as mildly irresponsible dreamers. Mia Wasikowska looks like a Young Actress To Watch, with a nuanced portrayal of 18-year-old Joni. In my mind, though, it is Annette Bening who deserves the award for her portrayal of Nic, the man of the house. I know that sounds like I’m stereotyping, ignorantly insisting that one member of this lesbian couple has to play the male role. I think it is fair to say, though, that Nic is a character with a lot of masculine energy. Bening’s genius is that she does not overplay that. She doesn’t play Nic like a softball coach or a female drill sergeant. She has respect for the fact that Nic can be a woman while still clearly being the yang to Jules’s yin.

Most movies are like wine coolers, made to please the sugary palate of the lowest common denominator of movie-goer. “The Kids Are All Right” is like a big, tannic red wine. It’s delicious and satisfying, but the viewer who has not developed a palate for sophisticated films will not find the movie to his taste. Some viewers might find the pace too slow or complain that not enough happens. Then, of course, there is the unfortunately large contingent who will be unhappy that the film promotes a gay lifestyle. If, however, you are up for a talky, art film and you are cool in the first place with a story about a couple of lesbians, then “The Kids are All Right” will be a barrel of fun.

4 stars

True Grit (1969) ****

2011-01-01T05:35:00.000-08:00

Many reviewers of the new Coen brothers’ version of “True Grit” have been falling all over themselves to describe how the new movie captures more of the true spirit of Charles Portis’s book than that old 1969 version, which, they say, was overly Hollywood and lacked the true grittiness of the novel. I can only assume that those reviewers either didn’t read the novel, didn’t re-watch the 1969 film, or both. I just recently read the book, and now re-watching the movie I am amazed at how faithfully it hews to the book. Even when the film makes small changes to the story, it generally captures the spirit.

“True Grit” is the story of Mattie Ross (Kim Darby), a 14-year-old girl bent on hunting down a scoundrel named Tom Cheney, who killed her father. “Spunky” just doesn’t describe Mattie; she is a force of nature. Neither attractive nor charming, Mattie is a character study in shrewdness and force of will. In a world run by men, this teenage girl uses that indomitable will to get what she wants, and what she wants is a federal marshal who will uncompromisingly pursue her dad’s killer. She finds that lawman in the form of Deputy Marshall Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn (John Wayne), a pitiless, one-eyed drunkard who would just as soon bring them in dead as alive. Mattie bullies Cogburn into agreeing to go after Cheney, and remarkably gets him to agree to bring her along. A Texas Ranger named La Boeuf (Glen Campbell), who is also after Cheney, complicates her plan, but ultimately the tough and resourceful Mattie bends both these men to her will, and together they track down Cheney and the outlaw gang he has joined.

John Wayne won his only Oscar for his portrayal of the flawed alcoholic Rooster Cogburn. He is a fascinating character who we learn has walked on both sides of the law. Doubtless, as a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, Rooster didn’t lose much sleep over stealing a little Federal gold in his younger days. Likewise, as a hunter of outlaws in the lawless Indian territory, he doesn’t feel much constrained by what were considered, even at the time, usual police procedures. This, of course, is why Mattie hires Rooster. She wants someone who will stop at nothing to catch or kill Tom Cheney, not someone who might follow the letter of the law, and let him get away.

Robert Duvall does an admirable job in the small role of Lucky Ned Pepper, leader of an outlaw gang that Tom Cheney joins. He and John Wayne have one of the great all-time movie scenes together when Rooster Cogburn faces down Pepper and three other outlaws across a clearing. What makes this scene such a great exposition of Cogburn’s character is that Mattie has already been rescued and Tom Cheney captured. Cogburn could easily follow Ned Pepper’s suggestion to back off and let the rest of the outlaws escape without further bloodshed. Instead, Rooster replies “Ned, I aim to see you dead in the next thirty seconds or else hung back in Fort Smith…Now which’ll it be?” Ned returns the famous line, “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.” If you don’t know what Rooster’s answer to that is, I’m not gonna tell you. You just need to watch it and see!

The real hero of the story, however, is Mattie, and I’m not quite sure what it is, but Kim Darby’s portrayal of Mattie lacks something. For one thing, she is a bit hard to look at, with her ridiculous bobbed haircut that no woman would have sported in the 1890’s. Also, her face isn’t really expressive enough, and sometimes it just feels like she is reciting her lines. That’s a shame, because Mattie has some zingers, most of them straight out of the novel. When offered some whiskey: “I would never put a thief into my mouth to steal my brains.” When Ned Pepper comments that unlike most girls, she seems to like guns, she replies, “If I did, I would have one that worked.”

Darby isn’t the only example of poor casting here. Glen Campbell is a questionable choice for La Boeuf, the Texas Ranger. I suppose he does reasonably well for a musician trying to be an actor, but there is clearly some room for improvement in this role.

I can’t wait to see if the new Coen brothers‘ “True Grit” manages to improve on these and other aspects of the original film. I hope it does. This is an excellent story that is worthy of re-telling. John Wayne and company set the bar pretty high, however. The original “True Grit” is nothing less than a classic, and it does not, as some have claimed, water down the novel it is based on. Watch the new film if you get the chance, but definitely check out the original version as well.

4 stars

The King of Comedy (1982)

2010-11-07T04:58:00.000-08:00

Well, this is one of those movies that I can’t even properly review, because I didn’t watch the whole thing. Fact is, I only lasted about 25 minutes. Still, I think that says something. This film is so flaccid and boring that I simply couldn’t go on. Robert De Niro acts like a guy who knows he is a great actor and thinks that means he can play a borish schlub without any engaging qualities. Martin Scorcese thinks he can make a movie called “The King of Comedy” and not provide any actual comedy. Maybe they can, but it doesn’t mean I have to watch.

I read several reviews of “The King of Comedy” to see if there would be a payoff if I dove back in, but it sounds like the whole movie pretty much keeps to the tone set in the first half-hour. Annoying, emotionally retarded people engage in boring, overextended conversations. The story is that De Niro’s character, Rupert Pumpkin, lives in his mom’s basement and works a boring job, but he fantasizes that he is going to be a great comedian someday. He is obsessed with getting on a late night show hosted by his Carson-esque idol, played by Jerry Lewis. Apparently Rupert kidnaps his idol in an effort to get on the show. Sounds like a fun premise. Lots of reviewers praise this film, but I notice that none of them are able to bring themselves to suggest that “The King of Comedy” is fun to watch.

I’ll bet you can impress people at a certain type of party by talking about what an amazing, under-rated Scorcese movie this is. Please don’t invite me to that party.

No stars.

Stardust Memories (1980) *****

2010-10-27T19:27:00.000-07:00

Woody Allen has always annoyed me a bit. His nebbishy, New York persona is hard for me to relate to. I have to admit, though, the guy is funny, and he’s a genius of a filmmaker. I just saw “Stardust Memories,” and I have to say that even among Allen’s filmography, this is a gem of a movie.

The film is an homage (or maybe more of a parody, if you will) to Federico Fellini’s “8 ½.” Just like “8 ½,” “Stardust Memories” is a stream-of-consciousness examination of the inner life of a famous movie director as he struggles to make a movie. Unlike Fellini’s director, who suffered writer’s block, Allen’s Sandy Bates character has already made the movie he wanted, but he is forced by the movie studio to create a new, more uplifting (marketable) ending. He does this while pursuing a love affair with one woman (Marie-Christine Barrault), reflecting on his failed affair with his ex-girlfriend (Charlotte Rampling), and considering an affair with a third (Jessica Harper). As the beautiful black-and-white footage unrolls, it is difficult to tell when we are in the present, in memory, or in fantasy. We are in Sandy Bates’ mind, which, like everyone’s, jumps around freely between these options.

I liked “Stardust Memories” considerably better than “8 ½.” Fellini’s film was a work of experimental genius, to be sure, but it was too long, and Fellini’s antagonist, Guido Anselmi, is too self-absorbed and weak of character to be much of a hero. I like my movies to have a hero, and unlikely as he is, Woody Allen manages to be a hero in this. Sandy is deeply flawed as a lover, but he engages in a small amount of growth during the movie, which is somehow enough to redeem his character.

There are a handful of films which are best described as Existentialist, and “Stardust Memories” is a masterpiece of the genre. The film begins with what is intended to be the end of Sandy Bates’s movie. Allen’s character sits alone on a train car filled with somber, sour-looking people. He looks across the tracks longingly at another train full of lively, happy people socializing, sharing wine, and basically having a ball. The trains take off, and Allen is miserable at being on the wrong train. When he arrives at his destination, however, he and his joyless companions find themselves at a garbage dump. As they walk through the trash, they are met by all the people from the happy train. They had very different journeys, but in the end, they all wound up in the same place. This is a rather blunt rendering of the more pessimistic side of Existentialism. The movie studio hates this ending, and Bates spends the movie dealing with his relationship issues and trying to come up with a more audience-friendly ending that won’t feel too contrived. He finds not one, but two solutions to the essential Existentialist problem: One is the pleasantly happy ending-on-a-train that he creates for his film, and the other is a quiet moment of bliss that is fully realized only as he looks back on it.

“Stardust Memories” beautifully balances the humorous and the profound. Watching it has given me a much deeper appreciation of Woody Allen’s genius. I think this movie may be slightly easier for someone who has already seen “8 ½,” but I think you will do fine with this movie as long as you come into it prepared for an atypical movie experience. This is a must-see for Existentialists everywhere!

5 stars out of 5

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) ****

2010-10-20T19:35:00.000-07:00

My wife gets the credit for this one. Never in a million years would I have randomly selected a movie from the ‘60’s called “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” That would have been my loss, because this movie is amazing! It falls under the category of movies about unconventional, inspiring teachers, e.g. “Dead Poets Society,“ but it is way more complex than most.

Maggie Smith plays Jean Brodie, a handsome, vivacious force of nature. She teaches at a girls’ school in the 1930’s and is beloved by the students and the male faculty. Rather than teaching straight history to her girls, she talks to them about art, poetry, and love, and takes them on walks around historic places. She sees a broad role for herself as an educator. As she tells one girl who admits to having no particular interests, “It is my job to give you interests.” It’s an admirable attitude, and Miss Brodie is truly devoted to her girls. She is also a woman ahead of her time, and quite the libertine. That she is able to get away with the occasional dalliance with a male faculty member is a testament to how widely she is admired by parents and former students.

There is a dark side to Miss Brodie’s dedication, though. She is equally devoted to her own romantic vision of herself, and as the story wears on we see that she is perfectly willing to sacrifice her girls on the alter of that vision. She is fond of telling her students that she is in her “prime,” and the implication is that they are lucky to be on the receiving end of wisdom from a woman in her prime. The sad part is that she is so self-deluded that she is incapable of seeing anything she does with her girls as wrong, even though it becomes apparent that Jean Brodie is capable of being a very bad influence indeed.

What makes this story so good is that Jean is neither completely good nor bad. Her failings are great, but she is also a great teacher. She offers her girls something besides rote memorization of historical facts. Doubtless most of her students grow up and look back on her as a great influence in their lives. On the other hand, she is enamored of fascist leaders Mussolini and Franco for some reason, and she takes every opportunity to impress her students with how great those leaders are. She gives a lot of herself to her girls, but it sometimes seems that she is mainly interested in her students as an audience for herself.

I find it interesting that so many people name “Dead Poets Society” as their favorite movie. Clearly there is something resonant in the story of an unconventional teacher inspiring his students in extraordinary ways. I’ll bet we all wish we had had a teacher like Robin Williams’s Mr. Keating. The thing about that movie, though, is that it is rather simplistic. There is never any doubt that Mr. Keating is right, and the hard-ass father who wants to send his son to military school is wrong. “Dead Poets Society” is about the value of questioning things and debating different ideas, but the movie really leaves no room for debate. On the other hand, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brody” gives the audience the opportunity at the end to judge for ourselves just how badly Jean Brodie transgressed. It’s the kind of thought-provoking film that I think Mr. Keating would approve of.

4 stars

The Running Man (1987) **

2010-10-13T18:13:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure why I re-watched this piece of 1980’s silliness. I saw it on the Netflix watch-it-now list, and just went for it. Not much of an excuse, I know. This was from the height of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie stardom, and the studio clearly understood that the only way they could go wrong was by driving the audience away by making a movie that was too smart. They took no chances on that. And yet, “The Running Man” still manages to be a somewhat entertaining movie, and there are times when the filmmakers let us know that they are in on the joke.

The movie is based on a novel by Stephen King. In a dystopian future world, Arnold plays Ben Richards, a cop who gets framed for murdering dozens of civilians. He escapes from prison with members of an underground resistance group, gets arrested again, and winds up on the TV game show “The Running Man.“ The show represents the logical outcome of an entertainment culture that is racing to see who can best pander to the most prurient and debased tastes of the lowest common denominator. Convicted felons are forced to run a deadly gauntlet of gimmicky gladiators. If they make it through, they supposedly get their freedom, but most get messily murdered on-screen. Richards and his friends try to negotiate this deadly game while finding a way to subvert the network satellite link and broadcast the truth about the game and the government that supports it across the world.

It’s not a bad premise for a movie, but great things should not be expected from this film. “The Running Man” is largely pitched to teenage boys, and there isn’t much substance. This is purely an action movie, and it’s okay as far as that goes, although I find even the action sequences to be a bit lazy and ponderous compared to a movie like “Die Hard.“ This is also one of those action flicks that is all about the “glib” one-liners, and man, they suck! Example: After Richards cuts one of the gladiators in half with a chainsaw, he says, “He had to split.” These kind of lines are forced and painful, and they have ruined many an action movie, with the James Bond films being a case in point. I seem to remember thinking these zingers were funny as a teenager, though, so I guess the filmmakers knew how to speak to their audience.

Now for the good parts: First, Richard Dawson is awesome! He is the old host of the game show, “The Family Feud,” and he plays the host of the Running Man brilliantly. This guy really should have done more movies. Future Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura has a small role as well, and does it up right. In fact, his character points out something about the movie that annoyed me, which made me then like the film more. All the gladiators have some sort of gimmicky weapon, like fire or electricity, which makes them really silly. Ventura plays a retired gladiator who gets called back into service after Ben Richards dispatches all the others. Ventura storms into the production room wearing some silly, creaky metal armor and starts ripping the pieces off, saying, “I don’t need this crap. I used to kill guys like this with my bare hands.”

Here’s one of the most bizarre things in the movie, and I don’t whether it was intended with irony or not. Early on, there are shots of the “Running Man” audience cheering lustily for the gladiators to kill Richards and his friends. Later, after the resistance broadcasts the truth, there are shots of the same audience lustily cheering on Richards and the resistance as they trash the TV station and fight the police. Did all those people in the bars and on the streets suddenly become enlightened citizens? Are they going to go out and fight for true democracy now? Or are they just happy to see some violence, no matter who is supplying it? Maybe I should get the actual DVD and see if there is a commentary that discusses that. On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t make sense to invest any more time in this movie.

2 Stars

The Town (2010) ****

2010-10-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

I suppose I’ll have to retire the Ben Affleck Test for good now. I described this test before in my review of “Hollywoodland.” Basically, in the past, for any movie I was considering watching, I would just ask myself, “Is Ben Affleck in it?” If the answer was yes, then I wouldn’t watch the movie. Simple, right? In the last few years, though, Affleck has managed to get himself together, and the test just doesn’t work anymore, as proven by his latest project, “The Town.” Oh well, at least there’s still the Keanu Reeves Test.

Based on Chuck Hogan’s novel Prince of Thieves, “The Town” is very much a Ben Affleck project. He helped write the screenplay, directed, and starred in the film. Affleck plays Doug Macray, a poor Boston-Irish guy who robs banks with his buddies. Doug plays with fire by getting into a relationship with the manager from one of the banks he robbed, while Jon Hamm’s FBI agent Frawley breathes down his neck.

There is nothing remarkable about the plot of “The Town.” It is a standard heist movie. What makes the film stand out is the top-notch performances from basically everyone in the movie, which must be a testament to Affleck, who directed them all. Jon Hamm is cool and edgy as an FBI agent, and way less annoying than Al Pacino was in “Heat.” Jeremy Renner is amazing as Doug’s dumb-but-loyal, sociopathic best friend. Blake Lively is absolutely unrecognizable as a skanked-out oxycontin-whore and Doug’s ex-girlfriend. Affleck himself is completely likeable and natural in his role. My favorite performance here, however, is that of Rebecca Hall, as the bank manager who unwittingly falls for a bank robber. I remember Hall and her natural, laid-back beauty from “Vicky Christina Barcelona.” The thing about Hall is that she wouldn’t be instantly considered the hottest girl at an Oscar party, but the more I look at her face, the more I dig her. It isn’t just her looks that make her shine in “The Town,” though. She totally nails the vulnerability and strength of this character.

I don’t know what this movie’s place in history will be. Other than tight acting and some nice camera work, there is nothing that will necessarily make this film be remembered twenty years from now. “The Town” is great entertainment for today, but in the long run it may simply be remembered as the movie that proved, once and for all, that Ben Affleck is no joke.

4 stars

Timer (2009) ****

2010-09-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

The cool thing about “Timer” is that it doesn’t look like Science-Fiction, but it is. My definition of Sci-Fi is that the writer comes up with a single, central technological reality that might exist in the future, and the story should just unfold naturally from there. In good Sci-Fi, everything that happens should feel like a natural consequence of that technological conceit. Good Science -Fiction is always posing the question, “What would happen if…?” What would happen if aliens landed? What would happen if an alien got lost and some kids found it? What would happen if there were manufactured humans with a limited life-span who weren’t allowed on earth. What if mankind abandoned Earth to live in a giant spaceship while cute little robots cleaned up our Earthly messes? And so on.

The question posed by “Timer” is, “What if you could know years ahead of time the exact moment you were going to meet your One True Love?” Dating would be unnecessary, which would either remove a lot of the pain from life or remove a lot of the excitement, depending on your attitude. If you did date, then it could just be for fun and sex, but every relationship would feel poisoned from the start. This kind of knowledge might free your energies for other pursuits or it could be really depressing. The timer in this movie is a device that gets attached to your wrist sometime after puberty. It analyzes hormones, DNA, etc. and establishes a long-distance link with whomever you are destined to be with, and both timers then count down to the predicted moment of your meeting. This only works if the other person has a timer, too, which most people in the free world do in this movie. Most people are walking around with timers counting down to a point 6 months, a year, maybe 5 years in the future when they will finally meet their True Love. Oona (Emma Caulfield) has had a blank timer since the age of thirteen, which means that her intended, if he (or she) exists, is wandering around out there without a timer. Naturally, she only dates men without timers, and only until she convinces them to get a timer implanted, and each time she is disappointed when her timer doesn’t sync up with theirs. Oona’s desperation is matched only by the despair of her sister Steph (Michelle Borth). Steph’s timer is running, but it says she won’t find true love until some time in her late forties. Her reaction is to pursue a series of one-night stands, and only with men who have timers, since that eliminates any pressure. The obvious narrative outcome here is that Oona finds herself falling for a guy with a timer while Steph breaks her rule and gets interested in a man without one. Hilarity and drama ensue.

We heard about “Timer” due to its excellent reception at the Tribeca Film Festival. It feels like a film festival movie, meaning it doesn’t have big stars in it, and it doesn’t feel dumbed down. It’s a little bit of a chick-flick, but it’s a sci-fi chick-flick, which is a rare animal. The acting is excellent, the babes are hot, and it’s a completely entertaining little romantic dramedy.

4 stars.

Hannie Caulder (1971) ***

2010-09-08T18:34:00.000-07:00

There really isn’t much to say about “Hannie Caulder.” Raquel Welch plays Hannie, a gal out for revenge after three low-lifes murder her husband and rape her. She gets a badass bounty hunter (Robert Culp) to teach her the way of the gun, then she gets that revenge, all while looking fabulous.

As revenge westerns go, this is just alright. Robert Culp’s bounty hunter is a pretty cool character, and Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, and Strother Martin are darkly hilarious as the evil Clemens brothers. The movie might have been better if they had gotten a better actress than Raquel Welch, but it wouldn’t have looked nearly as good.

I guess I might be more enthusiastic about “Hannie Caulder” if I weren’t a little burned out on a certain brand of movie gun fighting, which is by no means limited to westerns. I’m sick of seeing people run around with their finger on their trigger, sick of people getting ten shots out of a six-shooter, and sick of people in gunfights waiting for the other guy to draw first, as if that provides some sort of strategic advantage. I will say that Robert Culp’s character tries to give Hannie some actual useful advice, but in the end she doesn’t really follow any of it. Oh well, it’s a fairly fun, stylized movie, and they could have done a lot worse.

3 stars

La Dolce Vita (1960) ****1/2

2010-09-05T18:30:00.000-07:00

Italian for “The Sweet Life,” this film is ironically titled. It is basically the story of a guy in a mid-life crisis. He has a cush, easy life, but he doesn’t consider it sweet. Marcello (played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a dapper, successful gossip magazine editor. He glides smoothly through the elite social circles of Rome, mixing with movie stars and artists and presiding over a gaggle of ruthless photographers. (One of the photographers is named Papparazzo, which is where we got the term “papparazzi.”) Despite the glamour of his life, Marcello feels trapped and dissatisfied. He has a loving live-in girlfriend, but she doesn’t challenge him enough, so he chases more dangerous women. He longs to be a serious writer, but he lacks the courage to give up what he has in order to pursue what he wants.

“La Dolce Vita” follows Marcello through a number of wild nights and bitter mornings as he struggles with these issues, floating from party to party, woman to woman. At one point Marcello’s father visits, and proves to be a charming, but aging bon-vivant. Marcello seems torn between admiring his dad and fearing becoming like him. A wise, older friend seems to offer an example for Marcello to follow, but he tragically disappoints him. Marcello meets a young girl who reminds him of his own youthful innocence and aspirations, but later he sees the same girl and fails to recognize her, symbolizing how much he has lost track of who he is.

Marcello’s existential struggle is one that we all face when we realize that we are still young enough to change the direction of our lives, but that our time is running out. Marcello has discovered that he isn’t going to find happiness in affairs and orgies, but he can’t seem to give them up. I find myself wishing that Fellini had imagined a redemption for Marcello so that he could have been a role model for us, not just a mirror. Ultimately, Marcello doesn’t find an answer, which is realistic, but unsatisfying.

This long, meandering film left me feeling a bit empty, but if it is hard on the heart, at least it is easy on the eyes. “La Dolce Vita” is filmed beautifully in black & white and is filled with beautiful women. Mastroianni is a tremendous actor, able to speak volumes with a single line or just a change of expression. This movie demonstrates why Fellini is one of the Masters.

4.5 stars.

For anyone who is interested, I highly recommend Roger Ebert’s review of “La Dolce Vita” at:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19970105/REVIEWS08/401010336/1023

Winter’s Bone (2010) *****

2010-08-29T05:31:00.000-07:00

Well, y’all just need to see this one. You may have heard that “Winter’s Bone” is bleak or hopeless, but it really isn’t. It’s dark, but that’s different. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but the fact is, this movie has a hero and a more or less happy ending.

“Winter’s Bone” is a noir mystery set in the backwoods Ozarks. The story follows a 17-year-old girl named Ree Dolly, played with astonishing power by Jennifer Lawrence. (If Lawrence doesn’t get an Oscar nomination out of this role, then something is seriously wrong.) Ree’s dad is a methamphetamine cooker, and her mom is completely disabled by some sort of psychotic depression. The raising of herself and her two younger siblings has fallen squarely on Ree’s young shoulders, forcing her to drop out of school in order to chop enough wood, shoot enough squirrels, and basically scrape the bottom of the barrel enough to keep her family going. It seems like she might be strong enough to actually pull it off until the sheriff comes around to explain that her no-account daddy put the family home up for bond, then skipped town. If he doesn’t show up for his court date, the house and land will go to the county, and the family will be homeless. In Ree’s meth-head neck of the woods, you simply don’t talk to the cops, so Ree uses what little she knows about her dad’s potential whereabouts to go looking for him herself. Since this is the backwoods, the quest involves visiting a series of relatives and distant relatives, each of whom is scarier than the last, and none of whom is happy to see the little girl with the wayward daddy. One woman asks Ree, “Don’t you have men to do this?” Of course, Ree doesn’t. All she has is herself, which is a lot more than you might think.

I came into this movie expecting a really depressing, naturalistic story that would be hard to watch. I was thrilled to find myself watching a suspenseful mystery that contains at least a glimmer of hope. Ree Dolly is one of the best movie characters I have seen in years. She can be stoic and reticent, as you would expect from someone who grew up where and how she did. She can also be very kind and gentle when caring for her mom and siblings. Some of the film’s best scenes are when she is taking the kids to school while drilling them on their lessons, or teaching them how to cook, clean a squirrel, or shoot a gun.

Ree does live in a very rough world, though. The setting is extremely rural, where everyone has pigs, cows, and old cars in the yard, and everyone is related in some way. You would think these kinships would bind the community together so that people would help Ree and her family, and some people do help some, but unfortunately the community is fractured by the methamphetamine trade. It seems everyone Ree knows is using it, dealing it, or both. Most rural communities have a strong religious vein in them, but due to the meth trade, it seems the only religion in Ree’s neighborhood is silence. Ree’s stoicism and resignation in this world is heartbreaking. When she teaches her brother to clean a squirrel, he pulls out a handful of guts and asks, “Do we eat this part?” Ree replies, “Not yet.” Later, her uncle snorts some meth in front of her and asks, “You gotten the taste?” Once again, Ree’s answer is, “Not yet.” How poignant is it that at seventeen Ree has already had so many disappointments that she can no longer rule out even the vilest of possibilities? The best she can come up with is, “Not yet.”

I grew up in a rural area, and I live in the Ozarks now, and I feel comfortable saying that “Winter’s Bone” gets its characters pretty much exactly right. That’s not to say, however, that these characters should be considered representative of rural people in general, any more than “The Godfather” is representative of Italians. One thing that isn’t apparent in the film, and this may be my only criticism of the movie, is that even though the meth trade is pervasive where Ree lives, there are probably plenty of decent, hard-working country people there who have nothing to do with meth. Ree, however, wouldn’t know those people. Because her family is known to be mixed up in drugs, law-abiding people wouldn’t associate with her family or let their kids be friends with Ree and her siblings. Ree and her family are in dire straights because they have no one but criminals and drug addicts to turn to.

People are going to bring their politics to this movie, but this is not a political movie. This is a story of real people who are too complex to yield to ideological judgments. Ree’s uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) initially seems like a badass, abusive meth-head, and he is those things. He also turns out to have some genuine nobility, as does Merab (Dale Dickey), the rough-hewn wife of the local meth-dealing patriarch. A lot of people will want to know where the government is in this story. Why hasn’t Child Protective Services come in to save these children? Part of the answer is that, as screwed up as these people are, they have too much pride to turn to the government for help. With a long tradition of moonshine and illegal drugs behind them, these are a people who have grown accustomed to shunning agents of the government. The other issue is that a government solution would almost certainly involve splitting Ree’s family up, sending the kids to foster care, and she makes it clear in one scene that that is not acceptable.

In the end, winter throws Ree a bone, which she dearly deserves. Her mom is still mentally ill, her life is still hard, but for a little while longer, at least, Ree can continue to say, “Not yet.”

5 stars out of 5

Adventureland (2009) **1/2

2010-08-22T19:14:00.000-07:00

The best thing about seeing “Adventureland” is that I don’t have to watch any of the “Twilight” movies to find out if Kristen Stewart lives up to her hype. The answer is - not even close. She is a vaguely good-looking, minimally competent actress, and I cannot explain why she is on the cover of so many magazines. I guess Ayn Rand was right. A movie studio would rather take someone mediocre and build them up than have to control someone with real star power like an Angelina Jolie.

Aside from Kristen Stewart‘s somnambulistic performance, “Adventureland” is a moderately entertaining little movie. Jesse Eisenberg (from “Roger Dodger”) is pretty charming as James, a new college graduate whose summer and grad-school plans get derailed by his dad’s unexpected demotion at work. He takes the only job he can find in a recession, running games at a local amusement park. Martin Starr (from “Freaks and Geeks) puts in a nice performance as James’s co-worker and friend. Kristen Stewart breathes through her mouth and underwhelms as James’s love interest, while Ryan Reynolds turns in an uninspired performance as a hot, older guy.

Watching this movie, I was struck by how all these people in their early twenties seemed like they were in high school. James is still completely financially dependent on his parents, and he takes a job that is barely suitable for an 18-year-old. The depressing thing is, this is still pretty realistic. A college degree and $2.50 will pretty much get you a cup of coffee these days.

“Adventureland” misses out on the opportunity to be this generation’s “The Graduate,” which is a shame, because the setup initially seems pretty promising. Jesse Eisenberg is not a bad actor, and he does some good work here. I don’t know if he’s quite a Dustin Hoffman, however, and even if he is, I don’t know that this film ever aspired to that level. In any event, Kristen Stewart is no Katherine Ross, and Ryan Reynolds is definitely no Anne Bancroft. “Adventureland” is kind of like winning a prize at an amusement park. I wish I could pay a couple more bucks, throw a couple more balls, and trade Kristen Stewart in for a giant, stuffed panda.

2.5 stars out of 5

The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938)

2010-08-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

We watched these two Hitchcock films because, “Hey, it’s Hitchcock,” and I had never seen them before. One was just okay, and the other was really good.

In “The 39 Steps,” Robert Donat plays Richard Hannay, a dashing guy who lets himself get picked up by a girl. It turns out she is a spy, and when she is murdered by enemy agents, Hannay becomes a fugitive to escape the murder rap and carry out the girl’s mission to prevent the theft of British military secrets. The film starts out with an appealing level of mystery, but it begins to suffer from an abundance of narrow escapes and strained plot elements. For example, would a beautiful, cunning female spy really need to or choose to tell a random guy all about her espionage work in order to spend the night in his flat? Towards the end, the film completely loses its tone as Hannay engages in cute banter with a girl who gets caught up in his adventure (Madeleine Carroll.) “The 39 Steps” is just not one of Hitchcock’s best. For some reason, he never creates a Hitchcockian level of suspense, and the characters do too many things that make no sense. The movie still has some good parts, and the film might have been saved with a better lead. Unfortunately, Robert Donat just isn’t that great in this role, and the film didn’t spend enough time building his character up so that I would care about him. I suppose I’m in the minority here. Many people seem to think this is one of the great films, but I don’t happen to be one of them. It’s definitely no “North By Northwest.”

Fortunately, we watched “The Lady Vanishes” next, and it restored my artistic faith in Alfred Hitchcock. This film does everything right that “The 39 Steps” did wrong. Time is taken to develop the lead characters, and the romance between them builds naturally. The suspense in this one is also more what I expect from Hitchcock. The plot device of having the heroine and the audience know that something is wrong, while all the other characters deny it, works brilliantly. We identify with the heroine’s frustration while at the same time starting to doubt her.

Margaret Lockwood plays Iris Henderson, a spoiled, American playgirl enjoying a last European trip with her friends before her upcoming arranged marriage. During a railway outage, Iris befriends Miss Froy, a retiring governess on her way back to her native England. The next day, Iris, Miss Froy, and a colorful cast of international characters resume their rail journey. Suffering a mild head injury, Iris naps. When she awakens, Miss Froy is gone, and all the other passengers deny that the lady was ever on the train. What follows is pure fun as Iris struggles to find the truth with some help from a charming, English musician played with playful brilliance by Michael Redgrave.

“The Lady Vanishes” manages to create real mystery while being playful, something that “The 39 Steps” did not quite achieve. Both films are worth watching if you are a Hitchcock fan, but the priority definitely goes to “The Lady Vanishes.”

The 39 Steps 2.5 stars
The Lady Vanishes 4 stars

8 ½ (1963) ****

2010-07-11T05:58:00.000-07:00

Watching “8 ½” is a little like having sex for the first time. It takes a while to figure out how everything works. This classic by Federico Fellini uses a stream-of-consciousness style, interspersing and blending reality, memories, and fantasies. The story behind the movie is that Fellini wanted to make a film about a man suffering writer’s block. As he assembled his filmmaking team, including actors and financing, he found that the movie wasn’t coming together for him; he still hadn’t even decided what the protagonist’s profession would be. On the verge of cancelling the project, he hit upon the idea to just tell his own story of trying to make the film. Thus, “8 ½” is about a semi-fictitious director named Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) who finds himself creatively stumped while trying to make a movie. Fellini named it “8 ½” because it was his ninth film, but he didn’t think it counted as a fully realized movie. Little did he know that it would come to be seen by many as one of the great films.

The real-time part of the film is actually pretty mundane, as it follows Anselmi’s interactions with his film crew, his wife and his mistress. Blended into this narrative are bizarre and erotic elements from his memory as well as pure fantasy sequences, the best of which is a scene in which all the women he has loved or desired live together in a big house waiting to tend to all his needs. The movie is meant to reflect the actual mental processes that a person goes through on a daily basis as they shift their attention back and forth between reality and their inner life.

I can see why this is considered one of the great films. Fellini boldly uses the film medium in a completely new way. He doesn’t so much tell a story as expose his own soul frame by frame. I would absolutely recommend “8 ½” for anyone who is interested in art films, but be warned, this movie is long. Thinking about this film after the fact, I like it more and more, but while watching it, I found that it seemed to go on forever. Not only did I find myself bored at times, I found the frequent shifts between fantasy and reality to be off-putting. I once tried to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” I didn’t get very far, but I think there may be similarities between that book and “8 ½.”

In short, “8 ½” can be challenging to watch, but it is worth it if you are into this sort of thing.

4 stars

Extract (2009) ****

2010-07-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

How does this keep happening? Mike Judge will make a movie; hardly anyone sees it; it sneaks right past me in cinemas; and when I finally watch it, it’s brilliant. It happened with “Office Space,“ then “Idiocracy,“ and now it has happened with “Extract.“ Someone in Hollywood must be sabotaging this guy’s career. I don’t think any of his films has gotten a wide release or a decent promotional effort.

Conspiracy theories aside, “Extract” is excellent. It is not the classic that “Office Space” is, but in a way, it is a companion piece to “Office Space.” Where “Office Space” focused on the plight of employees, “Extract” comes from the perspective of an employer and all the headaches HE has to put up with. Jason Bateman is brilliant as Joel, the owner of a cooking extract factory. The role of businessman is an uncomfortable fit for Joel, who has a background in chemistry and actually invented the process used in his factory. He really wants to focus on research and development, but his long workdays are occupied with his idiot employees and their attitudes. He dreams of selling out and retiring. It seems his dream is about to come true when he gets an offer from a large food company, but things get sidetracked by an industrial accident. Meanwhile, things aren’t going so well at home for Joel, whose relationship with his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) has grown distant and sexless. He finally lets his bartender friend (Ben Afleck) convince him to pursue an affair with a gorgeous new temp worker at the factory (Mila Kunis), who is secretly a crook.

Good times, folks! Jason Bateman brilliantly plays the straight man in a crooked situation, not unlike his “Arrested Development“ role, actually. Mila Kunis is a convincing little con artist, not to mention a stone fox. Kristen Wiig is actually surprisingly foxy as well, and she brings a lot of humanity to a role that, in a lesser movie, would have been a 1-dimensional shrew. The rest of the supporting cast knocks it out of the park as well. Even Ben Affleck is funny as a drug-pushing, man-pimping, mop-hair-sporting bartender.

Hollywood has just got to start giving Mike Judge some respect. We’ve known the guy was a genius since “Beavis and Butthead,” and “Office Space” cleared up any questions about his ability to do a feature film. So why don’t people see his movies? I’d say it’s because no one knows about them. A studio will spend more promoting a film like “Sex and the City 2” than the entire budget for one of Judge’s films. I think it is because he makes fun of stupidity. Hollywood makes money pandering to the lowest common denominator, which is exactly the demographic that Mike Judge skewers in his films. The only solution I can think of is for smart people to make it a point to see his movies, preferably in cinemas, but on DVD if that fails. I’m doing my part; the rest is up to you.

4 stars out of 5

Get Him to the Greek (2010) ****

2010-06-25T05:55:00.000-07:00

I absolutely loved “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” and one of the best things in the movie was clearly the sexually ravenous rock star Aldous Snow, played by Russell Brand. For those fans who felt, as I did, that they could have used a little more Aldous, I give you “Get Him to the Greek,” an entire movie about Aldous. It does not disappoint.

Jonah Hill (the fat one from “Superbad”) plays Aaron, a cog in the music industry and fan of Aldous Snow, “the last real rock star.” He convinces his boss Sergio (played with hilarious intensity by Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs) to help Aldous revive his ailing career by promoting an anniversary concert at the Greek Theatre in Las Angeles. Aaron gets what he thinks is his dream assignment when he is sent to London to fetch the off-the-wagon Aldous and get him safely and on time to L.A. for the concert. It’s a Herculean task, as Aldous is distracted by every opportunity along the way to get drunk, get high, or get laid.

I wasn’t sure going in whether I would like this movie. First of all, the title is horrible. Someone should lose his job over the title. Probably the same guy responsible for “The 40-year-old Virgin,” which was also awesome despite its title. I also didn’t know if the Aldous Snow character would hold up for an entire movie. He does! Russell Brand imbues Aldous with unexpected depth as well as new heights of hilarity. He is, like a true rock star, a mesmerizing figure. “Get Him to the Greek” also introduces a new, female version of Aldous in the form of pop star Jackie-Q (Rose Byrne.) Her song “Ring Around My Posie” might just make you wet yourself. Jonah Hill is hilarious as well, mainly because everything is just funnier when a big fat dude is doing it.

I have heard that a couple of people didn’t like this film. I can’t fathom that. I suppose that the scenes of puking, blood, and Jonah Hill getting things shoved up his butt might turn some people off. There, you’ve been warned. As long as you can handle some gross-out humor along with some sex-humor, drug-humor, and potty-mouth-humor, you’ll be good to go. Get yourself to “Get Him to the Greek.”

4 stars out of 5

Date Night (2010)

2010-05-29T05:25:00.000-07:00

It feels a bit surreal getting a babysitter and taking my wife on a date to see a movie about a guy getting a babysitter and taking his wife out on a date. It just made me feel a little self-conscious. It’s a good thing “Date Night” is such a dead funny film.

Steve Carell and Tina Fey play Phil and Claire Foster, married couple in a rut. They get along great, and clearly love each other, but the day to day grind of work, commutes, and kids saps the energy that they once had for each other. They do the same things all the time, and have reached a point where they think they know everything there is to know about each other. What this couple needs is a night of excitement, and boy, do they get it! When they pose as a couple with a reservation in order to get a seat at a fancy Manhattan restaurant, they are mistaken for the targets of a couple of Mob hit-men, and the night takes off from there. Good times ensue all over NYC, including car chases, Tina Fey in a stripper outfit, and Mark Wahlberg without a shirt. Along the way - you guessed it - the Fosters learn some new things about each other and rekindle that old flame.

“Date Night” is fairly formulaic, but executed in a manner that shows why the formula works. It’s a combination of screwball, slapstick, and action comedy that manages to be sweet without being sentimental. Fey and Carell are wonderful at creating comedy that respects the characters. When the Fosters take time out to have a Big Conversation and get some things off their chests, it feels like a real conversation between real people, not trite at all. The movie also benefits from a pretty much all-star cast, including Wahlberg as an impossibly cool security expert, James Franco and Mila Kunis as a cute pair of scumbags, William Fichtner as a politician, and Ray Liotta as a Mobster. “Date Night” isn’t destined to become a classic, but it’s loads of fun and a great date movie.

4 stars out of 5

Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

2010-05-27T05:24:00.000-07:00

This is a movie with an edgy premise that turns out to be rather conventional. Lars (Ryan Gosling) is an odd, withdrawn guy with Avoidant Personality Disorder. He lives in his brother’s garage, and can’t bring himself to socialize even with his family, although he is able to hold down a job. One day his porn-obsessed cubicle mate shows him a site with extremely realistic sex dolls, and six weeks later the UPS guy delivers Bianca, Lars’s new girlfriend.

Shocked at first, Lars’s family takes him to their wise, small-town doctor (Patricia Clarkson), who convinces them to go along with the delusion and give Lars a chance to work through his intimacy issues. Pretty soon the whole town is in on it, and it’s just a beautiful image of small-town America, where everybody knows everybody, and the people are so tolerant that they’ll prop a guy up while he debuts on the social scene with his plastic sex-surrogate girlfriend.

I get that this is a fairy tale and shouldn’t be judged on a literal basis. It would be great if folks were really this compassionate and open-minded. It would be great if all family docs were just doing medicine as a hobby and could afford to spend an hour or so every week with the same patient, talking around his problems. My beef with “Lars and the Real Girl” is that it is, frankly, trite. Everything is quite predictable, and the whole thing is just syrupy sweet.

One thing I did like about “Lars and the Real Girl” is the way it depicted moderately religious people. I’m not religious myself, but I’m sympathetic to the complaint that Hollywood acts as if Faith barely exists. In a matter of fact way, this film depicts its characters as having a church community as part of their everyday lives, which is how it is in much of the country. It isn’t preachy about this; I only mention it because it’s something you don’t see much in movies anymore. In gratitude, God should have helped them make this a better film.

2 stars out of 5

The Invention of Lying (2009)

2010-05-12T05:20:00.000-07:00

Ricky Gervais co-wrote and co-directed this little gem, so of course it displays his signature brand of awkward humor. “The Invention of Lying” also features a serious, philosophical side of Gervais which I really liked.

Gervais plays Mark, a downtrodden guy in a world much like our own, except that everyone tells the truth, all the time. People aren’t even aware that they could do otherwise, and there is no word for lying. One day, in dire straits, Mark hits upon an amazing idea: He says “something that isn’t.” He tells a bank teller that his account contains more money than it really does. She takes his word for it, of course, and assumes that her computer is incorrect in showing a much smaller balance. With a wad of cash in hand, Mark goes out to pay his bills and reflect on this new possibility he has discovered. Soon he is using lies to fool a cop, get rich, and further his screenwriting career, which was traditionally limited to recounting true events from history.

Everything is going swell until Mark finds himself facing his mother on her death-bed. She is terrified of facing “an eternity of nothingness.” To ease her passing, Mark makes up his biggest lie yet: He tells her that rather than nothingness, she is going to a wonderful place when she dies, with a mansion, and she’ll get to see all the people she ever loved who have died. The fib works wonders, as Mark’s mom dies happy and peaceful, but the doctors and nurses overhear his story and spread the word about this “new information about what happens when we die.” Soon, Mark finds himself at the center of one gigantic, worldwide, snowballing lie.

“The Invention of Lying” could just as easily have been titled “The Invention of Religion,” and the point of the film, of course, is that the two are essentially equivalent. The film is not at all subtle in saying that religions are just a bunch of stories that people made up to make everyone feel better about death. No new philosophical ground is covered here, but “The Invention of Lying” deals with the subject quite amusingly, and you have to admire Gervais’s chutzpah. Hollywood frequently pretends that religion doesn’t exist, but it’s a rare film that directly espouses atheism.

Will religious people be able to enjoy this movie? I guess it depends on the person. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops rated “The Invention of Lying” as "O - morally offensive" calling it “venomous and pervasively blasphemous.” You can take the Bishopric at its word (full review at http://www.usccb.org/movies/i/inventionoflying.shtml) or check out the surprisingly open-minded review at a site called Christianity Today. (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/movies/reviews/2009/inventionoflying.html)

Beyond the religion angle, “The Invention of Lying” obliquely explores some interesting ideas about the nature of social interaction and imagination. I found it interesting that the people in the fictitious world of this movie don’t just tell the truth when asked, they blurt out whatever is on their mind. When Mark and his date Anna (Jennifer Garner) enter a restaurant, the hostess says to the gorgeous Anna, “Hello, I’m threatened by you.” Mark’s secretary greets him with, “I’m thinking of how overqualified I am for my job, and how incompetent you are at yours.” People say these things without any malice or thought for how the other person will take it. It’s as if everyone in Mark’s world is semi-autistic. I think that co-writers Gervais and Robinson meant to suggest that the missing element in these people’s brains is imagination. They cannot imagine what another person might feel upon hearing a harsh comment any more than they can imagine saying something that isn’t so. When Mark unlocks his ability to lie, he uses it for personal gain, but he also starts telling little white lies and even holding back hurtful comments to spare others’ feelings. To circle back to the religion angle, Mark’s new ability to lie could be a metaphor for the biblical Fall. In Genesis, the Apple gave Adam and Eve awareness of Good and Evil, bringing them from an animal state of innocence to a more complex, more human state. Once he tells that first fib, Mark also steps up to a more human plane of existence, where he is more aware and more responsible for his own actions and for the effect they have on others.

There’s also a love story in here (Isn’t there always?), as Mark tries to woo Anna. The romantic angle in this film is nothing special, but I did like that Mark makes it a point not to use lies to win the girl because, as he later tells Anna, “It wouldn’t have counted.” At the end of the day, lies are only useful if they serve some kind of truth, and Mark wisely realizes that it is Anna’s love that he craves, not a facsimile of her love based on lies.

“The Invention of Lying” is not a perfect movie, but it is thoughtful and a lot of fun. In general, if you are a religious person, this film has the potential to make you uncomfortable. If you can handle it, I suggest you give it a watch.

3.5 stars out of 5

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

2010-05-08T05:27:00.001-07:00

I have seen worse movies than this, but I don’t think I have ever been more disappointed by one. This is one of the beloved films of the science-fiction pantheon. Arthur C. Clarke himself supposedly listed it as one of the ten best sci-fi movies of all time. I was full of anticipation for this one, but watching it, I wondered how a poorly-acted, almost action-less, stilted B-movie production became so widely praised.

The film begins with a UFO, which announces its presence to the earth by circling the globe, then landing in a Washington, DC park. Surrounded by soldiers and police, the saucer sits there for a while, and then a guy in a spacesuit emerges. And I mean a GUY in a spacesuit. No pointy ears, no third eye, nothing alien about the guy at all. He calls himself Klaatu, but he looks like an insurance salesman, which, in a way, is what he turns out to be. Klaatu comes to us in peace, with a message of warning to stop our warlike ways. He wants to give this message to all the leaders of earth, but he soon is told that earth’s leaders are too belligerent to agree to meet in one place. Klaatu decides that earth’s scientists might represent a better audience, so he embarks on a mission to get THEM together to hear his message. He needs a place to stay while doing all this, so he rents a room from a sweet old lady and bonds with his new single-mom neighbor.

There are all sorts of ways that this story could have been made funny, subversive, scary, or just interesting, but it is really none of those things. The anti-nuke, anti-war message is very straightforward, in an After-School-Special kind of way. The dialog and characters are just plain hokey, without a trace of wit, and the only suspense I felt during the film was, “When will it end?”

That image of a visored spaceman that you see on the movie posters and DVD packaging? That’s not Klaatu; it’s his invulnerable robot, which is powerful enough to destroy the entire earth. Imagine all the cool sci-fi action fun the film could have with such a being! Now keep on imagining it, because it doesn’t happen. The robot does very little, and hardly gets any screen time. I don’t mind that the special effects are cheesy, but they should have DONE SOMETHING with them. Let’s see that robot rampage through the city and do battle with the military! “The Day the Earth Stood Still” gives us none of that.

The most bizarre aspect of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is that the Earth doesn’t actually stand still! A space alien lands on earth, and yet the citizens of the city where he lands just read about it in the paper, then go on to their regular jobs and schools. The president sends a secretary over to chat with Klaatu rather than going himself! If this was supposed to be some clever plot device, like the grandfather who considers vampires just a local annoyance in “Lost Boys,” then it is played so straight that it goes right over my head.

I believe that “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was successful in 1951 because it tapped into a political and philosophical backlash against McCarthyism and the Cold War. The dominant mood of the country then may have been hawkish anti-Communism, but there were a significant number of peace-niks and, frankly, Communists, especially among academics and in Hollywood. (Actor Sam Jaffe, who played Professor Barnhardt (an obvious stand-in for Albert Einstein) was an admitted communist and was blacklisted.) “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was a movie for them and for anyone who felt sympathy for those ideas. The movie goes beyond a general call for peace and international cooperation, however. The film plays on the idea that individuals and even nations cannot be relied upon to behave, and must be overseen by some benign, all-powerful, secular entity. Producer Julian Blaustein admitted that he intended the film to be an argument for a strong United Nations. Even the U.N., of course, is an institution of men, and therefore fallible. What Klaatu offers is an army of invincible robots that are immune to corruption or politics and that will swoop in to punish any act of hostility or war, ensuring peace throughout the universe. What a classic Liberal fantasy! In counterpoint, the movie version of “The War of the Worlds” came out in 1953, two years after “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” although, of course, the famous radio broadcast preceded both films. H.G. Wells wrote “War of the Worlds” well before the Soviet Union existed, but audiences in 1953 doubtless viewed the bloodsucking invaders as symbols of the Russians. In “War of the Worlds” the aliens are defeated by an earth virus, an act of Divine intervention evocative of the Conservative fantasy that God would save us from the Communists.

This dichotomy was to become the standard blueprint for Science Fiction. Aliens were either evil invaders who had to be fought off (“Independence Day” “Aliens” “V”) or the bringers of enlightenment to benighted Earthlings, often threatened, as Klaatu was, by the violent paranoia of humans (“E.T.” “Star Trek: First Contact” Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End”). The type of sci-fi that appeals to you may be determined, in part, by whether you have an essentially Liberal or Conservative world view.

Of course, the biggest determinant of which sci-fi stories you will enjoy is, and should be, the quality of the storytelling. That’s where “The Day the Earth Stood Still” falls short. The movie feels like a cheap comic book. Plenty of people will disagree with me on this, but even for 1951, this movie is not a classic.

1 star

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

2010-03-27T06:07:00.001-07:00

If they gave an Oscar for Best Title, I think “Hot Tub Time Machine” would be an early contender. I mean, the movie doesn’t even need a trailer; the title tells you everything you need to know to decide whether or not to see it. This is pretty much a movie about people traveling through time in a hot tub.

It doesn’t do to focus too heavily on the plot, but the story is that Adam (John Cusack), Nick (Craig Robinson), and Lou (Rob Corddry) are 40-something guys whose lives kind of suck. They head out on a ski trip to their favorite old resort, where “Nobody gets carded, and everybody gets laid,” dragging along Adam’s nephew Jacob (Clark Duke). There, the guys booze it up, party in the hot tub, and, you guessed it, travel back to the ‘80’s. The hung-over buddies don’t realize anything is amiss at first, but gradually the hairstyles, music, and day-glo clothing start to clue them in. When Nick asks someone, “What color is Michael Jackson?” and she responds “Black,” they know they are in trouble. This sets up the best line of the film, when they all stand around the magic hot tub and Jacob asks, “Do I really gotta be the asshole who says we got in this thing and went back in time?” Then there’s some plot stuff about how the three older guys have to go back and do everything the same way they did it the first time around or else it will destroy the future (which sucks anyway, for these guys), but there’s no need to get too invested in the details. Just enjoy the drinking, pissing, puking, bleeding and disappointingly stingy sex scenes.

This brings me to a disturbing modern movie trend, which is that supposedly raunchy movies have replaced bare breasts and hot sex scenes with stuff that is actually raunchy, like puking, diarrhea, and, even worse, male nudity. WTF?! I think the Joe Bob Briggs breast count for “Hot Tub Time Machine” is probably about 2 ½, at best. If this were an actual movie from 1980, there would have been a naked babe running through every other scene. I’m just sayin’; standards have dropped!

One thing the filmmakers did get right is the ‘80’s styles. A lot of movies set in the ‘80’s dress the girls like Madonna album covers, but “Hot Tub Time Machine” is a lot closer to the real thing. I also loved the blond, asshole-ski-patrol, ‘80’s jerk character, who was lifted straight out of John Cusack’s 1985 comedy “Better Off Dead.” Speaking of blond ‘80’s jerk characters, William Zabka, the original “Karate Kid” villain, makes a cameo. (See if you recognize him.) In another classy nod to the ‘80’s, Chevy Chase appears as a mysterious hot tub repairman.

“Hot Tub Time Machine” is definitely not the best comedy I’ve seen in the last few years. It isn’t quite as good as “The Hangover,” and it definitely can’t stand up to “The 40-year-old Virgin” or “Superbad.” Still, it’s a good time, and I can almost guarantee you will laugh. You’d better! If you actually go see a movie called “Hot Tub Time Machine” and don’t laugh, that’s just embarrassing!

3.5 stars out of 5

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008)

2010-03-26T04:45:00.000-07:00

I stand in awe of the phenomenon that is Neil Patrick Harris. Just a few years ago he was a child-actor punch line, better known as Doogie Houser, MD. Then he turned up to do a little self-parody in “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” Next, he took on the enduring role of Barney in “How I Met Your Mother,” and since then has been on an unstoppable roll of triple-threat awesomeness.

“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is something I read about in Entertainment Weekly. It seems to have been a small project by Joss Whedon (“Firefly”), featuring Nathan Fillian (the captain from “Firefly”) as superhero Captain Hammer and Neil Patrick Harris as aspiring super villain Dr. Horrible. Dr. Horrible longs to join the ranks of top super-villains, and the story follows his attempts to commit a crime worthy of membership in that club. Unfortunately, when he isn’t getting foiled by Captain Hammer, he is distracted by a cute girl from the Laundromat. The whole thing is interspersed with musical numbers, and it is loads of fun. Seriously, Google it.

4.5 stars

Groundhog Day (1993)

2010-03-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

It’s really nice to rediscover a classic. I had honestly forgotten how much fun “Groundhog Day” is, and how much of an existentialist classic it is. Everybody knows this film, right? Bill Murray plays Phil, a narcissistic regional TV weatherman with aspirations for the big networks. He gets sent with his producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) for yet another Groundhog Day celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, an assignment that Phil hates. He looks forward to being a big-time network weatherman and letting someone else cover the small-town kitsch of Groundhog Day. After doing their report, Phil and his team get stuck in Punxsutawney by a blizzard. He spends another night in his quaint bed and breakfast, and he awakens the next day to…another Groundhog Day. He encounters all the same people, conversations and events as the day before. He is understandably disoriented, and when he tries to discuss the situation with his coworkers, they naturally think he has gone crazy, but no problem, because the next day everyone except Phil forgets everything, and it’s 6 a.m. on Groundhog Day again. This happens again and again and again, as Phil goes through various fascinating stages of dealing with his situation.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that, in its own way, “Groundhog Day” is as ingenious a meditation on the human condition as the classic Franz Kafka/Orson Welles film “The Trial.” Both films address existence from a perspective that we are each headed toward an inevitable conclusion, no matter what we do along the way. In “The Trial” (and in existentialist philosophy), that conclusion is death and nonexistence. In “Groundhog Day,” the conclusion of each day is that Phil simply wakes up at the beginning of another Groundhog Day, no matter what he has done on the previous go-round. It is fascinating to watch him deal with this reality in various ways, first with nihilism, then hedonism, then through a misguided attempt to trick Rita into loving him, using accumulated knowledge about her interests and personality. Finally, Phil reaches a place where he decides that if he is going to have to live the same day over and over, he will simply try to live it well, being the best person he can be.

I saw this film back when it was released, and I remember it being intriguing, but in my mind I think I categorized it as mostly a Bill Murray comedy. I’m certain that it will be filed in the Romantic Comedy section of your local video store. Netflix lists it as “Romantic Comedy/Fantasy.” Fantasy is probably closer to the appropriate genre, but I think Inspirational might be more on the money. The Netflix summary says that Phil “realizes he's doomed to repeat Groundhog Day until he learns that his actions can affect the outcome,” but they’ve got it wrong. Much like the protagonist in “The Trial,” Phil never gets any explanation for what has happened to him, and the fact is that he repeats Groundhog Day until he learns that his actions CANNOT affect the outcome, but that being a good person is worthwhile anyway. This is the challenge faced by atheists and agnostics: how to find meaning in a life that may simply end, without being judged by a higher power. “Groundhog Day” delivers its message with humor, but the message is intense, nonetheless.

Murray has had a number of nuanced, provocative roles in his somewhat under-rated career. “Rushmore” and “Lost in Translation” are a couple of good ones. “Groundhog Day” may not necessarily feature Murray’s best acting, but the more I think about it, the more I think it is his best film.

4.5 stars out of 5

A Single Man (2009)

2010-03-15T05:36:00.000-07:00

There are great movies, and then there are great performances. “A Single Man” isn’t a particularly great movie, although it is competently done for a Sundance-type movie by a rookie director (fashion designer Tom Ford). The film does, however, feature a great performance by Colin Firth. He plays George, an English professor frozen by grief 8 months after the death of Jim, his lover and life partner of 16 years. George has decided to kill himself, and the movie follows him on what is to be his last day. The universe is not content to let George simply fade away, however. As he goes about tidying up his affairs, giving a last lecture, and having dinner with his best friend (played by Julianne Moore), he keeps having run-ins with people who seem determined to drag him back from the edge of despair. Finally, it is one of George’s students, a thoughtful, and optimistic young man (Nicholas Hoult) named Kenny, who makes George dare to consider being happy again. As Kenny puts it, “You never know what’s going to come next.”

“A Single Man” is exactly what it should be, a small, thoughtful movie that you just know is based on a book by somebody (Christopher Isherwood, in fact). It is, perhaps, a bit too full of scenes where men stare searchingly into each others’ eyes, but otherwise it makes a fine, intellectual-chick-flick. What takes the film beyond that status is Colin Firth’s acting. He is absolutely perfect in this movie. He is temperamentally the obvious choice for George, having played so many other restrained, extremely British types. In scene after scene, Firth speaks volumes with just a subtle change in facial or body position. He adeptly takes us inside the despair of this buttoned-down, closed-off character and makes us feel joy when George’s ice starts to melt.

3.5 stars

District 9 (2009)

2010-03-05T05:42:00.000-08:00

You simply have to see “District 9.” This relatively low-budget, sci-fi thriller may be the most gripping film of the year. This is definitely one where 8 bucks gets you the whole seat, but you’ll only need the edge!

In the near-future setting of “District 9,” an alien spaceship comes to earth and settles in the sky over, of all places, Johannesburg, South Africa. Then, nothing. No attack, no “We come in peace,” no musical scales. The ship just sits there while the world bickers over what to do. After months, the South Africans send commandos to cut their way in, where they find a million aliens starving and living in squalor. The film explains all of this retrospectively, through interviews, which go on to describe how the aliens are ferried down to the ground and fed. Unfortunately, pity for the aliens quickly gives way to fear and suspicion. Managing a million refugees of any kind is a challenge, and when the starving, desperate masses are bizarre-looking, tentacled creatures (soon nicknamed “prawns” due to their resemblance to shrimp) with an unknown language, problems are bound to ensue. The aliens are soon surrounded by fences and guards; District 9 becomes essentially a concentration camp; and quickly the opportunity to establish true communication with the prawns is lost. The prawns build themselves shelters which form into a shanty town; Johannesburg finds itself with another impoverished minority group; and human-alien interaction devolves into the spheres of crime, law enforcement, and exploitation.

Into this morass is thrown Alien Affairs agent Wikus Van De Merwe (newcomer Sharlto Copley). Wikus is a loveably dorky bureaucrat who gets assigned the job of relocating the “prawns” to a reservation miles from human habitation. He provides comic relief with his sweater vest and clipboard, trying to boss around military commandos, but he is capable of surprisingly callous cruelty because he views the aliens as nothing more than animals. That begins to change when he gets exposed to a substance that begins to slowly turn him into one of them.

Sharlto deserves some credit, by the way, for a really excellent performance in his first feature film. He is on-screen for probably 90% of the movie, and he is as funny as he is intense. His next film looks to be the “A-Team” movie, which I don’t know if I’ll be watching, but I do hope to see this guy again.

“District 9” is the kind of movie that makes me feel good about the future of movies. On a budget of $30 million (probably less than the marketing budget alone for “Avatar”), first-time director Neill Blomkamp has made an action movie that is vigorously entertaining and thought-provoking. The story is obviously inspired by South Africa’s racially fraught history, but the lessons translate equally well to the American experience with the Indians, or even to the screwed-up events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. The point that struck me the most in the film was how, when finally presented with intelligent, alien life, humans so quickly gave up on understanding and settled for contempt and exploitation.

The story behind the story of this film is that Blomkamp wrote and made a short film about the aliens called “Alive in Joburg,” which came to the attention of “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson. Jackson recognized a fellow genius and tapped Blomkamp to direct a Halo adaptation. When that movie fell through, Jackson apparently offered Blomkamp the chance to turn “Alive in Joburg” into a full-length feature, and thank goodness he did. In a season when all the attention is on movies in 3D, it is nice to see that filmmakers can still entertain us just by making the characters and the story three-dimensional.

4.5 stars out of 5

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008)

2010-02-17T19:16:00.000-08:00

The hardest thing about watching “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” is convincing yourself that this is a real documentary about a real band, rather than a parody. The similarities to “This is Spinal Tap” are absolutely uncanny. This is a story of aging rockers who delude themselves that their day is not done. Their attempt at a European tour is a depressing shambles. They speak in bizarre non-sequiturs: Fan - “Why aren’t you playing better venues?” Drummer - “I can answer that in two words, no, three, ‘We haven’t got good management.’” Strangest of all, Anvil’s drummer is named Robb Reiner. Who was the director of “This is Spinal Tap?” Wait for it….Rob Reiner. The film really seems for a while like a straight-faced put-on, an inside joke for rock documentary fans, but from what I can tell, the band Anvil and the story are real.

Drummer Robb Reiner and Guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow started Anvil in the ‘70’s, and the band was one of the vanguard of the metal movement that peaked with bands like Metallica. Much as the New York Dolls are considered a lesser known proto-punk band, Anvil was apparently the cutting edge of heavy metal in the early ‘80’s. This documentary features testimonials from members of Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax about how Anvil influenced them. The band never quite broke into the big time, however, probably because they are Canadian. I’ll bet they were notorious for cancelling gigs to go eat fries and gravy.

“Anvil! The Story of Anvil” finds Robb and Lips working menial jobs in their home of Ontario, living for the occasional tiny gig, turning fifty, and still chasing that elusive rock and roll dream. A European fan named Tiziana writes to offer to manage them on a tour of Europe, where they are supposedly still big stars. That turns into the farce mentioned earlier. Then they rekindle a relationship with their old producer, Chris “CT” Tsangarides. They borrow enough money to have CT produce their thirteenth album, “This is Thirteen,” but ultimately fail to get any record labels interested in their self-produced effort. And so it goes, a constant series of ups and downs, with the ups being illusory, and the downs representing reality.

The thing is, the story could be depressing, but somehow Lips’s childlike optimism carries us along and keeps his band-mates going, from one fading glimmer of hope to the next. Robb is more of a realist, and he frequently threatens to give up the dream and quit. Lips comes across as something of an idiot savant, or maybe just an idiot, but it is nice to see these guys’ wives and some of their family support them. In one heartwarming scene, Lips’s sister loans him a sizable sum to help produce their album. In another scene, Rob’s wife chastises his sister for suggesting that he should give up playing. Still sporting ‘80’s hair and wearing a rock t-shirt, Mrs. Reiner says, “We love the music and the bands. This is just what we do.”

“This is just what we do.” To me, that is the theme of this film. Many would look at the guys in Anvil and shake their heads at the folly of aging rockers still trying to “make it.” The thing is, what else are these guys going to do? Some people watch TV in the evenings, or go bowling, but when the guys in Anvil get off work, they pick up their instruments and play. Lips might seem deluded to some, but I think he is actually very wise. If you are lucky enough to have a dream, you should hold onto it. In this life, it isn’t achieving your dream that is the greatest thing; it is having a dream to chase.

Lips sums it up quite well himself:

“For all this horrible shit that I gotta go through, I’ve got Anvil that gives me my happiness.
The way I look at it, really, is that it could never be worse than what it already is. If it never got better, that’s the way that it is. It could only get better.
On the other hand, if it did get worse, at least this time, after all’s said and done, I can say that All has been said and done, instead of ‘I’ve left a lot of things undone.’”

An interesting post-script is that due to the critical and popular success of “Anvil: The Story of Anvil,” the band has enjoyed a massive resurgence. Heavy Metal isn’t exactly en vogue now, but there are still enough fans around that Anvil is now playing to packed houses and earning enough, finally, to quit their day jobs.

5 stars

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

2010-02-10T19:50:00.000-08:00

Good revenge flicks have a few rules. Number 1 is that the bad guys have to commit an atrocity so bad that it will justify all the mayhem that is to come. “Inglourious Basterds” is about Nazis, so no problem there. The hero or heroes are then empowered to engage in wholesale slaughter, but Rule Number 2 is that they only hurt or kill people who deserve it. Rule 3 is that the story must stay at least minimally plausible. I’m all for movies that engage in total flight of fancy, obvious fairy tales like “Edward Scissorhands” or “The American Astronaut.” That tone isn’t right for a revenge movie, though, because it distracts from the audience’s ability to project ourselves into the role of the hero, dispensing simple justice to people who rarely seem to get what is coming to them in the real world. That is the cathartic value of a revenge movie, and for me, “Inglourious Basterds” failed to provide that because the movie violates rules 2 and 3.

The story is of a group of American commandos, all Jewish, who volunteer to be dropped into Nazi-occupied France to carry out a war of terror against the German occupiers. Their mission, according to leader Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), is “killin’ Nazis.” It’s a great fantasy setup, really. How many people, past and present, Jewish and otherwise, would love the idea of engaging in guerrilla warfare against the Nazis? Who wouldn’t want to kill Nazis? The Basterds, as they are called, pursue their job with gusto, gaining infamy among the Germans for their brutality, which includes beating captives to death with a baseball bat and carving swastikas onto the foreheads of those they release. Then the dream assignment comes along. The entire German high command, including der Fuhrer himself, is set to attend a German propaganda film premiere in Paris. They set out to help a British secret service agent blow the place up. On top of all that, the Basterds aren’t the only ones with plans to destroy the place.

The acting is generally excellent. Melanie Laurent is particularly good as Shosanna, the only surviving member of a Jewish family slaughtered by “Jew Hunter” Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Landa, a chillingly astute Nazi detective, is the best character in the film, although there are occasions where he breaks into a bizarre clownishness that ill-suits the tone of the rest of his performance. Brad Pitt fits himself pretty well into Tarantino mode, although his Southern accent leaves something to be desired.

Now for those rules I mentioned. First, Rule 2, which says that the heroes must be just. If the Basterds stuck to killing and torturing hard-core Nazis, the movie would be all right. There is one scene I cannot get past, however. The Basterds have successfully ambushed a small German patrol, and they are interrogating three prisoners, trying to find out about the location of another patrol. When the German sergeant rightfully refuses to betray his fellows, he is threatened cruelly, and then beaten to death with a baseball bat. This is a Tarantino movie, so of course the entire scene is especially graphic. Now if this were Adolph Hitler being bludgeoned, or even a concentration camp guard, I’d be okay with it. These are just low-level, regular German army grunts, though, and it is disturbing, to say the least, to watch our protagonists torture and kill them. Perhaps Tarantino was actually trying to make a point about the nature of war and violence, but in any event, this scene ruins the movie as a revenge flick.

Lest you think I am simply squeamish, I would like to compare the baseball bat murder to the Marsalis Wallace rape scene in “Pulp Fiction.” That scene probably wouldn’t be considered quite as shockingly graphic today, but when the movie came out, the scene had people walking out of theaters. The deal was, though, the movie had earned the right to show us that. The entire buildup of Butch’s story line made it inevitable that he would grab that sword and go back to help Wallace, despite the fact that they were trying to kill each other in the previous scene. If that meant that we had to see a glimpse of homosexual rape, it fit the story, and in the end, justice was done and the right people were killed. Nothing in “Inglourious Basterds” justifies the baseball bat scene. We all know that the Germans committed atrocities, but these particular Germans are just soldiers as far as we can tell. If the Basterds killed Germans in battle, then fine. If they had to kill those prisoners, then they could have given them a quick, clean death. Their cruel tactics in that scene are unfitting in what is otherwise a cathartic revenge fantasy.

That brings us to how the film breaks Rule 3, the one about being at least somewhat plausible. “Inglourious Basterds” is way too much of a fantasy. I had heard that it was a “re-imagining” of WWII, but I never guessed just how re-imagined it is. Even so, I wouldn’t have minded the big-concept style if Tarantino had bothered to make the plot even remotely plausible, but this is the ’70’s porno version of a revenge movie. (The doorbell rings, and it's a couple of Nazis having an argument about who is better at killing Jews. They want you to judge, and by the way, would you mind holding their baseball bat for them?) Tarantino has always been a master of respecting plot details and dialogue, but in “Basterds” he treats these things as minor signposts on the road to “killin’ Nazis.”

Some have suggested that the film is Tarantino's parody of other movies, that this is his version of a western or a Charles Bronson flick. Maybe that is his intention. "Kill Bill" was his version of a kung-fu movie, and "Grindhouse" was his parody of, well, grindhouse movies. I guess I just don't like this mission Tarantino is on. I liked it better when he was making good movies rather than making fun of bad ones.

I am a bit puzzled at the awards-season attention “Inglourious Basterds” is receiving. The movie is very well-acted, and it’s worth seeing just for the performances by Diane Kruger (as a German movie star turned Allied spy), Melanie Laurent, and especially Christoph Waltz. This is a movie with great acting, but a flawed script and, frankly, uninspired direction. I suppose you could try to credit the film as an over-the-top comedy, but the movie invests too much and requires too much investment from the audience to get off that lightly. I have been a big fan of some of Quentin Tarantino’s work, but I was disappointed by “Inglourious Basterds,” and I like it less the more I think about it.

2 stars out of 5.

Julie and Julia (2009)

2010-01-28T18:30:00.000-08:00

It seems redundant to praise this movie. Everyone with a keyboard has talked about how nice it is that Hollywood made a good movie for women, and how great Meryl Streep is as Julia Child, and so on. They’re right, too. “Julie and Julia” really is that good.

The film is based on the blog-turned-book by Julie Powell about her yearlong project to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s classic, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Her story pretty much follows the standard stunt-memoir formula. First she is tentative-but-excited at having come up with the idea and embarking on the adventure. She makes good headway for a while. Then there’s the part where she is overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, and has a good cry. Then there’s the part where the project puts her marriage at risk. After months of struggle, she completes the project and comes to some sort of peace with it and with the changes it has made in her life. Finally, the book offers come rolling in. It’s the dream of every over-sharing, self-absorbed blogger in the world. Don’t get me wrong, though, it’s fun stuff.

Meanwhile, the film also tells Julia Child’s story: how she moved to Paris with her husband, and, inspired by the wonderful food, decided to enroll in a famous French cooking school. She wound up becoming a cooking instructor, which led to her writing her famous cookbook. The book was something of a magnum opus, but once it was finally published, it revolutionized the American palate and led to Child’s cooking show and lasting fame.

The more compelling parts of the movie are the Julia Child parts. I really have to hand it to Meryl Streep here, she is amazing as Child. (The way she disappears into the role reminds me of Jamie Foxx’s portrayal of Ray Charles in “Ray.”) Nothing particularly intense happens to Julia (or to Julie) in the course of the movie, but nonetheless, Child’s love affair with her husband and with food makes for a good story. If Streep wins some awards for this role, they will be well deserved.

4 stars out of 5

500 Days of Summer (2009)

2010-01-22T09:23:00.000-08:00

Love in the movies is always the same, right? Boy and girl meet in some adorable way and fall into a love that is perfect, mutual, and all-important. They usually have to overcome some obstacles to be together, and the movie may even give us a tragic ending where they are permanently separated by death or circumstances, but their love is eternal. The most important thing in the world is that the Boy and the Girl, who were Meant For Each Other can Be Together. If that can be achieved, then Everything Will Work Out.

Real love, of course, is complicated. It is probably made even more complicated by Hollywood’s efforts, which have trained so many of us to expect the Hollywood version of love. “500 Days of Summer” explores, in a small way, a more realistic version of love. It’s a love story where the Boy and the Girl love each other, just not equally.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, a greeting card writer who falls head-over-heels for Summer (Zooey Deschanel). It’s easy to see why. There are lots of beautiful actresses with big, blue eyes, but Ms. Deschanel has a certain fresh, quirky quality that makes her irresistible. She isn’t, strictly speaking, the sexiest actress, but I can’t imagine a guy who wouldn’t want her to be his girlfriend. (She reminds me of Molly Ringwald in that.) Anyway, Summer and Tom hit it off and date for a blissful while. Since the movie jumps back and forth in time, I’m not really ruining anything for you by revealing that Summer tires of the relationship before Tom does. Instead of the standard movie where Tom Gets Her Back, this is a movie about Tom Getting Past It.

No new ground is really covered here. Breakup movies aren’t as common as standard romances, but if there can be said to be a Breakup Movie formula, “500 Days of Summer” follows the formula. Tom gets advice from his wacky roommates and his ridiculously wise little sister. He mopes, breaks stuff, etc., and ultimately he uses the breakup as a transformative experience that gets his life back on track. Standard stuff, but nicely done, with charming performances by Levitt and Deschanel. The film has some good humor, it handles the serious bits with class, and it’s a nice little piece of entertainment.

3.5 stars

Children of Men (2006)

2010-01-12T05:07:00.000-08:00

Proving that a movie doesn’t have to be fun to watch to be brilliant, “Children of Men” is a dark work of genius. The story centers around the terrifying conceit that humanity has lost the ability to reproduce. This is ironic considering that so many of our problems today seem to be caused by excessive reproduction. “Children of Men” hypothesizes that all these problems would be that much worse if we weren’t kept sane by the hope embodied in the next generation. This dystopian, near-future sci-fi movie paints the earth as pretty similar to the world of today, but dominated by the existentialist hopelessness of an entire race of humans who face the likelihood that they are the end of the line.

Clive Owen is Theo, one of the unhopeful masses. He gets kidnapped by terrorists working for his ex, played with revolutionary style by Julianne Moore, and recruited for a shocking mission: to help smuggle the only known pregnant woman in the world out of England and into the hands of some trustworthy doctors. Calloused as he is, Theo takes the job for money, but during the nightmarish journey he rediscovers his humanity.

“Children of Men” gets so many things right. First of all, the actors are universally excellent. I’m not necessarily a big Clive Owen fan, but he really nails this one. Likewise, Julianne Moore is very convincing as an insurgent leader, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is chilling as one of her lieutenants. Michael Caine is wonderful in a small role as Theo’s dad. Another thing the film gets right is the Big Concept. This is science fiction, after all. “Children of Men” does a great job taking this concept, that the entire human race could suddenly become sterile, and envisioning our world under those conditions. The action sequences are also pretty good.

This is not, by any stretch, a date movie, but on a night when you are up for a serious, seriously good movie, “Children of Men” is worth seeing.

4 stars

Pretty in Pink (1986)

2010-01-06T05:09:00.000-08:00

I know it’s hard to believe that anyone in the free world hasn’t seen “Pretty in Pink,” but I actually just saw the movie. I know, bizarre, huh? The thing is, I think there are just some movies, even iconic ones like this, that you miss out on if you don’t see them when they come out. This film came out in 1986. It isn’t like five years later, when I was in college, I had friends saying, “Hey, why don’t we hang out and watch ‘Pretty in Pink’?” So the years went by, and now I finally got around to seeing it.

Molly Ringwald plays Andie, a smart girl from the wrong side of the tracks who gets picked on by the rich bitches at her high school and who finds herself having to chose between 2 guys. On the one hand, there is Duckie (Jon Cryer), her lifelong best friend and fellow outcast, whom she thinks of as a brother. On the other hand is Blaine (Andrew McCarthy), a funny, mysterious, charmingly sincere, good-looking, rich kid. If anyone watching this movie actually had any doubt in their mind whom Andie would choose, then they deserve some kind of award for actually knowing less about women than I do. In any event, Duckie has this secret crush on Andie but lacks the walnuts to even ask her to Prom. Blaine, meanwhile, comes on really strong at first, but winds up ditching Andie under pressure from his preppy friends, including an asshole named Steff (James Spader.) With prospects like these, I think Andie should just remain a virgin until college.

I didn’t like “Pretty in Pink” nearly as much as “The Breakfast Club” or “16 Candles.” This movie is way more of a chick flick, by which I mean that the entire movie is about which of these two guys Andie is going to date. As I said already, I was rooting for neither. Duckie is nerdily cool, and a good friend, but Andie has no chemistry with him. She has tons of chemistry with Blaine, but I found it impossible to root for the guy. He seems nice, but then why does he hang out with a stereotypical rich jerk like Steff? Plus, a guy named Blaine really ought to have a stronger chin. Harry Dean Stanton is sympathetic as Andie’s single father, but, like all the male characters in the film, he is just not quite respectable.

Probably the most likable character is Andie’s boss Iona, played with sexy panache by Annie Potts. She is a hipster who lives in Chinatown, owns a record store, and changes her hair daily. She’s a mother figure for Andie, and she provides Andie with evidence that being a single woman is not the end of the world. This is a message that young women need to hear, and Iona sent it long before “Sex and the City.”

Come to think of it, “Sex and the City” and “Pretty in Pink” share a feminine, feminist attitude. They are both about strong, independent women who are doing the heavy lifting in their lives while also being pretty in pink.

3.5 stars out of 5

Bay of Angels (La baie des anges) 1963

2010-01-03T15:14:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since we watched a Jeanne Moreau movie, so we took Netflix’s suggestion for “Bay of Angels.” Big mistake! This Jacques Demy creation is a bleak depiction of gambling addiction, more public service announcement than entertainment.

Claude Mann plays Jean, a young man newly introduced to gambling by a friend. Tired of his conservative life, he takes a vacation, intent on expanding his horizons and living a little dangerously. He meets Jacqueline (Jeanne Moreau) in a casino and gets sucked into her roller-coaster life of compulsive gambling.

Jacques Demy has some charming little movies, like “Lola” and “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” This film, though, is just painful to watch. When Jean and Jacqueline win, you know they are just going to lose it all again, and you know from the beginning that Jacqueline is never going to change. The only real question is whether or not Jean will become a gambling addict or win his way free of the situation. Unfortunately, the film never really makes us care enough about Jean to generate much suspense. Basically, the story is one predictable, bad outcome after another, without any real drama or action. The ending feels very tacked-on, as well. To top it all off, Jeanne Moreau looks cheap and ragged-out as a platinum blond.

An interesting noir could have been made out of this basic premise. Instead, “Bay of Angels” is a boring character study about one character who is unlikable (Jacqueline) and one who is not really developed (Jean).

1 star

The Proposal (2009)

2009-12-01T18:50:00.000-08:00

This piece of fluff is about a bossy book publisher (Sandra Bullock) who gets her assistant (Ryan Reynolds) to marry her in order to avoid being deported to Canada. Hilarious, right? Not really. The problem isn’t that this ground was covered quite well in the 1990 film “Green Card,” starring Gerard Depardieu and Andy MacDowell. Movies borrow from older movies all the time. The problem is that “The Proposal” seems to have taken a long, hard look at the classic “Green Card,” and just given up, turning to a hackneyed story line full of romantic-comedy clichés and lacking in any real humor. The result is a film full of good actors (including Betty White) who have absolutely nothing funny to do or say.

The plot, such as it is, is that the Sandra Bullock character, Margaret, violates her visa and, facing exile in Canada and loss of her job, bullies her assistant, Andrew, into agreeing to marry her. To prove to the INS agent how in love they are, they travel to Andy’s home in Sitka, Alaska, making this one of those fish-out-of-water movies. Ho, ho, ho, you are probably chortling, in anticipation of all the rich humor to be mined from a New York city slicker visiting Alaska. The TV show “Northern Exposure” certainly proved that there is some fun to be had with the concept. “The Proposal” manages to have almost no fun with it whatsoever. In one scene, the women in Andy’s family take Margaret to see a stripper, generating one of the only funny lines in the movie. “Ramone is the only exotic dancer on the island. We’re really lucky to have him!” This scene ought to be the height of physical comedy, but none of the actors seems to be able to summon the energy to make it work. I would swear that Sandra Bullock’s slightly bored, disgusted expression as Ramone (The Office’s Oscar Nunez) gyrates around her represents not her character’s reaction to Ramone, but the actress’s reaction to this lame movie.

Come to think of it, everyone in this film seems slightly bored, as if they are just waiting for the movie to work its way through all the clichés and be over. In that sense, this is a film where the audience can truly identify with the actors.

1 star

An Education (2009)

2009-11-28T06:48:00.000-08:00

It’s autumn again, the season for good movies. No more lame, big-budget video game movies or rom-com re-treads. From now to the New Year, we are guaranteed some worthwhile movies, big and small. “An Education” is one of the small ones, and very charming. The movie is taken from the memoirs of journalist Lynn Barber, with a screenplay by Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity”.) In the movie, Barber’s name is changed to Jenny, a brilliant 16-year-old who is secretly bored to tears with being a straight-A student at her all-girls school. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) seems like she isn’t even fully aware how bored she is until a flirtatious older man named David (Peter Saarsgard) introduces her to the possibilities of life in the big city. Inexplicably, Jenny’s parents allow David to court her quite inappropriately, until she figures out that there is more to David than meets the eye, most of it unsavory. What did she expect, you might wonder, of a grown man who picks up a high-school girl?

The first big question raised by this story is framed pretty well by Jenny in her tearful challenge to her parents, “Young girls are always getting seduced by older men, but what were you two thinking?” Indeed, Jenny’s parents are so ridiculously impressed by David’s good looks, fine clothes, fancy car, and fictitious Oxford education that he manipulates them even more easily than he does Jenny. I think this is partly because Jenny’s family is so nouveau bourgeois. Having managed some middle-class success, they aspire to more for their daughter, but they aren’t completely clear on what they are hoping for, or exactly why. They put her in a good school and push her to excel and aspire to Oxford, but when they are presented with a seemingly simpler prize in the form of David, who presents himself as a successful, young(ish) man who could take good care of their daughter, these parents turn out to have pretty provincial priorities.

This brings up the major theme of the film, which is, “What is the purpose of an education?” Jenny’s parents were seemingly going through the motions in encouraging her to go to college. At the end of the day, their main goal seems to have been to put her in a position to meet the right sort of fellow. While her parents are busy offering her up like a lamb to a wolf, Jenny herself seriously questions the value of a college degree in a world where the only career option for a woman seems to be teaching. There’s nothing wrong with teaching, of course, but if that is literally the only post that an educated woman can aspire to, then the whole process does seem a little bleak.

I am making it sound like the movie is a downer, but “An Education” is actually much more comedy than tragedy, with wit in even the most serious scenes. Carey Mulligan, who has the most charming face, is quite convincing as a schoolgirl; and Peter Saarsgard’s David is genuinely charming enough to pull off the seduction. Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour are cheerfully clueless as the parents, and I’ll be damned if Cara Seymour doesn’t look like she could actually be Carey Mulligan’s mother, matching dimples and all.

4 stars out of 5

Away We Go (2009)

2009-11-10T06:40:00.000-08:00

This was a movie my wife read about. I went in with basically no expectations, which probably wound up making it more enjoyable. “Away We Go” is directed by Sam Mendes, director of “American Beauty,” which I consider to be a crappy film with really good direction and some good acting, so I didn’t know what to expect.

John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph play a couple with a bun 6 months in the oven. She is an orphan, and his parents decide to move to Belgium right before the baby is due. Since they both work from home, they find themselves suddenly without any reason to continue living in their crappy trailer in a place they hate. They hit the road to visit friends and family in a few locations across the continent, in hopes of finding a better place to start over and raise their child. They start out thinking that their life is really kind of screwed up, but along the way they come to realize how lucky they really are, and blah, blah, blah. The premise is really a bit trite, but somehow “Away We Go” transcends the sentimentality to be a genuinely funny, entertaining little film. Krasinki and Rudolph turn in very likable, genuine performances, and Catherine O’Hara, Allison Janney, and Maggie Gyllenhaal bring the funny with some hilariously over-the-top craziness in small roles.

“Away We Go” plays like a Sundance movie, and it mostly works because it doesn’t overreach, which is a surprise coming from the guy who directed the intense “Road to Perdition“ and the too-big-for-its-britches “American Beauty.” I wouldn’t necessarily go out of my way to see “Away We Go,” but it’s a funny, entertaining little film that will make you smile.

2.5 stars out of 5

Religulous (2008)

2009-11-05T04:48:00.000-08:00

You know the traditional prohibition against discussing politics and religion in polite company? The wisdom of that rule is demonstrated by the movie “Religulous,” a movie so polarizing it makes “Fahrenheit 9/11” look like a nature documentary. I’m not sure what the original purpose of this documentary by Bill Maher was, but the finished product is pretty much a one-man screed against all religion, everywhere.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some fun to be had here, even if some of it is mean-spirited. Basically, Maher interviews a series of religious people of different faiths, asking them the pointed, full-frontal questions that the rest of us have long wanted to ask them. “How can you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin?” “How can you believe that the earth is only 5,000 years old?” “How can you claim to espouse love while preaching hatred of gays?” He doesn’t just go after Christians. Muslims get their fair share, including an interview with a radical Islamic English rapper who is terrorism‘s answer to gangsta rap. Maher asks him, “How can you expect people to tolerate your lyrics when you and other Muslims can’t be tolerant of someone like Salman Rushdie?” Scientologists and Mormons get some attention as well. Even though most religious people will find something to hate in this film, they will find a lot to love as well, since Maher makes fun of all the other religions, too. There is genuine vicarious pleasure in seeing these questions posed so bluntly, but many of Maher’s interviewees simply aren’t up to the intellectual task of defending their beliefs. Most (not all) of them are in positions of religious leadership, so I really shouldn’t feel sorry for them, but still, the effect is sometimes like watching bunnies get stomped. Maher concludes with a no-holds-barred manifesto in which he openly declares that religion is the source of great evil and that mankind will not progress or survive unless we put aside this relic of our superstitious past.

Even as I often cringed at the blunt, heavy-handed interviews, I had to admire, just a little, the sheer balls of this popular entertainer coming out and saying, without mincing words, that he thinks religion is crap, and that mankind would be better off without it. The thing is, Maher’s message lacks maturity. He has chutzpah and is often funny, but at the end of the day, he has something of the feel of a newly agnostic college sophomore. It is childish to lay so much blame at the feet of faith. From what I can tell, humans managed to slaughter and enslave each other before the advent of modern religions. Granted, it is easy to lose sight of that when what we see of religion is mostly protesters screaming obscenities at gay people, intellectual midgets trying to dumb down science texts, and suicide bombers murdering children. At the end of the day, though, I think that these are failings of human nature, and that religion is sometimes just a convenient outlet for our darker side. Just as much evil has been done in the name of a charismatic leader (Hitler) or a political ideal (Communism) as has been done in the name of God.

I am torn as to whether or not to recommend “Religulous” for mass viewing. It’s a no-brainer that the skeptics out there will enjoy this. I truly think that the film could be thought-provoking for religious folks as well, but you need to go into it knowing that if you are a member of any fundamentalist creed, this film will say things that disrespect what you believe in. If you cannot tolerate that, then stay away. While the movie may not be for everyone, I think the final message of “Religulous” is something everyone needs to hear: “The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that's what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.”

4 stars out of 5

The Reader (2008)

2009-08-18T18:51:00.000-07:00

Every year, five (soon to be ten) movies are nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and I always think I should try to see them. The problem is that so many of them look really unappealing. These nominees tend to be more than just art films (I LIKE art films.); they are Big Subject movies, and they tend to be preachy. These movies are about Race, Greed, Evil Republicans, or America’s Obsession with Violence. Then there’s the recurring favorite topic: The Holocaust. How many more movies about the Holocaust are we going to be subjected to? Well, I can’t believe I’m doing it, but I am here to recommend that you watch one more.

The Best Picture nominees for 2008 were “Slumdog Millionaire,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Milk,” “Frost/Nixon,” and “The Reader.” I watched and liked the first two, and I’d be up for watching the second two on the list. As for “The Reader,” I had zero interest in watching, and I just got sucked into it because I truly had nothing better to do. It turns out the movie is way, way better than I expected!

“The Reader” tells the story of a young man, Michael (played young by David Kross and older by Ralph Fiennes), who, at the age of 15, has an affair with an older woman, Hanna (Kate Winslet.) They have some hot times, but Hanna has something of a wall around her, and seems to carry a deep sadness and loneliness. The two manage to make something of an emotional connection, however, and in a moment of playfulness, Hanna gets Michael to read one of his books to her. Soon they are working their way through Michael’s library, Hanna listening rapt as he reads the classics to her.

When Hanna abruptly vanishes from his life, Michael is, of course, devastated. A few years later, as a law student, Michael re-discovers Hanna when she is brought to trial for, of all things, having been a Nazi concentration camp guard. Michael’s handling of the situation as a young man and years later, when he forces himself to re-visit the issue, makes an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The reason I was able to get into yet another Holocaust movie is that “The Reader” is only peripherally about The Holocaust. It is really about the thorny issue of how modern Germany deals with the guilt of the Nazi era. As the last of those who lived through that time die off, this will become less and less of an issue, but for recent history it must have been quite an elephant in the room for Germans. Meanwhile, knowing this history doesn’t seem to stop people in the rest of the world from repeating it. It seems that 20, 30, or 40 years down the line we are always going to be dealing with this thorny question of how to pass modern-day judgments on past crimes.

Caught smack in the midst of this question is Hanna. “The Reader” does not excuse Hanna for her crimes, but it carefully raises the question of how much of her trial is just scapegoating. If almost all Germans knew something of what went on in the camps, and if most kept silent, and many approved, then how much of that guilt belongs to any one camp guard? This film doesn’t answer the question any more than I could, but it does a good job making us aware that the question exists.

None of this necessarily sounds like good entertainment, but somehow “The Reader” kept me on the edge of my seat. Hanna’s situation and Michael’s journey as he reaches out to her are somehow transfixing. This is the kind of movie that people tell you you should see, and you know what? You really should see it!

4.5 stars

Tropic Thunder (2008)

2009-08-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

Everyone thinks that the best makeup job of 2008 was transforming Robert Downey, Jr. into a black guy in “Tropic Thunder,” and I have to admit that the effect is impressive. Honorable Mention, however, has to go to whomever turned Tom Cruise into the slightly bloated, bald, foul-mouthed movie producer Les Grossman. The movie was halfway over before I realized that was Tom Cruise. Maybe it’s just that I couldn’t see well through all the tears of laughter. “Tropic Thunder” is hilarious from the first shot, and your face WILL hurt from laughing by the end.

The movie is about the attempt to make a movie called “Tropic Thunder,” an effects-driven, blood-soaked cliché of a Vietnam movie. The would-be drama features an ensemble of self-absorbed actors: fading action star Tug Speedman (Ben Stiller), fart-joke comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), rapper Alpa Chino (Brandon Jackson), unknown Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), and serious method-actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr. in incredibly convincing blackface.) The production is plagued with accidents and budget overruns, Apocalypse-Now-style, partly because of the diva behavior of its stars. Desperate to make a realistic movie, the director decides to plant his actors deep in the jungle with nothing but a map and blank-firing weapons, and film them guerilla-style. Unfortunately, the jungle is full of actual guerillas, heroin producers who add a great deal of realism to the experience.

Robert Downey, Jr. can’t possibly get enough credit for this role, playing Kirk Lazarus, a white guy who undergoes “a controversial skin-darkening procedure” in order to play a black character. He starts out extremely convincing, but the more he is ridiculed and challenged by Alpa Chino (actually black), the thinner his charade grows, until finally he is reduced to quoting the Jefferson’s theme song (“Movin’ on Up”) as a source of wisdom. He stubbornly stays in character even when it becomes apparent that they are no longer filming a movie and just need to get out of the jungle alive. As Lazarus puts it, “I don’t break character until the DVD commentary is done.” This was obviously a risky career move for Downey. I don’t think anyone has worn blackface since 1986, when C. Thomas Howell darkened up to get a Harvard scholarship in “Soul Man.” Downey plays the whole thing perfectly, giving Kirk Lazarus just enough of the ridiculous.

Speaking of ridiculous, Ben Stiller’s Tug is pitch-perfect as well. He is a Vin Diesel-esque action star with a fading franchise and a misplaced desire to be a serious actor. He wants to adopt a southeast Asian orphan, but says “It seems like all the good ones are taken.”

The best way to sum up “Tropic Thunder” is Over-The-Top, but in this case I mean that in a good way. The film starts out with a gargantuan level of hilarity and manages to maintain that level to the hilarious end. I strongly recommend it, and I strongly recommend emptying your bladder before watching.

4.5 stars

Pineapple Express (2008)

2009-07-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

The Judd Apatow universe continues to grow and change. In the beginning, everything was written and directed by Judd Apatow (“The 40 Year Old Virgin”, “Knocked Up”) More and more now, the actors that Apatow has used repeatedly in his TV shows and films are taking over the creative role in Apatow Productions. The results are sometimes brilliant, as with “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” written by star Jason Segel. Other efforts, like “Superbad,” have been mostly great, definitely hilarious, but not quite at genius level. “Pineapple Express” fits into the second group. The toker bromance features Seth Rogen as a pothead process server and James Franco as his pot dealer. When Rogen’s character witnesses a drug murder, the two go on the run from the guilty drug lord and a crooked cop. Hilarity and some seriously violent action ensue.

I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t like this film. There is some truly funny stuff here. I did find, however, that the movie had something of an odd tone. It’s clearly a comedy, and a farce at that, yet the mood turns quite dark at times. There are some scenes of brutal violence that seemed a bit off. Also, I did get tired of the man-love, crying buddies stuff. I don’t know why, but this seems to be a motif of Seth Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg. These guys wrote “Superbad,” another funny movie slightly tainted by scenes of two guys hugging each other and promising to be best friends forever.

This is still a 90% hilarious film. Manage your expectations appropriately, and you are bound to have a good time with it.

3.5 stars out of 5

Up (2009)

2009-07-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

Pixar just keeps knocking them out of the park. The animation powerhouse’s latest offering, “Up,” may not be quite as much of a kid-pleaser as “Monsters, Inc.” or “Wall-E,” but it sets a new benchmark in the world of animation for quality storytelling.

Ed Asner is at his grumpy best giving voice to Carl, an elderly man who, after losing his wife, decides to belatedly pursue their shared dream of exploring the hidden wilds of South America. He launches his entire house into flight with hundreds of hot air balloons, but once aloft, he discovers Russell, an eight-year-old stowaway. The two have a fantastic adventure that leads to a great friendship and opens Carl’s eyes to the possibilities that still await him.

The whole thing sounds like it could be trite, but Pixar pulls it off. The difference between genuine emotional content and nauseating sentimentality is usually in the execution, and “Up” tells this story with subtlety and grace. Asner is the perfect voice actor for this role; he never uses words where an expressive grunt will do. There is also a heartbreaking, dialog-free montage showing Carl and his love Ellie getting married and living out their lives together that is just stunning. The sequence puts to shame just about anything I have seen in an animated film.

“Up” is also action-packed, admittedly with some poetic license taken in the physics department. Some of the action was too intense, in fact, for my three-year-old daughter. I’m glad I didn’t know that ahead of time, though. I might have missed one of the best movies of the year.

4 stars out of 5

There Will Be Blood (2007)

2009-07-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

You would think that an Academy Award or two would be some kind of guarantee that a film has at least some degree of entertainment value. Obviously, Oscar doesn’t always get it right, but even “Crash,” which everyone now agrees should not have won Best Picture, had something going for it. “There Will Be Blood” won Oscars for Cinematography and Best Actor, and for a while everyone was talking about the “milkshake” line at the end. I finally decided to see what the fuss was about. For such an esteemed film, “There Will Be Blood” is the biggest waste of 2 ½ hours I have encountered.

Daniel Day-Lewis won his Oscar as Daniel Plainview, a hard-rock silver prospector who strikes oil and works his way up through the oil business to become a tycoon. He takes no joy in anything save grasping for more, and once he has achieved all he can, he is swallowed up by his deep hatred for himself and others. He makes stumbling efforts, through the years, to be a loving father to his adopted son, but it seems that the part of the brain that allows most people to love is, in Plainview’s skull, given over to scheming and drilling.

I’m not here to argue that either of the Oscars that this film won was undeserved. The cinematography really is stunning, and Daniel Day-Lewis is as brilliant as always (although it has been pointed out that his character bears a strong resemblance to Victor Newman from “The Young and the Restless.”) I just feel that all that talent was wasted on a mean, pointless story about a mean, bitter man. The movie is based on the book “Oil,” by Upton Sinclair. Doubtless the book is another of Sinclair’s screeds against capitalist excess, but the film is only loosely based on it, and focuses more on the personality of Daniel Plainview. Such a bitter story does not bear telling.

As for that “milkshake” line, I’m going to save you 2 ½ hours. It’s simply a metaphor for how you can drain the oil under one plot of land by drilling and pumping oil from adjoining land. Plainview explains, “If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw that goes all the way across the room to you, I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!” The analogy is borrowed from a 1920’s speech by New Mexico Senator Albert Falls.

1 star.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008)

2009-07-05T19:01:00.000-07:00

Somehow I had the impression that this movie was a lot cooler than it actually is. I can’t say exactly what I was expecting. Maybe some sort of epic, “Dazed and Confused” kind of music extravaganza with a talkie, Whit Stillman influence. “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” does have some of those elements, but it is really more of a sweet, funny, but typical coming-of-age teen romance. Having said that, it’s a good movie as long as one’s expectations are appropriate.

Michael Cera (Nick) and Kat Dennings (Norah) are appropriately adorable as a couple of smart, hip teens who spend a night in New York City looking for an underground rock show and wind up finding love. At first I was put off by the unlikelihood of a high-schooler who looks like Michael Cera having dated one gorgeous girl (Alexis Dziena, as Nick’s ex-girl Tris ) and then hooking up with a babe like Kat Dennings, but it turns out that Nick plays in a band, so it makes more sense. (Note to teenage guys: Get into a band; seriously.) Nick is still hung up on that ex-girlfriend, who is frenemies with Norah. For her part, Norah feels she knows Nick a little from listening to the mix-cds he made for Tris. Norah is a stone fox, but she hangs out with pretty, shallow blondes, so she lacks confidence. It takes the pair all of a night out in NYC to work through all this.

From this movie and from a few snippets of “Gossip Girl,” I gather that New York City is full of orphans. (Actually, Nick and Norah seem to be from New Jersey. No parents there, either, apparently.) Call me sheltered if you will, but when I was a high-school senior I didn’t get to hop into a van with a couple of gay guys to go spend all night in a big city. I’m just sayin’. It’s fun watching these teens run around NYC having adventures with their friends and bandmates, but it‘s hard to identify.

Given this is a movie about people getting together over their shared musical taste, I was disappointed that “Nick and Norah” wasn’t more about the music. The soundtrack is full of cool, quirky, indy music, but it all just fades into the background of beautiful, funky people enjoying the beautiful, funky city. Compared to films like “Dazed and Confused” and “Empire Records,” “Nick and Norah” let me down in the music department.

Michael Cera is in no danger of losing his status as my go-to guy for smart comedy. The guy is really an amazing actor. He almost always has the same, blank expression on his face, but with just minute changes he is able to express volumes. I loved Kat Dennings in “The 40-year-old Virgin” and she acquits herself well here, showing that she can carry a leading role. Kudos also go to Ari Graynor, who plays a drunk girl perfectly and has a nice ass.

3.5 stars out of 5

Star Trek (2009)

2009-06-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

Star Trek hit television screens in 1966. Forty-three years later, it still isn’t safe to go down to a planet’s surface wearing red. The eleventh and latest movie based on the franchise hit theaters in May, and while it isn’t the best of the bunch (Objectively, that honor goes to Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.), it definitely isn’t the worst.

When I first heard that a Star Trek film depicting younger versions of Kirk, Spock, and crew was in the works, I groaned. The idea smacked of those lame attempts to revamp dying Saturday morning cartoons by making a series about baby versions of the characters. On the other hand, I’m always prepared to give Star Trek the benefit of the doubt. When I saw the trailer for the new film several months ago, I knew I would be giving this one a chance.

The story surrounds a malignant Romulan who travels back in time to threaten the very origins of the Star Trek universe. Sound familiar? Star Trek: First Contact had a similar theme, only that time it was Borg going back in time to prevent contact between humans and vulcans. This time, a rogue Romulan named Nero passes through a worm-hole seeking revenge against the aged Ambassador Spock. He goes back a hundred years or so and encounters Jim Kirk’s father and expecting mother. Twenty-five years later, a brash, rebellious, young James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) accepts a dare to join Starfleet, where he meets other good-looking young people like Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), and, well, you get the idea. Kirk is still a cadet when everybody gets called up to help out with a disaster on the planet Vulcan. It turns out Nero is still wandering the galaxy with, you guessed it, a Diabolical Plan.

Tinkering with the origins of the beloved Enterprise crew is risky business, indeed, given the fans’ obsession with parsing every detail of this franchise. That’s where the genius of this film comes in. Kirk’s dad is killed in the initial battle with Nero, so by traveling back in time and leaving James Kirk fatherless, Nero creates an alternate universe, which explains away any discrepancies between this film and the rest of the franchise. Brilliant! This device also essentially sets up a whole new franchise, and I hear that future New Trek films are planned.

Am I happy about all this? Yeah, more or less. I like Star Trek, but I’m not a real Trekkie, so I don’t have anything serious invested in the franchise. The new movie is not Amazingly Good, like the “Lord of the Rings” movies were, but it is plenty of fun. As one Facebook friend put it, I was “sufficiently Trekked.”

3.5 stars

La Truite (The Trout, 1982)

2009-05-22T16:02:00.000-07:00

We rented this for two reasons: Jeanne Moreau is in it, and the DVD case said it was a “sex comedy.” Ha! “La Truite” has neither sex nor comedy, nor anything remotely interesting to say, for that matter. The main character, Frederique (Isabelle Huppert), is supposed to be “The Trout” I suppose, in that she is slippery and constantly wriggling out of men’s clutches. She supposedly vowed as a teenager to use her sexuality to get whatever she could out of men, while giving them as little as possible in return. (Sounds more like what the filmmaker did to me.) Rather than making an interesting tale of that, or even a bit of soft-porn fun, the film presents a dour, tepid take on sexual politics that is as unbearable as it is long. Really, the only thing funny about the film is that I sat through the whole thing, thinking that surely a point would appear somewhere. The joke was on me!

Jeanne Moreau is excellent, as always, but she is wasted in this farce. The rest of the cast either cannot act or were as disgusted by the script as I was and couldn’t fake it. For the love of God, leave this one on the shelf!

0 stars.

Down By Law (1986)

2009-05-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

“Have you seen ‘Down By Law?’” This is a question that you might get asked at practically any moment if you spend enough time hanging out with folks on the artsier end of the spectrum, as I do. You should give serious consideration to making the answer to that question a “Yes.” This is one of those films that defines cult classic. Just being able to discuss it will give you significant street cred in certain crowds, and it’s a good movie, too.

“Down by Law” is written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, who described this black-and-white film as a “neo-Beat noir comedy.” The story concerns three men who are imprisoned together in Louisiana. Zach (Tom Waits), a down-on-his-luck DJ; Jack (John Lurie), a down-on-his-luck pimp; and Bob (Roberto Benigni), an Italian tourist imprisoned for manslaughter spend much of the film entertaining themselves in their tiny cell. Zach and Jack tend to grate on each other, but Bob’s childlike charm is irresistible. In one memorable scene, the three stomp around the cell chanting “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.” Interestingly, it is Bob who comes up with an escape plan, which lands them all in the Louisiana swamp enjoying the same dynamic they had in their cell.

Early on, I figured this movie would be about unjust imprisonment, but it isn’t, even though all three guys got something of a raw deal. This is just a story of three guys interacting as they deal with the extreme boredom of prison and the extreme stress of escaping. It is interesting that the swamp proves to be just as isolating as their tiny cell was. The wilderness forces them to stay together just as their cell did, so their relationships are unchanged. It is not until they have the option of separating that they feel themselves truly “escaped,” and it is then that their relationships evolve. The one difference seen in the swamp is that it becomes much more apparent that Bob is quite intelligent, and that it is merely his limited English that makes him appear the buffoon.

This film is extremely slow-paced, and filmed single-camera style in black and white. It’s really hilarious, but the humor is slow-moving and subtle. Audiences reared on a strict diet of big-budget popcorn movies will find “Down by Law” hard to digest. If, however, you have developed a taste for movies that require a little more patience, then I highly recommend it.

4 stars

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

2009-03-01T07:25:00.001-08:00

Once you know the central conceit of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”- Benjamin (Brad Pitt) ages in reverse - you have a pretty good handle on everything that happens in the film. Benjamin is born as a normal-sized baby (a detail I had wondered about), but he is horribly aged and monstrous. He develops into a crippled little boy with the face of an elderly man. As the years pass, however, rather than dying as his family expects, he slowly gets healthier and younger-looking. His life is by definition rather lonely, but he has a good heart that wins him a few friends despite his bizarre appearance as an aged child. One of them is Daisy (Cate Blanchett), a girl of roughly his age. Over the years their lives separate and re-connect repeatedly. They are clearly each others’ great love, but the reality of Benjamin’s reverse aging, as well as all the more ordinary things like pride and youthful folly, keep cropping up to separate them.

There’s an oft-repeated saying that “Youth is wasted on the young,” meaning that by the time we have enough experience and wisdom to appreciate all that life has to offer, our bodies won’t let us do it. In light of that, you might think that Benjamin’s reverse aging is actually a gift. The film does an excellent job showing that this “gift” tends to separate Benjamin acutely from those he loves or could love. On the other hand, the film suggests that whether we get older or younger over the years is not really the point. As Daisy says, “We all wind up in diapers eventually.” Benjamin’s uniqueness makes him a lonely soul, but he experiences all the usual things like love and loss. The one thing about his progressive youthfulness is that it puts him in a good position to understand the central theme of the film, which is that it is never too late to live your life or to change it.

“Benjamin Button” is inspired by a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which can currently be read online at http://www.readbookonline.net/read/690/10628/. The film was written by Eric Roth (“Forest Gump”, “Munich”) and directed by David Fincher (“Fight Club”). I would describe this as a gentle movie. There are no great shocks to the system, and it might be difficult to mark the dramatic climax. It’s as if the storytellers set up the initial condition of Benjamin’s reverse aging, then just allowed his life to play itself out on screen, with no contrived plot twists or major revelations. (Deistic filmmaking.) Folks expecting an explanation for Benjamin’s condition, or a science-fictionesque exploration of the process will be disappointed. It’s really a nicely paced movie, beautifully filmed in New Orleans. The story is told through the device of an elderly Daisy having her daughter read Benjamin’s diary to her. This shop-worn device feels a bit “Titanic,” but it doesn’t go over too badly. The film’s only weakness may be that it is so gently paced that you may start to wonder if anything Big is going to happen. Hopefully by the end you realize that the biggest thing of all has happened: a life has been lived. Benjamin may age in an unconventional manner, but when all is said and done he gets the same thing that we all get, a lifetime.

4 stars

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

2009-02-23T08:16:00.000-08:00

“Slumdog Millionaire” represents the future of movies in an ever-shrinking world. It’s in two languages, English and Hindi. It’s filmed in India, with Indian actors, but directed by an Englishman, Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting"). The music is a mix of traditional Indian sounds and hip-hop. None of the actors is famous in the West, but with Boyle directing, this can hardly be called low-budget Independent fare. It isn’t Hollywood, either, or Bollywood. “Slumdog Millionaire” is part of a new movement of multi-national, multi-lingual films that will eventually make the Academy Award category for “Foreign Films” obsolete. These movies may make Hollywood, Bollywood, and other centers of filmmaking power obsolete as well.

“Slumdog Millionaire” is only partly about a young man winning millions of rupees on the Indian version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” The film is really about that boy’s life as an untouchable in the slums of Mumbai. His family and neighbors live a life of physical squalor that still has spots of dignity and community, but they are constant prey for criminals, police, and vicious religious pogroms. In this world, the only hope for advancement for a boy seems to be crime; for a girl – prostitution. Jamal Malik, his brother Salim, and their friend Latika come of age as orphans in this world, eventually becoming separated, as Salim and Latika get sucked into the criminal underworld. Jamal, meanwhile, makes an honorable, if undistinguished life for himself in the new India, with a job as a gofer for phone operators in a call center.

Jamal lucks into the opportunity to play on the “Millionaire” show, where a lifetime of being observant pays off with one correct answer after another. In India, where many still seem to believe that your caste says everything there is to know about you, Jamal’s success leads the police to assume he has cheated. They torture and question him about how he got the answers, and it is through his explanations that his heartbreaking life story is revealed.

Some movie critics seem determined to sneer at “Slumdog Millionaire,” while grudgingly conceding that it is a story well-told. They call it a fairy tale, and it IS a fairy tale, complete with a happy ending. I think that all of us who have seen it were aware that we were watching a fictional movie, but these reviewers seem to feel it is important to remind us that it is unrealistic that a boy from the slums could win a quiz show. I think they are the victims of their own liberal snobbery. They doubtless approve of a film that shows the deplorable conditions of a third-world slum, but they can’t enjoy a happy ending that does not involve the government re-distributing wealth to save the slumdogs.

“Slumdog Millionaire” shows a heartbreaking side of India, and it helps put some things about America in perspective. We in the U.S. widely believe that our country provides opportunity for everyone, and that we are less obsessed with class than many other countries. “Slumdog Millionaire” made me realize that we Americans are absolutely right about that. Modern naysayers love to run America down, and one way they do it is by pointing out that classism exists here more than we admit. That may be true, but in “Slumdog Millionaire,” the game-show host teases Jamal repeatedly about being a “chai wallah” (tea waiter) from the slums, to the audience’s delight. Can you imagine a waiter or janitor being teased that way on American TV? Say what you want about America, but here we at least give lip-service to the idea of equal-treatment, respect, and opportunity for all.

“Slumdog Millionaire” is an optimistic movie in a time when we need the encouragement. In these troubled economic times, there are some cynics who have no room for optimism. I think that most of us, however, will enjoy a beautifully told story about how doing the right thing can pay off. Personally, I wouldn’t care to live in a world where people don’t believe in that possibility.

4 stars out of 5.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

2009-02-03T08:40:00.000-08:00

There are certain movies that loom like Everest, foreboding and unattainable. “The Seventh Seal” is one of those. It’s in black & white; it’s by Ingmar Bergman; it’s in Swedish; it tackles huge issues like death and religion. All the things that make it one of the great films also tend to drive you to watch “Spiderman 3” instead. As a film buff, you know you are supposed to see “The Seventh Seal,” but it tends to sit there like a dreaded homework assignment, put off for another day.

My advice is to get over it and throw that bad boy in the DVD player. “The Seventh Seal” is an amazing movie, and once you get into it, it is not hard to watch. The first few minutes look like some bizarre, art-house schlock, but that is just because all the art-house schlock since 1957 has been trying to look like “The Seventh Seal.”

There are probably endless interpretations of this film, and mine is bound to be unsophisticated. I am holding off on delving into any of the scholarship surrounding this movie until I get my own thoughts down. The story surrounds Antonius Black, a knight (Max von Sydow) returning from 10 years in the Crusades with his squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand). They return, soul-sick and disillusioned by meaningless conflict, to a Europe devastated by the Plague. One morning, Death (Bengt Ekerot) comes to claim Antonius. Faced with the end, Antonius stalls for time by challenging Death to a game of chess. The game takes place over several days of travel, during which Antonius tries desperately to regain his lost faith in the existence of God, while his squire tackles life with a pragmatic, agnostic wisdom. Along the way they befriend a number of people in various stages of joy or unhappiness, but none of them give Antonius the answers he craves.

“The Seventh Seal” is filmed in a stark black & white that displays landscapes harshly, but flatters many of the actors, particularly the lovely Bibi Andersson, who plays a member of an acting troupe. This is a serious film, but there is a lot of humor mixed in. My favorite character is the Squire, a very cool, confident dude. While Antonius agonizes over questions of God and Eternity, his Squire seems content in his atheism. Instead, he spends his energy enjoying life and committing acts of true chivalry. Here are a couple of his quotes that sum up his style quite well: “Our crusade was such madness that only a real idealist could have thought it up.” “Do you have any brandy? I've had nothing but water. It's made me as thirsty as a camel in the desert.” Antonius is a dryer, more earnest character who represents the part in all of us that burns with existential angst when he says, “I want knowledge! Not faith, not assumptions, but knowledge. I want God to stretch out His hand, uncover His face and speak to me.”

I will resist the urge to go into a long-winded discussion of everything I think “The Seventh Seal” means. It would give away too much, and besides, this film deserves to be mulled over, in small pieces, over time. “The Seventh Seal” is not for everyone, but for those willing to invest in a more artsy kind of movie, this is one of the greats. By the time the credits roll on a movie like “Spiderman,” you will already have thought everything worth thinking about the movie, but I suspect I will be mulling over “The Seventh Seal” for years.

5 stars.

Hors de Prix (“Priceless,” 2006)

2009-01-21T07:35:00.000-08:00

My wife says the romantic comedy is dead; they just don’t make good ones anymore. On reflection, of course, it’s clear that that is an overstatement. “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” came out just last year, and it was charming and hilarious. It is true, though that the genre is dominated by trite, disposable crap. The formula is pretty standard. Two people meet in some cute circumstance. They have obvious chemistry, and eventually they give in to it and hook up. Then there is some sort of misunderstanding that drives them apart. Then, triggered by obvious clues from the soundtrack, they realize that they were truly meant for each other and re-unite. Bring on the swelling score, the embrace, and the pull-back shot of the lovers in some romantic location, and everyone gets to go home and wait for their check. Hollywood just switches out actors and a few details and cranks these things out, and most of them suck.

Now to be fair to the romantic-comedy genre, I must point out that the same could be said of all Hollywood genres. Hollywood is not about making movies as much as they are about making money. Mostly they make crap, and they serve it up as fast as they can to a public desperate for the next distraction. By its nature, filmmaking requires the collaboration of so many artists and financiers that it is no wonder that most films are such a watered-down mediocrity, pandering to the lowest common denominator in the audience, that I can’t bear to watch. That’s why it is such a huge relief to me when I see something that doesn’t suck.

“Hors de Prix” is a sweet, funny Audrey Tautou movie in French that doesn’t suck. It doesn’t fail-to-suck in an epic, stirring way, the way “Lord of the Rings” didn’t suck. It fails-to-suck in the compact, straightforward way of well-done small films. Tautou plays Irene, a talented gold-digger who is one step short of being a prostitute. She lives glamorously off the largess of the older men she seduces, but she has nothing of her own and is always a day away from poverty. In quiet desperation, she works towards the goal of marrying one of these billionaires.

When Irene meets Jean (Gad Elmaleh), a hotel bartender, she gets the mistaken impression that he is one of the hotel’s wealthy guests. They hook up, but when Irene learns the truth, the pragmatic hussy leaves Jean without even looking back. Jean, meanwhile, is smitten, as Irene is a beauty beyond his wildest dreams. He follows her like a lost puppy, and in order to stay close to her, he becomes a gigolo. Sharing the same profession now, the two finally develop a real connection, and, well, you’ve probably seen enough of these movies to figure out the rest.

“Hors de Prix” never strays from the classic formula; it just executes that formula with grace. This romantic comedy delivers comedy that is understated and unforced, and romance that is actually romantic rather than trite. Now THAT is beyond price.

4.5 stars out of 5

Laura (1944)

2009-01-12T12:24:00.000-08:00

I’ve been trying to figure out what I didn’t like about “Laura,” and I think it comes down to the movie trying to pack too many noir mystery staples into one film. The title character is played by Gene Tierney, who is one swell-looking doll. The movie starts with detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) investigating Laura’s murder. He finds no shortage of suspects, including Laura’s fiancé Shelby (Vincent Price), Laura’s aunt, who is keen on Shelby, Shelby’s girl-on-the-side, and Laura’s aged admirer Waldo (Clifton Webb). The movie takes us through the usual rigamarole in which we suspect each person in turn. It also throws in plenty of twists that will be familiar to noir-lovers.

I’m not sure what place “Laura” is supposed to hold in the world of noir. I get the impression it is considered something of a classic, but I never got that magical feeling that is the hallmark of a classic. For example, one major plot device is that detective McPherson finds himself falling in love with Laura as he learns more about her and repeatedly sees her picture. This side of the story may be better developed in the novel, but in the film his morbid attraction is handled in a fairly perfunctory manner. “Laura” is entertaining, but it lacks the distinction of a true classic like “Double Indemnity,” which came out the same year.

2.5 stars out of 5

Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l’echafaud, 1958)

2009-01-09T08:12:00.000-08:00

One thing I love about certain old, noir movies is how moralistic they are. They may revel in murder, adultery, and all forms of vice, but in the end, the message is, “No matter how perfectly executed the crime, justice will find you.” In “Elevator to the Gallows,” the crime goes off almost without a hitch. Julien (Maurice Ronet), embroiled in an affair with his boss’s wife Florence (Jeanne Moreau), plots with his lover to kill her husband. He kills his employer in his office, staging it to look like a suicide. He makes only one mistake, but he recognizes it before it is too late, and zips back up in the elevator to fix things. Unfortunately for him, the power gets cut, leaving him trapped in the elevator with his boss’s dead body upstairs. He spends the night trying to figure out an escape, while Florence wanders the streets all night wondering what went wrong with their plan.

In a discussion of another noir movie, “The Third Man,” I believe, I commented that many noir films seem to have as a theme a basically good person who gets put into seedy circumstances in which he may or may not turn bad. Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows” inserts us into the story a little farther along than that. Julien and Florence have already turned bad, and the theme here is another noir favorite, “Will they get away with it?” As in most of these older films, the answer is “No,” but along the way we get treated to the vicarious pleasure of rooting for the bad guys.

With this film, Jeanne Moreau continues her habit of playing bad girls, with this being one of her darkest roles, yet. In other of her films that I have seen, her characters are torn by complex motivations, and they are not completely evil. In “Elevator to the Gallows,” she is really just a murdering adulteress, and probably a gold-digger. A lesser actress might have overplayed an “evil seductress” role like this, but Jeanne Moreau plays it with self-contained grace. The reason she is so good at these roles is that she plays them without shame. She never asks the audience to forgive her or tries to remind us that she is just playing a character. In watching a Jeanne Moreau performance, the audience is confronted with a strong, female character of dubious morality, and we are not allowed to stereotype or pigeonhole her. Moreau brings all the complexity of a real woman to these roles. We may not love her characters, but we are never able to dismiss them.

4.5 stars out of 5

Bad news for my wife

2009-01-02T07:44:00.000-08:00

It turns out I have terrible taste in women. The first time I saw Jeanne Moreau on the screen, my reaction was that she was gorgeous, and I still think she is one of the most beautiful women I have seen in a movie. I would place her in the same pantheon as Liz Taylor and Angelina Jolie. Once I started reading about Jeanne Moreau, though, I discovered that she is widely considered to be a talented actress of marginal looks. Even in her film “Jules and Jim” one of the characters mentions that she has appeal, but she is not really beautiful. Really?

I don’t know what is wrong with my eyes. I look at Jeanne Moreau’s strong features, full lips, and natural eyebrows, and I think she is a goddess, and an amazing actress to boot.

Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1959)

2008-12-26T09:29:00.000-08:00

Our mini love affair with Jeanne Moreau continues with this French adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Rather than telling the tale in its original eighteenth-century setting, as did the American version starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich, director Roger Vadim and writer Claude Brule set this story in late-1950’s France.

This time around, Merteuil (Moreau) and Valmont (Gerard Philipe) are cast as a couple in a VERY open marriage. They actively encourage each other in their dalliances, and enjoy crowing about their conquests to one another. Outsiders view them as a little odd, and most of their acquaintances know that at least one of them is unfaithful, but no one guesses at the true depths of their degeneracy. Merteuil is slightly piqued that Court, a lover whom she had been planning to dump, has beaten her to the punch by getting engaged to a pretty, young woman named Cecile (Jeanne Valerie). Merteuil decides to get even by having Valmont seduce Cecile, thus sullying Court’s marriage bed. In a stunning Alps ski resort, Valmont sets about the relatively easy task of bedding the curious teenager, but along the way he meets a much more intriguing woman. Marianne Tourvel is not only beautiful and charming, but a virtuous wife; and Valmont has just enough heart left to be drawn to her. He tells himself and Merteuil that he is simply relishing a difficult conquest, but Merteuil senses the budding love behind his bravado, and she is jealous of it. There follows a classic storm of jealousy and deceit, leaving behind broken hearts, minds, and lives.

I have not read the novel on which this film is based. My introduction to this story was through the 1988 John Malkovich movie, and I am a huge fan of that film. Merteuil and Valmont are simply fascinating people. They put on this elaborate show of worldliness and seduction, each for an audience consisting only of the other, yet they hold each other at arm’s length. There have never been two who deserve each other more, but they express their love for each other through elaborate conquests of others. Or maybe their delight in each other’s dalliances is not love at all, but a sick form of possessiveness. Perhaps each feels that as long as the other is completely promiscuous, they will never commit true, emotional infidelity.

Laclos’s novel is said to have made waves upon its publication in 1782. The tale of French aristocrats is one of a class of people whose lifestyle has run itself to its logical conclusion. The Aristocracy is known for living lives of leisure, with an obsession with fashion, and a lack of the usual sexual mores. In Merteuil and Valmont, the Aristocracy is seen as consisting of nothing but leisure, fashion, and sexual obsession. It is a story, in a way, of the end of an era, and some say it helped hasten the end of that era. The novel’s dramatization of depraved behavior may have helped flame the fires of the rising French Revolution. Really, the guillotine is too good for Merteuil and Valmont!

This modernized version of the story did not thrill me quite as much as the Malkovich/Close film. The quality of acting and dialog in that 1988 movie conspire to make it perfect. The 1959 “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” is not quite perfect, but it is still excellent. Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Philipe play their roles with charm and menace. Early on, Moreau seemed to be playing a slightly gentler version of Merteuil, but I think that was just her incredible beauty influencing me. Eventually she is seen to be crueler and more heartless than Valmont.

Jeanne Moreau is a fascinating actress. She has what I would consider to be one of the most beautiful faces in film. Her eyebrows are natural and full, on a strong, yet feminine face that, like many beautiful faces, borders on the ugly at times. With her looks and talent she could have been a traditional movie star, but she seems to have made a specialty of playing dangerous women, heartbreakers, and libertines rather than heroines. In an interview on “The Lovers” DVD, she makes it clear that she didn’t set out to play villainesses, but she was always drawn to strong female parts, and in the 1950’s and 60’s, that meant playing unsympathetic women. She plays them unapologetically.

That “Dangerous Liaisons” goes down so well in a more modern setting shows how timeless it is, and I’m sure that the right filmmaker could make a science fiction classic out of it. This story will remain relevant as long as people continue to fall in love and get jealous of each other. As for me, this film only left me more in love with Jeanne Moreau, who is quickly becoming my favorite actress.

4.5 stars

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964)

2008-12-20T08:13:00.000-08:00

This ranks as one of the most bizarre movies I have seen. From the first line to the last, everything is sung. I don’t mean this is a musical, where there are actual songs that tell the story. It is a regular movie, with regular scenes and dialog, but the actors sing all of their lines. Try it. Get your favorite song going in your head, and then sing these words along with the music. That’s this movie! I couldn’t believe my ears for the first couple of minutes, but after a while I got used to it, and it really wasn’t too bad! Actually, the singing adds charm to what is otherwise a pretty minimalist story.

Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) and Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) are a couple of young lovebirds whose prospects are threatened by the clash between Guy’s working-class position and the aspirations of Genevieve’s scrabbling, bourgeois mother. They are devastated when Guy gets drafted, so they commemorate their last date by finally doing the big nasty. You can guess how that turns out. Guy goes to Algeria, leaving Genevieve in Cherbourg with a bun in the oven. Genevieve is determined to wait for Guy, but her mom takes the opportunity to try to pair her daughter with Roland Cassard, a wealthy diamond merchant (Marc Michel, reprising his role from another Jacques Demy movie called “Lola”). It’s actually harder than you’d expect to root for Guy at that point, because he rarely writes to Genevieve, and damn, that Roland is charming!

At the risk of spoiling the plot, I’m just going to say that nothing really dramatic happens in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” (By the way, the title comes from the fact that Genevieve and her mom run an umbrella shop.) This film is driven by vibrant, colorful sets and winsome performances from the cast, who manage to make the singing-the-lines thing work. The movie was a nice introduction to director Jacques Demy, who is apparently quite accomplished. His work has been described as the “tragedy of the everyday,” but I don’t really see “Umbrellas of Cherbourg” as tragedy. To me the film is about how life doesn’t necessarily go in the direction we think we want it to, but there are still great opportunities for love and happiness if we face forward and embrace them. The wistful final scene is tinged with regret, but it also contains a hopeful message about refusing to give in to regret over lost opportunities.

3 stars

The Graduate (1967)

2008-12-14T07:30:00.000-08:00

To really get what a classic “The Graduate” is, it helps to consider that it perfectly captured the shifting societal mood of its time, but is still imminently watchable today. Prior to the late ‘60’s, movies almost always portrayed a positive outlook on America and our way of life. A few films, like “Rebel Without a Cause,” bucked that trend, but in general, Hollywood told America what it wanted to hear about itself. In westerns, the guys in white came out on top; in love stories, the guy got the girl; and in war movies (not to mention the wars themselves), America always triumphed. In the ‘60’s, people were questioning the American dream, and Hollywood started to really dip its toes into those turbulent waters with movies like “Easy Rider,” “Midnight Cowboy,” and “The Graduate.” Movies like these paved the way for what is today an almost dogmatically pessimistic view of American life among artistic films.

The standard description of “The Graduate” is that it is about a younger man, Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), who has an affair with an older woman, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). That misses the point of the movie, though. There is an affair, of course, and as far as that goes, it is fairer to say that it is about an older woman who seduces a younger man. The affair is initiated by Mrs. Robinson as a way to restore her sexual confidence and escape her boring, affluent life and inattentive husband. Being with a younger man, of course, helps her deal with her fear of aging and her disillusionment. The affair is also meant to help her combat her fear that her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) now possesses the youth and beauty that Mrs. Robinson once had, which is why she reacts so jealously when Benjamin takes notice of Elaine’s photograph.

But “The Graduate” is mainly about Benjamin, and for him, the affair is almost incidental. He IS trapped into the “sick” affair, but in the end it is really a more or less convenient way for him to deal with his horniness while he floats aimlessly through post-college life, waiting to be struck by the desire to make something of himself. He has successfully jumped through all the hoops his parents and society have set up for him, and faced with yet another hoop, graduate school, he suddenly finds himself completely without motivation. He looks ahead to a life of suburban homes, cocktail parties, and cheating wives, and he balks.

The affair between Ben and Mrs. Robinson is, of course, a major portion of the film, but when you take a step back and look at how Ben’s life is unfolding, the affair is not really a seminal event. The movie starts with a party celebrating Ben’s college graduation, and it is apparent that his academic career has been a success. Interestingly, the party is populated entirely by friends of his parents, so the tone is set early on that Ben hasn’t yet established his own identity. Ben’s attitude toward the party can be interpreted as shyness around all those older folks, but we eventually see that Ben is feeling deeply lost. We are left to guess at when and how he turned this corner, but he seems to have succumbed to the feeling that he has spent 20 years pursuing his parents’ dreams for him. He now finds himself very empty, without anything of his own to pursue.

Elaine gives Ben something to pursue. He is initially cold to her, at the insistence of her jealous mother, but he inevitably warms to the joy of being with someone his own age. Once he gets past her shyness, Ben falls for Elaine, and it is this, not the affair, that is the seminal event in the film. Falling in love awakens Ben to himself, gives him a sense of purpose, and makes him a man.

“The Graduate” is not an entirely perfect movie. Some of the directorial choices, like the rapid flashes of nudity in one scene, look a little dated now. I also think that Anne Bancroft played Mrs. Robinson as a tad overly harsh, which is ironic, because the role was supposedly very difficult for the normally sweet-natured Bancroft. The occasional flaw really isn’t worth quibbling over, though. In its witty, artful way, “The Graduate” is truly one of the great films.

5 stars out of 5

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)

2008-12-04T07:52:00.000-08:00

It’s a rare occasion now that I see a movie in the theater. On a whim, we decided to take our 3-year-old to see the “Madagascar” sequel. She saw the original in a hotel a while back, and she still talks about it, so she was completely stoked to see “Madagascar 2.” We would have been better off just watching “Monsters, Inc.” on DVD again.

For those without kids, just stop reading now. This is not one of those crossover animated movies that appeals to adults. “Madagascar 2” is for kids, and the adults will be lucky not to fall asleep. (My wife literally did fall asleep for a while!) Briefly, the plot is that those wacky zoo animals that were left stranded at the end of “Madagascar” finally fix up their plane and launch an effort to get back to New York. It turns out that penguins can’t navigate worth a damn, so when the plane inevitably crash lands, it is in Africa. This gives Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer), and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) a chance to re-unite with their own kind, which strains their friendship. Not that the plot matters, really. What “Madagascar 2” is really about is hyperkinetic characters zipping around the screen doing exaggerated voice acting and making winking pop-culture references.

Maybe I’m being churlish criticizing a kid’s movie, but “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” really isn’t the kind of entertainment I’m looking for for my kid. The characters, situations, and crises all feel manufactured and two-dimensional. It seems like whenever the writers got stuck, they just threw in some hip-hop and made the characters dance around. The film also slips in some clumsy slurs against hunters. Call me reactionary, but being a hunter myself I’m really not interested in having Hollywood teach my daughter that hunters are evil, thuggish, and trigger-happy. (If it sounds like I am over-reacting, I will direct you to Whit Stillman’s movie “The Last Days of Disco” for an exposition on how the depiction of hunters in “Bambi” shaped the modern environmental movement.)

If this were the best entertainment available for kids, I guess we could tolerate it, but we don’t have to! As Exhibit A, I give you “Wall-E,” which also came out this year. “Wall-E” mops the floor with the “Madagascar” movies in every way possible. This is a movie that doesn’t even have any dialog for the first 10 to 20 minutes, and yet my three-year-old daughter loved it. The robots and people in “Wall-E” have depth and subtlety to them. With a minimum of celebrity voices and no dance music, “Wall-E” manages to tell a charming story that entertains kids and adults alike. Since that is possible, we don’t have to settle for sub-par fare like “Madagascar 2”. Sure, kids like the “Madagascar” movies; kids like just about anything animated you put in front of them. We might as well put them in front of something good.

2 stars out of 5

Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

2008-11-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

No one is more surprised than me that I actually watched this 80’s movie starring Madonna. I mean, COME ON! I remember when this movie came out, and I pegged it then as a lame vanity project to cash in on Madonna’s popularity. In fairness, I’ll say that I read up on the movie and learned that Madonna wasn’t even the first actress considered for the role. In any event, I gave it a huge skip, because I wasn’t a fan then, and I’m still not. I know, ever since the famous “Madonna discussion” in “Reservoir Dogs” it’s been okay for guys to admit they like Madonna. I’m just not one of those guys.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I must say I don’t get what the big deal is about Madonna. She’s a pretty lady with an okay voice who co-writes fairly catchy songs. I’m okay with people digging on her pop-py music, but for some reason the world seems determined to give her way more credit than she deserves. I bought a new pair of pants the other day, but people aren’t falling all over themselves to congratulate me on my uncanny ability to “re-invent” myself in order to “stay relevant.” I can also play the guitar a little, just like about half the people I know. When Madonna learned a few chords, though, it was “a courageous move” that “legitimized her as an artist.” I mean, really. The girl has spent the last 30 years getting paid for hanging out in studios and traveling around with a bunch of musicians. It would have been shocking if she HADN”T learned to play an instrument in all that time. As for the feat of maintaining her stardom for three decades, it’s impressive, but I consider it mostly a commentary on the world’s appetite for sparkly mediocrity. McDonald's is popular, too, folks.

Now that we’ve established that I’m not a starry-eyed Madonna fan, I’ll admit that this movie was alright. Susan (Madonna) is supposed to be a lovably incorrigible New York free spirit rocker chick. To me she looks more like a lying thief who rips off her friends and bails on them, but since she is played by Madonna, I think we are supposed to like her anyway. She steals some cash and a pair of earrings from her latest boyfriend. When the earrings turn out to be stolen Egyptian artifacts, her life takes a dangerous turn. Rosanna Arquette plays Roberta, a bored New Jersey housewife who becomes obsessed with recurring personal ads between Susan and another boyfriend named Jim. She spies on one of their meet-ups and tries to take on a little of Susan’s zany, 80’s Boho style. When she gets mistaken for Susan, then suffers an amnesia-inducing coma, she gets to live Susan’s life for a little while. Hi-jinks ensue.

This was my wife’s pick, and she insisted that is was “an art movie.” Actually, the film does have a bit of that Sundance feel of a small movie that isn’t trying to be a big one. That sense of knowing its own limits saves this from being another piece of un-watchable 80’s crud. The acting and the story aren't anything special, but they are adequate to the film’s ambitions, making it a mildly amusing diversion. I don’t see myself buying the DVD, but I’m not suing to get my two hours back either.

2.5 stars out of 5

Jules and Jim (1962)

2008-11-28T08:06:00.000-08:00

Driven by an intense desire to see Jeanne Moreau on the screen again, I loaded our Netflix queue with her films. This classic by director Francois Truffaut is an ambitious exploration of a friendship and love triangle spanning 20 or 30 years. Jules (Oskar Werner) is an Austrian and Jim (Henri Serre) is French. The two meet and become fast friends in the Bohemian haunts of early-twentieth-century Paris. There, they drink, chase girls, and pursue their fascination with art. They become particularly taken with an ancient statue of a gently smiling female face. One day they meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), whose serene, yet devilish smile matches that of the statue.

Both men are struck by her, but it is Jules who woos and eventually marries her. The three share an invigorating friendship that survives WWI, but Jim warns Jules that perhaps Catherine was never meant for just one man. The wisdom of his advice is obvious from the way Catherine flirts with Jim, and it is inevitable that they will become lovers. What is not expected is how, as she ages, Catherine’s free spirit morphs into malicious capriciousness, which respectively hardens and softens the hearts of the men she loves.

I’m torn as to whether I loved or hated this movie. It’s clear that, by the end, I mostly hated the characters for their self-indulgence, self-delusion, and self-loathing. The film itself, though, is quite thought-provoking, and it mostly succeeds in its efforts to explore the tricky landscape of love and friendship. This is considered one of Truffaut’s classics, and it is no mystery why. The tale of two friends who fall for the same girl, and the kinky love triangle that eventually engulfs them all, is thoughtfully written and beautifully filmed. It’s a bit of a downer, though, because the passions that initially drive them all wind up becoming muted and sad. Their free lifestyle turns into a prison of the soul.

What initially seems free-spirited and alive about Catherine looks more and more like narcissism as the years pass. Early on, her character has an almost feminist aura, as she seeks to have the same power and freedom as her male companions. Tragically, she winds up looking self-absorbed and destructive. As much as she annoys me though, it is Jules whom I really dislike. His need to be with Catherine is so great that he is willing to tolerate ANY behavior on her part. His weakness is a crutch that allows her weakness to worsen. Jim, the most likeable of them, is only marginally better. He can at least summon up the gumption to be jealous of Catherine, but his constant wavering between her and his steady girlfriend in Paris dooms both loves. Come to think of it, why does Jim’s girlfriend tolerate this over the years? This movie is absolutely lousy with people who have no self-respect!

Most of my impressions from this film are negative, but I didn’t completely dislike it. I’m sure there is a variety of opinion on this tale, which was based on the real-life experiences of Henri-Pierre Roche, who wrote the novel on which it is based. Those more tolerant of human frailty might celebrate these characters for breaking with convention, even if it doesn’t work out well for them. As Jim describes it, they “tried to re-invent love.” The film raises questions about the emotional laws of love. Which laws are immutable, and which are societal constructs? Jim, Jules, and Catherine try to find out by breaking them all. Catherine says, “You said, ‘I love you,’ I said, ‘Wait.’ I was going to say, ‘Take me,’ you said, ‘Go away.’” This statement captures love’s confusion and bad timing, something we have all suffered. For the first half of the film, the threesome's friendship and love are truly delightful. Alas, they can never recapture that joy of their youth, and neither does the movie. For Catherine, Jim, and Jules, as for the viewer, delight gives way to delirium and despair.

3 stars out of 5

The Thin Man (1934)

2008-11-18T07:19:00.000-08:00

Having already checked out a couple of films featuring the acting duo of William Powell and Myrna Loy, I decided to watch their most famous film. The pair made six Thin Man movies about detective Nick Charles and his wife Nora. (Bonus points if you recognize these as the names from the latest movie starring Michael Cera.) These movies are famous for two things: the cute dog and the cute banter between Nick and Nora. The actual mysteries are more of a sideline.

In this first Thin Man, the main theme seems to be how much Nick and Nora drink, and I must say, they can put it away. They do engage in some cute banter, too. Somewhere in there, with the help of their dog, they manage to solve a murder.

I am inclined to say that I think this film is a bit over-rated. The mystery part is okay, but it’s extremely lightweight compared to something like Bogart in “The Big Sleep.” That’s fair enough, as this is more of a comedy than a mystery, and it certainly isn’t a noir film. On that note, the witty repartee IS pretty clever, but Myrna Loy’s aloof style is starting to grate on me. William Powell, on the other hand, is a genuine pleasure to watch. He has an un-self-conscious comedy style that allows him to slip on a banana peel and still come off looking like the coolest guy in the room.

This film does have a final grace note that really wraps it up in style. Remember that this was the 1930’s, so the scenes with Nick and Nora in their bedroom feature husband and wife in separate, twin beds. Well, the end of the movie finds them on a train, and as they prepare for bed, Nora suggests that the dog should sleep on the bottom bunk with her. Next thing you know, the dog has been tossed on the top bunk by himself, and even 30’s audiences knew what that meant.

One final mystery here: Who is the Thin Man? One would assume the title refers to Nick Charles, but William Powell had a decidedly medium build. I’ll risk a spoiler by mentioning that there is a dead body that is a thin man buried in a fat man’s clothes to throw off the police. I would suspect that that is the Thin Man, but it doesn’t explain the five Thin Man sequels.

3.5 stars

Superbad (2007)

2008-11-12T07:55:00.000-08:00

It took me a while to get around to seeing this movie, and even longer to write about it. That’s probably because, while “Superbad” is superfunny and supercool, it doesn’t quite reach the heights of brilliance that some other films from the Judd Apatow universe have (e.g. “The 40-year-old Virgin,” and “Knocked Up”). Produced by Judd Apatow and based on a screenplay by Evan Goldberg (who wrote some episodes of “Da Ali G Show”) and Seth Rogen (who needs no introduction), “Superbad” is directed by Greg Mottola (who directed episodes of “Arrested Development” as well as some episodes of Apatow’s “Undeclared”) That’s quite a pedigree, folks, and it produced a movie that is a hilarious good time, even if it isn’t super-deep.

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg didn’t waste a lot of creativity naming the main characters; “Superbad” follows the exploits of Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera), a couple of high school omega males preparing to graduate. These dorks enjoy flirtations with a couple of improbably hot babes, and get the chance to impress said babes by providing the booze for a graduation party. The only problem is that their ticket to that booze is their skinny friend Fogell (Chris Mintz-Plasse) and his fake ID, which claims he is McLovin (no last name), a 25-year-old, Hawaiian organ donor. Hilarity and a wild night ensue. Rogen and Bill Hader appear as a pair of fun-lovin’ cops, and Joe Lo Truglio from “The State” plays a creepy sex-offender.

By the end, “Superbad” degenerates a little into some sappy bromance stuff. I know this is intended to be sensitive and all, but it treads too much into After-School-Special territory for me. Still, the trip there is a great time.

I enjoy these “wild night” movies, in the tradition of “American Graffiti” and “Dazed and Confused.” The truth is, most of the long story arcs in our lives are too fraught with stops, starts, and overthinking to make great theater, but we can all identify with that “wild night” when anything can and does happen. That’s the part of “Superbad” that will keep me coming back for repeat viewings.

4 stars.

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

2008-11-08T07:15:00.000-08:00

Somehow I got the impression that this latest outing by Wes Anderson and company wasn’t much fun, so I didn’t come into it with high hopes. Maybe this film just looks better in an atmosphere of low expectations, but I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. This is no “Bottle Rocket” or “Rushmore,” but “The Darjeeling Limited” has a charm of its own for those who enjoy Wes Anderson’s talky, thoughtful style. For everyone else, Natalie Portman gets naked.

The story follows the Whitman brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman), an emotionally stunted trio who join up for a train trip across India in order to reconnect, deal with their dad’s death, and find their mom. The trip doesn’t turn out as planned, but as often happens in life, the journey itself winds up having value.

This film was way more fun than I expected. Besides the naked Portman (in a short film called “Hotel Chevalier,” intended as a prelude to the movie on the DVD), there is a lot of understated humor and just some good acting. Owen Wilson overdoes it a bit, and really just plays his character from “Bottle Rocket,” but Adrien Brody makes up for that. I wouldn’t rank “The Darjeeling Limited” up there with “Rushmore,” which represents the height of Wes Anderson’s work thus far, but it’s clearly better than “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.”

3 stars

A Brief Political Note

2008-11-06T08:58:00.000-08:00

This is supposed to just be a movie journal, but the recent election is simply too historic not to say anything about it. Politically, I’m pretty mixed up. I drive around in a Prius with a concealed weapon. I’m a doctor, and I would like to hang on to my income, but (or maybe because of what I already know) I’m not that afraid of socialized health care. Fittingly, I have mixed feelings about this election. Barack Obama is certainly an inspiring speaker, and if he keeps his word on avoiding divisive politics to focus on solutions to real problems, he could be a great president. On the other hand, my default setting is to distrust the government, and that instinct has rarely been wrong. I am not thrilled about having a president and a Congress in the same party, especially the Democratic party, because let’s face it, a hard-working, well-paid, gun-toting, straight, white male has more to lose with this party in power. If Obama turns out to be just another politician and allows his party to pursue their various evil schemes, my life is going to suck.

If that happens, who will I blame? The Democrats, sure, but keep in mind that they really can’t help themselves. Those pointy heads and bleeding hearts are a handicap against rational thinking. The real villains in this election cycle are the Republicans, who were given the reins of power and didn’t just abuse them, but literally squandered them on trifles. Instead of balancing the budget, once a Republican theme, they took bribes. They talked about the sanctity of marriage, then stayed up late at night trying to keep Mark Shiavo from pulling his wife’s feeding tube, per her express wishes. Instead of protecting our liberties from big government, they tapped our phones and tortured people. Instead of working to find a balanced solution to global warming, they ignored it, and spent their time playing grab-ass in airport bathrooms. John McCain made some mistakes, the largest being Sarah Palin, but the Republicans spent the last eight years losing this election. The Republican party today is corrupt, inept, and defiled. The only Americans they represent now are fundamentalist Christians, but if Jesus were alive today he would go through the Republican convention with a cat ‘o nine tails.

Alright, I feel better now. Back to the movies.

Stardust (2007)

2008-11-03T07:22:00.000-08:00

If you blink, you’ll miss Neil Gaiman’s name in the credits, but “Stardust” is based on his graphic novel of the same name. I struggle to understand why everyone hasn’t recognized Gaiman as one of our greatest living storytellers, but I seem to be part of a not-so-vocal minority in thinking so. Apparently, everyone didn’t flock to theaters for this one. “Stardust” grossed about $38 million at U.S. box offices, just over half of its $70 million budget. Looks like almost everybody missed a really entertaining story.
Relative newcomer Charlie Cox plays Tristan, a dreamer of a lad living in the village of Wall. The town is so named because of the wall lying just outside, which, it turns out, guards a magical world of witches, unicorns, and princesses. One night a falling star is seen to land somewhere beyond the wall, and Tristan, desperate to win the heart of the town beauty (Sienna Miller), pledges to fetch the star back for her. It turns out that on the magical side of the wall, a falling star is not a chunk of meteorite, but a beautiful babe (Claire Danes). Undaunted, Tristan gamely tries to escort the star back to Wall through a gauntlet of witches, pirates, and greedy princes.
This is fun stuff, folks! Sure, it’s a fairly tale, but one for adults. As with most fairy tales, you tend to know generally where the story is going, but it’s a fun trip getting there. There are definitely a few surprises along the way. I don’t think you will see Robert De Niro’s performance coming unless you have been warned. Michelle Pfeiffer is brilliant as a witch intent on cutting out the star’s heart for its youth-restoring qualities. “Stardust” also boasts Peter O’Toole, and even Ricky Gervais makes an appearance. It’s a heady mix of talent, and everyone is obviously having a good time.
Neil Gaiman has a funny, bitter short story about a guy trying to get a screenplay made into a film. I imagine he must have had some unsatisfying Hollywood experiences before. Still, I can’t see that he has a great deal to complain about in “Stardust.” Obviously, it doesn’t follow his narrative exactly, and the tone may have been lightened a bit, but I think this is a movie adaptation Gaiman should be proud of. This isn’t a film for young children, but for older kids and adults with some imagination, this is a well-made bit of light entertainment.

4 stars